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ughhhh posted:House of the dying sun. I think the guy who made it is also a goon. Homeworld is my favourite arcadey first person space combat game
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Jan 11, 2023 17:43
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Lunchmeat Larry posted:Homeworld is my favourite arcadey first person space combat game It has a strategy layer where you direct ships...
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Jan 11, 2023 18:04
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Corbeau posted:I just don't understand why we don't have a Homeworld-like in VR. Isn't this just because it's an RTS? Aside from Total War (which isn't even a pure RTS), that entire style of game essentially ceased to exist in mainstream gaming years and years ago. A niche genre on a niche console probably isn't going to attract investors. Also, any time RTS's are brought up I cannot miss the opportunity to mention that after TW:WH3, the most popular RTS on Steam for a while now is Age of Empires II, which is a game first released in 1999. The definitive edition is in active development and keeps getting new content! TheFluff fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 19:38
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https://twitter.com/MetaNewsroom/status/1613234541207904259
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Jan 11, 2023 19:55
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So, about why there isn't a Homeworld VR. For me, it's very related to the discussion about why there aren't good/big games in VR, and also it's related to standalone vs pc vr discussion, as you will see. It's the same as "why there isn't a good FPS like Half Life 1 or Goldeneye or Quake, or a good stealth game like Thief". Yes, you have Battlegroup VR or Eternal Starlight in VR. Or you have Espire 1/2 for stealth games. But their quality is *notably* lower than the mentioned titles. And the thing is, some people blame Quest for this lack of quality, to which I present the argument of, you know, great graphics aren't needed to make great games, examples are... precisely those, games like Half Life or Thief or Homeworld or System Shock 2. If companies could do great games with 1997-2005 technology, sure as hell they can do it now on Quest, right? (man, imagine a survival horror with the quality of SS2 in VR) The cause appears more clear if you check mobygames for the credits of said games. Teams for AAA games were notably smaller back then, but even at the end of the 90s, they were already 25-35 dev teams, composed by professionals with many years of experience. They weren't games done by 3 guys in their bedrooom/garage, with two of them their first foray in game development. And well, if you check who makes VR games, in a surprising majority of cases are teams like the latter. So many of them are 1 guy with maybe 1-2 contractors. Just from memory: Compound H3VR ETT Ancient Dungeon Ultrawings are all 1 man projects with some extra help. And many more, these are just some I know because they were able to reach some notoriety. Red Matter 1/2 is just a 2-man team with a few contractors (yes, even in the case of RM2) Some others graduated from 1 dev team to small but 'real' team just in the middle of development: cases like Into the Radius or Blade & Sorcery Turin Turambar fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 20:21
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Turin Turambar posted:So, about why there isn't a Homeworld VR. This is sorta just an effect of modern gamedev being expensive and there not being much return on the investment in VR specifically, I think
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Jan 11, 2023 20:26
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Blade Runner posted:This is sorta just an effect of modern gamedev being expensive and there not being much return on the investment in VR specifically, I think I think people are also underestimating how long those kinds of games actually had to "cook" in terms of the medium as a whole. In a lot of ways the progression of flat screen design has been limited by technology, but it's also had time to mature along the way. Flat games are decades and decades old, even at the point where a lot of those things were made. VR as a mainstream thing is a lot younger, so maybe we've just been really overestimating how fast people are able to iterate on and learn how to do things "properly" for the new medium (and I really do think it comes down to the fact that VR is a new medium, and not just a new way to play flatscreen games)
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Jan 11, 2023 20:43
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Tapping my foot impatiently, glancing at my watch occasionally, all for news about San Andreas VR
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Jan 11, 2023 21:02
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ughhhh posted:House of the dying sun. I think the guy who made it is also a goon. One of the first and few games I've played to the end. Great game.
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Jan 11, 2023 21:02
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Lemming posted:I think people are also underestimating how long those kinds of games actually had to "cook" in terms of the medium as a whole. In a lot of ways the progression of flat screen design has been limited by technology, but it's also had time to mature along the way. Flat games are decades and decades old, even at the point where a lot of those things were made. VR as a mainstream thing is a lot younger, so maybe we've just been really overestimating how fast people are able to iterate on and learn how to do things "properly" for the new medium (and I really do think it comes down to the fact that VR is a new medium, and not just a new way to play flatscreen games) That's pretty true. We can even look at older control schemes, for a direct comparison to your VR locomotion annoyances - FPS tank controls were, nostalgia aside, extremely bad.
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Jan 11, 2023 21:04
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Not quite, though it has elements of what I mean in terms of controls.
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Jan 11, 2023 21:44
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Good soup! posted:Tapping my foot impatiently, glancing at my watch occasionally, all for news about Index 2 pls 
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Jan 11, 2023 21:48
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I maintain that BattleGroupVR sucks. Targeting only works maybe a third of the time, and if you fail a mission you have to do it again (okay) but you don't get back any of the resources you spent on all the ships you lost. So it's effectively permadeath but with a linear, scripted campaign.
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Jan 11, 2023 22:02
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Thoatse posted:Index 2 pls a price cut on the index 1 wouldn't hurt in the meantime, the drat thing is 3.5 years old now and the price hasn't moved an inch, ever
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Jan 11, 2023 23:26
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Turin Turambar posted:Teams for AAA games were notably smaller back then, but even at the end of the 90s, they were already 25-35 dev teams, composed by professionals with many years of experience. I think it's pretty appropriate to compare the Quest to a mainstream console; it's priced like a console and although the ecosystem is more open than other consoles, it's not a PC either. PC VR is an entirely different thing and remains a niche peripheral. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Jan 11, 2023 |
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Jan 11, 2023 23:27
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I think that all is 100%. To add on to the problems, VR has a challenge flat games don’t: asking the customer to strap a computer to their face. People are willing to put up will lovely graphics if the game is easy to pick up and play, but the second you ask someone to isolate themselves from the world and then deal with comfort issues and lens spacing and oh wait just pushing the stick forward makes you feel sick…well the end product better justify all that bullshit. So far like two or three games have managed to cross that threshold for the average user it seems.
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Jan 12, 2023 01:27
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Blade Runner posted:FPS tank controls were, nostalgia aside, extremely bad. Wait, what? Do you mean WASD controls? What other way is there to play a FPS, or do you just not like FPS's?
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Jan 12, 2023 02:45
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King Vidiot posted:Wait, what? Do you mean WASD controls? What other way is there to play a FPS, or do you just not like FPS's?  No child; they mean the old days of like DOOM where it was forward/back and turn left/turn right with the arrow keys. Pre-mouse-look.
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Jan 12, 2023 02:56
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Oh yeah. It's amazing how long it took for wasd+mouselook to stick, and what games tried before that. Try playing the original Hitman, or System Shock! (You should do that second thing anyway, because even with the ancient controls it's really really good) E: it reminds me of how it didn't use to be common knowledge that when designing a game you shouldn't let your player get permanently stuck, or kill them for bullshit reasons. There were tons and tons and tons of adventure games where that was the norm. It actually took people saying "hey maybe there's a better way of doing this", sitting down, thinking about it, and realising you shouldn't do these things because they make your game bad (LucasArts). Before that, there was even the intermediate step of "we know that this is bullshit and not fun, so we'll try to solve the problem by making a funny joke for you to enjoy every time we kill you" (Sierra). Yes, that really was a solution they tried, before accepting what is now considered blindingly loving obvious. Hyperlynx fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 03:06
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Neddy Seagoon posted:
I'm almost 40 myself, I remember playing Duke3D with a friend and since we didn't understand rebinding keys we'd play with one of us moving with the arrow keys while the other ducked, jumped and shot. We didn't strafe even though the convenient strafe keys were right by the jump and duck keys. I was just confused because even with mouselook you still kinda had "tank controls", although with strafing which I guess a tank doesn't do. 
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Jan 12, 2023 03:18
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Hyperlynx posted:Oh yeah. It's amazing how long it took for wasd+mouselook to stick, and what games tried before that. Try playing the original Hitman, or System Shock! I feel like part of the reason it took so long is that it took some real brain training to get used to it, I got headaches and nausea from it when I first forced myself to start using the mouse playing Unreal. I always think about that when people talk about motion sickness being such a huge blocker for VR.
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Jan 12, 2023 03:35
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I’m a lefty so I always play using the arrow keys but I remember a distinct time in the early 2000’s where I still had the left and right keys bound to turning left and right and then I’d bind delete and page down, which were right above them to strafe left and right. And I’d still use mouselook too. It took me a while to figure out I didn’t need the turning keys at all
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Jan 12, 2023 04:40
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Police quest back in the day was infamous for having a random encounter you need to trigger on day x that furthers the story on day x+2 or something Miss the chance that first day and the game was unpassable
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Jan 12, 2023 05:24
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TIP posted:I feel like part of the reason it took so long is that it took some real brain training to get used to it, I got headaches and nausea from it when I first forced myself to start using the mouse playing Unreal. Really? drat, that sucks. I don't remember it being an issue for me... I remember I first saw it in Quake 2. I rebound it for old-style controls! I don't quite remember when I finally accepted the new way (might have been Half Life), but I feel like if I'd had headaches and nausea I would have remembered that.
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Jan 12, 2023 05:36
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Roundboy posted:Police quest back in the day was infamous for having a random encounter you need to trigger on day x that furthers the story on day x+2 or something
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Jan 12, 2023 08:54
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Collateral Damage posted:Didn't one of the space quest games have a section early on where you need to stop and pick up a small object that's very easy to miss, and said object is then not used for most of the game until it becomes critical to have very close to the end? So if you didn't pick that item up you could spend hours playing through the game without knowing you wouldn't be able to finish it. IV did, from memory. I wouldn't be surprised if all of them did really.
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Jan 12, 2023 09:00
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Hyperlynx posted:Oh yeah. It's amazing how long it took for wasd+mouselook to stick, and what games tried before that. Try playing the original Hitman, or System Shock! Or Blade Edge of Darkness / Severance. Great game at the time, with very advanced lightning and physics... and tank controls :/. The second part, imo, of why VR games are still not good or big enough is the nature of VR games. They are expensive to make, if you think about it (yes, you can laser focus on a single thing, like making a game around pure locomotion like Gorilla Tag, but I'm talking of a more general case). Think what happens if you are in a good virtual world in VR, you want to to be able to pick up things naturally, to be able to push, pull, throw things, etc. If you have melee weapons, you want weapons should behave somewhat realistically and not be able to wiggle it like crazy to kill things. Etc etc. VR inherently removes a layer of abstraction that exists in normal videogames. Instead of activating things or picking up things by pressing 'E', you do it naturally. Instead of attacking by pressing left click or right trigger to 'play' a canned attack animation, you do it naturally. This removal of abstraction for game development is expensive, it's lots of extra little (or not so little) systems and interactions you have to code and test and iterate. I think in the future there should be some kind of middleware for engines that help devs doing common physical interactions, to help speed up developments. Turin Turambar fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 09:29
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Corbeau posted:I just don't understand why we don't have a Homeworld-like in VR. We do; it's called Flotilla 2 and it's even by Blendo Games, the highly regarded Quadrilateral Cowboy devs. Unfortunately it's so rough as to be basically unplayable. I don't even know if it supports any controllers that aren't Vive wands.
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Jan 12, 2023 10:37
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It's a shame nobody's made a VR mod for Homeworld. It would be nice just to have the depth perception, honestly
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Jan 12, 2023 11:41
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Turin Turambar posted:Or Blade Edge of Darkness / Severance. Great game at the time, with very advanced lightning and physics... and tank controls :/. Even past VR games in specific being expensive to make, it can't be overstated that large scale games are also kinda just expensive, these days; Skyrim VR is by far the biggest open world VR game because it's also one of the biggest open world normal games, and it cost 100 million dollars or something to make. The flatscreen version was absolutely worth it and has made its money back several times over, but I doubt that's true of VR dev stuff, so you have a system where not only is it more expensive to make things to a large scale because of the removal of abstraction, but also where you have vastly less potential customers. Smaller games like Beatsaber or Gorilla Tag can do very well and be extremely fun, but they're hardly the same scope as AAA VR stuff like Alyx, which seemed to be mostly pushed by Valve just wanting to make it.
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Jan 12, 2023 12:28
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Timely twitter thread https://twitter.com/DennyCloudhead/status/1613327060071743489
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Jan 12, 2023 13:16
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That's the CEO of the Pistol Whip devs for anyone who wants to know the guy's credentials. Though I deeply question this part, VR is not a threat to the AAA games industry my dude. https://twitter.com/DennyCloudhead/status/1613327067147534338 njsykora fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Jan 12, 2023 |
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Jan 12, 2023 13:47
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njsykora posted:That's the CEO of the Pistol Whip devs for anyone who wants to know the guy's credentials. Though I deeply question this part, VR is not a threat to the AAA games industry my dude. That part mostly reads like cope for the disinterest of large studios; they don't see it as worth the investment and this isn't because it's difficult to monetize and has a witheringly small userbase comparatively, but because they're threatened
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Jan 12, 2023 13:53
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Yeah I dont see why it’s a threat. VR cannot, should not and will not replace 2D gaming. They will just exist side by side like they do now. It’s only a threat if your company absolutely refuses to do VR and even then it’s not a big threat, you’re just leaving some potential money on the table.
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Jan 12, 2023 13:58
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Blade Runner posted:That part mostly reads like cope for the disinterest of large studios; they don't see it as worth the investment and this isn't because it's difficult to monetize and has a witheringly small userbase comparatively, but because they're threatened There were also big studios who only did VR support because they were paid to, I remember someone from Codemasters outright saying they didn't add VR support to Dirt Rally 2 initially because they knew Facebook would pay them to add it like they did with DR1. Which is exactly what happened and why the F1 games never got VR support until they got eaten by EA.
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Jan 12, 2023 14:03
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Jim Silly-Balls posted:Yeah I dont see why it’s a threat. VR cannot, should not and will not replace 2D gaming. They will just exist side by side like they do now. to be fair to his metaphor, under current conditions the same also goes for renewables but people absolutely see them as a threat 
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Jan 12, 2023 14:04
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The overlap between the kinds of games I want to play on a 2D screen and the types of games I want to play in VR is fairly small.
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Jan 12, 2023 14:10
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The part where I raised an eyebrow is this one: " traditional publishers typically don't care about VR." They don't have to care about VR. They care about money. Traditional publishers will come to VR when they see they can win big bucks on it.
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Jan 12, 2023 14:30
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Turin Turambar posted:The part where I raised an eyebrow is this one: " traditional publishers typically don't care about VR." It also ignores that, whether those projects were good or profitable or significant amounts of effort, a lot of traditional publishers have put out a bunch of VR games, so they're obviously not actively ignoring it
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Jan 12, 2023 14:44
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The tweet also ignores the fact that VR has significantly enhanced some flat games, not just ruined them or made them weird as he suggests. Like racing and flight sims. If you're releasing a race or flight sim without VR support, I aint buying it. Its that important. And I know I'm not alone in that thought
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Jan 12, 2023 14:56
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