Even if the sickness issue is solved at some point I just don’t ever see VR become a dominant way to game. There are just too many downsides.
Story-focussed games can not direct you where to look. You are completely cut off from the world so you can’t e.g. watch a child or elderly relative while you use it or chat with friends while you work using it. Environments need a lot more work for a smaller market share if you can look at them from any angle. Hardware is much more expensive (and always will be) compared to a system that just needs to render a screenful of content at the same quality level. Your UI options are more limited if you want to keep things immersive.
Exactly, and that’s why we don’t have one. Maybe I’ll get one when my kids are a little older, but for now, it’s a lot more fun to experience things together than to have someone completely closed off in a VR world.
Even if I didn’t have kids, I still probably wouldn’t want it because I’d like to spend that time with my spouse, and looking at an avatar just isn’t the same.
I think the entire line of thinking that you need a first person perspective to be immersed in a game or virtual world is also flawed. As someone who has been on Second Life for more than 16 years now which uses neither VR equipment nor a first person camera 90% of the time I can certainly “feel like I am there” despite all of those factors and in the presence of many other factors that do not exist in RL like teleporting and camming through walls just fine.
Is that ever claimed anywhere? AFAIK, VR has just been marketed as a new way to experience a virtual world, not as the only way to be immersed in a virtual world.
I think VR would be really cool, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with my lifestyle at this point. And I’m not sure if I would be able to handle it since I and my spouse get motion sick quite easily.
Honestly even the very best VR-only games are only interesting because they are in VR.
Half-Life: Alyx is IMO still the best of those and it can be played outside of VR thanks to mods… But in that case it’s a curiosity, not an actual good traditional game.
HLA in VR is incredible though and I wish there were more games like it.
Alyx absolutely broke that mould for me. it started off good but built up to incredible as it progressed. I just wish more developers would do similarly. But then this article is the reason why they don’t
I don’t have problems with VR. I sold my Quest 2 cos there are not games like Alyx, which I enjoyed a lot, and that’s a pity. I see it going the way of 3D.
This may be a shocker but games on the same level of scope as Cyberpunk 2077 take years of effort to make. We simply cannot pump them out as fast as consumers and shareholders demand their release.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky. Ubisoft also did with both Division games.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.
Having played at release, Hello Game’s issue was much less “large scope games take long to make” and much more “we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game”.
Features that had to be cut because they lack the time to implement it, so basically “large scope games take too long to make”.
One feature was also removed because of player feedback, so the issue there is talking about features before they were tested. This issue stems from their lack of PR expertise, but it means they weren’t lying when they said it.
Except weren’t they still promoting those features at launch? And they had taken preorders before review embargoes were lifted.
Both No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk both had dishonest marketing and significant bugs. Call me crazy, but if a game isn’t ready to launch, it shouldn’t launch. The developer sets the launch date, and if they didn’t give themselves enough time, it’s not reasonable to ask the people who have paid for he thing as advertised to wait because they couldn’t deliver the features as promised.
As much fun as I’m having with starfield(150 hours since September 1st, because yes I pre-ordered but it was also the first time I’d pre ordered a game in a very very long time ) that was my take on a lot of its issues. I won’t say they did no QA playthrough but it certainly feels like they didn’t do enough and that was after delaying the game even for like an additional 2 years. Supposedly they were all set to launch the game in late 2021 but Phil Spencer paid them to work on bug fixes for longer. Then nonsensical design choices like not having med pack counters where your grenade counter is or a “current equiped power” info area above your current equiped weapon info area on the HUD in 2021 or 2023 is laughably unthinkable. But the meat of the game has been worth the questionable sourced veggie “bugs” on the burger as a whole imo.
You See advertisements for a big, thick, juicy black angus burger. Stacked with garden fresh tomato, lettuce, onion, with a side of the best onion rings man can make, for an ultra premium price (at least for those who actually paid money for it, Some of us got it free with a different purchase, and arent so heavily invested in it financially that we’re more free to criticize it, and the ridiculous price for what you get)
So you buy it
and what you got was a thin patty with a texture and taste that doesnt match any of your expectations of meat, much less black angus. The greenery is small, disappointing, and utterly tasteless and completely missable if you didnt open bun to go hunt for it… and instead of onion rings, you got some weird, oily, deep fried brussel sprouts instead.
and the Chef comes out and tells you “Of course the burgers mostly empy. We made it that way because the universe is mostly empty. Get used to it and upgrade your expectations”
Some people might be able to force themselves to enjoy that burger, by throwing salt and pepper and whatever else they can on the bland, tasteless, amorphus “meat”, but that doesnt mean its a super premium burger. and it certainly doestnt mean that its what you were sold, and ordered.
I wonder if this 40-70% demographic has actively tried to play it a couple times? My first experience with VR was incredibly disorienting, and yes, made me feel nauseated. But after playing for 2-3 hours across a handful of 15-20 minute sessions (passing it around a few friends for an evening) that just went away. Once the body uses it a bit and learns, even high-movement non-teleport movement games stop being an issue.
I wonder if I happen to be in that upper percent, or if the numbers in question are a matter of people who tried it once in their life and felt sick. Clearly the author has put real time into trying to move past it, but that doesn’t say anything for the study he quotes the “40-70% of players are 15 minutes” numbers from.
I played VR and had a blast. It was usually the ones that were mounted to the ceiling at a mall arcades. I could play no big deal for hours. My brother in law got a vr headset for Christmas and I tried to use it and got unbelievably sick after 20 minutes of playing it.
I played super hot, some moving zombie game, and that plank game on thw vr headsets at mall arcades with no problem moving around, twisting, and moving fast. I played a stationary puzzle game on my bil’s. I dont know what causes the sickness but it was veey bad on his unit. I womder if the suspension at the mall arcades made the difference, rather than having a free roaming headset.
Heard somewhere that it can get worse if you try to power through the nausea and sickness. Like your body remembers that it made you sick before and wants to actively avoid going through that experience again. So if you start feeling sick, especially when you first start out, stop playing.
Since you’re asking for anecdotes: my VR headset consistently made me sick following 30 min to an hour at the absolute max. I still played dozens of times for short spurts, but it never got better for me.
Really wish they would update it to allow you to define the space boundaries with the headset on. With the Vive if you don’t start it a certain way then you have to redo the boundary setup.
Yikes that sounds annoying and yea they should definitely make it possible, this really shouldn’t be much of a challenge to code on their end.
I’ve only had to do this a handful of times because I moved the base stations or reinstalled. (Index)
Dedicated servers ran by the community with a server browser to find games/servers.
Really the golden age of multiplayer.
Found a nice server that runs well, chill and well moderated? add it to your favorites.
No lobbies, well… technically the whole server was the lobby, kinda.
No progression unlocks bullshit.
No ranking. No waiting on matchmaking. Just play.
No AI spying on every thing you say or do.
Maybe a “SIR this is a Christian server, so swearing will not be tolerated” or other warning of some kind now and then, even on games like Counterstrike.
Eventually, you’d get to know people, kinda like how you might start recognizing names here on lemmy.
You’d make friends, rivals, etc.
I miss those times.
I got into Titanfall 2 pretty late (like last month) and waiting 10 minutes to even get into a lobby is just annoying.
As opposed to joining a server and playing non stop on there.
It’s even less costs to the publisher than to host and scale on their own because the community is running your servers.
But then they can’t pull the plug to force people on a new release.
They can’t spy on as much shit.
They can’t sell as much private data.
It’s probably easier to sell microtransactions this way too.
Yeah but there were admins spying what you did and banning you. Quite frankly i have much greater trust in AI admins than human admins. Not that some human admins aren’t great, but why risk it? Same as self driven cars, as soon as they’re ready im ready to never drive again.
Sure, but the mistakes aren’t the main issue, it’s that AI is just a tool that by extention can be abused by the humans in control. You have no idea what rules they give it and what false positives result from it.
My primary concern here is that it’s Blizzard, whom love to gargle honey for China and is all for banning players that speak against them, is in charge of this AI.
Blizzard’s previously talked about using AI to verify reports of disruptive voice chat, which is now running in most regions, though not globally. The developer says it has seen this technology “correct negative behavior immediately, with many players improving their disruptive behavior after their first warning.”
Great, they can auto-ban players like Ng Wai Chung, I guess. For whatever they subjectively deem ‘harmful’. There’s also the looming idea that a friend can wander in my room, say something dumb, and now I’m closer to a ban because of an unrelated choice I made outside the game.
And we definitely trust Blizard to be good with all the audio data they get to harvest. That won’t be abused later, right?
I mean that’s a general argument against technology. Yes, more technology means more ruthlessly efficient abuse, but ultimately you think technology is better in the long run or not. Either way it is inevitable. Maybe in the EU they will ban those abuses, in China they won’t, and US will find some weird compromise between the two.
You trust a billion dollar company with no morals with your data? Isn’t that the whole point we are on this site? Community servers are like lemmy instances.
Sure, and they can have AI moderators in lemmy instances. Whatever problems are concerning about corporate AI admins also apply to corporate human admins.
They already have your data without the AI. Most games have had wide rangeing telemetry sent to the dev for over a decade now. This includes the text chat logs.
Unrelated to the topic, but wasn’t Titanfall 2 plagued by this one hacker that basically filled every lobby with bots to make the servers crash? I think I very recently heard about them resolving the issue and the player count surpassed the numbers at launch even.
Active moderation isn’t spying but using an AI is? The only reason those self-hosted community servers didn’t have problems was because they (usually) had active admins to see bad behavior and take action. This is merely automating that so a real human being doesn’t have to be there watching.
This is automating something based on blizzard rules not community rules. What if people want even stricter rules or looser or none at all or completely different rules? Also how many times have billion dollar companies been caught selling customers private info? Too many to count.
First game to just have constant crashes on my seven year old RX480, which is great since otherwise the game runs completely fine. Support doesn’t seem to want my crash reports either, I guess in Todds world, I should just throw the thing in the trash for a game that does literally nothing special in the tech department.
If a game uses smooth locomotion, instead of teleportation based movement, I cannot play it without air blowing into my face, or sometimes been at all. Otherwise I have no issues at all
I do support live service games though. I prefer them and that’s pretty much all I ever play.
What they’ve done with handling this game in delisting it is quite frankly fantastic - get rid of all micro transactions and bundle every single one with the game and basically give the game away for free at its end of life. Now anyone what wants to play it like a regular single player offline game can for a few bucks, and I believe are least in pc it uses steam for online play so it will still be playable multiplayer. Everyone wins.
I have played several, and the vast majority have been Microtransaction Hell, and many games that are not live service are still consistently updated.
The fact that there are one or two games that do live service without intrusive and annoying microtransactions that are frequently barriers to progression or end up being pay to win doesn't make the description invalid. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The vast majority of Live Service games have zero pay to win microtransactions or barriers to progression. They’re almost all purely cosmetic microtransactions because that’s been proven to be what people want.
There was a bit of a learning curve for devs to see what people would put up with and what they wouldn’t, and stuff you describe was left on the cutting room floor years ago. Even games like COD now give you all actual content for free and just sell you cosmetics, and it’s wildly profitable for them. Selling map pack dlc got abandoned because it split the player base, whereas cosmetics don’t.
Isn't that literally what they are though? Fortnite, WoW, Runescape, Warframe or Hearthstone are all vastly different genres of games but they are still live-service games at the end. What else could the term mean besides "constantly updated", they are a living, evolving long-term service?
What are you basing this definition on? A rudimentary google search for a definition gives more than one answer and yet none of them have "always online" as a requirement for something to be live-service.
Hitman 3 for example is an example of a singleplayer live-service game, Paradox games like Stellaris are basically that as well, and Minecraft and NMS are often used as examples too. Nobody claimed that a game needs to be online to be updated, that's ridiculous, so not sure who was that clarification meant for.
"In the video game industry, games as a service (GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service.
[...]
Games released under the GaaS model typically receive a long or indefinite stream of monetized new content over time to encourage players to continue paying to support the game. This often leads to games that work under a GaaS model to be called "living games", "live games", or "live service games" since they continually change with these updates."
GaaS monetization can't be achieved without a central online service. Even with Hitman 3 a lot of content is locked behind the online requirement.
You can bend the definition as much as you want but this is what most people mean by" live service games".
Because literally every live service game ever made goes out of their way to constantly dictate your engagement with it in a way that is exclusively designed for the sole purpose of taking money from you.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
That’s strange because I’ve spent about $15 all up on micro transaction since they became a thing yet I have tens of thousands of hours in live service games and I’ve had a ball.
The fact that you can "play them" without spending money doesn't change the fact that every single element of every single feature is designed to make you want to spend money, and every interaction with every menu has ads shoved down your face.
There is exactly one design conceit for live service games, and it's "rob every player you can blind". It's the exact business model of every single one. There are zero exceptions.
Every single element of these games isn’t designed to make you want to spend money 😂. Going by your hate for them along with that terrible comment shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Almost every single live service game now just has optional cosmetics as the microtransactions. That’s the opposite of what you’re saying.
Just because some games have certain content on disk doesn’t mean others would. At some stage a game has to be cut for release and is “content complete” for printing. With live service games they continue creating content to sell in-game. With non live service games they don’t.
If you’re going to bring mods into it then that’s a completely different conversation.
Just because there are many games that do it badly doesn't mean the genre label means something different. I'm playing GW2 and Warframe which are very much live service games and I rarely, if ever, feel exploited or manipulated into giving money to them - if anything it's the opposite and the only occassion when I do spend extra on them is when I'm happy with content or updates and want to support them.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
This is subjective and I believe this might be the case for you, but it is demonstratively absolutely not true for everyone. You framing it like some absolute authority on the subject is just shortsighted and inaccurate.
I’ve been playing Old School Runescape and I must say it’s fantastic. Selling drops os enough to pay for my subscription and there’s no microtransactions.
I’ve been playing Dota more than a decade, the game that technically introduce Battle Pass. I don’t even feel pressured to buy microtransaction, the community even disappointed when Valva stop selling the yearly battle pass
The argument against live service games is that you are dependent on the servers hosted by the developer/publisher (afaik).
In normal circumstances, they are able to stop you from playing or alter the terms at any time however they like.
This is a dominant/subordinate relationship which is quite risky. Especially for young people who are still learning what a healthy relationship looks like.
The alternative is a equality relationship where you decide if you buy something based on the price.
One argument against that would be that you can „rent“ an apartment as well. But legislature has shown that states will intervene on a vendor (landlord) redefining the terms of the contract. Not so much with gaming.
Now you are arguing that the game is taken off live service and you will be able to play it offline. I don’t know if that is the case but if so then buying it now would actually send the message that doing the right thing after all boosts sales.
TL;DR: Live service games are badly legislated imo but truly making such a game offline playable with all dlc would be a good thing in my book.
Sorry you got downvoted by this Lemmy circlejerk. There's a certain toxcicity in these parts; basically anything not Linux and offline with the slightest hint of privacy issues is downright hated here.
Which is funny since the fediverse by its core principles has 0 consideration towards privacy.
It is really astonishing how reddit-like the hivemind here has become already, people don't care about even objectively discussing the terminology if they can circlejerk about "GaaS is bad ehmahgerd" instead, just going straight for extreme viewpoints and seeing it black and white. Really thought I got away from that when I joined here...
Live service games represent lazy, copy and paste style game mechanics. They’re insulting to the gaming consumer’s intelligence, and they’re basically just jobs. Daily inconsequential tasking that eventually allows you to do an inconsequential raid, where you have a 1 in 1000 chance of dropping a rare item. All so you can stand around in the game world’s hub and show off your meaningless cosmetic item that isn’t really all that useful because you’ve accomplished all of your mundane, copy and paste goals. Oh, and the casino mechanics that psychologically incentivize buying microtransactions.
The game being “constantly updated” isn’t the issue. The issue is that the “constant updates” are basically nothingburger, repetitive tasks that you’ve already done a thousand times.
Do I care enough to go on a crusade and slap boxes out of people’s hands? Fuck no. But they are a stain on gaming
I don’t know about that. The game has now removed all of the live service elements, so I would say it’s showing that there is interest in this type of game without the live service.
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
Sony did that bacuse they’ve skirted laws about refunds in some parts of the world for years and CDPR inadvertently highlighted that. MS, Valve and GOG left the game up and issued refunds when requested as that should be a normal part of doing business.
Or… your experience was different from that of others. I had some weird glitches in a boss fight early on which made it difficult or impossible to progress. The person you responded to said it was a mess for them, yet it wasn’t for you. We all saw different things.
And yet, any Bethseda game has the same or worse kind of “game breaking” bugs, and gets away with it from a community backlash perspective.
I never had a bug in CP77 that broke progression. I had one boss get stuck in an elevator that made him trivial to kill.
In skyrim, I had to search up console commands to reset main quest lines that were otherwise completely broken, and commands to restore companions forever lost. And those were common experiences.
My point is that the community reaction was completely overblown when compared to other, very comparable, open world games. CP77 certainly had bugs and areas of improvement. But listening to the community, you’d think the whole thing was a dumpster fire, which it simply wasn’t. And my response was to someone who didn’t play it at release, saying that their opinion of the game being a dumsterfire was “correct”, without any frame of reference besides the community backlash.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn't - it's GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
It was straight up broken for many console players.
Some PC players had performance issues.
For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Very nice summary, thanks. I just recently started CP77, about 30 hours in now. I will stick with 1.63 for this playthrough.
My notes: The story and writing seems mostly excellent and unique (but not near the magic and masterpiece of Witcher 3.) Feeling that development was chaotic (pieces cut, rearranged, “montage” with Jackie was jarring.). World seems quite empty, few “layers” (soulless, unpolished). Car controls are not great, very “floaty” and strange. Literally zero encounters with NCPD yet (lol?). Reminds of Deus Ex, but leaning more action FPS. Bugs still apparent (floating cars, missing items), but nothing game-breaking. Graphics underwhelming (city environment especially, characters better, mostly “very high” settings, but admittedly no HDR or ray-tracing).
Would rate 4 out of 5 for now, but a 3 is possible (hopefully not).
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
LMFAO, a lot of you guys sound so fucking bitter and I don’t understand. I used a Vive years ago and it was so much fun, zero nausea the very first time I played it and I played it for hours. The tech has only gotten better and better. Stay mad. 😂
Edit: Accidentally said Rift when I actually meant the HTC Vive. It was awesome.
Would be nice if the author had done a bit of research on the specific things that had been done in VR since he tried his DK2 to prevent nausea:
An Oculus DK2, a PC that couldn’t quite run a rollercoaster demo at a high-enough framerate, and a slightly-too-hot office full of people watching me as I put on the headset. Before I’d completed the second loop-de-loop, it was clear that VR and I were not going to be good friends.
For one, non-persistent displays have become the norm. These only show (strobe) the image for a fraction of the frame time and go black in between. Valve discovered that the full 1/90th of a second an image is displayed is enough to induce nausea if the head is moving during that time. So the Vive (and the Oculus Rift) had non-persistent displays.
The stobing effect is so fast you don’t notice it.
Elimination of artificial movement is another. The reason Valve focused on games with teleport movement and made a big deal of “room scale” early on was to eliminate the nausea triggers you encounter in other types of experiences.
Valve had an early version of Half Life 2 VR during the days of the DK2, but they removed it as the artificial motion made people sick (myself included).
For many, sims work as long as there is a frame in their field of vision to let their brains lock into that non-moving frame of reference (ex car A-pillars, roof line, dash board, outline of view screen on a ship interior, etc). Note the frame still moves when you move your head, so it’s not a static element in your field of view.
Also it helps if your PC can render frames under the critical 11.1ms frame time (for 90Hz displays). Coincidentally, 90Hz is the minimum Valve determined is needed to experience “presence”. Many folks don’t want to turn down graphic options to get to this. It’s doable in most games even if it won’t be as detailed as it would on a flat screen. Shadows is a big offender here.
Resolution isn’t as big of a factor in frametimes as detailed shadows and other effects. I have run games at well over 4k x 2.5k resolution per eye and been able to keep 11.1ms frame times.
Lastly, it has been noted that any movement or vibration to the inner ear can for many stave off nausea. This includes jogging in place while having the game world move forward. For many years we’ve had a free solution that integrates into Steam VR:
Jog in place to make your character move forward in the direction you’re facing. Walk normally to experience 1-to-1 roomscale.
I’ve use the above to play Skyrim VR without any nausea. Good workout too!
For car, flight, spaceflight simulators, a tactile transducer on your chair (looks like a speaker magnet without the cone - or basically a subwoofer without the cone) can transfer the games sound vibrations directly to you and therefore your inner ear and prevent nausea.
I’ve literally played over 1,000 hours of Elite:Dangerous this way as well as Battlezone VR and Vector 36. All games that involve tons of fast artificial movement.
The main issue is too many people tried out VR cardboard or old DK2 demos with low and laggy framerate, persistent displays, and poorly designed VR experiences and simply write off all VR as bad and nausea inducing.
Edit: added links and trailers to the games mentioned so folks can see the motion involved. The “study” wasn’t a proper study. It was a quote from a scientist. No data was given about what headsets or which experiences caused nausea.
Some researchers did a study several years ago and found that adding a virtual nose decreased motion sickness significantly. However, I don’t think I’ve seen any developers try this. I wonder if it’d help.
Have they discovered a link between people with big noses and less motion sickness? Imo these are the more important questions that will drive humanity forward
Yes although I’m hypothesising large nose peoples brains will be doing this with a larger area hence the greater effects against motion sickness. It could lead to novel treatments for motion sickness like wearing a big nose while riding on a bus.
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