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Great op. VR is cool and good. Kind of like having a theme park that you can access directly from your room any time you want. Edit: updated 27 March 2020: The OP games post doesn't have most of the 'big' VR games. What follows is the latest version of a list which I put together ages ago and have been adding to from time to time, figured I might as well update it given there are probably quite a lot of new VR-ers because of Alyx. There are a lot of terrible little VR 'experiences' filling every VR store for some reason. I have tried to only include experiences and games which are decent and also at least somewhat substantial in terms of content or at least notable in terms of their mechanics: The Room VR: A Dark Matter just came out today. By all account it's the Room (excellent mobiles puzzle game where you physically interact with beautiful intricate puzzle boxes and other puzzle elements), but in VR, which is a very good thing. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, a highly polished first person zombie-fighting singleplayer narrative you get the rest. Apparently very good. Looks like it would scare the bejesus out of me. Stormland is an AAA-quality first person sci-fi game in which you play a robot exploring a world in which you can fly between islands in the sky. Apparently the gameplay is very well done, a lot of flying about, climbing, movement. It looks great and there is some element of replayability. Boneworks appears to be a pretty successful attempt to do a kind of Half-Life 2 for VR, with lots of physicality to almost everything in the game world, lots of combat against creepy enemies with which you can experiment with the physics systems in a deadly manner, and a generally creepy world/atmosphere. Asgard's Wrath is a large, AAA quality made-for-VR fantasy role playing game produced by Oculus. First person combat with use of a third person God mode as part of the puzzle solving mechanics. The game looks great but the gameplay itself has divided opinions. Some people love it, some think that it's not well designed for VR and instead just feels like an attempt to make a 2D AAA title in VR with little to no thought about how to best take advantage of the new medium. In any case if you're looking for a quality, long form single player in a fantasy setting (that isn't a badly done port of a 2D game e.g. Skyrim VR), here it is. Lone Echo is a must-play experience and probably the best single player VR game so far [edit: until Alyx, maybe?]. Echo VR is its free multiplayer. Definitely need to check both of them out. Defector was the most recent big Oculus release before Asgard's Wrath. Defector is a singleplayer spy game with some big setpiece Bond-type scenes at the beginning. Decent reviews but apparently pretty short and with quite restricted gameplay. Vader Immortal is a highly polished episodic Star Wars singleplayer 'experience'. Not a huge amount of gameplay but that doesn't seem to matter to most who've played it. Beat Saber is the biggest game in VR. Rhythm game with lightsabers. BoxVR is another rhythm game, good for a workout. Soundboxing was the original VR boxing rhythm game. Thrill of the Fight is an actual boxing game, not a rhythm game, but is apparently a great workout and well-put-together game. Pistol Whip is an FPS 'rhythm game'. I know nothing about it except that people seem to really like it and it looks trippy as hell. Blade & Sorcery is the premier arena melee singleplayer experience, with emphasis on more realistic physics than you find in most VR games even today. AI is terrible unfortunately but the handling of the weapons and objects is incredibly immersive. Gorn is also a great arena melee experience of a totally different kind, cartoon visuals and decapitations, physics-based madness. Hotdogs Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (H3VR) is a VR shooting gallery with tons of highly realistic guns, and now has several fully-fledged game modes where you fight giant sausages as an alternative to human enemies. Brass Tactics has a free demo and is the first (and a really awesome) proper VR RTS, made by some old Age of Empires devs. Online, co-op and AI play available, plus a little singleplayer campaign. Online population may be pretty dead these days, I don't know. Espire is a first person stealth combat game, almost a kind of MGS for VR perhaps? Haven't played but it has OK reviews for an indy product. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has a VR mode which is very well done apparently. Wait I actually own this game, I forgot. I need to spend less time posting about VR and play more VR. Landfall is an ok RTS type game but focuses on controlling individual mech characters on smaller arenas. Presumably multiplayer now dead. The Mage's Tale is another big singleplayer. First-person spellcaster. A good length, 15 hours+ for most people. It's fun and the visuals are decent but there's a bit of a lack of polish. There are some really awesome setpiece moments especially near the end The Ninety-Nine! The Wizards is also a first-person magic-based/spellcaster singleplayer. I know nothing about it except I think it was from an indy studio so may be a bit rough around the edges, but then again it does seem to have pretty good Steam reviews. Sprint Vector is a cool multiplayer, first-person skimming/skating racing game, kind of like Motorball if you've seen Alita. You go very fast. Look up some videos, it's sort of hard to describe, there's lots of flying. Search Reddit or whatever to see if anyone's still playing, it might be a bit dead now. From Other Suns is described as a cross between Faster Than Light and Borderlands. It's a single player/multiplayer co-op game where you command your own spaceship and travel across the galaxy, fighting AI enemies either in space with your ship, or in FPS by jumping onto other ships and space stations. Some people say it gets monotonous due to the proc gen used for combat environments. But it's pretty polished and fun and the feeling of piloting your ship with your own crew, with the various different jobs of engineer etc.. definitely gave me a Firefly trip. Up to 4 player co-op or you can play with AI on your side. Arktika.1 is a very polished FPS single player from the Metro devs, apparently it's great unless you have a searing hatred of teleportation gameplay. Wilson's Heart is another singleplayer first person experience, it's a noire puzzler/gothic horror game but in reality is more of a long-form interactive narrative experience. I really like it though despite the lack of in-depth gameplay mechanics. Incredibly polished as an experience, except for the movement mechanics which are teleport-only and very restrictive. In a somewhat similar vein, The Invisible Hours is a totally non-interactive, 'virtual immersive theatre' experience. It's a murder mystery in a mansion with a whole story all going on at once - so you choose how to experience it, which characters to follow and in which order. Really awesome apparently despite somewhat mediocre visuals. Mission: ISS is a simulation of the internal US side of the ISS (and the whole thing in EVA mode). Very cool. Obduction is basically Myst in VR. Very good if you like that sort of thing, but there have been performance problems so it's worth keeping under two hours playtime to see whether it works properly at first, so you can refund if needs be. Star Trek: Bridge Crew is what it sounds like; you play pilot, captain, engineer or tactical specialist, on the bridge of the Enterprise (classic or modern versions) with either AI or other players filling the rest of the four roles. Really fun with a good crew, lots of capacity for amusing idiocy. Only criticisms are that it's visually somewhat meh, and whilst there's a good amount of content, the actual number of campaign missions is a bit limited. There are AI if you can't find other players, but it recently released in '2D' so there may still be a decent community. Robo Recall game that I assume still comes free with Oculus Touch (not sure though) - fun FPS where you fight robots with a lot of physicality involved; you can grab them and tear them apart, bounce your guns off enemies and catch them to reload, there is a lot of gameplay variety and the visuals are still pretty great. Res Infinite has a VR version and is beautiful and trippy as hell. Fallout 4 VR is Fallout 4 in VR. Typical low-effort Bethesda janky port where you have to use community mods to get it to run properly. Ditto Skyrim VR. Onward and Pavlov are still the biggest multiplayer VR shooters I think. Good online multiplayer fps's of very different types. Pavlov is Counterstrike in VR, Onward is somewhere between that and ARMA on the game vs sim spectrum. I think both have (rubbish) bots to play against now but the communities are still going strong I believe so you shouldn't need them except for practice. Standout is a battle royale game in VR. The Climb is a highly polished climbing game, with nice visuals and atmosphere although the gameplay isn't hugely exciting. Climbey is an indy climbing game which has multiplayer functionality and I think there are lots of custom maps. Arkham VR is actually great even though it's a quite short. Weirdly enough, the last half is one of the best narrative uses of VR I've seen. The visual polish is loving great too. Marvel Powers United was meant to be a big blockbuster Oculus multiplayer, Facebook invested a ton of money in it and even released a branded Rift bundle, but the game fell totally flat due to a crippling (and baffling) lack of variety in the gameplay and scenarios. Croteam has converted a bunch of its games for VR including Talos Principle and the Serious Sam games. I Expect You To Die is a first-person parody spy puzzler game, with fun puzzles and a great theme tune. It has quite recently had yet another mission added to it for free, so there's probably a solid three hours' playtime in there at least now. The Unspoken is a multiplayer first person magic duel game. But they released a single player campaign which was pretty cool and visually great, unsurprisingly short though. I doubt there is much of an online multiplayer population these days. The Gallery: Call of the Starseed is a first person adventure/puzzler game. Two episodes so far. The first episode was very well done for early VR and had introduced some great mechanics for perhaps the first time, including a semi-physicalised backpack inventory system. The second episode was something of a disappointment as far as I heard. Dead & Buried was my favourite game when consumer VR first launched and comes free with Rift. Very simple, western-themed multiplayer shootout, but the visuals, gameplay mechanics and pretty much everything else were highly polished. So much fun if you enjoy ducking and running around your playspace making use of the in-game cover and lobbing sticks of dynamite at people. The co-op wave scenarios are fantastic, especially the Graveyard map with the Void Widow boss. There are still players around online when I pop in, very occasionally. It comes free with some Rift packages still, I think. They released a sequel to the game with Oculus Quest. The sequel used standard fps movement instead of the fixed positioning of the original, and this kind of destroyed the arcadey style and any originality from the first game, by all accounts. Vanishing Realms, a first-person dungeon crawler. Very basic combat mechanics, but not without a little interest at least despite not having any real physicalised aspect - the aesthetic and feel of the game is first-person Zelda, including pots you can break for coins and some fun basic puzzles and big bosses. Still quite charming. Chronos was the first long-form VR singleplayer and it's still great. A third person Zelda-like game which has a collection of the best made-for-VR game mechanics I think I've ever seen in a single title. No motion controls, you use a gamepad or your controllers but just as a traditional game controller. Don't be put off by dying a lot, it's not meant to be an easy play. Edge of Nowhere is a quite well-polished, roughly four hour singleplayer third person game with a cool H.P. Lovecraft-esque world and storyline. Arizona Sunshine possibly the first proper singleplayer fps for VR, a zombie shooter, very rough around the edges by modern standards by all accounts. Rec Room is a free online first-person multiplayer, almost like a proto-MMO. It has a common space where you can mess around with various physical games, plus a load of multiplayer minigames you can access like paintball. It also has a whole bunch of 'quests', co-op dungeon-type experiences each modelled on a totally different kind of game style (sci-fi shooting combat, old school RPG, a pirate one, etc) except they are all stylised to look like they're just games made by kids, it's pretty cool. It also has customisable persistent community rooms where you can build poo poo, kind of like a paired-down Garry's Mod. You need to be playing with decent people to be able to survive any of the Quests. Big Screen is a multiplayer virtual desktop app, you can broadcast your screen to all other players with audio if you have a decent upload bandwidth, there are big shared rooms now to hang out in too. 3D movies are insane in VR. VR Chat is an infamous MMO-type experience with environments and characters largely built by players; Second Life in VR but weirder. Finally, there are also a whole ton of free experiences, documentaries and so on many of which are well worth checking out: Google Earth VR is mindblowing. Welcome to Lightfields is also from Google and is also loving amazing. The BBC documentaries tend to be good. Crow: The Legend is a visually stunning short animated movie which is well worth checking out, and Coco VR is a movie tie-in experience from Pixar which is really drat beautiful too (doesn't matter if you haven't seen the film). The more recent recent Wolves in the Walls is also brilliant. El Grillo fucked around with this message at 15:56 on May 1, 2020 |
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Oct 12, 2019 12:08
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I never got into Echo VR before but I spent about an hour vs bots tonight and it is really, really fun. Anybody who hasn't tried it before should give it a shot. I'm considering getting a Quest just for that once it releases.
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Oct 12, 2019 16:22
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Zero VGS posted:That's odd, I just got an invitation to a Boston-area Oculus User Research home study in my email: If Rift, ask them if they're every going to complete Oculus Home with proper social features etc. so it's not totally loving useless. Also if they're every planning to bring flipping Netflix to Rift...
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Oct 16, 2019 00:30
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https://www.roadtovr.com/hands-on-marvel-iron-man-vr-preview-psvr-playstation-vr/ This looks like it could be pretty fun - Iron Man VR game coming out in February for PSVR. I think it's priced about £35, what does that mean in terms of PSVR games, any chance it will be a decent length? It would be pretty hilarious if Sony gets a Marvel hit for PSVR, given how shockingly bad Oculus's own (extremely expensive) attempt at milking the franchise was.
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Oct 17, 2019 20:16
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I finally got Blade & Sorcery. Holy crap. The level of presence the physics simulation provides is amazing, I haven't had that wow sensation from VR for ages. Even just being in the rooms with the practice weapons and stuff at the beginning. The first thing I did (obviously) was go up to the mirror you're facing when you load the game. Put my hand up to touch it and the in-game hand just naturally makes contact with the object, catches on the frame of the mirror etc. in exactly the way you'd expect. Even just scraping my hand down the surface of the mirror made it feel like that object was actually there in front of me. Then loving around with the weapons, one thing that really got me was using the little rapier and just lifting up the practice dummy's head with the thing - somehow due to the feeling of weight everything has in the game and the need to really push in order to move stuff, it genuinely felt like I was pushing against this virtual object. This should be the default for any game that wants players to feel like they're actually present in the virtual world. My only issue with the game is that the actual combat is limit due to the AI. I'm really impressed with what the dev has done with the enemies so far but their attacks are just rubbish and not well-designed from a gameplay perspective. A lot of the attacks just seem to be 'run forwards and flail at player from multiple directions', especially the twirling attacks, so there's no real parry-repost 'dual' gameplay. Also it seems impossible to 'beat' the enemy weapons properly. I don't seem to be able to make their weapons move at all when I hit them; it's like the enemy's arm and wrist are made of concrete. This means that, as far as I can tell, the only way to land an attack on an enemy with a weapon + shield is to charge in bashing at them madly or trying to stab over at their heads, or wait until they've made an attack and leave an open gap. If the enemies' wrists worked more like the player character's, i.e. there was some level of flexibility so you could beat their weapons out of the way and make a lunge attack, then the fighting might be a bit more dynamic and interesting. Another issue is that the blocking movements seem to be effectively instantaneous, there is no lag so if you try to attack their weapon will instantly move to meet yours. So you can't do one-two attacks, beating on one side to get them to move their guard and rapidly attacking on the other side when they're exposed. Anyhow the stuff I'm proposing would be insanely complicated to realise in-game, I'm sure. What there is, is still pretty drat great. e: does anyone know what the development path looks like for the game? Is the dev planning on making major improvements to AI some day?
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Oct 23, 2019 11:13
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Wheezle posted:Not sure about the AI but I know the current set of animations are just store-bought and are going to be replaced at some point. Had a look and there's a roadmap on Steam, only mention of AI on it is this though: Blade & Sorcery posted:Update 11 e: nope, turns out the above is just about adding new AI to support dungeons: The Baron on reddit" posted:This will add in semi-procedural maps/dungeons to the game with improved ai that are already spawned in the maps patrolling, have a fields of view, etc…. Yes, this is real. No plans for any story mode to go with this though; it will just be random dungeon spelunking. Details of this to be expanded on at a later date of course, because we are still so far out from this. Kospy has some wild ideas about it but as is his nature he prefers to underpromise and overdeliver rather than anyone be disappointed if something he promised doesn’t make it. Doesn’t wanna pull a Molyneux or No Man’s Sky. El Grillo fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Oct 23, 2019 |
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Oct 23, 2019 11:33
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Dongattack posted:I've had limited luck with getting some good parries by swinging against the AIs swing, kinda meeting their swing not just by holding my weapon the way, but kinda "attacking their swing" if that makes sense. Usually seems to make them recoil and even hit the weapon out of their hands sometimes. Granted i almost exclusively use big beefy weapons like dane axe, two handed sword, longsword and etc, that might be having an effect too. What it needs now is some assessment of strength when you make a strike which is parried by an enemy's weapon or shield - so that either you move the weapon/shield a bit, opening up an exposed area for attack, or perhaps you could make the enemy stagger or whatever (is that already a mechanic beyond just when you parry their attacks and when you actually land an attack on them?)
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Oct 23, 2019 15:29
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spacetoaster posted:And are there any RPG games in the works like MOSS? My daughter, and I, have been playing it and the way it plays is wonderful. I'd love to do a game like neverwinter nights like this.
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Oct 24, 2019 20:53
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mashed_penguin posted:I imagine it opens up durability problems compared to being in the front as you are adding the power cables into an area that will flex a lot.
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Oct 25, 2019 08:39
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spacetoaster posted:They released some numbers on the oculus quest. About 400,000 quests sold so far.
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Oct 27, 2019 19:02
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Vanishing Realms got a DLC! Which is longer than the original game (not that long I guess). I quite enjoyed the original, despite the very early-VR mechanics. Had a lot of charm (and reminded me a lot of Zelda).
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Oct 28, 2019 23:34
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Shine posted:Onward's new update is nice. The game loads much faster, the interface is cleaner, and the AI foes do a bit more than just charge headfirst into you. There's a pretty busy online population at the moment. Plenty of co-op servers.
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Nov 2, 2019 09:35
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If anyone, like me, found BoxVR poo poo because you couldn't hit uppercuts... it may be your tracking. Having adjusted to a new tracking setup, and made sure all my Rift sensors are registering properly by trying different USB 2.0/3.0 combos until it stopped giving me warnings about one of them, it turns out BoxVR works fine if you have tracking actually set up properly. I guess for stuff where your hands are moving seriously fast, you really need things to be working perfectly. Duh.
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Nov 5, 2019 23:42
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Final level to be added to I Expect You to Die later this month: https://www.schellgames.com/blog/schell-games-adds-final-level-called-operation-death-engine-to-i-expect-you-to-die I love how they've built this thing up. So many VR games seem to have been produced with vast amounts of efforts going into making interesting mechanics work in an entirely new medium... and then they have about 2 hours worth of content and are basically dropped after initial release. These guys though have almost doubled (or maybe have actually doubled?? I think they've added three new levels at least as free DLC) the size of the game since release.
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Nov 7, 2019 18:42
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WaterIsPoison posted:If you haven't taken a look, I've written some blog posts about constellation tracking for Quest + Rift S Are you able to give us your view on how close these inside out systems are to the Constellation system? (I assume not but it's always worth asking right..) Good to have an Oculus (Facebook?) dev in the thread.
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Nov 7, 2019 23:49
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WaterIsPoison posted:Are you talking about performance or general algorithmic approach? 
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Nov 8, 2019 11:15
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Luneshot posted:Space Engine ($24.99 on Steam) is essentially a virtual planetarium/universe explorer program. It's been in development for years by a one-man team, and the first full retail release was a few months ago. It's loving beautiful and everyone should try it. FYI Overview is a nice curated experience built in the same engine which is designed for museums and other public exhibitions. It's cool but you should just get the main 'game' instead. Zaphod42 posted:It helps that in boxing you don't really try to parry, you just punch or you guard.
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Nov 11, 2019 22:45
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Sounds like Stormland is pretty good. Some day I'll finish playing the current single players I'm on (Wilson's Heart and Arktika.1) and then I'll be able to try out the most recent releases. Someday.... I'm a bit sad now though because I just remembered that Insomniac got bought by Sony. Which I guess means they'll only be producing PS exclusives from now on? Which means, I assume, that we'll never get another Unspoken game - probably this was very unlikely anyway but I had a little hope that they might one day release a sequel which had similar awesome magic mechanics but with free movement instead of the fixed teleportation stuff they did in the original. The world was so cool, too, so I really wanted them to do more single player campaign stuff with it. Welp, pipe dreams
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Nov 15, 2019 13:29
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The cutscenes in Wilson's Heart are loving great. But that game generally has incredibly high production values.That Italian Guy posted:This is a thing I am actually worried about. I got a Rift 2y ago but had to abandon it cause my old pc couldn't run it properly. I got back into VR now that I have a new pc and a lot of the recommended titles from 2y ago are still the go-to titles for VR. Also it's probably my headset showing its age, but most VR games still look like crap even with AA or SS cranked up. Robo-Recall is still one of the most polished games (both visually and game play wise) in my library. Other games are fun but super brief (I Expect You to Die) or just look very outdated from a gameplay perspective, VR capabilities aside. I am waiting for Boneworks and hope it'll deliver on the immersion side of things. El Grillo fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 20:26
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Has anyone tried out the Doctor Who game? The trailer looks cool: https://youtu.be/V-AjWi6j1fE Wouldn't expect much from the gameplay but as a Who fan I figure it like like quite a lot of fun, and the reviews have been decent.
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Nov 17, 2019 15:45
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Thank gently caress, Valve might actually release a game. ...oh poo poo I jinxed it sorry guys. The Walrus posted:the portal vr games are not made by valve, unless you mean The Lab I reckon it's seriously big for VR if they do follow through on this however. Could really bring over a bunch of hardcore PC gamers who've so far refused to touch VR (no matter all the (legitimate) bitterness about how poo poo Valve have been for the past ~years, i wouldn't expect that to actually translate into lack of interest in the game, nerds gonna jump on this nerd crack)
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Nov 19, 2019 06:55
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Zero VGS posted:it's interesting to think that VR is what finally motivated Valve programmers to stop counting money long enough for some actual work. I'd be incredibly happy with something episode 1 length, assuming it's up to scratch. KakerMix posted:You know how the new Corvette is mid-engine now? And how a bunch of boomers are pissed as hell? There are like 60 million Steam users who meet the hardware requirements for VR. Which means they've already spent a significant amount on their PC and VR is all of £400 more if you want to get the most recent (decent & reasonably priced) headset. It's still amazing to me that so many nerds are so resistant to the idea of VR. Oculus's fuckups at the beginning did a lot of damage (though that's nowhere near the full story).
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Nov 19, 2019 13:23
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^^yeah you may be the odd one out on thathomeless snail posted:Presumably since they just sold everyone really expensive hand controllers, its gonna be a game with good hand interactions that you can't get outside of VR. At least I sure hope so 
El Grillo fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Nov 19, 2019 |
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Nov 19, 2019 21:34
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gently caress yes new Half-Life. And it's going to be a full game.Claes Oldenburger posted:It's funny, all I ever wanted was more half life, and in VR is even better. I never even considered having to fight headcrabs in VR until seeing the trailer and it gave me a sense of overwhelming dread. I barely made it through that segment on flatscreen, and if memory serves I had to have my brother sitting in the room with me when I did lol. Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Considering he's dead it's understandable.  That really sucks. He had an incredibly characterful voice. It's going to take a lot to sell me on the new Eli..4000 Dollar Suit posted:drat just pulled the trigger on a rift s last night, now I'm reading that hand tracking is only planned for the quest. probably shoulda popped into this thread first.
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Nov 21, 2019 22:37
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GlyphGryph posted:Two, basically none of the genres I regularly play have decent VR games because why would you bother putting them in VR, and why would I bother putting on a headset to play them if they did.
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Nov 25, 2019 22:38
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Rookersh posted:Whats the best way to "find" old VR games. Once I get past the best of/intro stuff and just want to keep playing older games.
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Dec 17, 2019 22:10
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Wolves in the Walls is great, everyone should check it out. I think it's the last thing from Oculus Studios sadly, but it's got really beautiful animations and art, and is certainly the longest animated narrative piece they (anyone?) have done for VR. Also it's based on a Neil Gaiman book.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:06
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SCheeseman posted:Anyone want to add any more games to the second post? My tastes are pretty specific so I'm not great at covering the entire breadth of what is available, so I'm happy to hear some suggestions. Including some of the more mainstream/polished games might help avoid the problem experienced by a new VR player a couple of pages back, who tried stuff like H3VR and Boneworks and appeared confused as to why people are recommending those quite rough/indy/early access games for first time VR-ers: El Grillo posted:Asgard's Wrath is a large, AAA quality made-for-VR fantasy role playing game produced by Oculus. First person combat with use of a third person God mode as part of the puzzle solving mechanics. The game looks great but the gameplay itself has divided opinions. Some people love it, some think that it's not well designed for VR and instead just feels like an attempt to make a 2D AAA title in VR with little to no thought about how to best take advantage of the new medium. In any case if you're looking for a quality, long form single player in a fantasy setting (that isn't a badly done port of a 2D game e.g. Skyrim VR), here it is. El Grillo fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Jan 2, 2020 |
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Jan 2, 2020 16:56
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Finally got around to doing some more VR, and finally finished Wilson's Heart. The aesthetic and production values were great, and it was probably worth a playthrough just for those; and I have no problem doing point-and-click style wandering around an environment and picking up objects to unlock whatever the next puzzle is. But drat if some of the 'combat' mechanics weren't awful; specifically, throwing the heart around to try and electrocute stuff, and the final boss fight which was basically the most unintuitive time-limited puzzle ever. Very frustrating. They should have just stuck with the more traditional combat-style mechanics, like the punching and close combat weapons handling, or alternatively go full Bioshock with the heart mechanics. In any case, it was pretty cool. I've now started Arktika.1. Production values are pretty drat good, as you'd expect. Gameplay is pretty basic so far, but I'm only on the training missions. Guns feel great except for the stocks being slightly too angled, which takes a little bit of adjusting to. Also, holy gently caress I am not cut out for fighting horrible mutant monster things in enclosed spaces in the dark in VR. This is going to be traumatic 
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Jan 3, 2020 14:11
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The Walrus posted:arctica has like eleven Spooky Elevator Rides and they are all terrifying. Hopefully it won't make me repeatedly smack my HMD with the controllers, as Wilson's Heart managed to do with a particular number of close up 'surprise' boxing QTEs loving teddy bear 
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Jan 4, 2020 10:55
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It's pretty certain that eye-tracked foveated rendering would need new GPU hardware (beyond what Turing has), right?
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Jan 6, 2020 23:13
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The Gunslinger posted:What's a really good standout VR singleplayer experience? Some sort of RPG would be great. Skyrim VR is really neat and I modded it up but I realized I just can't sit there with the headset on 100+ hours again. And maybe Vanishing Realms... Truga posted:Vanishing realms is very old now by VR standards, but still quite good IMO. 2nd chapter is kinda eh since it's just some combat arena tournament, but otherwise it's proper dungeon crawling.
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Jan 8, 2020 00:01
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Stick100 posted:I kind of doubt it, they have to build the HMD in china and ship it over, that stuff takes a long time and comes in big batches. I thought they had a whole hardware facility they built for the steam controllers or something.
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Jan 8, 2020 16:38
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Kamrat posted:Recently got my hands on a first generation Vive, any recommendations for games?
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Jan 21, 2020 12:28
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Re: goon multiplayer sessions, I really wish there were proper multiplayer/community features in Oculus Home. In SteamVR can you make a persistent communal room that's only available to certain people (passworded or whatever)? I would love it if either platform had a way for you to create a persistent community space, available only to people in your organisation + invited guests, which members could set as their default environment on entering VR and from which you could jump off into multiplayer games together. SteamVR is part of the way there I think with communal rooms but I don't think they can be persistent? And I think it's only done via password and there's no way to default into a community space when you load VR. The latter element is important as a Rec Room-like way of having a space where people can chill and watch stuff/mess around whilst waiting to see if other players come online who might be interested in teaming up for multiplayer stuff. Speaking of which, Rec Room should definitely have done the same within their own game. A persistent Goon custom Rec Room map could be a lot of fun now that they have their own in-game environment toolset - and Rec Room is exactly the sort of game where you need vaguely competent players to go do the Quests with, because if you try doing them with randoms you almost invariably die horribly.
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Jan 27, 2020 21:51
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fliptophead posted:Any recommendations for an on rails shooter like house of the dead or time crisis? Just straight up here is bad guys and cover to hide behind. Shooting positions are fixed with varying cover, but there are a variety that you can teleport to. Also has the advantage of being well made, set in the Metro universe, and looks loving great.
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Feb 1, 2020 19:05
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1104380/The_Room_VR_A_Dark_Matter/ The Room VR's page is up on Steam - looks like late spring release. I am very excited about this. canyoneer posted:Blade and Sorcery just feels so right. It's got such an excellent feel, and the swing speed mechanics that force you to slow down to simulate weapon weight are really good. Unfortunately in terms of gameplay the awesomeness of the physics really just meant that the terrible combat AI and enemy animations were too distracting to make the whole thing add up to a really fun experience. It's so close to being the perfect melee combat sim. Sadly I don't expect this to be improved much because melee AI is just hard as gently caress.
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Feb 6, 2020 08:56
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Pierson posted:Thanks man, appreciate it. My only other question is really a generic one that I guess is hard to answer: Once I've played through the big "must-play" games from the OP is there still a bunch of other decent/interesting stuff out there? Or is it still the case that outside of the very few good VR games the rest are kind of overpriced tech demos? What follows is the latest version of a list which I put together ages ago and have been adding to from time to time, figured I might as well update it given there are probably quite a lot of new VR-ers because of Alyx. There are a lot of terrible little VR 'experiences' filling every VR store for some reason. I have tried to only include experiences and games which are decent and also at least somewhat substantial in terms of content or at least notable in terms of their mechanics: The Room VR: A Dark Matter just came out today. By all account it's the Room (excellent mobiles puzzle game where you physically interact with beautiful intricate puzzle boxes and other puzzle elements), but in VR, which is a very good thing. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, a highly polished first person zombie-fighting singleplayer narrative you get the rest. Apparently very good. Looks like it would scare the bejesus out of me. Stormland is an AAA-quality first person sci-fi game in which you play a robot exploring a world in which you can fly between islands in the sky. Apparently the gameplay is very well done, a lot of flying about, climbing, movement. It looks great and there is some element of replayability. Boneworks appears to be a pretty successful attempt to do a kind of Half-Life 2 for VR, with lots of physicality to almost everything in the game world, lots of combat against creepy enemies with which you can experiment with the physics systems in a deadly manner, and a generally creepy world/atmosphere. Asgard's Wrath is a large, AAA quality made-for-VR fantasy role playing game produced by Oculus. First person combat with use of a third person God mode as part of the puzzle solving mechanics. The game looks great but the gameplay itself has divided opinions. Some people love it, some think that it's not well designed for VR and instead just feels like an attempt to make a 2D AAA title in VR with little to no thought about how to best take advantage of the new medium. In any case if you're looking for a quality, long form single player in a fantasy setting (that isn't a badly done port of a 2D game e.g. Skyrim VR), here it is. Lone Echo is a must-play experience and probably the best single player VR game so far [edit: until Alyx, maybe?]. Echo VR is its free multiplayer. Definitely need to check both of them out. Defector was the most recent big Oculus release before Asgard's Wrath. Defector is a singleplayer spy game with some big setpiece Bond-type scenes at the beginning. Decent reviews but apparently pretty short and with quite restricted gameplay. Vader Immortal is a highly polished episodic Star Wars singleplayer 'experience'. Not a huge amount of gameplay but that doesn't seem to matter to most who've played it. Beat Saber is the biggest game in VR. Rhythm game with lightsabers. BoxVR is another rhythm game, good for a workout. Soundboxing was the original VR boxing rhythm game. Thrill of the Fight is an actual boxing game, not a rhythm game, but is apparently a great workout and well-put-together game. Pistol Whip is an FPS 'rhythm game'. I know nothing about it except that people seem to really like it and it looks trippy as hell. Blade & Sorcery is the premier arena melee singleplayer experience, with emphasis on more realistic physics than you find in most VR games even today. AI is terrible unfortunately but the handling of the weapons and objects is incredibly immersive. Gorn is also a great arena melee experience of a totally different kind, cartoon visuals and decapitations, physics-based madness. Hotdogs Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (H3VR) is a VR shooting gallery with tons of highly realistic guns, and now has several fully-fledged game modes where you fight giant sausages as an alternative to human enemies. Brass Tactics has a free demo and is the first (and a really awesome) proper VR RTS, made by some old Age of Empires devs. Online, co-op and AI play available, plus a little singleplayer campaign. Online population may be pretty dead these days, I don't know. Espire is a first person stealth combat game, almost a kind of MGS for VR perhaps? Haven't played but it has OK reviews for an indy product. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has a VR mode which is very well done apparently. Wait I actually own this game, I forgot. I need to spend less time posting about VR and play more VR. Landfall is an ok RTS type game but focuses on controlling individual mech characters on smaller arenas. Presumably multiplayer now dead. The Mage's Tale is another big singleplayer. First-person spellcaster. A good length, 15 hours+ for most people. It's fun and the visuals are decent but there's a bit of a lack of polish. There are some really awesome setpiece moments especially near the end The Ninety-Nine! The Wizards is also a first-person magic-based/spellcaster singleplayer. I know nothing about it except I think it was from an indy studio so may be a bit rough around the edges, but then again it does seem to have pretty good Steam reviews. Sprint Vector is a cool multiplayer, first-person skimming/skating racing game, kind of like Motorball if you've seen Alita. You go very fast. Look up some videos, it's sort of hard to describe, there's lots of flying. Search Reddit or whatever to see if anyone's still playing, it might be a bit dead now. From Other Suns is described as a cross between Faster Than Light and Borderlands. It's a single player/multiplayer co-op game where you command your own spaceship and travel across the galaxy, fighting AI enemies either in space with your ship, or in FPS by jumping onto other ships and space stations. Some people say it gets monotonous due to the proc gen used for combat environments. But it's pretty polished and fun and the feeling of piloting your ship with your own crew, with the various different jobs of engineer etc.. definitely gave me a Firefly trip. Up to 4 player co-op or you can play with AI on your side. Arktika.1 is a very polished FPS single player from the Metro devs, apparently it's great unless you have a searing hatred of teleportation gameplay. Wilson's Heart is another singleplayer first person experience, it's a noire puzzler/gothic horror game but in reality is more of a long-form interactive narrative experience. I really like it though despite the lack of in-depth gameplay mechanics. Incredibly polished as an experience, except for the movement mechanics which are teleport-only and very restrictive. In a somewhat similar vein, The Invisible Hours is a totally non-interactive, 'virtual immersive theatre' experience. It's a murder mystery in a mansion with a whole story all going on at once - so you choose how to experience it, which characters to follow and in which order. Really awesome apparently despite somewhat mediocre visuals. Mission: ISS is a simulation of the internal US side of the ISS (and the whole thing in EVA mode). Very cool. Obduction is basically Myst in VR. Very good if you like that sort of thing, but there have been performance problems so it's worth keeping under two hours playtime to see whether it works properly at first, so you can refund if needs be. Star Trek: Bridge Crew is what it sounds like; you play pilot, captain, engineer or tactical specialist, on the bridge of the Enterprise (classic or modern versions) with either AI or other players filling the rest of the four roles. Really fun with a good crew, lots of capacity for amusing idiocy. Only criticisms are that it's visually somewhat meh, and whilst there's a good amount of content, the actual number of campaign missions is a bit limited. There are AI if you can't find other players, but it recently released in '2D' so there may still be a decent community. Robo Recall game that I assume still comes free with Oculus Touch (not sure though) - fun FPS where you fight robots with a lot of physicality involved; you can grab them and tear them apart, bounce your guns off enemies and catch them to reload, there is a lot of gameplay variety and the visuals are still pretty great. Res Infinite has a VR version and is beautiful and trippy as hell. Fallout 4 VR is Fallout 4 in VR. Typical low-effort Bethesda janky port where you have to use community mods to get it to run properly. Ditto Skyrim VR. Onward and Pavlov are still the biggest multiplayer VR shooters I think. Good online multiplayer fps's of very different types. Pavlov is Counterstrike in VR, Onward is somewhere between that and ARMA on the game vs sim spectrum. I think both have (rubbish) bots to play against now but the communities are still going strong I believe so you shouldn't need them except for practice. Standout is a battle royale game in VR. The Climb is a highly polished climbing game, with nice visuals and atmosphere although the gameplay isn't hugely exciting. Climbey is an indy climbing game which has multiplayer functionality and I think there are lots of custom maps. Arkham VR is actually great even though it's a quite short. Weirdly enough, the last half is one of the best narrative uses of VR I've seen. The visual polish is loving great too. Marvel Powers United was meant to be a big blockbuster Oculus multiplayer, Facebook invested a ton of money in it and even released a branded Rift bundle, but the game fell totally flat due to a crippling (and baffling) lack of variety in the gameplay and scenarios. Croteam has converted a bunch of its games for VR including Talos Principle and the Serious Sam games. I Expect You To Die is a first-person parody spy puzzler game, with fun puzzles and a great theme tune. It has quite recently had yet another mission added to it for free, so there's probably a solid three hours' playtime in there at least now. The Unspoken is a multiplayer first person magic duel game. But they released a single player campaign which was pretty cool and visually great, unsurprisingly short though. I doubt there is much of an online multiplayer population these days. The Gallery: Call of the Starseed is a first person adventure/puzzler game. Two episodes so far. The first episode was very well done for early VR and had introduced some great mechanics for perhaps the first time, including a semi-physicalised backpack inventory system. The second episode was something of a disappointment as far as I heard. Dead & Buried was my favourite game when consumer VR first launched and comes free with Rift. Very simple, western-themed multiplayer shootout, but the visuals, gameplay mechanics and pretty much everything else were highly polished. So much fun if you enjoy ducking and running around your playspace making use of the in-game cover and lobbing sticks of dynamite at people. The co-op wave scenarios are fantastic, especially the Graveyard map with the Void Widow boss. There are still players around online when I pop in, very occasionally. It comes free with some Rift packages still, I think. They released a sequel to the game with Oculus Quest. The sequel used standard fps movement instead of the fixed positioning of the original, and this kind of destroyed the arcadey style and any originality from the first game, by all accounts. Vanishing Realms, a first-person dungeon crawler. Very basic combat mechanics, but not without a little interest at least despite not having any real physicalised aspect - the aesthetic and feel of the game is first-person Zelda, including pots you can break for coins and some fun basic puzzles and big bosses. Still quite charming. Chronos was the first long-form VR singleplayer and it's still great. A third person Zelda-like game which has a collection of the best made-for-VR game mechanics I think I've ever seen in a single title. No motion controls, you use a gamepad or your controllers but just as a traditional game controller. Don't be put off by dying a lot, it's not meant to be an easy play. Edge of Nowhere is a quite well-polished, roughly four hour singleplayer third person game with a cool H.P. Lovecraft-esque world and storyline. Arizona Sunshine possibly the first proper singleplayer fps for VR, a zombie shooter, very rough around the edges by modern standards by all accounts. Rec Room is a free online first-person multiplayer, almost like a proto-MMO. It has a common space where you can mess around with various physical games, plus a load of multiplayer minigames you can access like paintball. It also has a whole bunch of 'quests', co-op dungeon-type experiences each modelled on a totally different kind of game style (sci-fi shooting combat, old school RPG, a pirate one, etc) except they are all stylised to look like they're just games made by kids, it's pretty cool. It also has customisable persistent community rooms where you can build poo poo, kind of like a paired-down Garry's Mod. You need to be playing with decent people to be able to survive any of the Quests. Big Screen is a multiplayer virtual desktop app, you can broadcast your screen to all other players with audio if you have a decent upload bandwidth, there are big shared rooms now to hang out in too. 3D movies are insane in VR. VR Chat is an infamous MMO-type experience with environments and characters largely built by players; Second Life in VR but weirder. Finally, there are also a whole ton of free experiences, documentaries and so on many of which are well worth checking out: Google Earth VR is mindblowing. Welcome to Lightfields is also from Google and is also loving amazing. The BBC documentaries tend to be good. Crow: The Legend is a visually stunning short animated movie which is well worth checking out, and Coco VR is a movie tie-in experience from Pixar which is really drat beautiful too (doesn't matter if you haven't seen the film). The more recent recent Wolves in the Walls is also brilliant. El Grillo fucked around with this message at 12:30 on Mar 27, 2020 |
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Mar 26, 2020 19:24
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Oculus's stated reason for locking out other HMDs, at the beginning, was because they wanted to heavily curate the experience of first time VR users, as they were aware that VR is a difficult concept to sell (see e.g.: the massive general resistance to VR even now amongst turbonerd PC gamers) and the initial impressions people get are extremely important in determining whether they will lik VR or just think it's a poo poo new tech gimmick that has no future. They said they were not allowed enough access to the Vive (the only other PC HMD at the time), in software terms, for them to ensure that it would run their stuff as smoothly as their own devices. I don't know much about how the various bits of firmware/wrappers interact to describe it any more than that - perhaps someone more knowledgeable can flesh this out. Essentially the situation was OVR would have a run as a wrapper over SteamVR or something like that (perhaps it's similar to how Oculus users have to access SteamVR?) There were real performance problems with this, not least because if I remember rightly allowing Vive users to access Oculus content, in the only way that HTC would allow, would prevent Vive users from getting stuff like reprojection and the other QoL software features Oculus spent a lot of time and effort creating for their platform. Anyway, that was Oculus's stated initial justification. I don't know whether it holds water now (or back then tbh). One continuing factor to be taken into account is that the only other major platform, SteamVR, is janky as all gently caress. But in a perfect world, all HMDs would be useable on Oculus store and instead of having to try and lock people in with exclusives etc., Oculus would just spend even more money making their platform/Oculus Home/their HMDs wildly better than all the other offerings out there, to attract people to their platform. As it is, their platform is only better because it's not totally loving janky all the time - and they have now basically abandoned development of Oculus Home for PCVR - and their latest PC HMD is a big compromise solution that they farmed out to a third party manufacturer so they could concentrate on a more popular platform (Quest/mobile). Basically the closed wall platform is not really justified any longer, if it ever was. There are a lot of people using other PCVR HMDs. I think their reasons now are probably just that they don't want to spend the money and effort to support other HMDs, want to lock people into their platform for the obvious monetary reasons, and anyway there is a functional third-party solution (ReVive) which is likely to continue to be maintained as long as people are using PCVR in its current form. But I would assume that they could make a significant amount more money from their store by enabling access for other HMDs at this stage. The fact that they are unlikely to do so is more an indication, to me, of the lack of importance they will likely be assigning to PCVR going forward. Which if correct, sucks a lot (who the hell else is going to make big PCVR games; Valve has said nothing about the other two games they hinted at). Ultimately my view is it's fair enough that they are limiting titles like Medal of Honour to their store, as that's the only way they can recoup any of their massive investment in it. The store is the only thing that actually makes any money for them, and overall they have invested far more than anyone else in making decent VR content. Most of the even vaguely polished/non-indy stuff that exists for VR is content they have directly funded, in part or (often) wholly. Pretty much all VR content outside of what they've funded is very indy and quite limited in scope. Their Oculus exclusive titles are not all brilliant by any means but there's little else out there that is technically polished and has any real depth in terms of content. Long story short, use ReVive and at least play Lone Echo/EchoVR/Stormlands, I guess? Kind of related to the above, I was somewhat surprised to see that Oculus PC HMDs are still well over 50% of the user base (assuming there are at least some Oculus users who don't use Steam): https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam Gnoman posted:It would probably be worthwhile to include Hotdogs Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (H3VR) on this list. Primarily a VR shooting gallery with tons of guns, it also has several modes where you fight giant sausages as an alternative to human enemies. El Grillo fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Mar 27, 2020 |
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Mar 27, 2020 12:27
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Lol, no; Facebook's massive return on investment is when they can just functionally sit and do nothing while algorithmically harvesting everything people say and do in Facebook Horizon (or really anything else in the Oculus client if they just merge an Oculus account into a mandatory Facebook one) and selling it as marketing data. You have to remember; Facebook's real money-maker is on-selling their userbase every way they can get away with, not any product with their name or an offshoot's on it. Companies and political lobbies would kill to know stupid poo poo like how long someone's looking at their advert billboards on-average, or just know in realtime what people are talking about (well more relevantly; Their product/candidate). And that's not even getting into the biometric stuff they can flog to insurance companies. They are also well aware that even to get to that 'sit and do nothing' data selling situation you describe, they have to invest a shitload in this emerging platform in order to encourage content development so the userbase will grow - and they have said they're aware they need to do that for a long time. It needs to be good content otherwise they won't achieve the end goal. This is good for VR gamers because without this, nothing at all will be developed besides (mostly) relatively shallow and poo poo indy offerings. How committed FB are to long term content production in relation to PCVR I don't know, as Quest seems vastly more popular. Naturally if they decided e.g. not to operate a store at all (just sell hardware), or not to try to get people to buy stuff from it by having exclusive offerings on there, then there would be internal considerations about how long they could continue operating this part of their business at such a loss without them making serious efforts to mitigate that loss (increase store sales), given that they are investing in a tech that is still going to take years more to mature and gain widespread adoption. I would be surprised if, as a business, they would do anything on the scale that they have done (funding all the games etc) if they weren't at least making serious efforts to recoup something along the way. As I said, it would be much better, and I think they would make more money, if they opened up their store to other HMDs at this point - but given that ReVive exists and they've shown they are happy with it existing, I'm not going to criticise them for the current approach. They certainly have better numbers than me on the different monetisation strategies available. In general I don't think it's unreasonable for them to do try and make money from VR in the short term, given their investment, no matter their long term monetisation plans. Who the hell knows what this tech will end up as or even if their investments will pay off at all in the end. Were I to govern how these things were done I would ensure that everything was collectivised and non-profit but hey, that's not the system right now. Maybe if we have a massive economic shift post-Corona
El Grillo fucked around with this message at 15:01 on Mar 27, 2020 |
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Mar 27, 2020 14:58
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