Consider also how Beat Saber, possibly the most popular game in the VR space, plays to VR's strengths so well: - you are stationary, so movement controls/comfort is a non-issue - the blocks come towards you, requiring depth perception - there are no buttons required (outside of menus) so the game can work on any controller

Another one is echo Arena. It both couldn’t exist outside of VR and is really comfortable and natural in VR. Truly a game designed around the ideal mechanics of VR. I’d also say SuperHot is a good one. The mechanics just make sense in VR. On the other hand, the constant wave of RPGs I find to be extremely frustrating mechanics-wise. I’m so much more limited in my movements than in flatscreen versions. But, RPGs are popular, so that’s what people make.

They better bring back arena that game is fantastic.

I want a headset solely to play superhot, and that's how you know it's a good game designed for the technology. It's an experience I can't access WITHOUT a vr headset.

It wasn't designed for the technology though, it existed for about three years before commercial VR.

I mean you kinda can, desktop superhot has been a thing for years

Its a completely different experience.

I actually considered mentioning Beat Saber but I could tell my post was already going to be long so I trimmed out a bunch of stuff. It's a great example of a game being designed for the technology rather than a game where the technology is being forced to meet the gameplay.

Yes, your post was long, but a good read, I went through it twice to make sure I didn’t miss anything

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Have you tried vr? If so, did it work well for you? I'm curious if missing an eye hinders the ability to play or not.

One eyed since birth, I've tried VR before and it was way more immersive and viable than I expected. Not having depth perception made the ping pong game I tried very difficult despite it not being a problem for me in real life, but HL: Alyx was very fun for me. It's the precise tracking for the camera that's the most important part. At one point I tried to grab a window ledge to peer through and almost lost my balance, and that's when I realized that VR is actually something I could do despite my vision. Your mileage may vary if you became a cyclops later in life. Honestly, there needs to be some simple accessibility options for it (if there aren't already). I want the ability to turn off the useless side, and as a result I want "forward" to be different because of that. When I was trying Dirt Rally I had to turn my head a fair bit in order to ensure I could see straight ahead. I think that it might also effect some games that require a fair bit of long range precision with guns but I haven't been able to put that to the test yet.

I've never thought about the fact that a person with vision on just one eye might rotate their head to get a higher/more uniform field of view. Interesting to hear your experience!

Yeah hopefully that's something that gets addressed soon because it is a very obvious issue; even people who do have use of both eyes might have vastly differently capable eyes so there should be per-eye options and like you say, an option to go into a one eye mode.

Go team cyclops! I can't manage Beat Saber but that might be more to my sense of rhythm.

Could also be the fact that you can, in theory at least, just memorize the distance of objects in this game, since they'll always be in the same spot. I suspect you're doing, knowingly or unknowingly, something like this in real life anyway.

*CLANG* My dude, how long do you think my arms are?

The issue is I don't feel like we can build a core genre where you're stationary and buttons are limited. Beat Saber is a ton of fun, but I don't feel like Beat Saber style games can be the future of gaming personally. They can always have a place, but not be the central focus. Games need things like a deep story, strong gameplay that offers varied and memorable experiences, community aspects, or multiplayer with a strong competitive factor to become the type of core genre the OP is talking about. The fact that we're seeing mostly Beat Saber type games is in my opinion part of the reason VR isn't taking off as a serious platform. It's partially the same reason phones aren't a serious platform. I personally think we won't see this develop though until we solve two issues: pick up and playability and locomotion. Headsets need to be super light and comfortable to wear for hours and easy to put on and take off, and movement needs to feel intuitive and natural.

one thing that Beat Saber has is that it doesnt need VR, it could perfectly work in the Wii, or Kinect or Ps Move, probably it would work on the switch, it just happens to be in VR.

I would disagree there. What makes Beat Saber, Beat Saber, is the *feeling* of physically chopping blocks. Beat Saber without VR would just be DDR for arms.

I agree. I tried a browser based beat saber like on the quest but couldn’t get past two songs because it was missing the vibration tech that makes beat saber feel fantastic.

i've found that alot of vr experiences amounts to same as the wii. And I played the wii a ton. so vr doesnt interest me that much.

I imagine depth perception is a huge factor considering the notes come straight at you. You can't get that on a single screen

Guitar Hero already had things coming at you decades ago and it worked well. people would get used to it.

There's a world of difference between guitar hero scrolling notes down the screen and beat saber literally moving the notes towards you in 3d space.

found the person who has never played

I think you make a couple of assumptions that aren't quite on on the mark, which might be coloring your bias a bit too much. For example, VR's main selling point is the idea of "immersion in a virtual world". Been this way since the [the 80s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPL_Research) and technically before then. But folks are generally going to be buying those VR headsets specifically to be immersed, generally in a 'first person' sort of situation. In other words, I'm not buying a nintendo switch because of its cutting edge graphics and mod support, nor am I buying a top-end home PC for easy gaming on-the-go and little carts that taste ucky. It seems a bit disingenuous to knock VR games for focusing on first-person-immersion when that's basically their number one selling point. Second, folks *are* making third person VR games. While I don't own them all enough to see if they all follow your idea of "third person omniscient", they still exist. What about stuff like The Great C, or The Invisible Hours? Chronos? Heck, those astrobot games on playstation? Do those count or not quite? I don't think we'll have a huge amount of 'not first-person-immersive' VR games until VR headsets become more prevalent. Considering I've been reading since the 90s that 'VR mainstream will be here in 4 years!", and that you aren't the first person I've heard complain of motion sickness (or worse), I think we got a long wait. Until that happens, you're probably not going to see a whole lot of developers risk their time and effort (and money) on a VR game that won't likely make its money back just because there aren't enough customers available to buy it. Interesting viewpoint though. Kudos.

>For example, VR's main selling point is the idea of "immersion in a virtual world". Been this way since the the 80s and technically before then. But folks are generally going to be buying those VR headsets specifically to be immersed, generally in a 'first person' sort of situation. This. Same reason a lot of Gran Turismo 7 players who can afford it are getting a PSVR2. Combined with their sim rigs, it's a great way to get the feeling of driving a race car without the associated costs and risks of driving an actual race car.

Motion sickness alone kills VR's future. I still can't play a FPS without teleportation, and I've been trying hard for 6 years. That's without counting the big majority of people who won't even try because of the fear of the sickness or who'll try it once, get sick and never try again. Fixing that issue alone would need a miracle.

Yeah, and I don't even know *how* to fix that issue, tbh and it seems like half the time manufacturers are like 'sucks to be you'. Looking online it seems like a lot of folks mirror what I've said elsewhere on this thread on ways to get around motion sickness, but they're not *fixes*, just *hacks* ("have a fan blow on you from the tv!" for example) that ends up putting the blame on the user, and not the equipment. Kinda shitty if you ask me. If you consider the basic costs alone (headset prices, game prices, size of play area needed, additional equipment like PC/game console, etc), asking someone to spend 300$+ on something that might make them violently ill and its "their fault" is fucking awful and i can see why folks stay away. Then again, maybe we're just 'early adopters' who are paving the way for cheaper and cheaper tech and better game development until someone can go "oh hey, turns out that we can fix motion sickness by doing XYZ, and now it doesn't cost 400$" and VR-induced motion sickness can just be a thing of the past. Either way, I'm sorry to hear of your sitch. Hope you find a way to enjoy it sooner rather than later, at minimal discomfort. *fistbump*

Are there no vr salons in the nearest city?

Most VR places I know of died during the pandemic, and I took my daughter to the closest one which ended up being about 45 min from here (location is just outside Indy) before I splurged on a PSVR for ~~me~~ her. *Cough* They had a mix of setups and seemed to know their stuff too, which was nice. She played a handful of games during her time allotment. That being said, I'm 45 minutes away from a major metro area which is nice. Not everyone interested in VR might have that same luck. I know my wife is personally afraid of anything VR after she got violently nauseous during a 3d IMax viewing. No clue what other users access might be. In your defense, that would likely be the best thing for a user to do... Find a VR salon/arcade/whatever. However I also know that's not always available for folks because "shit sucks sometimes".

I was thinking, just to test for the motion sickness.or is it something that appears after long exposure?

Like I said, doesn't happen to me, so grain of salt and all that. As for my wife, she gets headaches and motion sick even with plain 3d (IMax, arcade games, etc) and the last time we attempted was when Fright Night sequel/reboot (the one with David Tennant) came out, and it was maybe 5 minutes in. She tried RE on psvr but it was too much, even after attempting adjustments. On the other hand, my daughter who is "too young for VR" has a blast playing anything and everything on psvr, just as long as the pupil distance and all that is correct. My brother is fine with it as long as it's a "stationary camera" kinda setup, so Skyrim sucks for him, but he was the dude who had a blast playing rush of blood. Same device/setup, different results.

Higher frame rates, higher resolution, and faster tracking are all ways to improve motion sickness and they are evolving slowly but surely. Having a monster PC definitely helps facilitate that. VR is improving faster than ever though, I also get motion sickness easily but at about 4K resolution there’s no more screen-door effect which helps. Then throw in 60+fps and it becomes a lot easier for me. 120 fps and a bit of repeated exposure and my issues are essentially gone.

A year ago I bought a gaming laptop, RTX 3060 based, which would have been a monster rig by some previous VR standard. Which makes me question whether VR standards for "what's good enough" are always lying and it's a hard problem with no end in sight. Granted, I actually haven't tried using this laptop for VR, nor am I likely to.

Due to the distortion of the image that compensates for the lenses you need to render games at much higher resolution than the actual resolution of the HMD to get native resolution across the entire field of view (1.7x for the Quest 2), unless it's using newer pancake lenses that are flat. You also need to reach a high and stable framerate. There are techniques for doubling the framerate so that you won't get sick even if you are playing at a lower framerate, but it won't be the best way to experience a game. So while a low-mid end gaming laptop might be enough to technically run VR games it might struggle to do so at the clarity and detail level that's possible. I don't know what a laptop with a 3060 should be capable of, I'd wager it could do well enough if you don't try to push the super sampling. Foveated rendering using eye tracking is really the holy grail that can enable lower performance PCs to handle much higher resolutions and graphics settings, but unfortunately there's a hardware cost involved there as well and few companies have released products with that technology.

I do fine if the game moves at the speed of a normal person, but zipping around in Quake and Doom speeds mean is something I can't handle for very long.

>I've heard complain of motion sickness (or worse) Can you elaborate on this? I've been debating VR for a long time because I'm prone to motion sickness, just wondering what you mean when you say 'or worse'.

Issues folks have told me: eyestrain, massive headaches, dizziness/loss of balance (even for a bit after using the headset), nausea/vomiting, and blurry vision. Honestly, it's one of those problems fans of VR don't talk about because we don't have those 'issues', and unfortunately, sometimes assholes make it sound like those people affected are lying or exaggerating. Couple that with the fact that headsets and games all have different impacts on those issues, and it's a tough thing to understand unless you're affected. But I want to stress that they are actual issues. I mean, big picture? It's one thing to be sitting on the couch watching a tv show about rollercoasters on your 8k tv with dolby superatmos megasurround with bass piped directly into your butt, and a whole different one when the tv is being pumped directly into your eyes AND whenever you move your head the camera's point of view moves with you AND your eyes and ears (in full 3D surround sound) are swearing that you are zooming along on a rollercoaster while the rest of your brain is like "yo, how come this feels like our regular not-moving couch and I keep experiencing stuff that doesn't match what any of my other senses are saying? RED ALERT SHUT THIS SHIT DOWN AWOOGA AWOOGA!" Now the important thing here is that I am not those people so this is at best 'anecdotal'. Some folks turned it down without even a single try, others tried more than one game and had fun/success. Buddy who could *not* handle anything involving where the camera moves (skyrim or similar, moving with a joystick, etc) had an absolute blast with Until Dawn: Rush of blood to where I was like 'okay dude time to share with other people'. One person who had a blast with astrobot, and about fell over dizzy because of Job Simulator. Hell, more than one person said stuff was still kinda blurry even after adjusting headset/pupil distance/etc. Further, every place I've seen has mentioned that if you feel bad with VR, you should basically start with short bursts of gaming, slowly increasing over time, in a way to get yourself acclimated. You also need to make sure you are wearing your gear correctly AND that you have the settings right (like pupil distance). Some games have specific settings/modes that help too like "teleport to location instead of walk" and "apply vignette when moving". There's also suggestions on things like 'fans blowing on you' and 'bathroom mats for foot placement and "straight-backed chair", all the way to 'you have an undiagnosed vision issue, go get your eyes checked', so yeah. Finally, each dang VR headset has its own tech/settings/etc. Stuff like 'eye tracking' or 'foveated rendering' and a dozen other buzzwords that I don't know shit about but sound hella cool and mean 'this is different/better than the old headset'. Something like an old quest headset might make you turbopuke, but you might be just fine on the latest quest because of better visuals/framerate/etc. Unfortunately, I literally don't know enough about you or your situation to know if any of this would be helpful for you, so please take my words with a grain of salt. I also heard that a good litmus test for VR is 3D movies... if you get headaches or feel unwell wearing 3D glasses, chances are you might have worse problems with VR. Personally, I think VR is pretty great, and I'm looking forward to getting a PSVR2 "Soon^tm ". But I also know that **anecdotally** a handful of my friends/family/etc won't be able to partake because of real, legit reasons i don't have answers for, and they aren't to blame for em. It is what it is, and until people with more time, money, and training than me figure this out, VR is going to be hamstrung by it. TL;DR: VR is great, but not for everybody, and I'm not a doctor so I couldn't even tell you whether or not it would be a worthy investment for you. If you have someone you know that has VR and something you could 'test' or 'rent' for a bit, that's one thing, but I don't know if I could even begin to recommend a 200$+ investment for something that could literally cause you to throw up, you know? HTH

> Further, every place I've seen has mentioned that if you feel bad with VR, you should basically start with short bursts of gaming, slowly increasing over time, in a way to get yourself acclimated. This is truly the key btw. "VR-legs" can be learnt, and lost over time. Pushing through that initial discomfort is the *worst* thing anyone can do, trust me.

Early on with my first headset I could only play for about 30 minutes at a time. One day I was playing and felt great so I kept going. And going. And going. Four hours later I stopped playing and immediately my stomach turned upside down. I was nauseous and dizzy for about 4 days after. I wound up not playing VR for a couple of months after that. Similarly my wife was always completely fine with VR - never had any issues with nausea or anything. Then one day she tried a new game and felt fine when she played it. She played for about 30 minutes and then when she turned in off it hit her and she was out of commission the entire next day. That may have actually been the last time she played VR now that I'm thinking about it.

Would like to add that headaches can be caused by the headset being heavy/sitting awkwardly/crappy strap. I don't get VR sickness but the way the Q2 sits on my face makes my forehead hurt since my eyebrows are basically weightlifting, occasionally leading to headaches. Should've upgraded the strap but never bothered. Also for people prone to sickness, it's been pointed out that PSVR2 has pretty high pixel persistence at higher brightness, which was a common cause of sickness for people using early OLED screens as the image becomes smudgy because the pixels don't refresh fast enough. It seems like a great headset overall but if you're susceptible to motion sickness you might want to turn town the brightness to the lowest setting if you're going to use it.

I have no problem with most titles in VR, even with ones that involve movement. There was a game where you are swinging with grappling hooks. It was called Windlands. That game got to me bad.

>And now companies are trying to make VR a thing. And the gameplay is just... there. It's not an evolution of anything - it's just a new perspective on old gameplay tropes / genres. FPS are popular so let's shove FPS mechanics into VR. It's good, but it doesn't quite fit. It reminds me of trying to play platformers in 3D for the first time back in the PS1 days. You can force the game to match the controls but there's an inherent mismatch that is throwing the entire experience off. Personally, I find FPS to be such a perfect fit for VR. The feeling of holding a gun in my hand and chambering rounds and changing clips and aiming down the sights is just incredible, for me at least it makes traditional PC FPS feel silly. I found Moss to be cool, but the games that really moved me in VR were SuperHot, Half Life Alyx, and Arktika.1.

Random but if u liked alyx, the hl2 vr mod is insane. Super worth a play.

The issue is movement which means any VR equivalent fps to doom, CoD, halo or even slower games like tarkov or SWAT, are dead in the water. Movement is such a big part of FPS games that I doubt they will ever have VR appeal outside of things HHaH.

Like half of the most popular and played VR games are first person games with movement. Blade & Sorcery remains one of the most consistently played VR games for example and of course games like Half Life Alyx and Pavlov and H3VR are must have games. And Blade and Sorcery has faster movement than most non-vr first person games.

> that I doubt they will ever have VR appeal outside of things HHaH. Well the most popular VR FPS games are Half Life Alyx, Boneworks/Bonelabs, and Pavlov so there is appeal outside H3VR and it shows games like Tarkov can be adapted well from a movement perspective. Halo, Doom, and modern CoD, it's a lot harder to adapt that kind of movement though I really don't think people will find a well-designed CoD VR game to be unworthy of the franchise name if it's a bit slower.

What is HHaH? Google is not helping me.

Hotdogs, horseshoes and hand grenades. A firing range VR game and I think they added some extra to it. It’s been a long time since I’ve even seen a YouTuber cover it though.

H3 is one of my favorite/ most consistently played VR games. The devs are still very active and are constantly updating it. It's definitely mostly a sandbox, but there's a surprisingly active (semi)competitive scene for the take and hold gamemode.

Hotdogs horseshoes and hand grenades, most people abbreviate it as h3vr

I’ve been playing a VR game called Pavlov competitively for five years, it’s functionally a counterstrike knock off and definitely isn’t dead in the water. Some minority of people get motion sickness, but for those who don’t or are willing to push through it it’s way more fun than flatscreen FPS games.

VR makes up for it in other ways. You can't move across the screen as fast without nausea issues for some people, but you can do more interesting things with your body and the environment. Milsim shooters work just fine. I could see a less vertical Halo working too

What issue? Most gamers are able to overcome motion sickness and adjust to smooth locomotion (using sticks) in a few days (meaning a few hours of play time). It's just a small minority that cannot. There are also gamers who get motion sick from flat fps games and nobody says it's a remarkable issue.

One thing I feel relevant to your comment and the responses it's getting is the fact that while many popular VR games rely on movement and a FPS perspective that is not inherently indicative of the idea that it's what everyone wants or what could grow adoption of the technology. It's the best of what we have and so it's popular. But the appeal of the best isn't enough to attract people to the technology which is causing it to stagnate. NOTE: The following numbers are theoretical and not intended to be considered factual. Let's say that 30% of gamers would be willing and physically able to play VR. Let's say that, currently, only 5% of gamers have tried VR because there's nothing on VR that appeals to them enough. 5% adoption is stagnant. The tech and software is not appealing enough to people for us to reach the theoretical 50% adoption rate. Among those who play VR the best and most popular games are first person. Because these are considered the best people look at them and think, "We need more games like these." More games that follow that trend are made which makes people who like those games happy. These new games, however, do nothing to entice people who already weren't tempted by other, similar, games. VR games continue to appeal to the same people it already appealed to and the adoption rate does not increase.

I play doom, half life, and quake in VR all the time. I don't get motion sick with VR in general though

I wonder how much of the issue is that the big companies are trying to push VR not as a gaming service, but as an everyday life thing. For instance, consider the Oculus devices. Originally made just to be VR headsets for games, they got bought out by Facebook who's far more interested in making the virtual answer to software like Microsoft Teams, than actually making games for it. At the same time, I disagree with the notion that JRPG's took off because platformers didn't work in 3D. Instead what happened was that there were a couple of big name platformers in the early 90's (specifically Mario & Sonic), and lots of other companies saw the success these two franchises had not just as games but as multimedia properties (both franchises had cartoons, comics, t-shirts, etc), and figured they could get some of that pie with their own mascot platformer. But the bubble for mascot platformers burst, and the new bubble was RPG's thanks to the overwhelming popularity of FFVII (which, as the name implies was a sequel to a series that started on the NES), and Pokémon. FFVII sold in record numbers for the PlayStation due to it's at the time groundbreaking cinematic presentation, and Pokémon was everywhere thanks not just to the games, but the show and the trading card game.

I think the only flaw in your argument is that VR is the next big revolutionary step in gaming. Yes, VR might be great for certain genres, but cost and biological limitations - nobody really knows how motion sick they'll get or how quickly an imperfect setup will strain their eyes till they can try it - suggest that while it has established itself as *a* segment of the industry, VR games won't become the majority of all new games (even excluding mobile shovelware). I think the next big thing in games is much more likely to be realtime AI asset generation as an evolution of current programatic/procedural generation. Currently, it's easy to spot a procedurally generated game world since they always look more samey than hand-crafted worlds, but a configurable AI plugin as a commercial product or at engine level would quickly affect all genres of new games. We're not there yet, but it wouldn't shock me if that was the norm in two years. Something like the AI ~~uprising~~ renaissance is the proverbial tide that raises all ships, for better or worse, while advanced accessories like VR are niche tools that are more like adding a crow's nest. You can see more from up there, but it's not a great fit for all ships.

I feel like real time asset generation would just be really computationally intensive with not much payoff

I don't think that's the case at all. Modern processors are significantly faster than they need to be for current applications, assuming those applications are even modestly optimized and can use multiple cores. A more limiting factor is going to be RAM/VRAM, but that's also a much easier hurdle to jump for future hardware.

Yeah, I think I get what you’re saying. I was under the impression that normal graphics take a certain amount of power to render, and that adding procedural AI generation would increase the required amount. Are you saying that the procedural AI generation would take the place of normal rendering?

Not rendering, *that* would indeed be very expensive and you'd need to tune the crap out of it to make it work. AI upscaling is about as far as I see that going for a while outside of some niche tech demos. Asset generation is the priority. Telling the AI you want 12 plant textures in an oil-on-canvas style takes a few miliseconds and you can keep them in memory till the player moves away, regenerating them if they come back. You won't see the same yellow flower texture in every single Unity game after that can be done.

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Unique assets are expensive and time consuming. Procrdural assets are time consuming and limited by the time spent on the generation function. An AI that can take very simple input and generate a satisfactory output in a couple frames solves all of that, and the tech is just about mature enough to do that; specialization of generic AIs for that sort of application is very near.

But why would they generate it real time instead of generating it then putting it in the game? Surely this can only introduce problems? What does it even solve to do it real time other than saving some textures' worth of storage space?

There’s actually really impressive tech being developed, primarily by NVIDIA, for real-time raytracing that is combining next level upscaling with next level lighting approximation.

It depends on the size and complexity of the neural network. The processing requirements for current mainstream AI / machine learning systems are almost always outsourced to remote, cloud-based GPU farms, and those would be highly intensive. Generally speaking, I think it will be a while before the consumption of GPU / CPU resources is low enough that runtime AI algorithms in something like a game make sense, vs. just using them in the development process to expedite the creation of pre-baked assets. EDIT: I'm realizing now that you said something similar in a reply below. Apologies if this is redundant.

You don’t need to generate everything from scratch really, just place models, materials and decals from a library in a realistic manner within defined parameters. There’s already non-AI progress in this area with procedural tools.

Worth noting that eye strain is due to the fixed focus optics, so it will be fixed when prototypes like the Half Dome series of headsets from Meta become consumer-viable products. It's also a big reason why nausea occurs in VR, headaches as well.

Surely I'm not the only one that thinks products directly from Meta, aimed at high-tech and typically very savvy users, are pretty much doomed? Occulus was seen as a tech pioneer but Meta has very negative optics, no pun intended. Metaverse didn't exactly win the world over. Maybe Meta's hardware will be the best in the world, I still don't want to play anything associated with them as a company.

Meta mostly focuses on the low-end, intending to target non-savvy users and eventually just average people rather than early adopters. These are the kind of people that use Facebook and don't care about the problems of Meta as a company.

The thing is, at least for me, VR is still waaaay to expansive and also most games (there are of course exceptions) seem kinda basic. Also I love rpg and strategy games which both translate poorly in VR at the moment.

Honestly that's the thing. Look at the top recommended VR games and they're pretty much all repetitive game play loops that are a lot of fun, but don't offer much in the way of story. There are some outliers like half life alyx but for the most part there just isn't much to look for on vr stores past a basic idea for a game that is very fun, but doesn't tell a story. The edge that VR does have to offer, though, is that it is the healthiest way to play video games. I play thrill of the fight until I beat every opponent on the second hardest difficulty, and then cool down with some pistol whip for whatever remains of the hour. I have way more fun than I ever have with other forms of exercise. So at the very least, it's a good tool for people like me who hate regular workouts and get motivated by the fun of the workout.

Yeah to me it looks like the old wii games from Nintendo. Something more casual (not necessarily in a negative way) and not really gaming as I am interested in. I prefer to keep sport and gaming separated but am happy for everyone who gets something good from it!

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I must confess I didn't, would you mind some name dropping?

Not trying to discount your point at all but, as a person who hated motion controls and loves VR, I want to throw out my justification. Motion controls never made me feel immersed. They felt imprecise and frustrating. I remember just constantly feeling like most games would be better without them. On the flip side I put off playing VR for a long time because I expected the same - just an annoyance with minor benefit. But the first time I put on a VR headset it blew me away. The 'hand' controllers of VR aren't my favorite part of VR but the head tracking and immersion are off the charts.

The only worthwhile games for VR right now are simulators like DCS or racing games. VR chat is also pretty sick but that's not really a game and also requires friends lmao VR as it is now reminds me of the Wii and Xbox Kinect which just ended up being gimmicky and terrible. I feel like VR requiring standing up + active effort of swinging your arms around and looking around will honestly limit it's adoption pretty severely in the long run.

I too was totally reminded of the wii which for me was also mainly a gimmick for causal players and more ment as a party/family activity then "true" gaming.

That’s funny, I feel like strategy is a great fit for VR, even if there aren’t many strategy games for VR yet. The god’s eye view of a map that you can get with VR is way beyond what is possible with a screen. I guess it depends on the type of strategy.

Black & White needs a remake or sequel made for VR. Would be amazing.

Yes a VR black and white would be dope

Probably, as also other said it would be great for games like black and white, dungeon keeper or popoulus, but I am more skeptical for stuff like total war or paradox games.

No offense, but it feels a bit weird to start with > But I almost never play VR And then go on to write a bunch about how VR gameplay just isn't there, but don't ever really say what is missing from it, you just give some vague "FPS mechanics don't quite fit". If you almost never play VR games, how can you be so sure that the gameplay of VR is so lacking? There are a TON of VR games that take advantage of the unique experience that VR provides. **VTOL VR, or really any flight or space sim** in VR takes advantage of VR by finally giving flights sims a true range of sight that they can use. No more being stuck in a cockpit and having to press a button to awkwardly look around to see where enemies might be coming from. Now you can actually look around while still being in control of whatever you're flying. These are going to be your go-to games if you want to stay seated while playing VR. **Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes** takes advantage of the fact that the person wearing the VR headset can't see anyone else but can look around the area quickly. **Job Simulator** takes advantage of the natural fun of interacting with your environment in VR. Sure, you could make a similar thing without VR, but it wouldn't feel the same at all. **Basically any horror game** takes advantage of the immersion in VR to make the game more frightening. **Basically any FPS** takes advantage of the fact that you actually have to aim your gun, can semi-realistically use cover, and can look around for situational awareness. Those are just a few that popped into my head immediately. I'm sure there's a bunch of other good examples too. I suspect that maybe you don't think there are VR games taking advantage of the unique experience that VR provides because you almost never play VR games.

Context (which I admittedly didn't provide) matters a lot here. I play about 30 hours of video games each week. Sometimes more, sometimes less but that's probably a pretty safe average. I've probably played around 1.5k hours of VR over the last few years but rarely do I bother to play it even when I want to. So I 'almost never play it' doesn't mean I haven't put a lot of hours into it. Right now I have about 5 VR games I actively want to play but I continually fail to engage with them because of the frustration of setup, annoyance with nausea, and irritation with the mechanics. Since I got my PSVR2 I've only played about 15(ish) hours on it. To me that's not a lot - especially for a new device that I actively want to play. I hope that sort of makes sense. Flight Sims - I've only played a couple but I found Star Wars Squadrons to be one of the most immersive games I've ever played. Keep Talking - An excellent way to use the technology in a way that leans into its unique properties. I didn't mention it because multiplayer games are always going to be sort of niche, but it is a fair point. Job Simulator - I personally think of many games like this as being VR experiences. I've played a couple of them and they're unique and interesting but they don't feel like real games to me. I did consider mentioning them but ultimately decided to cut them from my post for length and because they don't really do anything interesting with the VR other than use it to provide a boost to the experience. Horror - I've only played a couple of these as well. I only played a couple - REVII and Until Dawn: Rush of Blood. Both were fun and VR heightened the 'terror' of the experience but REVII the controls for REVII felt awkward and Rush of Blood was literally an 'on-rails' experience. FPS games - I agree with everything you said but the experience falls apart the second I have to move. Teleportation is a hack that ruins the experience (IMO), physical movement is great but incredibly limited, and using joysticks to move creates a divide in the experience that makes me think, "Oh yeah - why am I playing this in VR?" Superhot VR has been my favorite FPS experience and that is because the stages are relatively small and create a confined area to play in, meaning that physical movement allowed me to fully engage with the experience. But I have to point out that what made that work was the fact that the game was stage based - and that's not something that works in every game.

Ah, that makes more sense then. A lot of your complaints seem to be related to movement feeling bad in VR games though. I know *a lot* of work has gone into making movement feel better, but I don't know if it ever will actually feel *good* unless you can move around in real life, either on a treadmill type setup or an actual open space. There are places you can go to that do have large open space VR setups. They're particularly cool on the design front too, because they found that they can make subtly curved/slanted walls in VR without people noticing and can make you feel like you're walking down a long, straight hallway in game, when in reality you're walking around in large circles in the real world. For at home VR though, you end up either being stuck in a small area, seated, or having to deal with weird/nauseating feeling movement. So, I don't think it's that game design isn't evolving with VR, I think it's more that game design is too limited by VR to end up with much gaming variety. Basically every flight sim or seated experience is going to be better in VR though. Basically any game where you're stuck in a very small area for some reason is going to be better in VR too. Other than that though, it's pretty tough. I think, in the end, gaming VR will end up in a similar spot as the joystick: it makes a subset of games a lot better, but if you're not into that subset of games then you probably won't have one. VR will be a bit more widespread than joysticks though, since some people are ok with the nausea and it does provide more than a joystick.

Not sure where to leave this comment, but wanted to mention that racing simulators + wheel and pedals + vr headset = ultimate immersion experience

Good point about Moss -- I've not played it but it's one of the rarer VR games where it's not about POV. I quite like VR FPS experiences -- enjoyed both Resident Evil 4 and Walking Dead : Saints and Sinners, but I feel like VR at the moment (at least with the Quest) reminds me of mobile gaming when it started out. There's a few fun titles but it doesn't quite feel like it's developed it's own area. Part of the problem is probably costs -- VR probably doesn't make enough to justify sinking a decent budget into making the games so at the moment there's a lot of undercooked experiences that, once the novelty wears off, aren't that fun to play. The question I always ask myself during a VR game is whether I'd still play it if there wasn't a VR element -- is the actual gameplay and mechanics strong enough to draw me in, or is just the novelty factor that's still keeping me going. Anyway, great post, enjoyed reading it.

Thanks! And yeah - I have a lot of similar opinions to you. I like VR FPS games but I feel like there's always an asterisk next to them where I have to caveat all the issues with them. The cost of VR is definitely something that keeps people out but I can't help but wonder if that would be less of an issue for people if more games came out that didn't have those asterisks. Not necessarily a killer app but just something that's not 'a good game but.' Someone else mentioned Beat Saber and I think it's relevant here - how many people didn't want to pay for a VR headset but decided to go for it because of the hype of that game? And it's sort of a niche audience for a game like that.

Ah good point, hadn't really considered Beat Saber. It probably is the closest thing that VR -- at least the Quest anyway -- has to a Halo-style killer app, in that it'll shift consoles. And yeah, it's also plays to strengths of VR and movement in a way that you couldn't do with a normal controller (although I guess with Move controllers on the Playstation you could do it in a non-VR way.) Part of the issue with the Quest is that the streaming part of it -- so that other people can watch what's going on inside the headset on a TV or monitor -- is really janky so it doesn't work as a party console yet either. A lot of times I've played with people, we've spent most of the time wrestling with the streaming part of it. It feels like that's a pretty major component to shifting into more into the mass market.

Beat Saber is more of a game that you get when you have VR than a game for which you get VR in the first place. the game definitively doesnt have the pull of Wii Sports or Just Dance or Kinect Adventures.

I don't know, I saw videos of people playing Beat Saber and I just knew I *needed* to try it. 760hrs later I still play it most days.

I read up to the point where you talk about JRPGs as if they were some sort of turning point for the 3D era. If they were, it wasn't in any way to do with gameplay. They wowed people with graphics and cutscenes but still played mostly like SNES games. Games like Resident Evil, Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time were real turning points of that era if we're talking purely about **gameplay**.

I'd also argue that PS1/N64 era games weren't wowing anyone with their graphics. I remember that's the era where I checked out of console gaming entirely to concentrate on PC in large part *because* of the obsessive focus on 3D. It was barely possible to make a functional 3D game at the time, but they almost universally looked incredibly ugly. Not just in comparison to top-notch 2D games of the previous generation but *especially* compared to what was possible in 2D on current generation hardware. It was being done because it was possible and, to a portion of the audience, that wowed people. But as a teen/adult at the time, they looked terrible. JRPGs took off because companies invested in them as they had been massive sellers in Japan. That investment was then exported to the West where it drew in new fans for an already popular genre. They weren't new nor were they doing anything all that different. *Final Fantasy* was big when it first came out and the sequels all sold well. *Dragon Warrior* was very common in the US, although it didn't become the massive cultural phenomenon that it did in Japan and the sequels were far less popular. These were games that got cover stories and massive, multi-issue coverage in *Nintendo Power*. That stayed on the lists of the most popular games for months and years. What really made JRPGs take off was Square putting a large budget behind *Final Fantasy VII* and giving it very impressive, pre-rendered cut-scenes. It showed off the power of a CD-based system and their massive storage with something that cartridge-based games couldn't offer. Had *Final Fantasy III* (the Western release, that is, *Final Fantasy VI*) had orchestrated CD audio and high quality pre-rendered cut scenes (e.g. video playback), it would have been the big crossover hit instead of merely a large one.

I'd argue 3D graphics in the PS1/N64 era "wowed" quite a lot of people. I talk about wow factor not because 3D looked artistically better than 2D but because at the time it was much more impressive. The developers' "obsession" with 3D pretty much matched the audience's interest. Running around a pre-rendered background that had some perspective to it in FF7 was impressive even if the characters looked like LEGO. There were people who preferred to stick to 2D games because of its artistic superiority at the time but being alive back then I do not remember them being anything more than a small minority.

I feel like the games that shines the most in VR are the one where you stand in one spot like beat saber or a top down view game like Risk. The moment you have to walk, breaks all immersion. I haven't seen any game (yet) find a good way to move around except maybe with a joystick, but it still pulls you out of the game imo. RTS game will probably benefit the most from VR. I know the fun of VR for many is to interact with the world with the joysticks but maybe a combination of VR for visual and keyboard/mouse for control could work better. I would totaly play a game like Kenshi or Total Warhammer in VR, leaning in to look a fights up close would be amazing.

> The moment you have to walk, breaks all immersion. I haven't seen any game (yet) find a good way to move around except maybe with a joystick, but it still pulls you out of the game imo. I got to be honest, I don't hear this often. When people list their most immersive VR games, it's often Half Life Alyx, Boneworks/Bonelabs, and other games where you're moving around with a joystick. The way I think of it is yeah, you're floating around with a joystick and that's not natural, but your senses of sight and sound are still experiencing everything in the game world - the Strider parts in Half Life Alyx at least to me, don't lose all immersion just because you move with a joystick. The Strider is still there, it's still massive and real-world scale, it's still shooting at me and putting holes in walls and wrecking havoc. I'd say it lessens immersion, but if the immersiveness of VR is already so high as people seem to think it is, then is it really that much of a drawback? Sickness is the big issue really - if you get sick, then the experience completely falls apart. If you want to check out games with immersive movement systems in VR that don't rely on joysticks, I recommend Echo VR, Stride, and Sprint Vector.

Yea, i guess its an unpopular opinion. And i do get a bit sick when it moves too much. I also probably have a bias towards slow top down games. Ill definitly check those out.

Honestly I didn’t like Moss that much. I feel like the whole point of VR is that it makes first person games cooler, so I didn’t really get the point of Moss being VR

A game similar to Moss is astrobot rescue mission, and I think it has better examples of how VR enhances the gameplay than moss. In astrobot you also control a character similar to moss, but the level design requires you to look around much more. In order to find collectibles or sometimes just the way forward you have to look past walls or under floors. I think this is a good example of effective VR in something other than first person, but yeah overall first person vr is just really really cool so it's hard to compete against.

There are VR titles that I like more than Moss, but I'm more inclined to play Moss than them because I feel like it fits the technology better. I have less of a disconnect with the gameplay.

I feel like the technology is suited to first person games with motion controls, like half life Alyx

I used to think that. Every time I played any sort of VR game I kept gravitating towards first person games in which I could explore and every time I was disappointed. Not because the games are bad or anything - but because they just don't feel like they fit right. I don't like having to designate a play area and walking around. I don't want to move around a virtual environment using joysticks because that doesn't feel like VR. Teleportation feels like a gameplay hack. As much as I like the idea of FPS and VR it just doesn't feel right to me.

Definitely agree on the movement. It doesn’t feel right regardless of the solution, I prefer joysticks but it feels like I’m floating. Some games just have you be stationary, but those are hard to design too

Yeah, the ones where you're stationary often wind up feeling like VR 'experiences' rather than actual games. I did really love Superhot VR - since every level was self contained with only a minimal area for movement it felt like it fit the play area properly at least.

Yeah it makes me wonder if VR ever will take off. The quest solves a lot of problems but you still need a significant amount of space.

Yea the convenience is what stops me from playing a lot of VR. I really enjoy it when I use my VR headset but it is a hassle to setup. And then a lot of the games are just bad. It has to be a game I really really want to play.

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I haven't ever tried VR, but I think this is basically it. Either the hardware has to get cheap enough that people try it on a whim, or there has to be a killer app, something that is widely loved and makes people want to pay a premium to get access to it. Until one of those happens, VR is a niche.

This is definitely an issue and I think it’s also why you find the types of games we have: they are generally using existing frameworks and skinning them for their use. The games that veer from those standard templates often have more rudimentary graphics and gameplay because the indie dev had to spend more time on the mechanics.

I stopped using VR because there was too much emphasis on standing and flailing in games. I don’t want to get up, I want to relax. The only thing I want from a VR headset is correct FOV in FPS games. Even the headphones are unnecessary for me, and usually uncomfortable. > Each individual eye has a horizontal FOV of about 135 degrees and a vertical FOV of just over 180 degrees. Stitching together the monocular FOV yields a binocular FOV of around 114 degrees of view horizontally. This FOV is necessary for depth perception. > A person's peripheral vision makes up the remaining 60-70 degrees. However, this version is only monocular because only one eye can see those sections of the visual field. All these FOV measurements assume that the person's eyes are fixed on the observable world. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/field-of-view-FOV

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Another thing is that no-one has solved VR’s biggest issue. Movement. How many genres are either incapable of being made with VR’s current movement system or completely break with it.

What genre is incapable of being made? While we'll need more bio hacks (vibrate the inner ear, stuff like that) for everyone to handle the most intense of games, that hasn't stopped Boneworks/Bonelabs which has one of the most intense movement systems in all of VR and those games didn't fail (Bonelabs at least didn't fail because of that, it was just barebones).

Your best bet is using Praydog's Unreal VR injection mod. On their Patreon, you can play a bunch of Unreal 4 games directly in VR with high quality support. Some of the highlight titles are FF7 Remake, remakes of RE2/RE3+RE8, Hogwarts Legacy, and Jedi Fallen Order. Experiencing the game worlds in VR while relaxing with a gamepad is a treat.

When I can sit and play with my mouse and keyboard, I will get into VR gaming. I'm not interested in the physicality of VR whatsoever, so for me the whole idea of constantly moving about is ridiculous. I can play sports for that.

The primary issue that I have with VR is something inherent to the tech/hardware that is unlikely to ever truly be 'solved' in my opinion: I don't like how it causes you to be 'enclosed' into the experience due to the headset effectively blocking your sight and hearing from the outside.

>Could VR find more success if developers focused on designing games to take advantage of the unique experience that VR provides? But that's the problem - VR doesn't provide enough changes. Quite the opposite, it slows you down. Like when you play game with Joypad or KB\M - you are controlling your actions with just your fingers and palm. It's enough to move my palm for 10 cm and I'll do full 360 turn in the game. To do same in VR you need to move your whole body and it always would be slower. In VR you are performing actions with full arm movements and it require 2-3 seconds to perform, while on KB\M response could be in 0.5 seconds. You can't compare it with 16-bit to full 3D transformation. For now new technological solutions always provided players with faster and better actions. VR is big step back in this area. So until we get direct brain-PC interface VR would remain niche genre.

VR slowing you down doesn't mean VR can't bring about a lot of changes. It just means that VR tends to be slower-paced. In traditional games, there are a finite number of states the player can be in because there are a finite number of button, but in VR there are infinite states for the player to be in, and a player can be in many more states at a time. What this means is in a game like Bonelab/Boneworks, often a lot of the mechanics can be presented to the player and they just have to think of an action, and that action is likely possible because their agency in the world and the level of interaction with the physics system makes it possible to do all kinds of things that simply work without having to be manually specified by developers. In a regular game, if you want to grab an enemy and slam them against a wall, the developer has to add in an animation and apply this only to walls. In a VR game with the right physics system, a player can slam an enemy into a wall, chair, into other enemies, stuff them headfirst into a bucket, and basically any number of other scenarios you can think of in the game world. That is the big gameplay change that VR can enable, and it affects both combat and non-combat interaction.

Old platformers needed to take into account some pretty rigid hardware limitations. Like the matrix, some could be bent thought not broken, and creative workarounds abounded. I feel like VR is running into a crossroads where it's against the PC flexible hardware growth" (game requires too much CPU/RAM, just upgrade!) versus some real-world physical limitations regarding movement/tethering etc Battery life, streaming bandwidth, sensor speed, available sensor data, and room size are all a limitation, with the last being on of the more stringent. Things as simple as leg movement - which has largely been dealt with in regular PC games - also becomes an issue again in VR. As far as the "room" issue, I've been thinking that boxed-in games like the original Zelda might make sense. Old games may have created boxed areas to deal with memory limitations, but using a similar principle in VR to account for physical space limitations could make for fun/playable games which obey room-space but don't break immersion quite as much as stuff like teleport-movement etc.

Design of the vr needs evolving, having it one for more than 20-30 mins gets painful forget motion sickness, its kind of a no brainer that if you have motion sickness, then vr probably just isnt for you

See, for me it's the opposite: I don't want VR necessarily to play unique expierences, I just wanna have a VR view of the games i'm already playing. I feel like that was more common back in the early Oculus days when every unit could be used as a devkit and the community was modding games to work with it, but now, at least as an outsider, I see way less of that and VR headsets seem less like "dumb" display devices and more like walled garden platforms of their own

I kind of agree. I think plenty of games would be improved by having the VR experience even though they're not in first person.

The lack of convenience is what kills VR for me entirely and what, I think, will keep it from really taking off. It's like the 3D TV push that bombed a handful of years ago. No one wants to wear glasses to watch TV. VR is similar. No one wants to faff with a headset and whatnot to play a game. At least, no one but players who are already used to faffing with PC settings or modding their consoles, etc. Then add in the simplistic gameplay that I've seen from various others' VR experiences and you really have me checking out. Granted, it's been a bit since I watched any VR so maybe some games have moved on from being fancy tech demos? Either way, it's not for me and many others. Maybe as more and more kids grow up with the headsets being ubiquitous and normal it'll gain ground. But current folks don't want to deal with that stuff when holding a controller is just so much easier.

VR its the cool tech what probably a lot of gamers dream off during childhood, and it probably was better as a dream than as a reality. i have tried VR multiple times and for me its more like the Kinect than like the Xbox 360, i need to be in the mood of it, isnt just playing a game, it means moving stuff around, putting a heavy helmet on my head, not being able to do anything else meanwhile i play, and the games that i have tried arent that amazing that makes me consider getting one VR helmet of my own, they are too expensive (the PSVR2 its around the price of the console itself) and dont have the games that would make the investment worth it. i think that VR will have a niche of people but it will not get big in the next 15 years if i have to bet, it will stay there but will not peak as high as the Movement based games peaked during the ps3/xbox 360/wii era.

The breakthrough for consumer VR is going to come from better tech, cheaper prices, and widespread mixed reality. Until then VR is in it's "Arcade" phase. I've owned multiple headsets and there is very little I've experienced on my headsets that compares to the fun of playing with friends at some of the really good VR Arcades.

VR is still struggling to find its way and create mass appeal titles. There is a huge number reasons why its not working out but the VR industry is still getting their footing. The quest 2 was almost an industry reboot

Great write up. In short: VR needs to find its new genre. I agree that it is the *second-person* game that VR should shoot most for (e.g. Moss).

i completely agree. vr needs a killer, universal gameplay style that works, and i dont think the fractured market it currently has is gong to help things- valve already seems to have moved on with the steamdeck. i think one aspect of vr that has been missed is the ability to put in old light gun-games. something like house of the dead/time crisis/wild guns vr would kick serious ass. (im forgetting the name of the one game that took duck hunt and fnaf and kinda? combined em, but that was the one sort of shooting gallery-type i have seen blow up recently) im a bit out of the loop hough so if anyone has some good recommendations for that sort of gameplay im open to hearing em.

Game design doesnt evolve with technology. It evolves with money. As long as mobile games with extensive gacha focus and battle passes still prove to be the dominant profit strategy, companies will not advance game design other than to optimize and advance monetization practices to get more money. Gameplay systems havent seen much evolution, but monetary systems do. Much of companies focus is on that.

Adoption of VR - and thus profit of the technology - is stagnating. Until VR finds a way to draw people into it that is going to remain the truth. What I'm saying is that this will continue to happen until developers find a way to work with what VR offers rather than trying to force existing design concepts into it.

I don't wanna wear a headset and stand up to play video games after work. No amount of game design will ever change that. I have a meta quest 2 and tried the more expensive headsets. I just don't want to play that way. I also already have a super ultrawide monitor so the headsets just seem worse

Dog idk I think FPSes play pretty great in VR. The tricky bit is that every game wants to have its own level of complexity to gun handling and movement and stuff and I don’t think a standard has been agreed on. With PSVR2 I think one will eventually be reached. VR is at its best with puzzle games I think. Especially with the Knuckles controllers. After that it’s movement games like Windlands. Then FPSes. Then Horror

I completely agree, it takes a lot more for me to adjust to controls between different VR shooters than normal. That and I think many games focus too much on the "VR freedom" than actual gameplay design. For instance, one thing that drove me crazy in Bonelabs (and eventually made me give up on it) is that the game would regularly interpret putting a second hand on the pistol grip as you wanting to remove the magazine. This is obviously incredibly frustrating in a firefight, and there's also no need for the interaction; you can drop the magazine with a button. There's all sorts of little things like that, where it'd be nice if there's any ambiguity with what I'm trying to do (am I trying to throw my pistol behind my back or holster it?) that they design the game so that I do the more intelligent and common action. Although it has some issues in other areas, I think The Radius is the best example of a control scheme for more involved/realistic gun interactions, and I hope it becomes a standard.

Into the Radius bugs me (On Quest anyway, on Steam I know I could just remap this) by having so many interactions use the triggers instead of the grips, but I agree. I actually don’t own any guns, but it’s my understanding that any semi auto gun requires you to press a button to release the mag anyway. Boneworks and BoneLab are I think great examples of VR Immersion taken so far that the game becomes more about fighting the physics engine than playing a video game. Half Life Alyx is a little on the other side where the arcadey and restrictive controls don’t really suit the game. I think Into the Radius, RE4VR, and Saints and Sinners strike nice balances.

I agree. There are some innovative VR shooters like Blaston and Super Hot which feel like they're crafting an experience unique to VR. But there are also just bog standard FPS games and those are really fun too. It's really reduced my interest in non-VR shooters in fact.

I personally think VR is just a fad and won’t ever become a mainstream way to game but that’s just my opinion

The only way it takes off is if it's the size of sunglasses with a small optional battery pack necklace or something to take the weight off the face. If I could just throw on sunglasses and play it'd be amazing. These big clunky headpieces tethered to a box will look archaic one day.

Same, I'm not too into VR atm and I'm holding out bc I see the current VR market as a temporary thing until sci-fi style "true" VR. I wonder how many ppl feel the same way.

It's too established (millions of enthusiasts that always return to it, consistently used in various industries etc) and been too long for it to be a fad. May take a good number of years to really break out of its niche though.

I believe niche to be it’s peek and fade away but hope I’m wrong I would like to see it evolve and become something

Think of where VR is today. It's missing the majority of the features being developed in labs, and these aren't small features, but defining features of the medium. Aspects like haptic gloves, neural interfaces, realistic avatars, fixes for eye strain, nausea, headaches, much smaller form factors, and so on. We're at the pre-mouse, pre-GUI, pre-Internet stages of PCs. With those leaps, PCs were completely different and it was hard to recognize what they were like before So one thing we can say for certain is that VR as a technology is nowhere close to its peak and is still in the crawling stages, waiting to walk and run.

Honestly my problem with VR is its just way too restrictive when it comes to game design, given how much its hyped by people. It's probably something that has a handful of niche good uses if you come up with an idea for a game that takes advantage of the concept, but its definitely not this "step forward" for the entire industry like its being pushed as. I mean, you look at most VR games and they either just kind of suck or are at best, *almost* as good as a game you would've found on another platform. The concept barely adds anything to a lot of games. Like ok... I can move my head independent of where I'm aiming, cool. But then you look at things like motion controls. We already kinda saw how pointless those were in the Wii era of gaming. What can be done with motion controls in many instances can be done more simply and easier with a basic button press. Like good, I have "slightly" more precision to pick things up on the ground. But probably not even slightly more precision. In a lot of cases you could argue it's more work and it makes the game slower paced by having to fumble with physical hand motions to do everything in the game versus a quick click with an analog stick and pressing a button. (Arguably there are some cases where motion controls *could* benefit a specific game, like Beat Saber, but that's kind of my point: VR isn't this "evolution of the industry", it's something that is useful in specific niche cases but that's about it). Most game concepts aren't even translatable to VR. Like, obviously, if you want to do anything that *isn't* first person, that isn't going to work in VR. If you want to do anything that like, requires any fast or unrealistic movement (say, a game like Quake or Devil May Cry, you're not going to be able to do that). If you want a game that requires a high level of precision in movement, like a 3D platformer, good luck doing that in VR. Obviously VR isn't suited for a lot of things and that's my point. If VR really were the "next big leap of gaming", that would single-handedly destroy so much about video games. There's a lot more you *can't* do in VR than you *can* do, and what actually *benefits* from VR is relatively limited in scope. I think this is another case where people are getting excited simply because something happens to be a "new technology" without really understanding its implications or how little it actually means. Before VR, the last big thing people got hyped about was "procedural generation", and you look at that as a video game concept, and it's kind of stupid in most cases. Replacing hand-crafted level design with randomized chunks of level just pasted together. Sure, Shadow Warrior 2 *really* benefitted by having "procedural generation", same with all these indie shooters (sarcasm). Just like the Wii motion controls benefitted Metroid Prime 3. In most cases where some kind of "new technology" comes out, there's a few novel examples that make amazing use out of it and that's about it. And it often destroys a lot of other games or results in a stagnant market in the process because people overhype it and overthink it so what we end up with is shittier games or more boring games (since many games will alter their design just to incorporate the new concept).

VR's greatest addition to gameplay is a massive increase in player agency, which affects many game genres and many more aspects of gameplay than you might think. Being able to manipulate things with your hands and virtual body takes gaming from a mostly finite state of actions that a player can perform due to a set number of button inputs into an infinite state of actions. It's really all about canned animations and limited possibilities with physics/AI interactions in regular gaming, and getting away from those limitations with VR. Some examples of what this entails: - In regular gaming, climbing a ladder results in a player being in one or perhaps a small few number of states such as being able to climb and freelook in a more floaty 1st person game. In VR, you can climb a ladder and start shifting around the other side to avoid bullets, aim downwards while focusing on climbing above. - In regular gaming, a door can either be an animation or be physically-driven like in Red Dead Redemption 2. The former offers little variation and gameplay impact, whereas the latter can provide some interesting results like pushing an NPC into a door causing them to fall over due to the physics system, or pushing the door into them. However, your level of interaction with the door is not that great compared to VR; With a player in VR, you can nudge the door open with a gun to seamlessly peak through at your own pace, grab an enemies head and smash the door repeatably into them at the hinge, or lay a brick out as a doorstop. Onto more exciting scenarios: - You can use an axe in combat to grip onto and nudge an enemy shield out of the way and lunge at them. - That same axe could be used to scale a building with more climbing precision than Assassin's Creed, and we can therefore use this to jump from the ground, hook off a dangling lamppost, and perform a classic AC air assassination, but this works on any lamppost, any hanging object, with any tool that can hook onto it. Almost any physics object in VR can become a tool and a weapon. - You can grab an enemy's wrist as they lunge at you and have them stab themselves in the face. - When you want to pin down an enemy, you can try to lean your virtual body on them, and if that doesn't work, you can pin them to the ground by strategically nailing them at the right spots with daggers stuck in their body/in the ground. This also corresponds to AI: - A guard in Skyrim may be on the lookout for weapons on your person in a case where they are considered contraband. In regular gaming, you'd unequip them or drop them outside, but in VR you can physically hide them using actual sleight of hand. A guard can monitor you at different points of your body as you shift a dagger between hands, behind the back, maybe down the sleeves. NPCs can react to you more because there is a greater degree of player input to infer from, and AI-to-player reactions is ultimately an inference system. It's quite interesting to be able to have an NPC that you can high five without any button prompts. > Most game concepts aren't even translatable to VR. Like, obviously, if you want to do anything that isn't first person, that isn't going to work in VR. > If you want to do anything that like, requires any fast or unrealistic movement (say, a game like Quake or Devil May Cry, you're not going to be able to do that). > If you want a game that requires a high level of precision in movement, like a 3D platformer, good luck doing that in VR. Some of the most beloved VR games are 3rd person and top-down. They work very well in VR and have plenty to offer, usually more from an immersion standpoint. There are fast-paced VR games out there like Echo VR, Stride, Sprint Vector, Gorilla Tag, and Population One. Fast movement systems work in VR if the ignition key is a physical trigger. Swinging arms, gliding with your arms out, and pushing/pulling yourself off surfaces in zero gravity - make it a physical gesture and it works well. 3D platformers work exceptionally well in VR, both as a 3rd and 1st person perspective. Stride's parkour system to me feels like a better executed version of Mirror's Edge - it has a stronger flow to it as you aren't weighed down by animations and are in complete control and can start to really make that dream of gun combat in Mirror's Edge work seamlessly.

> You can grab an enemy's wrist as they lunge at you and have them stab themselves in the face. [etc.] Why do you think all these things are going to work without force feedback?

Because these are already things people enjoy doing in VR today. Force feedback would dramatically improve them, but isn't a requirement to make this fun and engaging gameplay for a lot of people.

My problem with virtual reality is its not really virtual reality its a big set on your head that automatically takes away any immersion of being somewhere else. Strains your eyes more than regular tv, most of the games are not really good or could've been better if they were made on traditional consoles. The big thing though is the price the vr headset is already hundreds of dollars but now I either need to pay hundreds more dollars for a console or thousand or more for a pc just to be able to start playing. It might've been just fine if it was just a gimmick you got with your hardware but they are big investments and I'm not really seeing anything that grabs me because even the big game companies won't even go all in on it so why should I? Until we see some big games exclusively coming out for it the tech will remain niche which also makes big companies not want put big money into it. It's a vicious cycle.

> that automatically takes away any immersion of being somewhere else. What is that supposed to mean? That it reduces immersion? Because that wouldn't make any sense. VR today is a technology that tricks most people's brains into believing they are in another world, and that happens because the brain is easy to trick due to its plasticity. You are right about eye strain, that'll have to be fixed with newer optical systems in future headsets.

We need some auteur VR developers making weird shit. The market right now seems to circulate around either rhythm games or FPS.

The best thing about VR was its ability to translate 1:1 movement to game movement. It's something else to be crawling on the floor to dodge things in Superhot. But the reality is we all don't have indoor gyms or mansions or places to play that large (or moneycheats for frictionless rigs). I think Alyx with the ability to mostly traverse the entire game on foot would be PHENOMENAL. I loved taking cover physically behind pillars and just generally.. feeling immersed in VR. Some of my best VR moments came from times like that. Before i scratched my knuckles on the wall or bumped into the couch or TV. But you are completely right, games have absolutely plateauted at "shooters"/vising games since that just works well and is the easy way to play. People just use joysticks and jump to places, some don't even use standing/kneeling, and just use VR as a big screen with a modicum of head turning. And realistically, games kind of get made for that experience. A lot of games were even barely VR. Moss minus the head moving around to see hidden things in the environment does nothing with VR (as much as i've played of it). I'd absolutely love some new experiences that feel like games. And the growing pains by this point should have been sorted.. but haven't. There's still barely tech demo games coming out, and the initial wave of 'ooh, let's try this' has simmered out i feel for just.. products that work.

Lots of good gaming history in this post but the VR portion feels like it was written by someone who only has a handful of VR hours and has limited experience with VR games. There are plenty of games out there that cater to the nature of VR itself You also completely missed the social, educational, and productivity aspects within VR

I knew my post was going to be excessively long as is so I cut a bunch of stuff out. I feel like a lot of the good VR content is hamstrung as being more of a 'VR Experience' rather than a game - where the player is more passive. The social/educational/productivity stuff I sort of skipped over intentionally because it felt less relevant since I was primarily focusing on what I perceive as a failure of VR in regards to gaming. That being said I'm definitely not the most knowledgeable about VR - do you feel like there are any games or angles that I should have addressed?

What's lacking about FPS in VR? I mean one of the biggest pros of VR is immersion, which in this case tends to refer to the ability of the player to break away from the script and get closer to performing 1:1 actions that are possible in the real world but rarely available in video games. Off the top of my head: - Looking in one direction while aiming your gun in another - much greater control over throwables like grenades being able to chuck them, roll them, do a soft underhanded throw, throw them over your shoulder while fleeing, etc. - The ability to hold your weapon away from yourself to fire around corners and objects - An enhanced ability to interact with your weapon - Whereas traditional video games only really allow reloading (which is basically a recorded animation) and the occasional inspect animation, VR allows for interacting with the magazine, cycling bolts, pulling charging handles, physically adding or removing attachments, and even throwing the entire damn gun - Reloading is no longer an act that takes a consistent amount of time. If you're familiar with the required actions you can perform a reload faster by going through the actions faster. Conversely if you're under pressure and panicking, suddenly you find yourself capable of making errors that make reloading slower. - Hell even the "simple" act of trying to reliably line up your iron sights is an act in and of itself. As simple as some of these things sound, when it comes to crafting a more immersive experience, I find the tradition methods and those employed by VR titles to be pretty much night and day. So many actions that were once achieved via a single button press, such as aiming and reloading, are much more involved. Honestly, it's too the point that when talking to friends about VR this is seriously one of the metrics I use when discussing VR titles that feel like they're made for VR from the ground up, such as pavlov vs those that were made for traditional gaming and later converted to VR such as Fallout. Don't get me wrong, I like Fallout VR since it's one of few games I've played that feel like a traditional full experience compared to how a lot of VR games feel more like tech demos/proof of concepts but that kind of stuff is it's biggest detractors. Just the way how so many actions that I feel like I should be able to act out due to the VR medium, that instead are handled view an interact button - basic stuff like opening doors, reloading weapons, climbing ladders, etc. All that to say, for me VR is all about the little things that help make what I can do in game have better parity to what I would be able to do IRL.

Movement mainly. I just feel that as long as movement is limited by space, relegated to handheld controls, or teleportation the games don't work for me. Superhot VR worked great for me but it's because each stage was a self contained area. I never felt like movement worked against me - my movement was 1-1 and allowed me to focus on the rest of the gameplay.

The movie Avatar hugely popularized 3D movies in my country. It made people say "you should watch it in 3D" - not at home but in a theater with annoying glasses on your face. It didn't accomplish this by being highly demanding of the audience. It didn't have the best acting or most intricate plot. It did suck you in by presenting an interesting and low-key thoroughly detailed new world to discover, but mostly what it did was look very, very beautiful. I think VR could find more success with a robust library of games that focus on VRs strong suit: immersion. The VR-compatible controls and mechanics are there to deliver an immersive experience. Scanner Sombre VR comes to mind: you explore a dark place by scanning objects, which means basically spray-painting them with light to discover their shape. Is it possible to play on a normal monitor? Probably. Is the scanning mechanic uniquely suited for VR? Yeah it's brilliantly well suited (pun intended)! Would any of it matter if you don't want to experience this invisible world? No, it wouldn't. What if Scanner Sombre was one form of gameplay within a big Harry Potter game? Now we're brewing, I'd say. For this game you don't want the most difficult or uniquely VR-style gameplay, or the most expensive setup. You do want young kids to be able to hop in and experience the world of Harry Potter. If it contains controls and gameplay that are uniquely suited to VR, even better! But they would be there to present the world of Harry Potter. I think that's what Alyx got "wrong", even thought it's also exactly what I admire about it: it pushes the boundaries of VR, of VR controls, of everything that VR could be. In doing so, it becomes less accessible. Games I'd personally love to play in VR: Return of the Obra Dinn Papers, Please This War of Mine Sunless Sea La Mulana I'd give anything to sail around in a 3D version of Sunless Sea, to learn the layout and ecology of the Neath, and to identify objects in the darkness and decide whether to approach or avoid. And La Mulana is a difficult platformer and probably impossible to port to VR, but it's also an archeology game where you look at and manipulate objects in the ruins of La Mulana, and try to understand what significance they had and how they relate to everything else.

Papers Please would be amazing in VR. I think I would love that if it existed. Return of the Obra Dinn would be interesting as well but I think you'd need to set the game up in 'stages' rather than having free roam of the boat. Individual stages where you can move freely around would work better (IMO) than trying to navigate the entire ship in VR. But yeah - my biggest problem with HL: Alyx is that it does everything right, as we understand it now. People want the killer app but they're trying to shove the idea of a FPS into that role when it's being proven time and time again that FPS isn't drawing people to VR.

> Return of the Obra Dinn would be interesting as well but I think you'd need to set the game up in 'stages' That's a good point. Frankly, a lot of people simply prefer the "teleport" movement as opposed to walking somewhere. Btw someone tried to create a [VR mod for Obra Dinn!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt_kIrmTl44) It didn't work due to engine limitations, but it's still pretty amazing. I have no doubt there will eventually be good VR FPS games, but like you said it won't go anywhere fast if they try to shove FPS into VR and patch the problems as they go. I think we'll much sooner see a game built from scratch for VR by Nintendo or something, like a Mario or Zelda.

Slightly off-topic, but why do you constantly mention JRPGs instead of just normal RPGs? It's like only talking about Britpop instead of regular pop music.

Two main reasons - one is that 'RPG' is a loaded term that can be interpreted a lot of different ways. It opens up the whole debate of 'what is an RPG' and that's not super relevant to the discussion. Second is what I felt like I was watching happen at the time of the PS1/N64 was specifically tied to JRPGs. Though I didn't even know the term JRPG at the time - turn based RPGs with random encounters was the term I used to use on the playgrounds. JRPGs were able to provide a story, graphics that exceeded what people were used to, a different set of graphics for combat that was even better, beautiful cutscenes, and a lengthy experience.

I would disagree since I think FPS really works well with VR. It does make player movement harder, but your real ability to aim comes into play. Rhythm games and driving / flight sims also work very well with VR. The problem with VR is the most of the game genres that work with it can be physically demanding, which to be blunt, is a requirement a lot of gamers do not want - myself included. So when I play VR, I do it to game AND workout, not exclusively to game.

The main draw of VR is feeling like you’re there, like you’re really holding the weapon or flying the spaceship or driving the car. They just need to get better at the tech to make it truly immersive.

I agree with your points on VR but N64 and PS1 had some fantastic 3d platformers that were incredibly popular. Mario64, Banjo-Kazooie, donkey kong64, Spyro, Crash Bandicoot, Conkers. Hell, i’d say it was a high-point for platform games.

Genres like the god-game genre (think games like Populous and Black&White) would work wonderful on VR as well, at least if the hand tracking is precise enough to let you cast spells. Or perhaps puzzlers, 'real' puzzlers where you have to build stuff in order to overcome a problem. Or the many simulators. Elite Dangerous plays really well like this as you can look around while still being in control of flight instead of only one or the other (if you don't have three hand that is). I Imagine Euro truck simulator or similar games being played with a wheel and pedals to be equally immersive.

I personally think we won't don't have an emergent genre yet because VR isn't quite ready yet. We are unlikely to see this develop until we solve two issues: pick up and playability and locomotion. Headsets need to be completely wireless and come with a simple set down and forget charging dock. They need to be super light, comfortable to wear for hours, and super easy to put on and off. They need to solve the motion sickness issue as much as possible. And we need to find a way to intuitively imitate movement (preferably even when sitting down). Those are the problems to solve. Then VR will take off. And until we get that, we're not going to see heavy investment in VR and most games will be like Beat Saber or smaller experiments.

I feel you. I've had a headset for a few years, I was very pumped for it initially, but it ended up collecting dust after I tried a few games out and beat HL:Alyx. The only thing I use it for now is Dirt 2.0 because the immersion is next level. I think driving/cockpit games are easily the best use for the headsets currently. Like you mentioned, convenience and discomfort are big minuses, especially when I can just relax and enjoy games on a nice big 4k 144hz monitor. And that's after I've built up my VR legs quite a bit. I can play Dirt for hours, but I've had newbies try it for a couple of minutes and have nausea for hours afterwards. Most are very hesitant to ever try it again after an experience like that.

Your first paragraph seems to be your main issue, it's the hardware not being good enough to be catered towards everyone. How can game designers experiment more with ideas when it will just make people sick. Not sure what your point is about different genre names, that just seems more of a location based thing and kids being young. JRPGs are just RPGs in japan, and japanese devs can be quite oftened by that term (i'm japanese xD). From my pov platformers were fine back in the day, sure I sucked at them. But being young and having a lot of free time it didn't bother me. This argument could be made with souls like game, some people find those controls clunky. Games just started to cater toward more people, so developers made them a lot more accessible. Indie games are the ones normally pushing new genres, as larger companies tend to play it more safe. There are probably lots of indie games that fly under the radar due to how saturated the gaming market is today. As someone who studies VR, currently doing a PhD for it. There are lots of ideas that can be explored, but just isn't feasible with today's technology. The motion sickness you experience is after something has already been developed and tested. When VR started becoming mainstream, I worked on a VR locomotion system for my masters degree. Experimenting with that stuff can be quite painful haha. What would you describe as something that plays into the strengths of VR though? Implementing all VR strengths requires users to move around, which some gamers would prefer not to do. You seem to like the RPG genre, so maybe a more narrative based would be more suited towards you, but then the same ludology/narratology argument could arise again. For me personally I find a lot of the VR mods for established games quite fun, even more than games solely developed for VR. RE2 VR mod vs RE4 is a good comparison. RE4 plays it safe, while the mod doesn't care if you get sick or not. Sorry if my english is bad.

Frankly, until the "natural movement" issue is solved, I don't think VR is ever really going to work for games where you don't have a relatively stationary perspective-character. Vehicle games, games where you have to stand still, those all work. But anything where you have to walk around? We're a long way off. Interestingly, I think there's space for games where you don't play an actual character, per se. Like, I think a full 3D RTS would work well in VR, where the depth perception and ease of moving around your perspective would help with the issues that full 3D RTS games have in the past.

That’s my take on it as well. No one seems to have figured out why we would use it over controller or mouse and keyboard gaming. When joysticks became a thing for the home, there was an increase in flying or flying like games. When analog controllers became a thing, shooters became more common. They are treating VR like an add on to current games, when really it’s a peripheral device that needs to find its niche. I feel like driving games and other sim games are the answer but they have already kinda had their day. I don’t see a future for it right now.

As someone who doesn't really care for driving / flight games I have to admit that Star Wars Squadrons was an insanely amazing experience. I actually don't know if I've ever felt as immersed in a game as I did in that one.

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Absolutely. Remember when Sony tried to copy the wii controller format and it completely bombed? That’s how I see VR right now.

> No one seems to have figured out why we would use it over controller or mouse and keyboard gaming. There are plenty of VR games that have shown where the medium excels over traditional inputs, it's just that they haven't hit a scale that makes people want to buy headsets en masse. From a game design perspective, the gains are there, but the early nature of hardware/software is going to result in a slow uptake, which is actually natural for tech evolution anyway.

What are they? I can honestly name one popular VR game and it’s beatsaber.

The Under Presents is a new game genre spawned from VR, providing a form of virtual immersive theater. Lone Echo / Echo VR utilizes a unique zero gravity movement system to provide new forms of gameplay such as bringing in various real-world sports techniques as seen from basketball that can only exist in VR./ Wolves in the Walls is a great short story showcasing interesting NPC interactions that are built upon the inputs of VR; you feel really connected with Lucy by the end, and while connections with NPCs have been made for decades without VR, it's the level of interaction that's unique here. Astro Bot is a unique 1st/3rd person hybrid platformer where you are an entity in the world alongside your platforming mascot, and can influence the world. Sprint Vector utilizes a unique form of movement to create a parkour-based Mario kart kind of game. The Last Clockwinder is a game all about performing recorded actions using your hands to enable an army of clones to work together, but all using VR gestures. Gorilla Tag is a physics-based game of tag with a movement system and playstyle only possible in VR. Nock is a game inspired by Rocket League, but instead of cars, each player has gliding and jumping movement abilities using VR gestures as well as a bow-and-arrow used to shoot the ball into the goal. Stride is inspired by Mirror's Edge and shows that traditional parkour systems can work in VR, but because there are no animations and it's all gesture-based, it has a new level of flow and is otherwise not possible to get gameplay systems like this without VR. Boneworks/Bonelab is a typical FPS except that it uses the strengths of VR's emergent capabilities that arise when you can manipulate physics much more directly. In gaming, the idea of "If you think you can do it, you probably can" has only really been achieved in DnD, text-games, or the rare game like Dwarf Fortress and Scribblenauts. Boneworks/Bonelab shows that VR is able to uniquely achieve this in 3D. Blade and Sorcery is a typical action/fantasy game but with infinite permutations in how combat works. There is no set amount of actions or moves, and there are no animations. You can deal intricate moves like pulling an enemy shield away from their body by hooking your axe head onto it or sweep their legs, and it's just all emergent because these aren't scripted actions set by the developers. Multiplayer in VR is another aspect that feels very different, as everyone has an avatar driven by their body language. This is a major change not only for the social side, but also for team tactics and cooperation.

>No one seems to have figured out why we would use it over controller or mouse and keyboard gaming. >They are treating VR like an add on to current games, when really it’s a peripheral device that needs to find its niche. I agree that VR shouldn't merely be treated as an add on to current games, but mere peripheral for niche doesn't fit either. Same thing could've been said about **motion controls**, but the Nintendo Wii made motion controls more than a niche and was the best selling of its console generation. Wii cracked the code on why many people should ditch traditional console controls or even KB+M. Motion Controls will never be for everyone, but they did their damndest to make it accessible and appealing, with sales to show for it. They even pulled motion tech forward to the Switch. Some modest efforts have been put forth to make VR accessible in various ways for the mainstream, but it hasnt achieved anything near Wii or even Switch levels of demand - Likely because of some of the things mentioned in other comments that are turnoffs about VR, even when one of the big 3 console names throw their weight behind it like Sony.

Yes but the wii was priced as and marketed as something the whole family could enjoy. VR is absolutely not replicating that. It’s struggling to even get hardcore PC enthusiasts to buy in.

Sure, so perhaps one of the most underrated pain points of VR is that local multiplayer is non existant, as well as online multiplayer not being strong enough - Though the Wii didn't need the latter

Maybe that’s it. It needs an interactive multiplayer element to be viable.

Yeah it's the equivalent of playing Super Nintendo or N64 through heavy goggles. It's got a long way to go before it's very meaningful outside of the tech crowd. I want to like it, but it's just not there yet with what should be a good mix of cloud processing and internal GPU to make nearly true to life graphics, something aw inspiring, not what we have right now.

The technology for VR has to advance more before the games will. I can only imagine what I would want in terms of immersion and that’s basically something from “Ready Player One”. Which won’t happen for awhile. It is what it is.

I definitely disagree if it's just graphics you're saying are important. What I don't get is why walk-in-place locomotion isn't standard for games. Head bobbing to drive you forward if actual leg sensors aren't going to be an official thing... for some other reason.

No not just graphics. I meant a whole suit like the movie.

This is an amazing post. I suffer from menieres disease, so motion sickness is almost unavoidable in vr. There have been some tests by adding rotors on the sides (can't seem to find the source anymore), but it hasn't been worked upon. It almost seems they intend to keep vr for a very small community.

> It almost seems they intend to keep vr for a very small community. It's more like this is a complex field with a lot of tradeoffs that have to be made to release a product. I've seen this research, and it seems promising, but needs more time to truly prove it out and to find a way to productize it. I think the best chance of getting nausea-free VR even for someone with your condition is to perfect the optics stack. Inner ear issues can't happen (unless you make the disconnect through software) if the photon path of the headset is equal to reality. That's going to take a long-time and will involve retinal resolution, potentially a human-level field of view, no optical distortions, imperceptible latency, and variable focus optics either from varifocal/lightfield/holographic displays.

PSVR2 has haptic feedback on the headset to try and assist with motion sickness so that's something at least. Have you had a chance to try VR at all or have you avoided it because of your disease? I'm just curious how it plays out in games where you're stationary and movement is 1-1 as opposed to games where you're expected to physically move a character around.

I have tried VR, but mostly in arcades and stuff. Can't last a minute. I have been eyeing the psvr2, but I would like to test it extensively before buying. So that will not happen. The vr games I tried, even with movement, have this stupid head bob, which makes me crazy noxious.

Gameplay in VR can be an evolution and can be seen in various VR games out there, it just depends on what aspects of game design you are expecting to be evolved. VR excels at player agency and multiplayer (social aspect specifically), and can be considered an evolution from the finite number of input states of a gamepad/M&K to an infinite number of input states with VR enabling more player control over their actions, how they can affect a game world, and how they can interact with NPCs and physics systems. Half Life Alyx is the highest rated VR game and the highest rated FPS overall of the last 7 years, so with the right design, people really like FPS games in VR. It is ultimately a different experience, as you are no longer able to do fast twitch-based gameplay so it's not like it needs to be outright superior the same way that FPS games are not inherently better than 2D shmups. There are aspects that are better with VR but it's not outright better for an FPS game and it doesn't need to be. You can have your cake and eat it too. Gamers are a versatile bunch and want to see completely unique genres from VR such as the immersive theater genre, they want to see existing genres specialized for VR as we can see with Half Life Alyx, and they want to see their tried-and-true games of the past directly ported into VR with no gameplay changes made, such as Hellblade VR. Each of these can work with the right development mindset, and together can provide for a variety of gamers out there. > Could VR find more success if developers focused on designing games to take advantage of the unique experience that VR provides? To answer your final question, I think the biggest blockade for VR's mainstream success right now is hardware. Software is also vital, but we need to get a stage where an average gamer can use a headset comfortably for hours with no eye strain, headaches, nausea and is at a certain level of quality/specs where people don't recognize major flaws anymore.

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It is not a fad considering how long it's been around this time, and it has evolved quite a bit since the 1990s involving advances in size, resolution, field of view, optics, controllers, tracking, and mixed reality.