I have been really tempted to jump into VR for a little while now, I tried it when the quest first came out, the very first one but it was too blurry and made me dizzy. I’ve considered getting back into it again, but the thing that has made me really hesitant is I’ve heard that VR is not in the greatest place and that it’s really tough to find good VR games to play. For example, there’s Fallout and Skyrim VR but they’re not really in good shape, and it takes a lot of modding and tweaking to get them to actually work properly. But I’m curious what other people think. Do you think VR is in a good enough place to be able to play it and enjoy it long-term? Or is it some sort of short-term hype thing?
Almost every content creator I watch say their VR headsets are collecting dust. Part of that is because there aren’t many good VR games, but also I think there are very few types of games that are fun in VR. They’re just not made for long-term play, you’ll quickly get exhausted in half an hour and want to rest your eyes (or if you’re playing something movement heavy like Beat Saber, rest your body as well).
I tried Skyrim VR, albeit the vanilla version. It sucked. Once you get over the initial hype of “wow, it’s like I’m really there!” you quickly start to realize that VR adds nothing to the experience. It’s the same game, except way clunkier with broken combat and makes you dizzy after some time. Most VR games feel similarly shallow. Even when it comes to racing games which I thought would be killer in a headset, I came away realizing I’d prefer just playing it on a flat screen.
I don’t know where you live, but here there are a couple of places where you can try a headset. I would recommend finding a way to try it first before buying.
Very accurate. We have the Quest 1 and 2, both just collecting dust now, I’m not even sure if they would work anymore. We set up a VR gaming night with a few friends who also had headsets, played Beat Saber and Synth Riders a bunch, then got bored and decided to explore a new game where you walk about and chop wood and whatnot. Five minutes of that and I was so dizzy I almost threw up. It made me realize that the type of game you can play on these is very very limited. I did get a lot of mileage from Synth Riders, so I’m not saying it’s all worthless tech, but we probably could have got a better ROI just buying a regular console with the money.
Fun story about VR and being dizzy.
I had huge problems with VR dizziness and blurriness and it turned out I had strabismus which was not normally noticeable as it was mitigated by my glasses and by being only a modest amount of cross-eyed-ness, but would absolutely make itself known after about 20 minutes of playing VR, to the point I was absolutely certain I was just getting motion sick.
Might be worth talking to your optometrist the next time you’re there, since boy, it’s shocking how much better my eyes got after dealing with it.