AKA please don’t drop VR, please
I love VR. I mean, I want to puke my guts out after 20 minutes of play, but those are 20 excellent minutes. I don’t love the abysmal lack of satisfying games for the platform. Juicy, thick AAA games that at least try to keep the promise implicit in the “virtual reality” expression. The Playstation VR 2 could help with that.
The majority of available titles are either tech demos, lazy ports, no-budget solo projects or what I like to call “normie games”. They are usually traditional first-person games where instead of a classic controller, you have half of the inputs in one hand and half in the other. They are games like No Man’s Sky and Skyrim: they are otherwise excellent, but do not go the extra mile to place your (or your avatar’s) body in the game world. You could just as easily play them sitting on a chair with mouse and keyboard and it would not make a difference.
It’s not exciting. It’s not (buzzword incoming) immersive.
The only games I could think about from the top of my head that actually try to capture what made people dream of virtual reality are The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, Boneworks and Half-Life: 3 Alyx. Excellent games, no arguing there, but here kicks a personal problem.
While I generally enjoy horror media, games have always been too much. And in VR? Oh boy.
All those three games are horror games at their core or for significant spans of playtime. Spooky parasites and zombie clones chasing you. Nope. I quit Alyx after grazing one hand against the wall and punching myself in the face with the other at the first headcrab assault. I knew it was coming. I was ready. I killed dozens of the little fuckers over the past 20 years. And yet…
Enters Sony, a new Playstation VR
So, yes. The onslaught of news about the upcoming iteration of Sony’s headset gave me a little hope that we might still get some heavyweight support behind the whole platform. While it’s true that we need a solid number of sold kits around the world to justify investing in developing the kind of experiences I’d love to see in the future, players need software to justify their investment in what (despite Zuckerberg’s creepiest intentions) has no mainstream application beyond entertainment (and gaming in particular – don’t get me started talking about 360° videos, those are an insult on the whole history of gaming).
The single killer app is not enough. There must be continued support by developers who, despite the lack of a massive market, are willing to take the hit and push videogames into the future they always tried to be.
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