VR Design Unpacked: The secret to Beat Saber's fun
roadtovr.com
roadtovr.com
Having played them, they were slightly disorienting at first but nowhere near as actual movement-based VR games.
Any game where your game-world movements don't match your real-world movements is what causes motion sickness.
It's as simple as that. If you're sitting in a mech, once the mech moves, you're likely to get sick, because you're moving in the game world, but not the real world.
There are ways to kind of fool your brain to make it work, but it's not 100%. For example, in Gorn, one of the movement options is to move an arm forward, then pull it back while holding the trigger, kind of like you're pulling the world. But if you alternate arms as you do it, your arms kind of simulate the swinging motion of walking, and that can be enough to drastically reduce or even eliminate the sickness.
I never used to have it, but in modern cars where accelerations are much higher and you're much more disconnected from the outside in terms of how much you can see and hear, it's almost a certainty. This is especially true on the backseat where it can also get fairly claustrophobic.
Brain expects movement (from visual stimuli) and doesn't feel any movement? Nausea. (VR sickness)
Brain expects stability (from visual stimuli) and feels movement? Nausea. (Sea sickness).
This is why when you're sea sick they tell you to watch the horizon, because if you watch the horizon, you can tell that the horizon is going up and down and your brain can correlate that to the motion.
I'm immune to VR motion sickness, but games without fake movement just feel so much more immersive!
"Tea for God" and "Unseen Diplomacy" are the only games I'm aware of that operate in this fashion, with "realistic" walking movement that doubles back on itself.
But I've played all three of these to death!
If you’re getting close to your IRL boundary, it sets up a rolling log as part of a puzzle. To stay on a real forward-moving rolling log, you have to walk backwards to maintain balance. So in context of the game, you’re convincingly moving “forwards” while in reality you’re walking backwards.
Pretty sure I took off the headset and geeked out at everyone in the house first time I realized what was happening.
I'd say because the gameplay is so elegantly simple, most people can do kinda sorta well right from the get go. It feels extremely natural with almost no set up apart from height, just incredibly intuitive and frictionless.
Synth Riders is quite nice as well, and so is Pistol Whip. Both are "on rails" rather than standing on a platform. I'm not sure if that's what makes Beat Saber slightly more appealing though.
> The key scoring factors are how broad your swing is and how even your cut is through the center of the block. So Beat Saber throws these cubes at you and challenges you to swing broadly and precisely.
Oh. Coming from a rhythm game background, I couldn't figure out why I kept failing charts when I tried Beat Saber on my friend's VIVE. Now I finally understand what was happening. The experience was frustrating and disheartening. Maybe it wouldn't have been if I'd gone through the tutorial instead of picking up from my friend's game save?
I’m not at all interested in high score min/max, but I do confidently play most “dancey” expert+ (as in, not the ridiculous Camellia stuff), and this is how I think about the game.
As far as I know this is not explained anywhere in the game itself. Coming from DDR I finally twigged that something was up when I did a full combo and realized I was still light years from the #1 score, and realized there must be more to it than that. Obvious in hindsight, but easy to miss. And I would not have guessed how much it wants your swing to be rather large; scoring [1] is 70 points for a 100 degree approach, 30 points for a 60 degree follow through, and 15 points based on accuracy in hitting the center. Nice in the sense that it creates a lot of headroom for high scores, but most people should not obsess over score too much. The swing sizes it "wants" get absurd pretty quickly as the boxes start coming faster.
Or you can intuit from the score displayed after you cut each block
Maybe you have a different one on a different platform but there is no score discussion there.
Intuiting things at 3 blocks a second is a challenge.
That said I always kind of wished it was based more on the the timing, if only because it feels good to hit the boxes in time with the beat. People tend to move around though and that'd throw that off.
A tight 30 seconds of wordless, uncut gameplay that intuitively unveils the game mechanics while the simple track, just when it seems overly easy, crescendoes into the beat drop and trickier motions. The finishing touch is the missed note right before the hard cut to title.
It's interesting to note that similar movement-quantizing systems are at the core of numerous other hit games, most notably in Dance Dance Revolution but also to some extent Rock Band and Taiko no Tatsujin.
My brain can't dance, can't even perceive dance. When I see dancing champions perform, their movements make no sense to me and seem completely unrelated to the music they are dancing to. However when I played Beat Saber occasionally I feel glimpses of the feeling of dancing. That's pretty much as close to dancing as I can get.
[1] https://youtu.be/QNZh2lvd5gs [2] https://www.imsarahkolb.com
1) multisensory experience - when you chop the block it's a music+visual+kinestetic experience (beat/flash/haptic). That alone was wildly satisfying and worth playing game for 2h hours.
2) simplicity of rules
The first thing later was replicated in may apps/games (one I enjoyed a lot is FitXR). But Beat Saber nailed it so good and early, that it's still unbeatable :)
My personal favorite VR rythym game is Audica. As for why it did poorly I can only guess that it's not that interesting on easy. On expert mode though, it requires (required) you to move your entire body as things come at you from all sides. It's got 2 basic movies, shoot and smash. When a target appears you shoot it to the beat. When a ball appears you smash it to the beat. It's also got sticky targets (you need to hold the trigger) during which it projects a beam. The beam's sound changes based on how tilt the controller which is nice touch.
When it first came out it required you to hold your hands out at arms length to get a good score. They removed that requirement and I get why but, like Beat Saber, the game is less fun the less required you are to move)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftH825-SeQ
Another one I liked was SynthRiders but it's far less polished. In particular, Audica, each track has been edited for game play, ending on a cresendo. In SynthWave, the songs are just the songs as released on the artist's CD. Many of them are too long and end really boringly compared to the edits in Audica.
Another issue with SynthRiders is they don't adjust the timing based on where you're standing so that it's pretty obvious the sounds are off the beat. The only way to fix that AFAICT is to walk forward or back and try to find the spot where the timing aligns. That's arguably just lazy design IMO because it ruins the experience when you feel like you're doing the right thing but the game's audio makes it sound like you're way behind/ahead
Still, I had a lot of run with it and it does do a good job of making you movie. Unfortuantely it didn't have many tracks I found appealing but those I did I played too many times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XaUdBgAHbM
I have friends who got into Pistol Whip. Didn't do it for me though.
Oh, and from the article, I agree that Until You Fall is an amazing game.
And when I got bored of beatsaber, I was bored of VR.
Memorizing levels in Beatsaber isn't required to do VERY well. I very rarely ever play a level more than once in a session. And actually tend to struggle with highly repetitive "memory intense" sections of songs where it DOES become a rhythm game.
But if you follow the blocks they will lead you to where the next block will be.
Synth also removes some anxiety about playing in smaller spaces because AFAIK you're not encouraged to aim for big swings.
Guitar Hero, one of the best known rhythm game doesn't score based on timing accuracy. You hit a note or you don't, that's all, ut you still have to hit that note with a certain timing. Same thing for Beat Saber, you hit or you don't hit the note. If you want a high score, which is completely optional, as may just be interested in pass harder and harder songs, then there are other mechanisms at play. Guitar Hero has star power, Beat Saber has motion. That it is not pure timing doesn't make them less of rhythm games.
The article says that instead of being a rhythm game, Beat Saber is a "motion game" because it rewards precise and intentional motion. But it is the case for all rhythm games. For games about pushing buttons, the motion is rather basic, but take DDR for instance, even if it rewards timing, the key is how you move on the dance pad. Even if you hit the right arrows, bad movement will mess up your timing and drain your stamina. Even some pure button pushing game like, say, Jubeat is all about making the right movements.
The reason Beat Saber used motion for scoring instead of timing is, I think, that the smooth motion of the VR controllers didn't lend itself well to it. I mean, how to even judge timing? So instead, it judged motion, but it is not just a "motion game" like, say, Just Dance (which is also considered a rhythm game btw).
As for why is it so fun? There is no single thing. It took everything that worked, combined them, executed them well, and boom, a hit.
- Rhythm games are fun, you already have motion controls, motion controls + rhythm is dance, dancing is fun.
- Sabers just work in VR, there are plenty of VR games that feature some kind of sword.
- It is an active game, so it attracted those who want to exercise.
- It has an active modding community, and I thing the devs are smart about it. They tolerate it, without supporting it officially, so modders have a lot of freedom. Most of it is about the sharing of songs without having the right to do so after all.
- It is intuitive with a good learning curve. Most people just need a couple of songs to get comfortable on easy/medium difficulty, but the skill ceiling is high. For example, there is no special symbol to learn, just colors and directions, and on easier levels, they follow naturally (ex: blocks meant to be cut by the left saber are on the left).
- It is a VR game with no locomotion, it limits the risk of motion sickness.
Taken individually, none of these are special, but that's the combination that's great.
Edit: Another argument for "Beat Saber is a rhythm game" is that timing does matter. Unlike in most rhythm games, the timing window decreases as the notes/blocks move faster, simply because you have less time to cut them. Higher difficulties have the blocks move faster, making timing more critical.
The problem would be people walking forward/backward a bit. That'd throw all the timing off. I can only guess they tried various things to take that into account but then settled for a different type of scoring.
It’s a good game with nice UX. It is most definitely a rhythm game. But you could get 99% of its value prop on an arcade machine setup sort of thing. It doesn’t need to be strapped to your head. It’s barely VR. The fact that it’s still pointed to as the best VR experience is proof that VR gaming is going nowhere.
Certain songs will get taken down if you stream them, but they're still licensed.
https://beatsaber.com/faq.html
> Our aim is to release Content ID-free songs for future OSTs as well. However, we cannot guarantee that Content ID will be disabled for paid music packs since they are owned by our third-party partners. We value the work of artists and respect their decision to keep Content ID enabled for the music they create.
https://edm.com/features/inside-the-ambitious-quest-to-licen...
> The ambitious effort to activate Daft Punk in Beat Saber took over two years, according to Vickie Nauman, founder of the Los Angeles-based consultancy and advisory firm CrossBorderWorks. "The collaborative effort was between Beat Saber core team, Warner Music in London and Daft Punk crew," Nauman tells EDM.com.
> Nauman has worked with the title's developer, Beat Games, to execute the company's licensing deals since its early days as an independent gaming studio in Prague, a role in which she remained after Facebook (now Meta) acquired the studio in 2019.
You won't get sued for that just like singing Taylor Swift in the shower is permissible.
And I am thankful they do!
There's zero liability for Beat Saber or Meta here. People distributing the pirated music would be liable.
Maybe someday one will be released with Spotify, YT Music, and Amazon Music integrations. Advertising that you just need to connect your accounts and can use anything. But I'm sure there are a lot of people working to make sure that never happens.