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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

For me Beat Saber is that game. With mods and community-made songs/beatmaps which can be quite intense and it's how I get in some cardio on a regular schedule (~1h30m on a two-days-on-one-day-off cycle).

Currently I do this with a Quest 2 attached to a Vive Deluxe Audio headstrap with 3D printed adapters and a counterweight on the back to take pressure off my face (a setup dubbed "frankenquest"). It works well enough but there's a lot of room for improvement.

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I think the issue is that Beat Saber has been the answer for the last four years and if you are not into rhythm games then... It's kind of a hard sell.

One issue is that Beat Saber is a waste of money if you don't get the custom songs/mods/etc. This is easy if you're playing on a PC, it's a one-click thing which has wink-wink tacit endorsement from the devs. It can be done on Oculus devices too, but it involves a convoluted jailbreak that regular users won't bother with, and without that Beat Saber runs out of appeal pretty quick.

I think the included songs are the best and I have bought many packs.

Yeah I agree. The first-party maps have been getting better since Beat Games started hiring from the community mapmaker talent pool, but prior to that the stock maps felt kinda clunky and lacked flow.

Also while the variety in stock maps is better than its ever been, it still doesn’t hold a candle to the thousands of community maps.

I only played stock for a long time

You're exaggerating.

> which has wink-wink tacit endorsement from the devs.

Is that true? A kinda competitor to Beat Saber is Synth Riders, and it's not wink-wink, there is official support for custom songs (and mods I think? I'm not sure). And when I get back to Beat Saber (because I like both Beat Saber and Synth Riders' game play), I feel like I'm owning an iPhone: a beautiful object but I can't actually do what I want with it

> For me Beat Saber is that game. With mods and community-made songs/beatmaps which can be quite intense

Some people seemed hesitant to trust Meta due to it's Facebook account requirement (now removed), but for me their behaviour with Beat Saber is one reason that I'm kinda hesitant to trust them going forward.

e.g. Beat Saber has an update appear and all your mods stop functioning for a bit until verified to work with the new release. (From what I recall on the Quest version trying to mod results in some warning messages that stuff like this might result in your account getting banned, though I've never heard of them actually doing this to Beat Saber players). i.e. it's annoying and cumbersome to do, needs to be repeated for each update, and you're threatened with having your account banned (though I suspect that they'll continue to not follow through with those threats).

They'd also previously promised they were gonna add custom level support on Quest (e.g. https://twitter.com/BeatSaber/status/1182645623683727360) but despite tweaking stuff like this multiple times in 2019 that support never materialized.

Net result is that I'm mostly a Synth Riders player and tend to advise people purchasing a headset to avoid Beat Saber when looking for rhythm games.

(Synth Riders, Audio Trip, Boombox all allow custom songs out of the box and Pistol Whip finally has that scheduled for release this month - https://twitter.com/PistolWhipVR/status/1664037754550771717)

This is why even though I'm using a Quest 2, I don't bother with the Quest-native Beat Saber and instead play the Windows/Steam version through PC link. Well that, and the Quest version will chug on some maps that are a bit too much for the Quest 2's midrange smartphone SoC to handle, while my PC tower doesn't even break a sweat.

On Windows there's several utilities to keep your Beat Saber version and mods frozen. The utility I use, BSManager[0], also symlinks your beatmaps folder so it's shared between versions, making it easy to switch between arbitrary versions at will.

With that setup I play one version for extended periods and only upgrade when custom maps start using frills from newer versions. I'm currently playing on 1.27.0 even though the current version of Beat Saber is up to 1.30.0.

[0]: https://github.com/Zagrios/bs-manager

bsmanager is a perfect name for the stuff it helps me put up with...

> For me Beat Saber is that game.

Yeah, Star Wars Squadrons was what sold me a VR headset. No regrets.

I didn't hear good things about that game... is it that good in VR?

I think some people set their expectations like it's a $60 + battlepasses live service game instead of a $40 game that got a complete release and had no plans for future content.

If you're looking for a long-lived multiplayer game, probably not. If you're just excited to sit in an X-Wing cockpit and blow up some TIE fighters then it's really great in VR.

If you ever wanted to feel like you're flying in an X-Wing, it's pretty incredible. I play for a couple hours at a time with a basic joystick, a Lenovo Explorer headset, and an Nvidia 1070. I'd like a bit stronger of a graphics card but it's still very clear and sharp. All the control screens in the cockpit are quite large and easy to understand, not a lot of tiny numbers to squint at.

I'd agree, but Beat Saber with mods and community songs bumps the whole package to around 2000 bucks worth of material for someone who doesn't own a windows PC.

That's bummer, and it was worse when GPU were costing an arm and a leg, so I'd totally understand people being hesitant to jump in.

I think the experience just isn't mainstream enough. I think there are a lot of people that would drop $200-$300 to get a beat sabre experience if they were aware of the option. Is there any reason it should be less compelling than the "Wii as exercise" craze, for example?

The Wii was heavily marketed as a family entertainment system. A 'Family Computer', if you will. It's even in the name. People were buying it because it's something your grandmother could play alongside your five year old son. VR is still marketed as ages 13 and up, gives some people nausea and can only be used by one person at a time. There's also extra hygiene concerns that make them awkward to use at parties as you have the extra step of wiping the headset down between users. The controllers are also pretty intimidating for new users because you can't see them. I was showing PSVR2 to my dad and told him "Push R2 to select" before realising that if you didn't know where the R2 button was already, you had no hope of finding it because you're physically incapable of seeing the controller.

It's a long way from the ultra-casual Wii experience.

> you have the extra step of wiping the headset down between users

You wipe it down? Is that normal?

For germaphobes. If you have people at a party, the higher likelihood one will be.

I'm old; I ate dirt, swam in lakes and drank from a garden hose! My immune system is superman.

Huh. Wild. I'm unaware that I have ever even associated with anyone even close to that level of germaphobe.

People that are that level of germaphobe tend to avoid people that are obviously the opposite way. It’s easier than explaining and getting them to do it your way (because there’s no meeting in the middle in these scenarios, it’s either clean enough, or it’s not)

Fun fact about wiping the headset down —- there’s a study at Yale to determine whether the Oculus mask can be sufficiently sanitized for safe use in pediatric cancer wings (a high bar) because of it’s form factor and immersive experience. Turns out it absolutely cannot. Sanitizing that mask is practically impossible.

Yeah I highly doubt you could sanitize to medical needs levels but the casual user should be fine.

Is this with or without a silicon cover on the foam face guard? Silicon has worked really well for me from a cleanliness perspective.

VR just seems too intense. I legitimately don't want to immerse myself in a new world. I'm perfectly fine sitting in front of the TV for an hour and mashing buttons from a distance and walking away after I'm done.

In case you didn't know, the PSVR2 has a button on the front right side that switches the display to that of a camera coming out the front face of the unit so you can see around. It's a huge improvement over the previous generation. However, the resolution isn't great. While you certainly can see the controller, you wouldn't be able to read the "R2" imprint on it.

Tried Beat Saber once in a VR lab type thing, it's really hit and miss.

With some practice, you get fewer misses. :-D

Feels more like Half Life Alyx would be the killer app for VR instead, but I'm not sure what the replayability is. Maybe with a VR gmod based on it or something?

I played Alyx some and it was neat, but I didn't get terribly far into it as it wasn't very compelling for me. Maybe because I've never played the other Half Life games?

Absolutely. To truly appreciate Alyx, you need to know a few things about the Half-Life universe.

HL:A showed what a AAA FPS is in VR.

I wouldn't call it a killer app simply because these days, FPS is all about multiplayer, and a FPS multiplayer in VR is just...meh? It doesn't really work.

Really, any sort of action-packed combat is just not going to work in VR. Jumping behind cover works fine outside VR because the medium acknowledges the limitation. But in VR, trying to jump behind cover doesn't work when you have to worry about being next to the edge of your play space. VR tries to immerse you, but that immersion is limited when you can't touch your surroundings. Being crouched behind cover and peeking over it to shoot feels unnatural and immersion-breaking when you can't lean against the wall you're hiding behind.

Even as a VR supporter and owner of a Valve Index (And the HTC Vive before that), I don't know what the killer app for VR would be. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd even EXPECT there to be a true single "killer app" for VR, but rather, a collection of apps that work incredibly well in VR, or don't work without VR. Beat Saber comes up a lot, and it's fun, but I wouldn't call it the "killer app". It's just an example of something that only works in VR.

Super Hot manages to pull off immersive combat in VR like to other game, it’s absolutely fantastic - but it only works for this particular type of game mechanic.

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

SUPER

HOT

Yeah, SUPER HOT VR was amazing. It really makes you feel like you're in a kick-ass slow-mo action scene.

Beat Saber is the most successful successor to DDR. DDR worked without VR obviously, but requires an expensive and easy to break input device. Also, downstairs neighbors are less likely to complain when you are playing BeatSaber vs DDR.

From having friends try different things in VR, Beat Saber has been far and away the biggest hit with the most people relative to any other type of game or experience.

Out of ~20 people, I think there has only been one who liked something else better (the X-wing mission in SW:Battlefront).

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