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My most anticipated VR titles for the first quarter of 2020
ultimateduck
Member EpicPosts: 1,309
Hopefully this is ok. None of the titles are MMOs but my hope is that with the growing interest of VR, an MMO will come with soon. Considering the amount of time developers need to make a AAA MMO, it may not be terribly soon but a man can dream. Even making an existing MMO VR capable would be awesome. Regardless, Q1 is going to be pretty fun.
Here's my list for the first four months:
Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. Releases Jan 23. This seems like a gritty, open world survival type game. I hope it is as tactile as the next game on the list. So far, it looks like it is.
Half-Life: Alyx. Expected to release in March. I'm excited the venture into a fully tactile world, not to mention the story line. This game has so much hype, the Valve Index is currently on back order going into March.
Lone Echo 2. Release date Q1 2020. Just going off how great Lone Echo was, this has to be a great game. The story and polish of the original Lone Echo was solid.
Horizon. Release date Q1 2020. Facebooks first real attempt at "The Oasis". A customizable and expandable world. The Wii style avatars are a little off putting but I believe they will be customizable in the near future.
Enjoy and thanks!
Comments
On rare occasion, say with a movie like Avatar, 3D really enhanced the experience and brought the world to life.
Usually however, most of the 3D movies I've seen are more like Friday the 13th 3D, which has, as my son said to me after seeing it together, "annoying 3D" where its mostly used to have sharp instruments or blood coming out of the screen and into your face.
Point is, does VR really add that much to the actual game experience to make it worth the time and trouble?
I know FO4 and Skyrim have VR now, but reviews I've read are mixed with many saying it was kinda cool, but didn't really add much to their original experience.
Pretty much how I feel about 3D movies, and being an eyeglass wearer it makes watching them annoying which I also fear would be true with VR.
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Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
I purchased the original Rift when it was released in 2016. It was initially released with an Xbox controller for games and a thumb pad to navigate through some of the experiences. The games that were available were almost demo like. Really cool experiences with very little dynamic gameplay. The only actual games that stood out were driving games like Project Cars and Dirt and flying sims like Eve Valkyre. Games that were made for the PC, but modified for VR.
Later in 2016 Oculus released the Touch controlers and with it, a game called RoboRecall. These controllers were the beginning of VR legitimizing. They allowed not only grabbing and squeezing, but hand articulation with touch sensitive thumb, pointer finger and middle finger buttons and arm articulation (extension, pronation and supination). Robo Recall was incredibly polished and allowed you to shoot opponents, gab and tear off limbs, use these lims as weapons to beat opponents, catch projectiles, etc.
Then came the development lag. After seeing what VR was capable of, it took developers a couple of years to create games. In the mean time, games like Elite Dangerous and Skyrim were made fully VR capable. Fun games like Beat Saber and Gorn were released along with a plethora of "wave killing" games, where you stood in a small area and killed waves of opponents, story driven games like Lone Echo and coop shooters like Arizona Sunshine.
2020 is hopes and dreams for us VR people. The HMDs were on back order for a reason. Valve released news that they will be making the next iteration of Half Life, Half Life: Alyx for VR only. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, a survival game based on the television series, releases today. Facebook announces their effort to create their version of "The Oasis", an open and fully customizable world, with Horizons. The list of AAA games is expanding almost daily.
There's a "Guardian" system that starts to form a grid, almost like a slowly forming chain link fence, as you get closer to the boundaries of your play area so you don't destroy your house. Most of the funny videos you see, the Guardian system isn't set up or is turned off for immersion.
Low-Fi looked good, but I couldn't get a solid release time frame. I also couldn't get a real solid feel for the gameplay. The world seems like it would be amazing to venture around in.
As far as the cost? I would like to say I spent more on my ultra-wide curved monitor than I did on my VR HMDs, but I bought into the Rift when it was $499 and the Touch controllers came separate, at a later date, at $199. But... I did spend more on my monitor than I did my wife Rift S.
PC gamers are nuts with money. We will spend $1k on a new video card and look for a budget monitor. As you mentioned, $100 gaming mouse, $300 keyboards, multiple $60 games... and complaining that $399 is too much for an HMD. It's kinda funny.
I did pick up an Occulus Go after trying out several options. As a portable big screen TV it's actually quite nice. It made my 4 hour stay at the DMV go by much more quickly. Being able to store multiple movies on it and watch them anywhere on a 100"+ screen is a nice experience worth the $150 price tag (I picked it up for $120 from Amazon if you're willing to wait on sales).
I bought the Go last month for use as a portable TV and have never tried to game on it.
The games they are coming out with now are much more interactive than they were even six months ago. With a few exceptions, games have gone from navigating through a world by taking a very specific path with very specific interactions available to being in an open world where you can interact with almost everything. I think it took developers a bit of time to catch up with the capabilities of VR... but they are definitely catching up.
VR right now is very inconvenient no matter the platform. It's essentially a peripheral in most cases, and one that has very few use cases. You could.. but shouldn't wear VR sets while traveling on trains or buses. When you're out with friends the last thing you want is to be closed off from them.
My wife likes VR for more immersive feelings, and when I introduced her to it, she wanted to play for a week, and her favorite experiences weren't games at all. She liked the "fear" based "games" where you are on a building or flying over a mountain range and you look down at everything.
Those are experiences that feel different in VR for her... but she doesn't ask for the set any more.
I know that there will be more inclusive HMDs over the next few years that will be easier to present similar experiences, but I don't believe they'll be VR sets. I feel like VR in its current iteration will forever stay niche.
It isn't the cost of ownership, or the lack of interesting content (though I haven't found any long lasting content I come back for myself), it's that it's simply inconvenient.
My wife likes experiences like roller coasters and fear based things because she doesn't like actual roller coasters. Loops make her sick, but not when it's in VR.
She would never play a VR game that requires controllers in their traditional sense, but when hand capture or glove devices are more common place, maybe then she'll get into it more.
I just don't like wearing the headsets for long periods of time. I think they've done better on the newer sets with weight management, but PSVR and Gear VR sets hurt my neck after an hour of use. But I've seen much lighter sets on the horizon.
I can't recall who made it, but the new goggle set looked really cool, they showed it at CES. I think in that case, with a much lighter goggle set, it could be a piece of hardware that will fix the weight issue entirely, as long as it doesn't sit too heavily on the bridge.
I'm always on the lookout for new hardware that will make it more accessible to me, I just don't know if we'll get there in the next few years. I also think a standardized software would help.
I personally love my VR headset, and have used it quite a bit. But I also went in knowing it wasn't going to be my main gaming source.
I played an MMORPG in it (a township tale), and it felt amazing to just wander around the world and interact with people but at the same time all of the annoying things started stacking up, like the clunkiness of reaching to your belt to grab something, or having to chop trees in a specific way to get them to knock down (I sat there for 15 minutes hitting a tree getting tired as hell just to learn I was doing it wrong).
Games like Beat Saber, Pavlov VR and Super Hot I would say provide better experiences than their non VR counterparts just because the feeling of playing them is insane in VR. In Beat Saber, getting a full combo on a difficult song feels so much better than when I would do it in Guitar Hero. In Pavlov it just feels awesome to be playing a team shooter in VR, especially with how the guns control. In Super Hot it's just great to play with how fluid it feels in VR.
But 99% of the games coming out are utilizing it like 3D movies did. They are either some boring wander a hall jump scare game, or stand still and interact with crap in a room games. I think with the new Half Life, more companies will start to actually utilize it better.
It also is annoying as hell making enough space for room scale VR. I ended up drawing a barrier through my couch so that I wasn't running into the barriers during beatsaber, but when I forgot to change it back I ran into my couch a few times playing other games.
In just about every case, the weight became uncomfortable for me after a while. Maybe it would get better over time, if I used it more often.
It's also why I feel like there needs to be a single operating system for HMDs. Hololens has pretty decent hand tracking at the moment, and its newest iteration makes it easier to navigate and do different things.
I don't feel like it's much of a priority for a lot of companies to accelerate these kinds of technologies. I think if there was a larger audience we would have seen greater strides in hand tracking and more engrossing games on the horizon.
The hand tracking isn't bad on the S right now, not sure if you mean it will be improved in the future?
I also like that some AR sets can utilize "totems". Totems are just basic items that mean nothing in the real world but are simulated as something else in the game world. they can be controllers, or magic wants, or a gun, or whatever. I'd like to see that kind of thing get implemented later on, but I doubt we'll start seeing full on harnesses being sold.. there's just no way for them to be cost effective and safe.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.