SvennoJ said:
potato_hamster said:
I totally disagree.
VR is not a new idea. People have been making VR solutuons for decades now (remember Lawnmower man? That's 25 years old!) , and it's never seen mass success. I can remember going to a theme park decades ago and playing Duke Nukem 3D using a VR headset with a gun shaped controller. Two years after that VR area was replaced with something else because no one gave a shit anymore. This new VR fad will come and go too. Maybe next time it becomes a fad (and it will) it'll finally reach a point where it'll have mass appeal, but it definitely isn't close to there yet.
VR is just 3D + Expense. Once the novelty wears off, all you're left with is a handful of experiences that actually offers a legitimately enhanced experience and isn't a gimmick that people will become bored with. The vast majority of VR games are literally taking a game that doesn't need VR at all and making it VR for the sake of VR. But the expense? That's means that this round of VR was once again dead on arrival. It's still way, way, way too expensive for it to see mass adoption. You'll have to see great VR solutions for less than $100 that is easy to set up, maintain, and support before you'll ever see mass market success, and that's probably still decades away.
|
Yet 3D stuck around this time in the cinema, and doesn't seem to be declining at all. VR arcades aren't quite there, but developments are going very fast atm. Lightweight high res glasses for VR arcades aren't far off.
I had 3D in the 90's on a CRT projector. That was a fad and the fun wore off quickly. Great to play Descent 2 in 3D with fire balls floating through my room and behind the wall I was projecting on, yet after a month I was back to gaming in 2D. 3D didn't add anything. Yet this time, even with low res VR with all its problems, I don't want to go back to old fashioned gaming. It's very liberating not to be stuck to a fixed viewpoint with limited fov. It's not a gimmick. But it doesn't help the industry seems to be hell bent on promoting it with gimmicky experiences.
Will the mass market care? I dunno. I love dedicated surround sound yet most people are satisfied with headphones or tv speakers. Perhaps VR will become like that. Every movie and tv show support at least 5.1 sound though... Perhaps it will be easier to add a VR option in future game engines. Perhaps we should simply forget about special VR games and treat it as another display option. Perhaps social multiplayer games can break through in VR. Perhaps natural language interaction with AI characters will be the breakthrough point. The only thing I'm certain off is that I'm enjoying every bit of it right now and amd looking forward to all the things that are coming out soon.
|
Surround sound is a great parallel, and I'm glad you brought that up. Some people think games/movies/tv aren't nearly as good without it, and will pour thousands of dollars into an amazing home audio experience, but the vast majority of people are quite content with their TV speakers or a soundbar because its cheaper than a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound system and the difference isn't worth it for them. Surround sound has existed for decades, and it has always, always been niche, no matter what advancements have been made, or how cheap surround sound systems get. But here's the thing. Surround sound is built in to pretty much every game engine, requires little -to-no effort from developers to fully support it, and it doesn't exactly require an immense amount of system resources to run, and most importantly, it actually has the potential to enhance the experience of every single game that supports it in a meangingful way. Something like a car blowing up behind you and hearing that explosion behind you adds a level of realism. But VR doesn't have that luxury. There are many games where VR is utterly pointless, like any non-first person games like GTA or Assasin's Creed, or sports games, or more casual games. It's a complete waste of time for titles like that because any type of "enhancement" you can think or making isn't actually going to make those games meaningfully more fun to play.
If you don't like that example, use Racing Wheel controllers for PCs/consoles as another example and look into how affordable they've become, and how most people who love racing games and play them regularly still aren't willing to buy a wheel, and many popular racing games have very limited racing wheel support, if any, even though racing wheels have been available for decades. Yet, there's people, like you, that will no longer play racing games without a wheel because how how "old fashioned" it feels. it doesn't change the fact that racing wheels, no matter how long they've been on the market, will always be a niche product because it has such limited appeal.
