It’s like i can feel VR growing.
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I feel like it’s growing but in the wrong direction. More towards Facebook’s walled garden, fb account required, and away from PCVR. Someday everybody may end up using Android VR headsets and then developers will stop making quality PCVR games and then all VR will be crappy due to the cheap quality games.
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I disagree to an extent.
The facebook thing kind of sucks. Yes. The walled garden… every system has one. Heck thats what PSVR is. Last I checked you need a sony account to use the PSVR and its the only way to play Blood and Truth, and Astro Bot. I grew up with consoles so i’m not new to brand exclusivity.
More people in VR can never be a bad thing. The fact that we can be playing a game like Star Wars Squadrons is directly related to that. I can only open more people coming into VR causes companies to put out more games like this. I hope EA gives us Need for speed Heat 2 with VR support next.
I disagree with this. The quest is a hybrid headset and I believe this is the magic formula for the Quest 2. I also believe that this is the approach that Sony will take with the PSVR 2. It makes sense from every angle.
I have never been able to convince anybody I’ve shown VR to to join me in VR buy buying a headset. With the quest 2 I converted 2 of my friends already. These guys showed no previous interest in VR at all, and all it took was showing them that they didnt necessarily need a pc or to be a computer nerd to do so. One of them saw a few PC games and is now interested in PCVR now too because you need a pc.
I don’t believe facebook can single handedly force VR to be mobile only but even I have to admit. For some games i’m shocked that the Quest can play by itself without the need for a pc.
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Fair point. I first got into VR by buying an Oculus Quest and I probably would’ve never done so otherwise.
Yes that’s true, but most Quest people likely won’t be upgrading their PC to play PCVR games. Also Oculus link does not yet provide a latency free experience like native PCVR. Once developers see that there is way more money to be made creating small games for the Quest, they’ll be disincentivized from catering to PCVR. We’ve already seen how the developers of Onward took a fantastic PCVR game and made it crappy just to port it to the Quest and make it cross play.
On the plus side though, eventual wide availability of 3070, 3080, and 3090 cards and AMD 5000 series GPUs will make it much less expensive for people to get into PCVR. And the Quest 2 is able to run much more graphically demanding quality games.
Sure but we’ve also seen developers take the power of Quest 2 and make crappy looking games look spectacular like Walking Dead S&S ,Arizona Sunshine etc. Onward will be upgraded to look like the old pc days don’t you worry. The game has already seen the graphics upgraded.
What’s the XR3 going to be capable of? At this rate I think we’ll see Asgards Wrath in it’s entirety ported to Quest 3, so i think your point is kind of moot.
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To me the problem has existed in every creative industry where large amounts of money start to become a factor. Music and film for decades, computer games relatively recently as an industry originally for nerds that has now become mainstream. Creativity means taking risks, which is seen as the opposite of making reliable money. Hence indie vs mainstream.
How do you make large amounts of money by selling these things to the mainstream? Largely by making them generic, shallow, and avoiding too much of anything controversial or thought-provoking. Then most people can get invested in it.
You occasionally get creators who manage to achieve both, say AFX Twin, or Hideo Kojima, but it’s the exception rather than the norm.
Most large production / distribution houses want an easy risk-free ROI for their millions. If that means making “Creatively Bankrupt Sequel VII” then that’s apparently fine. They milk it until the cow is dead, and then try to cash in on the zombie if they can get away with that.
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Yes and I hate PSVR. We can’t play great VR games like Ironman and Hitman 3, etc. We have to play on their low res headset to enjoy those games. Limiting AAA titles from a full audience limits the growth of VR.
If it weren’t for Revive, we would never be able to play any Oculus titles on our Pimax 8KX.
I think the ‘creative’ aspect is the problem. Training a good race horse may seem like a somewhat ‘creative’ process, but today, it has been refined to the point that winning derby horses are within at most about 1% slower than the all-time record breakers.
When the development process is sufficiently refined, the technology sufficiently advanced, etc, whatever remains ‘creative’ has much more freedom to try new iterations or even make mistakes, until that becomes ‘routine’ as well.
The walled garden aspect may not be helpful, but at least these platforms are using things like Unity, Unreal, CryEngine, etc, that are now already multiplatform.
The short-term problem is ‘games’ like DCS World, that are based on a lot of custom code around custom LUA script interpreters. Eventually that will be portable, and the aircraft (which much more limited scenery/terrain) will be available for Quest.
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Yes I guess it all comes down to the sales pitch, in order to get the millions of dollars of investment.
How to get rich:
“Fortnite made lots of money right? OK we’ll make a Fortnite…but the twist is…it’s cyberpunk. That’s trendy.”
[EA hands over cheque]
You don’t say:
“We’ll make a massive open world sim for geeks with full VR support from day one. We need at least five years of development investment to go live.”
[Every major publisher calls security and has you thrown out of their office]
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We need the Quest and it’s good for VR. Facebook have deep pockets and they can drive things forward at a loss until it catches. As is investment from Sony. We need a ton of market growth for network effects to kick in and investment to be pushed towards advancing the things we care about. We are just too niche at the minute so we get forgotton. Do you think devs wouldn’t bother implementing parallel projections or other efficiencies if there were as many people using the platform as there are that use mobile phones? The sooner it gets bigger the better for all of us. And in the mean time you’ll have to put up with some walled gardens etc as the price of investment in the medium.
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I think the devs who act like that still wouldn’t bother, and would still exist. The difference would be more and better developers, resulting in more and better tech.
Yeah, or implementation at a driver or engine level.
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Interestingly enough though, EA did fund Crysis/CryEngine2 , which at the time was obviously close to, if not the most, ambitious project yet. This probably had a lot to do with the team having already developed much of the fundamental tech (including the ability to display >1million polygons) with Far Cry. Crysis itself really seems to be nothing but a bunch of scientific research on all the shaders required for photorealistic rendering - I remember a photo of a camera they had in the office to accurately measure various object’s reflectivity and scattering parameters.
Financial products of any kind mostly available only to finance things that already exist. AFAIK, large companies like Dell, Wal-Mart, etc continuously buy short-term loans, then buy inventory to sell over the following month, paying off the last loan and buying a new loan at the end of the month.
In short, it seems to me any kind of investment, loan, etc, is normally not money you ‘get’ to go do something, but just a way to ‘outsource’ yet another aspect of a business.
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Sure, and I’m not saying that a large house cannot fund an interesting game. They have done so in the past and will do so again. But they need to see a clear money making market. Don’t try and create a new one with their help.
Crysis is an example with the obsession of graphical fidelity rather the obsession people should have ie great gameplay. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed Crysis, it was a great game to play that also happened to have a very technically accomplished engine as well, which I know is Crytek’s forte. But it probably sold due to the latter.
But all graphical niceties are only valid for the pre-sales pitch. A week of playing and it’s all forgotten. I still remember magazines drooling over Quake I pre-sales shots, because it was all polygonal 3D compared to Doom. It goes on forever.
Crysis 2 is an example of where it went wrong. They said ‘now we need a mass market version that works on console’. And to do that, they ruined the gameplay that made the first one great, no doubt because of the limitations of the console architecture at the time. I stopped partway through 2, it was just too boring by comparison. I heard 3 was better but I had just lost interest by that point.
I’m here for the FOV…
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Crysis/CryEngine was a necessary step towards decent virtual worlds of any kind though. An old GTX 1080 was suddenly enough to get literally photorealistic rendering in realtime - to the point of closely matching real photos of real islands with vegetation, beach, etc, at all times of day, shown side-by-side.
I remember spending many hours studying the jungle, water, etc footage, before Crysis was released, and thinking at the time, this is the software we need to make VR look real.
Crysis 2, set in NYC, was a bit lower resolution in some respects, but did have some catastrophically beautiful (their words IIRC) scenes, mixing warm sunlight, water, and well-placed greenery, with the ‘concrete jungle’ of tall buildings, glass, cement, and roads. For those of us interested in the technology milestone, that was well worth seeing every minute of. FWIW, the gameplay wasn’t that bad (though it could be rather clunky to master), and the ‘Hargreave’ character had some memorable lines later on.
Crysis 3 takes things to the maximum, mixing all natural and organic elements set in a very detailed, very lush city ruins environment. It was also very expensive to develop, costing around $100M or so.
Where Crysis/CryEngine really failed was never making it to global lighting in publicly released versions. If you look at the Crysis 2 missions in the SandBox editor, a lot of the darker area lightbounces are lit up properly by manually placed light sources. To be fair, it was accurately done, but inordinate person-hours were obviously wasted ‘just to get it done’.
At least now that is giving way with NVIDIA RTX stuff. Not the best way for it to happen, but it is simple enough that developers are bothering to integrate it…
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If it weren’t for revive I wouldn’t own any non oculus headsets. lol
Exactly.
I dont get people who dont understand that things are the way they are because VR needs to grow and fast.
FB and Sony are the only companies that can expand VR beyond us VR enthusiasts.
This hippie dream world where we all sing kumbaya and share all VR resources is not going get us anywhere.
I appreciate that the Index exists for example. But it was just another overpriced headset that was largely unavailable.
The quest was a $400 device that could be used with or without a pc and has the curated simplicity that only a rich company like FB or sony or (Apple) can provide.
Im afraid if it wasnt for the Quest VR would be looking really bad for VR right now.
PSVR isn’t natively even supported on ps5. Only for ps4 backwards compatible games.
But mark my words if sony is going do what they do best and copy the Quest. (I mean Shuhei Yoshida himself is tweeting pics of him getting a Quest 2, how has nobody read into that yet). I imagine plenty more people would love if sony had their own quest like hybrid. No need for a FB account then…but you will need a Sony account.
Either way VR grows.
Even microsoft is realizing now that it means nothing to simply throw dozens of headsets out without software.
Fs2020 is only exclusive to WMR for a short while, but I imagine quite a few G2’s sold based on that fact alone.
i love this simple and straight forward response.
If some one else had FOV we’d all leave.
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We have a lot of people leaving without it. Hope pimax adds some spice and sticks with it. They need a partnership along with their new funding to stir some interest.