This is what happens when you stop focusing on building immersive VR gaming experiences and go towards mobile quality graphics and stupid metaverse / workplace productivity improvements. When will these companies ever learn to focus on the games? Sony learned it with the PS3, MS with the Xbone, and now Meta.
I am a VR fanatic but even I won’t buy a Quest 3 because there’s just no quality VR games that make me want to upgrade. The fact that no game has yet matched Half-Life: Alyx in terms of immersiveness is just sad.
I mean, the VR hype from a few years ago has mostly tapered off. Meta clinged onto it for quite a while with their Metaverse idea, but even they seem to have given up on it earlier this year, as LLMs stole the last bit of spotlight they had.
And the PS VR 2 launched earlier this year, too, was generally well-regarded from a hardware viewpoint, but the lack of hype means there’s still not terribly many games being released for it.
It also is an expensive investment and people aren’t exactly flush with money, thanks to inflation + countermeasures. So, if there is a chance, they buy this headset and no games get released for it, many people will hold off on that.
I think we’re still YEARS away from this tech taking off. It’s too expensive, it’s too bulky, and it’s not powerful enough.
I think the Apple Vision headset will be the first meaningful step forward since the CV1, and even that is just one step on a journey that could take another decade.
Personally, I have no trouble believing that. Thing is, these companies’ investors don’t really benefit from long-term plans. So, if it does not pay out in the next two or so years, I expect them to scrap that endeavour altogether.
I just find it weird that Apple decided to jump on that train now, but it’s also possible that they started development at the peak of the hype and finished only just now.
If you look at all the useless AR features that Apple has pushed into iOS over the years, you can tell that they've already been working toward this for at least a decade. They aren't giving up on it any time soon... they're playing the long game. Wearables are inevitable, and they want to be way ahead of the curve.
Lol what did they even expect… Their VR team has to be dysfunctional in some way. Like my quest2 somehow got worse after a new upgrade. They added these stupid ass cartoon arms (which cannot be disabled!!) and also your headset is used as a controller after your controllers idle for 5 minutes, which became a huge pain in the ass when watching movies. (Also can’t be disabled btw)
Idc about all that Facebook shit (although it’ll be way nicer to not have it), but everything about the quest except the hardware is just so fucking stupid. I have way higher expectation on Apple’s device… Say what you want about them, but they don’t have braindead product design (most of the time hehe)
Omg I thought I was the only one who hated the arms. Nothing worse than putting down your controllers on the table and then having those stupid arms spaz out around your screen as it tries to resolve how your hand could possibly be in that position.
I totally agree. Each firmware upgrade has just made my Quest 2 worse and worse.
And you can’t reject an update. They won’t even let you use your headset if there’s an update available. I haven’t used mine in months because every time I try to use it the battery is dead, then once I get it charged it needs an update, and by the time that’s done I don’t have any time left.
Hahahah fr… Like all I want is to play some simple games (eleven vr for example) and watch movies. Why tf you gotta add all these extra bs. But I guess that’s just them as a company. Rift S is so much easier to use
I had/have the first two quests. But needing a Facebook account was one thing I had to think hard about when I got it because I wanted to delete my account. With Facebook getting worse and worse it means I have zero desire to get a new one.
And to address the article, I would say it isn’t that interest in VR is decreasing, people don’t want meta VR or anything tied to Zuckerberg. I would love a valve index personally, just need to wait to afford it.
None of my friends have a Meta Quest (or any VR headsets for that matter). On the extremely few occasions the headsets are brought up, all the conversations are the same; “it’s kind of cool but it’s made by Facebook”.
I wonder how many people would be in the market for a relatively cheaper headset like the Meta Quest if it wasn’t a Mark Zuckerberg project
Its a mixed bag. The Pico headsets are around the same price point but at that price point, you are typically paying with your user data as well. Its just a question of who you are giving it to facebook or some random ass Chinese company. While Facebook trying to own "VR" for itself is bad I will at least thank them for making headsets that make it more likely people are willing to dip their feet into VR. While facebook sucks, only having to pay 300 to 400 to get into something you may absolutely hate. They make for great "starter" headsets that you can probably easily find on the 2nd hand market for sub 200. Try out VR on a quest and if you like the concept and feelings of it probably invest more on a better headset. Hopefully we will hear more about Valve's Deckard soon.
Edit: I almost forgot to mention PSVR 2 which is pretty damn good but for 550, I don't think it will have a massive appeal to console games seeing as they are gaming on something funnily worth less than that headset. It being locked to only the PS5 is also a massive penalty against it and there is no news of a fan made driver for it on pc.
They’re not just entry level headsets. You can link them to a powerful gaming computer through Steam Link and then they’re the equivalent of a $1200 headset from Valve or HTC.
100% not equivalent. I said entry since it gets the job done but it has a ton of limitations. The biggest one is it having to compress the video via the link cable and it having to decode on its own cpu. So this can lead to a some artificating and some stuttering issues. This is a problem that can be solved if Meta chooses to use DP over usb via the displayport protocol but that makes engineering a bit harder and it runs counter to their whole point of the device being a standalone unit, this isn't even an unrealistic ask since this is how the PSVR2 works.
2nd one and this is only a partial issue but its still worth mentioning battery life. For many people having a link cable will extend the life of your quest 2 but it won't keep the same charge level so a session will probably stop after 2 or 3 hours. Which is fine for a single person but if you are doing this for a party or something, may not be enough time to let everyone have a go with the thing. So a standard headset will just have a dedicated power cable and can go for as long as you want it to. Like said I'm hesitant to put too much faith on meta since they can easily drop support for these headsets. To my knowledge the quest 1 still works with a link cable but how long do we expect that to be the case, maybe one day a software update with their oculus platform basically makes it impossible to use it.
If your computer has USB-C 3.2 v2 then you can play for infinite time over the charge cable. I have a couple on my MOBO and as soon as I switched to those ports I never had charging issues. I think that resolves the video compression issue too. I’m not certain about the video issue but the bandwidth of 3.2 v2 is double what the display port is. I’ve never had any issues anyway. I’m sure there are other benefits to the pricier headsets too, like not having to deal with Facebook, and possibly better interfaces and stuff, but for the money the Quest v2 is pretty awesome.
I’m not suprised. On one hand, there wasn’t exactly a lot of marketing around it. I didn’t even know it was announced until last week, and I follow gaming news and some VR news. On top of this, its an expensive, casual device - the sort of thing a kid will ask for after seeing someone else using it, not something people are lining up day-one to buy. At least something like the Valve Index, for all its disadvantages, very clearly targets enthusiasts who will go out of their way to seek out newer or better products. If Valve decided to release a Valve Index 2 (or for a more direct comparison, a Valve Index Pro) I’d be willing to bet their day-one numbers would look better, even if their overall market is much smaller.
Redfall studio job listing indicates returning focus to single-player
A job listing for Redfall studio Arkane Austin appears to indicate that the Dishonored and Deathloop studio could be returning to single-player games soon.
Honestly, the proliferation of widely-available Internet access and the fact that multiplayer games can be harder to pirate has, IMHO, tilted things a bit overly towards multiplayer games. That’s not to say that multiplayer games can’t be fun, but there is a lot to like about single-player games.
They don’t go away forever once the player base drops off.
On the PC, modding provides for a lot of life for many games. Modding competitive multiplayer games tends to run into issues with people cheating.
More-broadly, it’s not a problem if someone cheats in a single-player game, but it’s usually a problem for single-player, so all the anti-cheat infrastructure has to come along in multiplayer games.
For competitive multiplayer games, providing an even playing field is important, so using a controller with more buttons tied to game functions – a nice quality-of-life improvement – becomes a problwm, whereas it’s fine in single-player games.
Single-player games can be played offline.
Single-player games don’t have issues with connectivity interruptions.
While it’s true that playing against or with a human can be a good way to provide “AI” for other characters, humans aren’t getting better at filling that role, whereas the advance of computing power and software improvement permits for games to have better AI. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement, but most first-person shooters have drastically more-interesting enemy AI than they did in the 1990s, and the technology isn’t going to generally go downhill. If someone makes a good “AI engine”, then many games benefit from improvement.
Single-player games are normally free to let the player pause what’s going on and deal with things In The Real World. If you’ve got an infant who needs their diaper to be changed, say, it’s not an issue. Multiplayer doesn’t generally deal so well with that.
It’s not as bad with centrally-controlled servers, which is the norm these days, but multiplayer games do have security concerns – you’re letting random other people affect your computer via software that probably isn’t very well-hardened.
To a degree I’d say this applies to anyone that works on a game except upper management. With games like these the devs/artists are almost always the passionate ones trying to put their best effort into their games but end up forced into incredibly condensed timescales by upper management.
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