Back to Reality: What can we expect from VR games?

December 12th, 2014, 08:52 Posted By: wraggster

With the launch of the Samsung Gear VR this week, what many believe will be a revolution for video games started in earnest. In the two-and-a-half years since the Oculus Rift first came to attention as an enthralling hobbyist project it has generated more excitement - and prompted more career changes - than any gaming technology since the iPhone. Right now, anticipation could scarcely be at a higher pitch.
And yet for all the positive press, virtual reality remains something of a mystery for those not actively working with the technology: a regular feature of industry conferences and consumer events, but generally showcased to limited numbers of people by brief demos or discrete sections of modified games. Like many journalists, I have tried a broad selection of what's available: some of it seductive, some of it jarring, but very little of it resembles a product that could be sold to a consumer.
Indeed, despite all the exposure, exactly what Oculus Rift or Project Morpheus retail games will look like is as indistinct now as the day that John Carmack arrived at E3 2012 with a unique new way to play Doom 3. This is far from ideal, because, as Palmer Luckey has taken great care to point out, the quality of the software will be vital to establishing a viable consumer market for VR gaming. In an attempt to gain a little perspective, I looked back over a year in which VR has dominated the conversation. A year in which I've interviewed the prime movers, reported on a string of lectures and panel discussions, and talked to some of the most excited and engaged developers I've ever encountered.
"When the commercial version comes out somebody is going to scare somebody to death. It is going to happen"
Denny Unger, Cloudhead Games

Amidst all of that noise a few key trends emerged, with one in particular underpinning them all, neatly summarised by nDreams' senior designer Andreas Gschwari: "Nobody really knows anything. That's the scary part, and it's also bloody incredible."

[h=2]Size matters[/h]At a panel led by Oculus VR at this year's Unity Technologies conference, Cloudhead Games' Denny Unger warned developers about what he saw as a very real danger of virtual reality: player death. With any new technology, he explained, developers will always be tempted to reach for the "low-hanging fruit," which, in the case of VR, are horror games full to the brim with jump scares. "When the commercial version comes out somebody is going to scare somebody to death," he intoned. "It is going to happen. Absolutely."
It seemed a little melodramatic at the time, but Unger's words still resonated with my own VR experiences. When I played Alien: Isolation on a widescreen television and an Oculus Rift DK2 in quick succession, my preference was unquestionably for the former. The addition of VR made The Creative Assembly's game so intense it was overwhelming, to the point where even a 20-minute session struck me as unappealing. Even demos that weren't situated in so overtly horrifying presented a clear challenge to the long play sessions preferred by the core audience.
This is an entirely relevant concern, because core gamers and their expectations will be a key driver of the early market for VR software. In a recent interview, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick echoed this idea when explaining the publisher's reticence to commit resources to VR development. Take-Two's customers, he said, "play our games for a long period of time," and yet public access to the hardware has largely been restricted to 10 or 15 minutes in a given session, and only at events attended by a relatively small number of people.

But the reality is that these snappy play sessions may be closer to actual VR gaming than many assume. For Julie Heyde, an independent developer, the comfort level for a VR play session is 45 minutes or under, and she's using that as a cornerstone for the structure of her game, XTODIE. "That's after discussing with a lot of people how long we should actually make it," she says. "We'll have save points so you can put it down if you have to, but I want it to be a complete experience where you can finish it in that time without taking a break. The only way to be sure that people stay inside the experience until the end is by design."
nDreams' Andreas Gschwari's sees the matter differently. He agrees that VR is better suited to shorter play sessions than those associated with, say, Skyrim, but he maintains that abbreviated play sessions needn't be such a challenge to the tastes of the core audience - not in certain genres, at least.
"We are concerned that you'll play our games for a long period of time. We don't want people getting nauseated"
Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two

"If you look at most AAA shooters, one level is around 15 minutes and a chapter is around 45 minutes - that's the length of a TV episode," Gschwari says. "That's about as long as you've got, in my opinion, of a player's attention. I'm an average gamer, with a lot of other things going on in my life. 45 minutes is a good amount of time to fill. I see VR in a similar range.
"With pure VR games, you should play them as episodic content, just as most gamers do with all other content."

[h=2]Motion sickness is not just a hardware problem[/h]When Strauss Zelnick questioned whether VR could support the long play sessions preferred by Take-Two's audience, he added a very important qualifier: "We don't want people getting nauseated." Speaking at a conference last month, EA CFO Blake Jorgensen voiced similar concerns. "If you are even slightly motion sick prone, it's very tough," he said. "I've seen people within 30 seconds have to take the goggles off." Even Brendan Iribe, the CEO of Oculus VR, described motion sickness as, "the elephant in the room," and a problem with the potential to harm the growth of the VR market.
It should be noted that Iribe was referring to problems with VR hardware, which a great many attendees of the Oculus Connect conference believe have been solved with Oculus' Crescent Bay prototype. It should also be noted, however, that motion sickness isn't related to the hardware alone. It is also borne of inappropriate design choices, and those will be all but impossible to eradicate.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-from-vr-games

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