Adventure Gamers - Forums

nomadsoul - 01 March 2014 11:15 PM

This year Valve VR vs oculus vs Sony VR, lets see how things will go.

I think it was said there won’t be Valve VR. It was just a showcase where VR will be in a year or so.

Interestingly, there are many games with old mechanics that simply work in VR. Even some 2d side-scrolling platform games look and play well with Oculus.

There’s one catch though… while immersion factor is mostly much higher than on monitor, simply because your field of view is filled with a game, you soon realize there can be more to VR than just immersion.
When everything is perfect (positional tracking, latency, graphics, frame rate, etc.) you get so called presence- a feeling that you are actually looking in another world. People often mistaken immersion for presence. Presence is more like a switch in your brain and it only happened to me 2 or 3 times (for a fairly short time, a few seconds at most) with the current limited low-res DK1. It’s hands down the most amazing thing VR can offer.

The easiest way to describe presence are lucid dreams. While lucid dreams are even more advanced (inclusion of all senses), the feeling of knowing something is not real but feels real, is the same.
When you achieve presence, standard game mechanics become distraction and actually teleport you out of the experience.

That’s what excites me the most about VR. I don’t play games much nowadays and I guess there’ll be lots of experiments in coming years, that will go beyond your usual interactive entertainment. I can see short “experiences” become very popular.

What i heard that both Valve and Sony tech shits on Oculus, better to cut off time of
beta testing Hardware prototypes and directly jump to best device and churn out proper games than half assed prototype softwares.

GDC this month , Sony rumored to be showing the goodies. If sony is serious i can see
them making good creative titles on VR, like they did with previous gen.

The thought of Siren (ps4) horror on SonyVR alone is enough to make me shit my pants. 

UntillDawn is shifted to PS4 , might be another VR transition(Since PSMove is dead now.

nomadsoul - 02 March 2014 08:55 AM

What i heard that both Valve and Sony tech shits on Oculus

Only their kickstarter dev kit. From what I understand, Crystal Cove is quite on par with Valve’s prototype. Better in some ways, worse in others, but comparable. No one really knows shit about Sony’s thing yet.

I think the big thing Sony’s going to have to fight against is games that support it as a peripheral. I think VR seriously changes the paradigm for what gaming is, and I don’t think traditional gaming experiences are going to translate. They might “work” technically, but I don’t think they’ll capture what people want to do in VR or the sorts of things that have a real impact.

Certain games might. I feel like Portal 2 might be amazing in VR for its disorienting topsy-turvyness as well as the fact that it lets you set your own pace and explore.

Frogacuda - 02 March 2014 10:01 AM

I think the big thing Sony’s going to have to fight against is games that support it as a peripheral. I think VR seriously changes the paradigm for what gaming is, and I don’t think traditional gaming experiences are going to translate. They might “work” technically, but I don’t think they’ll capture what people want to do in VR or the sorts of things that have a real impact.

Every shit old/new indie game is now getting PS4 ver, so i wont be surprised if all those devs indie or with oculus kit will eventually make Sony VR games. (As long as dev kit is cheap and porting/making games on ps4 is easy which i suspect should).

I think though price of Sony vs other VRs will be the key. 

As far capturing the feel, igor pointed some right things, immersion vs presence.
I think the overall cognitive feel and ergonomics will be deal breaker, if that will somehow work, the tradtional experience can feel cool too.

For me, some good IPs and easy DK for dev, to build confidence for future lineup , will be enough to buy it.

Edit:

Good article with valid comments

http://www.roadtovr.com/sony-ps4-virtual-reality-headset-launch-oculus-rift-debut-gdc-2014-report/

Edit2:

Just came to my mind, new mediamolecule ip blowed executives mind.
If MM guys will be using some VR related or some other Sony first party

Monolith - 02 March 2014 01:06 PM

Why would you think Sony would do better? That’s like saying PS4 is better than PC. lol Not to mention, Oculus wins in the DevKit department offering extremely easy installation of the software, helping you oculize your games in minutes.

Valve and Sony wouldn’t have bothered if it wasn’t for Oculus.

I never said PS4 will do, i think Sony (can do) have resources and attitude to Push new IPs.
When you look at Tearaway,Rain, puppeteer, Malicious, Siren etc.
You dont see money but creativity, which other corps like M$ would never make.

So i am excited with the idea of Sony new IPs + VR possibility, and the fact that
they can make good hardware like PS4, PS vita etc.(even Move, just that it was
little too late, but in case of VR , it wont be much of the follower act).

I recommend reading the comments in link above, some good points to progress
the discussion further.

Wow, great points so far everybody! And very well said, Monolith.
I wish I would have posted over here earlier - I’m actually getting a better discussion over here than at the Oculus forums where I posted my demo.
Glad to see this thread is continuing with a nice discussion on VR! It’s great to know that a lot of Adventure fans here are also interested in the upcoming VR revolution that is undoubtedly approaching. I really think the slow-paced style adventure/exploration genre is going to make a huge return once commercial VR catches on in the gaming industry.

Now, as far as the brand-name debate..
Valve - yes, they have superior VR technology. And so does NASA, and Sony and probably all of the other big corps & gov’t agencies that have $$$ to throw around. They’ve all had the technology to make this happen - but only now is it becoming affordable/accessible enough for the modern end-user.
The big advantage that Oculus has over other companies - is that they have already been doing all of the R&D on consumer level-hardware for the past few years and have been working towards releasing an affordable consumer product since day 1 (AND they have Carmack to top it off) so they are likely to be quite further ahead than the Sony & MS & Valve’s of the world etc.

Now back on topic - I’d like to hear more from you all about how you think VR is going to affect the adventure game genre? I find it interesting that somebody mentioned above that game-mechanics can actually take away from immersion & presence!
I somewhat agree, but I think that is only because the software/hardware isn’t quite good enough to make mechanics that don’t break immersion (yet).
I, for one, would hate to see our community miss the step on this one - as I think Adventure Gaming could have a significant draw in VR, so perhaps the better question is
What do you all think would be the BEST way to bring adventure gaming into the world of VR (without having to abandon gaming/mechanics in the name of ‘experience/presence/immersion’?

If not abandoning, then retrofit somehow, which can piss off gamers if wont work well.

Personally i see open exploration games like Thewitness as natural fit for VR Adv Games.

You get the world, slowly intake all of it , explore and solve puzzles with streamlined
interface.

Secondly, games like Alien Isolation, Routine can work perfectly i.e Survival horror
adventure.

AG community will keep struggling to find better AG definition and will blend in more with new form of VR adventures rather than PnCs.

Sony VR reveal is going on follow the link

http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/viewthread/3288/

Talking about AG on VR, if Sony have iota of common sense, they should make Everybody’s gone to Rapture, Untill Dawn and Witness VR compatible

London studios are working on Deep sea adventure

And there is another