I’ve had Euro Truck Simulator 2 for quite a while and had my Rift for over a year. I finally tried the game in VR.
Wow. Incredibly immersive. Especially when the rain starts hitting the windshield at night. I popped on few podcasts, selected the longest routes, and had a really relaxing time. When I was backing up, it was amusing that I could look back and ‘stick my head out of the window’.
I haven’t fired this up in VR this entire time because I didn’t have a steering wheel. All I can say is even if you have something as absurd as what I’m using (a Saitek X-52 HOTAS, though I think even an xbox 360 gamepad should work), you have to give this a try in VR.
If you like flight sims, VR is here and worth every penny. Just makes us want faster computers and higher-resolution headsets, but even the V1.0 stuff is an amazing experience that makes you never want to go back to playing on a monitor.
Besides the seated sims something like Robo Recall, built for VR and with high production values, makes a pretty good case for the stand and teleport approach already.
Skyrim VR has been a hoot. It has some sloppy bugs with regard to left-handed users and shields, among other things. But the experience of wandering around the world, plundering dungeons, and just plain old “being” in a familiar place is just great. I’m playing at regular difficulty and now that I’m used to the locomotion controls on the Move, it’s challenging but not because I’m fighting the controls. I just need to remember that I can block with my sword by holding it up horizontally.
Doom VFR (on PSVR) is a different story. This could be excellent but they fucked up ALL the control schemes. Apparently the Aim Controller (the gun) works best. I don’t have it, but it allows for full control of movement. However your arms in the game world don’t match up with how you’re holding the controller. If you use the Dualshock you get good movement but doesn’t feel right to me. There’s not as much of a sense of presence in the world. If they had mimicked the Skyrim Controls the Move Controllers would easily be the best choice.
But it’s amazingly bad. You can only teleport around, which wouldn’t be much of an issue as it works well and feels natural (plus the glory kills are excellent). But there’s no way to rotate your view. You can flip around 180 degrees but you can’t rotate your view in place. You can dash-strafe but not rotate. So you’ll spin you body around to compensate for this and inevitably wind up facing in some weird direction causing the camera to lose track of your controllers.
I would assume this is not a problem with Vive as it has full 360 degree tracking. Poor PSVE doesn’t, but Skyrim solved this issue beautifully.
RecRoom and Lens are pretty cool.
Room (that minirobots thing that come with the console) has serius cool minigames for kids.
I tried Skyrim VR and I find exausting to play it, and I have yet to find a control scheme that works for me 100%, using the controller mostly work but…
It was just hilarious to play RecRoom doing the “Dungeons and dragons” thing.
I got to play around with a hololens some… it’s cool, and it’s nice that it’s fully wireless, but it’s got some major drawbacks.
The main one being that the FOV for the actual screen is stupid tiny. Like, a little box in the middle of your view. This sucks, because it means you can’t do real AR stuff that well, since you can only see the virtual stuff in a little box in the middle of your view.
Also, the rendering power is apparently pretty limited, so you can’t really render that much without getting framerate problems.
Still, I think it’ll get to be pretty cool in a few years. The next generation might be worth getting.
I don’t know about the future of hololens, but just remember the one you used was made available to developers almost two years ago, and even that one was based on 1-2 year old tech at the time of its release. Hopefully the FoV and rendering power are solved problems in a new iteration.
In case anyone missed it, Star Trek: Bridge Crew has been updated to work without a VR setup. While this is good for gamers that don’t have VR it seems to be generally bad for VR.
Yeah, this and Eve Valkyria moving to non VR is meaningful, I think.
It’s bad for pure VR experiences, but I also think you’ll see more regular games that also support VR pretty soon. It’s moving from being a platform to being a peripheral, at least for the time being
You say that as if its a bad thing but i think its great. VR goggles are a peripheral and to treat them otherwise is bullshit that hampers their development and marketing.
For certain genres of games they enable an earthshakingly transformational experience. This gives hope for both that genre and VR to be tailored for eachother. (speaking of flight and space sims here)
Other genres do not fit VR very well imo, such as the first person shooter games that killed flight back in the 90s.
As a peripheral, VR goggles enable awesome stuff, if and when they fit as a tool, think of the sculpting software, or google earth. Trying to see them as a platform means trying to shoehorn things into them that do not fit very well, such as fallout 4 VR.
