How Does VR Ultimately Work?

A small, proud, VR community. I have been a fan of VR since 2017, when I first entered the VR gaming scene and realized how great this form of gaming can be. Soon after, I got a PSVR headset with Skyrim VR, and I was hooked for life. Since then, however, while the VR gaming community has taken off, there is a huge problem with the platform itself.

It just doesn’t increase. Despite Meta’s mysterious investment in it, VR is not a must-have platform. There are so many reasons for this, and despite everyone knowing what they are, change doesn’t seem to be upon us anytime soon.

We’ll take a look at what’s wrong with VR today and what it needs to do to reach the level it should be in the gaming world.

What Holds the Stage

We are tired, Boss

As someone who has tried to find friends in VR for years, there is a common thread. People are tired at the end of the day, and VR is work, any way you slice it. You’re going to be active in some way, whether you’re sitting or standing playing VR, and no matter who you are or what shape you’re in, there’s only so long you can comfortably do it.

For me, a 2 hour VR session is a ton, but conversely, a 2 hour flat screen session is just a normal night. VR just requires more of you, and the games I love in it require more of my body. That makes the sessions automatically limited. And that physical aspect goes beyond the limits of your body and extends into the machine itself. No matter what VR headset you have, it’s still not comfortable to wear for long periods of time. Whether it’s the weight of the headset, the strain on your eyes, or your arms getting tired, it’s not something you can do for a long time.

There is also the effect VR has on you. Your hands can literally start to ghost in the real world if you play VR for too long. You can have extended nausea spells, full blown episodes of hallucinations (as I’ve seen from being in VR for so long), and other dizziness related issues. It’s not nearly as appealing as day-to-day compared to playing on a flat screen.

Check out a title like Asgard’s Wrath 2, for example. That game is absolutely exhausting to play; whether it’s frantic combat or puzzle solving, you don’t take much of a break at any time. It’s good to exercise, but not everyone wants to exercise every day, and that aspect alone limits the appeal of the field.

More than a Gimmick

Another Truth

VR, despite its 10-year lifespan in its current form, is still considered a gimmick. Not “real” games. Mock games and tech demos, sideshows, anything you can think of, VR has been called for. As a player of almost ten years, I can’t deny it. While there are, of course, some amazing VR games, there are oceans of games that fit this bill.

The games are just sandboxes, or they look good but have no real gameplay, and are, frankly, fantasy experiences. It’s not to say that those games can’t be fun, but in terms of longevity, there are a handful of VR games that will take you more than a week to finish. The best compilations for VR games are often very short, and that’s a problem for a genre that’s been around for a decade.

The problem is, because this is still a new platform in many ways, many developers are flying blind a lot of the time. The ideas may be great, but putting them into VR is a total ball game. It has drawbacks in many games, such as painful combat, visuals that feel decades behind what you would expect, and struggling to make their ideas true in the VR space compared to a flat screen.

All of these factors combine to make games that sometimes feel like a waste of money or just not that fun to play more than a few times. We lack the talent and money to make these ideas happen in the VR industry, and there’s a big reason why.

AAA Doesn’t Want Any Part Of It

Big Boys Sit Down

There have been teases of the AAA norm in VR for years now, from Astro Bot Rescue Mission (still not on PSVR2, mind you) to Horizon: Call of The Mountain and Half-Life: Alyx. But there’s never been the same presence, and we’re lucky if we see anything like AAA games for years at a time.

Look at the big companies that didn’t pay attention to it, like Square Enix with the same weaknesses as the VR experience of Final Fantasy 15, or Bethesda, who were more than happy to create lazy VR ports of Fallout 4 and Skyrim, but didn’t care a bit to make them competent in their vanilla state.

Half-Life: Alyx seemed like it could be the revolution of the VR world in 2020, but unfortunately, it was a joke. A good AAA game wasn’t enough to get some of the big hitters going. There have been other attempts, such as Assassin’s Creed Nexus, but the effort that came in felt too small, giving us a hodgepodge story that has just been forced into a series of favorites without a hit of nostalgia.

Where are the big budget RPGs? Where is something like a Matrix title right now, which couldn’t be more obvious with a VR title if we tried? Where are the first-person shooters to compete with the likes of Call of Duty? Why Pavlov and Contractors VR, great multiplayer shooters, when Raven Software is sitting on a mountain of money?

They just don’t see the potential benefit. They don’t care enough to risk their money just to make the platform appear to work. They can make Call of Duty VR, and it could be the best-selling VR game of all time, but those sales won’t be worth the small amount of what they do to sell the title on the platform. It’s a sad fact, but one that doesn’t seem to be changing in the near future. As for getting a AAA quality experience right now, your only bet is to try fan mods for flat screen games, which are sometimes pretty cool.

How is VR Coming to the Promised Land?

All About Games

If we’re going to see VR become the video game industry, the games will have to do the talking. You know how people bought a Nintendo Switch to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild? We need that kind of game. We need what you can’t miss. As good as Half-Life Alyx was, it wasn’t that game, as it honestly lacked a lot of features that VR games really should have these days, like a VR body, manual riding, and other basic features.

Now, if you ask me, Skyrim VR is completely revamped by that game. But to get my Skyrim VR the way I wanted it, it took hours and hours of work. We need something that works out of the box. We need that big-time, big-budget action that you can only get in VR. Something that lasts a good while, and has gameplay and story that you need to see to believe.

Honestly, we might need a Sandfall-style studio to break out of VR to give us a game we can’t afford to miss. We may need talent to grow from within; we need that game that feels like The Matrix, or Ready Player One, depending on how realistic it feels. Maybe that game is far away. Perhaps it’s only in the future that VR contact lenses are the thing that takes us into these amazing worlds.

Maybe I’m just dreaming of the day when that comfortable VR technology meets an unmissable VR experience to really grow the brand like never before. Is that experience close at hand? Sadly, it doesn’t seem close. Lately, every major VR release has me down in some way, shape, or form. I have yet to see anything more immersive than Skyrim VR in my ten years with this genre. Batman: Arkham Shadow is a close second, but not much in between.

As the VR fan base dwindles, we’re waiting for that game. I think it’s still years away. There is no game like that on the horizon. For now, I just hope that John Wick simulator Gunman: Contracts will come out and at least live up to expectations for the first time in a long time. The world of VR is hurting, and at this point, we’ll accept a Band-Aid, even if the cure is deep in the future.