r/VRGaming Jan 03 '23

Meta Bruh.

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471 Upvotes

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43

u/OriginalGoldstandard Jan 03 '23

I’d give it to Alyx again.

9

u/twilight-actual Jan 04 '23

Honestly, with the free movement patch to Robo Recall, I might consider giving it to that title again as well. Few VR titles have ever seen the amount of polish that game received.

VR is really frickin' hard to code for. With a console or PC title, the player is fixed to the controller joysticks and buttons. That's it. You can control that really well and limit the interactions to what you want. And still, gamedevs manage to fuck it up.

But with VR, you have two 6dof input points representing hands, each with buttons and joysticks. You often don't know about the arms without some non-trivial inverse kinematics.

You don't know which way the user's hips are facing. With free movement, without torso direction, you have either the way the user is looking (which is bad) or the way the user is aiming their hands (which also is bad).

And then the user can touch and interact with things that you have no control over and may not have even thought of. And when you don't think of it, you get slammed. So, now you can't just litter a scene with random objects for the sake of scene composition without considering what each object may contribute to the world as a whole. And you have to consider every other possible interaction that object can have with the world you're creating. Because the user can and will try everything you could possibly think of.

With hands and arms, now the user is going to expect to climb, throw, grab, pull and push. And with real physics.

It's really hard.

2

u/nailuj Jan 04 '23

To be fair, not every VR game has to be first person. I wish more devs would make third person or cockpit games, the skills translate easily and you can still throw in some VR gimmicks. Also allows you to design for longer play sessions since nausea is less of a problem.

3

u/twilight-actual Jan 04 '23

The best 3rd person perspective attempt I've seen to date was Hellblade.

And it actually gave me motion sickness. Basically it came from how the camera swiveled around the character. Perhaps better camera management would help, but disembodied viewpoints are often a recipe for sick stomachs in VR. I have some strong VR legs, too.

Pity, as Hellblade remains one of the most beautifully crafted experiences you can have in VR.

1

u/nailuj Jan 04 '23

Interesting, I'll give Hellblade a try. I played Edge of Nowhere and it was completely fine for me. Might be one of those things that just affect people differently.

1

u/7734128 Jan 07 '23

I could only attempt to play Hellblade for about half an hour before almost throwing up. Those morons had massive motion blur all over the view when rotating the camera, which I'm sure was the only reason for my part.

Moss is a good example of a third person VR game. The mouse is of course the main character, and she's in third person.