It's amazing for about 15 minutes, then you start to feel the motion sickness, or the sweat starts to build up around the warm headset.
It's just not comfortable enough for prolonged use. As well as those issues, there's the discomfort of being so isolated from the world, especially if in a home/office with other people around. And other (more solveable) issues, such as text legibility.
The motion sickness really depends on the refresh rate (so currently on the price). Very much like with phones, the faster the display gets the fewer people will experience issues.
Games like I Expect You To Die expect the player to sit (as the game character does) with only camera movement coinciding exactly with the movement of player's head -- do not cause motion sickness (unless we go into low FPS as you say).
Games like Echo Arena where the entire time you are flying around (you see the environment moving around you) with no accompanying inner-ear sensation of movement, can cause instant motion sickness in some.
I get where you're coming from but "not a single game" is far from true. There's lots of games made strictly for VR, including great hits like BeatSaber.
Sure, but there's essentially nothing new or interesting about BeatSaber. It's the new DDR.
If anything, what's telling is that it's the only VR game I see getting significant traction*, which implies that VR might be a one off the way DDR was.
Anectodallish source, I teach at college where we have a public free "cool tech hub" with a bunch of VR headsets with a bunch of games that anyone can use. I'd say about 95% of the time anyone is doing vr, it's BeatSaber.
>I'd say about 95% of the time anyone is doing vr, it's BeatSaber.
This has more to do with Beat Saber being really fun, and well, CASUAL. The majority of people who play any kind of "video game" play candy crush remember.
Nobody is going to do a run through of HL:A or a flight or driving simulator in that kind of public "tech hub".
BeatSaber is Unity, Unity has GC (garbage collection = stutters) and even if they worked around it for such a simple game it doesn't matter.
On the other hand if you want a action MMO (something we never succeeded in doing yet, Planetside 2 was a latency fest) you need to go vanilla C/C++.
Engines make games economical (in zero interest rate times) but the value of the games is lower because nothing is invented, they are just copying the wheel.
I never buy Unity/Unreal games or non-multiplayer games.
> I never buy Unity/Unreal games or non-multiplayer games.
Well, of course that's a valid approach, but you do realize that most people playing games don't really care which engine something is developed in?
Even if this personal requirement of yours is true or not, "Not a single game is custom made for VR" couldn't be further from the truth, and the mainstream does not have anything close to those requirements. They simple buy and play games that look fun, regardless of engine.
> Engines make games economical (in zero interest rate times) but the value of the games is lower because nothing is invented, they are just copying the wheel.
Thats... a weird take.
lots of applications share 80% of their functionality and thus makes sense for there to be a shared codebase that engineers can start from to build their projects. thats the entire point of frameworks like ruby on rails or Django in web development. if you wanna go lower down, most people are using a library to interact with the gpu. either opengl or vulkan or metal.
Would you go as far as to say you won't play a game that wasn't built from scratch all the way to the metal?
I don't know if you have followed the numbers, but Steam is a massacre right now.
So many low quality Unity/Unreal copies that ruins peoples lives making them indebted because they think they will make it as indie by just pasting new content into the same engine.
Content is becoming over saturated. Yet another look/sound/storyline that nobody cares about. What we need is new engines.
Unity is pure madness, so bloated not even the Unity devs. know how to progress.
> So many crap Unity/Unreal copies that ruins peoples lives making them indebted for life because they think they will make it as indie.
Thats because people are making crappy games. all unity and unreal did was lower the bar to making a game.
At the end of the day, its about the quality of the game + how well you market it. Sure there are a lot of shit games made in Unity. but you also get gems like cities skylines and cuphead too. The difference is the quality and attention put into making a GOOD Game. good games take worse. a platforn like unity makes creating a good game for a dev from impossible to possible.
> are just a copies, they don't reinvent anything fundamental.
if by copies, you mean they fit in a genere? The engines are constrained by the heardware. what we really need is new paradigms for how we interact with computers before engines are going to start giving us new novel ways of doing things. at the end of the day, all an engine is giving you is a fast and performant way to draw to the screen and send audio to the speakers based on whats coming in from the input.
Motion sickness depends heavily on both the person and how each app handles motion as well. I can get motion sick depending on the app, while my dad gets motion sick if anything is even slightly off.
It's just not comfortable enough for prolonged use. As well as those issues, there's the discomfort of being so isolated from the world, especially if in a home/office with other people around. And other (more solveable) issues, such as text legibility.