Virtual reality: to boldly game like we never gamed before...

I have to concentrate intensely to have any chance against hard. Usually win 1 or 2 out of 10. Easy was tough for awhile…takes time to get used to it.

Yeah this is about where I sit.

DF’s positive take on the PSVR2 spec. They’re also not sure what a haptic headset would do :) Maybe a bit of g-force…?

Oh - someone in the comments suggests haptics in the headset might provide a little fake ‘motion’ to match the in-game movement and offset motion sickness.

Being a pretty solid player in real life, I can consistently beat Hard, but the next level up is pretty rocky. I wish they’d invest a little more in the AI behaviour… the AI serves aren’t up to snuff, can return almost anything, and while on higher difficulty they laser shots, they don’t use spin, or counter spin in any way I can discern.

That said I’ve had plenty of good online matches, but sometimes you don’t want to spin the wheel and wind up humouring kids on their first game, etc.

I’m guessing the headset haptics are going to just vibrate the headset. I hope I’m wrong and it’s something cooler.

If you get shot in the head it knocks you out.

When you headbutt someone in a game, you feel it.

Finally someone has made a clone of the elite strap with battery, and at a cheaper price.

(no idea of the quality of the product!)

While talking of the new humble monthly thing, I decided to check their Store… they have Pistol Whip for 35% off

Where are you seeing that? Doesn’t seem to be mentioned on the store page as far as I can see.

Yeah I’m only seeing that it’s for Steam, nothing about receiving the Quest version. Would love for that to be the case though.

Sorry, i was wrong. Before, Humble store had sold some keys for the Oculus pc store, I know that for a fact. And I had selected the filter for ‘Oculus Rift’

that showed the sale. Hence the error.

Blaston is going to double the price on Jan 17.

I like Blaston, but there never seems to be anyone playing. But when there is, it’s a hoot.

I noticed that https://vrdb.app/ has interesting historical data, with it, we can know what games has sold* the most in Quest in 2021.
Ratings gained from 2021/01/01 to 2021/12/31

Beat Saber: 10696 ratings
RecRoom: 10364 ratings (free)
Walking Dead S&S : 8856 ratings
Blade & Sorcery: 7241 ratings (released on 11/14)
VRChat: 5895 ratings (free)
Gorn: 5644 ratings
Resident Evil 4: 5634 ratings (released on 10/31)
Onward: 5622 ratings
Population One: 5535 ratings
Superhot VR: 5175 ratings
The Room Vr: 5085 ratings
Supernatural: 4208 ratings
Walkabout Minigolf: 4060 ratings
A Township Tale: 4038 ratings (released on 07/25)
Job Simulator: 3757 ratings
Demeo: 3648 ratings (released on 05/09)
The Thrill of Fight: 3260 ratings
Five Nights at Freddys: 2627 ratings
Pistol Whip: 2384 ratings

*: not really, but we can correlate number of ratings to number of units sold, more or less

It seems finally in 2022 a game will surpass Beat Saber, I’m talking of Blade & Sorcery ETA for the studio to be bought by FB?. RE4VR sold less but it did pretty well, taking in account it costs twice as much.

The very highly rated InDeath Unchained is an example of the dearth of quality content in VR. It’s a decent enough archery game, but it’s so lacking as a full experience. It would be trounced if something like this would release on the non-VR market. Let’s hope the entire market starts to heat up in 2022.

What the game does it right?
-Archery
-Art. It looks nice for a Quest title.

In what other areas is mediocre, if not bad? In most of them. Some of my complaints:

-Half the enemies are ‘elite’ reskins. Real enemy variety is actually lower than I’d like.
-There isn’t basically anything beyond normal archery. There aren’t traps that you have to avoid or use against the enemies.
-Or there isn’t anything interactive like breaking a oil barrel and then putting it on fire with a fire arrow, or elemental effects like using an ice arrow to make a icey patch in the ground.
-There isn’t any player progression in a run, beyond getting money, health or arrows (and money only serves to get the latter in shops). No attribute progression, no randoms perks like wall climbing or arrow splitting or faster running. No builds or combos to do with perks (imagine if you combine the previous example with 'extra damage depending on your speed).
-No weapon random traits, weapon levels, or ugprades.
-This is obvious, but being an archery game, there are no other player classes, and in fact only two weapons, normal bow and crossbow.
-There is a big difficulty curve in between the trivial first level and the second one, much harder (combo of open spaces, more enemies, enemies that fly high in the sky are hard to hit, even the traversal is harder given the verticality).
-The game fails on important stuff like sound feedback. There is a special sound f/x that sound when an enemy teleports, but there is no good indication of where they are , nor they make a sound if someone in walking towars you from behind. They are strangely silent (well, they are spirits and shit so it makes sense in the lore, but still gameplay wise, it’s a bad choice!).

But because it’s a bit more involved than a shooting gallery, it’s considered good.

I agree with that… picked it up on sale, and for £10, I’ve easily spent six hours and I haven’t tired of the gameplay yet. It fricken hard though… I’ve yet to beat either of the two bosses I’ve met. And yes, at times I wondered if I had met my limit, but then I killed that bat and it opened up the next nevel, and it’s very pretty… not sure when I’ll ever unlock the one that requires me to beat the boss six times, but the mechanics are so sharp, I’ll always come back for a quick session here and there and keep trying.

I think that’s key with VR games… if you’re not going to provide a deep story campaign, make sure your core game is very replayable, and a lot of the games on the quest are.

The explosive arrow (Cataclysm) makes short work of the first boss. In fact imo there is too much difference in fighting him with it vs fighting whim wihout it.

Yup… I unlocked the ricochet cataclysm arrow right at the same time I got the amulet that lowers the bosses’ health… I think I had previously tried the bomb arrows on him but wasn’t able to kill him before the swarm of red priests got me, and so thought I was forced to do cat and mouse no matter what… but with his health down I just unloaded on him till he went down.

The level you move on to is really impressive, floating in the clouds, and the women wraiths and little Cupid dudes are no joke.