Little kids love even the simplest buggy broken demos. They go wild for it.
- Resolution: It'll always be worse than a phone because for the foreseeable future VR screens will come from phone screens and the field of view on a VR HMD is many times greater. People liked doom 1 and other low res games for what they were in the day, and I think people will accept the trade off.
- Oculus Rift is pretty sharp across the FOV, I hear Vive is a bit worse in this respect.
- Moving in VR is hard... I think 3rd person view is pretty great for action/adventure games. I think the nature and style of games will inherently need to shift, which we're already seeing a bit in the Oculus Home catalog.
- True, it's the chicken and egg paradox. How can you get big games without a big user base? How do you get a big user base? I think Oculus and Valve are getting this right by directly investing in games. We have more and more fun games from large studios coming out which our current user base size really shouldn't allow for.
I think the first and second points are the strongest as it requires a change of expectations, and highlight the real fight for adoption in VR. FPS games wont work, and the most obvious metric that gamers had for high quality experience, resolution, is going to appear lower.
Only response is current gamers enjoying buying and playing games on Vive. As game developers figure new fun experiences for the platform that overcome those obstacles we'll likely start to see more success. I think a key will definitely be social aspects, as there isn't anything quite like standing next to someone or an avatar that is interacting with you in VR.
I would really enjoy if someone made a game in the spirit of QWOP that uses the two triggers in a gamepad to simulate steps made by each leg.
However, I don't mean that I would enjoy playing that game.
- The resolution needs to be higher. It is very difficult to read anything but oversized text at a hand's distance. While the low resolution doesn't kill the immersive effect of VR, it is very noticeable.
- The clear viewing angle through the headset is small. You can't look too far off of center screen before everything becomes blurry.
- They haven't found a decent solution to the problem of moving around in a VR world. Right now the best answer is teleportation, but that is an awkward solution that pointedly breaks immersion. We'll see how well that can work in a large open-world game when Fallout 4 VR comes out.
- The catalog has very few complete games at this point. Almost all of what is available is very early access or "discrete experiences" that don't last very long.
So, for the most part the Vive has convinced me of VR. Having played with it I am not sure I would enjoy a first-person gaming experience outside of VR now. Still, it is at the early-adopter stage. Better graphics hardware needs to be cheaper, and a couple of generations of headsets will likely see a drastic improvement in the quality of the experience.