Excellent, thanks!
The Talos Principle was released today in VR (includes expansion). Never played the original game and really looking forward to trying it.
Well damn… I did play the original and it was cool but I always figured this would be great in VR. Now it’s here and I need to know if it’s worth $30 to play it again! Probaby, but maybe in a little while when things quieten down.
I’m guessing this doesn’t work in their Serious Sam Fusion unified thing does it?
I have no idea what “Serious Sam Fusion unified” means :)
They have like 3 or 4 Serious Sam VR games they’ve done, so they made them all run via a single unified system called “Serious Sam Fusion” if you so chose.
edit: gah for some reason Steam won’t link straight to it, I’ll just include a pic:
I want to support the developers on their VR efforts, but, man, $40 for a game I already own…
There’s 25% off for owners of the original game, for 3 weeks. Might take a little sting out of it.
So I get to try VR out as part of my new job at work, and today I spent some time in Google Earth & in Lone Echo and a failed attempt at Defense Grid. While I get to try it on every conceivable platform there is out there, along with a host of the highest gaming laptops / pcs and VR backpacks, I’m starting with the Rift on a fairly non-descript core I-7 system.
As I’m a complete newbie with this, I thought I would start documenting this with my narrative and basic questions and hopefully you can answer some or ask questions on others.
Google Earth:
The tutorial is OK but then diverts me into a path it wants me to take (I DON’T WANT TO SAVE another location based on your already save location), and the volume was way too loud with no ability to change it. They make it look so impressive in the beginning / tutorial / their saved locations.
But then I did what I would assume 90% of people will do and that is to look at my house. As I live in a somewhat rural area, it’s no better than what I would see on a PC, in fact it’s worse since the resolution is far lower.
But then it says “ah click here to go into street view” and It transports me to an intersection about 2 miles away, so it’s interpretation of where I want to go to and where it actually puts me is pretty damn far off. To make things worse, I can’t figure out how to exit street view other than to bring up the menu & go to a saved location, which puts me thousands of miles away.
HORRIBLE FIRST IMPRESSION. So many people rave about this but honestly, this is just a gimmick on their saved locations, the lack of volume control (on / off), and inability and horrible user interface of trying to navigate back out of street view really have me wondering here. Probably just pilot error and I don’t know what I’m doing but I clicked every button and pulled every trigger to no avail.
Lone Echo
Wow. What a start. Beautiful graphics (comparably so), great voice acting, wonderful setting in space, and how they create the tutorial with a “malfunction” requiring me to go through a calibration session both introduced me into the controls and immediately reinforces it through immediate game play once I exit. Still getting my bearings and adapting to this new form of input, but grasping things and using my wrist jets to control movement / direction is very cool. After about 20-30 minutes, I started to get fatigued and my forehead was developing “VR Head” and I put it down, which brought up my single complaint: There appears to be zero save game support for multiple people. It only has “quit / continue” so if different people want to trade off, I can’t figure out how I would save something just for me.
Defense Grid 2: VR
Well, this was a bust, I was really excited to try it and while the menu comes up, and I can traverse the menu, any trigger pull / button push acts like the game is reading it as said button depresses, and the screen kind of pauses, but then the menu is refreshed. As the quit button is a menu button as well, no way to exit other than getting to windows & killing it with task manager.
Anyone know what I’m doing wrong? I’d love to play this as I have hundreds of hours in Steam on it.
First day impressions:
I hit the screen in front of me once, which really accentuates the need for an “environmental avoidance” option where it could potentially overlay the surrounding obstacles when I get close. i wasn’t using the “barrier” that can create a “play pen” to keep you contained as it takes up too much room and people walked by several times while I was playing.
The cord on the Oculus is pretty good and heavy and I could actually feel it as it was wrapping itself around me and I was able to “unwind” without the game really being impacted.
The heat / sweat from the screen needs to be taken into consideration. I can see how this can get uncomfortable over extended plays. Right now, I’m attributing the “fatigue / slight dizzy” feeling to being in new environment, not unlike my first foray with Descent 20 years ago when I experienced something similar. Over time this effect went away, so it will be curious whether I get acclimated to it.
The other thing is just within three games on the Oculus and I’m seeing such a disparity with controls / menu options, this is going to be a poor user experience if there is zero consistency between apps.
You exit street view the same way you go in, by pointing and clicking at the globe in your hand (which now has a big “X” on it). But the easiest way to use it is to just hold that globe thing over your head, which puts you in street view as long as it’s held there.
It’s obviously only going to show you the closest point for which there’s actual data. But from my experience it’s extremely accurate - if you are close to ground level on a street then pull the globe “helmet” on, the two line up really well. It’s also highly dependant on network and sometimes takes a little bit to update the currnet location. You can preview by just glancing at the globe in your hand which is really cool.
You can skip the intro, I think it labels one of the controller buttons with a “skip” or something.
Oh and volume control is on the Rift itself, press the option button on the right controller. :)
Only Lone Echo is an actual Oculus game. Defense Grid is quite early/old. Google is cross platform. But yeah… it’s pioneering days and these kinds of languages are still being developed I guess.
This is the weird thing - the globe completely disappears once I’m in street view & I can’t figure out how to get it back!
Never had that happen, and I muck about in it quite regularly… possibly that controller is low on battery? Make sure it’s viisble to the cameras and you’re pointing and looking at it?
Defense Grid was fine here. The free trial anyway. And if you’re seeing the same from Google in VR as you could on your PC… you’re doing it wrong :) Street View wasn’t that great the one time I tried it though. Photos don’t look a whole lot better in VR IMHO.
I thought the ability to quickly swap from the 3d view to looking at photos of the actual surroundings was quite genius. But they need to re-do them all with proper stereo cameras now. :)
Maybe we also one day get their predictive interpolation thing:
Once I highlight a menu, is it just a trigger pull to get it to launch? Just want to make sure it isn’t a swipe or something else!
It’s the A button to select stuff from menus, like Play etc. Is that what you mean…?
(and you navigate the menus with the right stick)
Well, my favorite video game of the last decade and a half, Vendetta Online, runs on Gear VR and that’s pretty cool:
So I tried Batman Arkham VR today and the first 15 minutes were cool / confusion as I tried to figure out what the game wanted me to do. Oh, you want me to shoot that crane in the distance to launch the computer instead of pushing a button on the computer in front of me. OhhhhhKaaaay
I get these cool gadgets, and then I head out, but it’s kind of jarring to be put into a new scene already there. At the batcave, you see the batmobile, and I think, OK, cool let’s drive around, but then I don’t get to do any driving! It’s just a blink and I’m in an alley. blink and I’m on a rooftop.
The warping from one vantage location to another is interesting way to get away from actual locomotion, but it feels like a cop-out to make it easier.
Overall, the experience is more like a quick time event where I get to nominally participate every once in a while with a gratuitous button press.
For the record, once I’d strung up penguin in the “tipping point” scenario, and his goons come out, for some reason the game wasn’t recognizing any “lock” on the targetting reticles and after dying 3 times, I hung up the HMD.
I really need to figure out how to “quit” games properly - I keep having to go back to my PC, CNTRL_ALT_DEL and use task manager to kill them. There should be a button to bring up an ingame menu to quit, I think I finally may need to break down & run the tutorial ;-)
I think you’re supposed to target all 3 at once, then it’ll move on to the next action.
Rift has ‘return to home’ on the options screen you can bring up, which quits any running VR game. Not sure exactly how well this plays with SteamVR - it may leave SteamVR itself still running.
There is.