Alyx is probably one of the greatest gaming experiences I've had... but I was also able to borrow a Vive from a friend to play it. I'm a Half-Life nut so I would have bought a headset anyway, but I'm glad I haven't bought a Quest.

The immersiveness is fantastic, but movement feels like trying to use a 1970's pong controller while something is strapped to your head.

I want standard joystick-based movement. I suppose too many get motion sickness, or that joysticks are ergonomically awkward to place onto motion controllers while maintaining the "pointing" and "picking up" metaphors.

VR's "aim and teleport" mechanic is the worst, though. It ruins the entire experience for me. I just want to walk in a direction - easy with a game controller. But instead you have to aim, judge distance, and click. It's so weird and feels gross.

The game asks you whether you want standard joystick-based movement when you start it.

As others have said, true movement and turning is an option in a good number of games. Having tried it myself, I won't do it again. I had a headache that lasted several hours as a result. Honestly, I was surprised how much it affected me, given that I've never had any form of motion sickness before or since. My brain did not like the perception of movement disconnected from sensing that movement.

Now, when omnidirectional treadmills become a thing so I can literally walk / run places in games, I'm onboard.

I get terrible motion sickness so I opted for teleportation. I still get sick in a playthrough. The part where you free the vort in the square was the first time I started really feeling sick, but that's because you have to take an elevator.

After like 3 playthroughs I've gotten the teleporting movement down and it's pretty much second nature. Outside of the game I found myself holding out my hand and flicking to try to pick things up IRL

There's smooth movement and smooth turning options for most games, including Alyx.

Alyx "smooth motion" is in settings - game settings, not Oculus or anything, and yes, you have to be careful. Sometimes I can barely maintain my footing if something happens too fast.

You can use a Oculus Account (not connected to facebook) and then use Virtual Desktop to stream the game from SteamVR over Wifi. If you have a Wifi 6 router it's the best PC VR experience you can have (wireless, no base stations, really high resolution, very low latency) and besides the Quest 2 and Virtual Desktop you are not giving any money to Meta. If you are worried about battery life, I already player with a battery bank in small backpack without any problems! Absolutely awesome.

You don't even need Virtual Desktop, the Quest 2 supports wireless VR natively.

I've ranted about this several time on hn but Alyx was a huge disappointment to me. I did it on an index. The fakeness and heavy hand holding of the combat pulled out any sense of immersion for me.

How much do you have to move around to play Alyx? I have an old Oculus Rift gathering dust, but my gaming PC is in a super cramped room.

It has two modes. To play comfortably you need probably a 6x6x10ft area.

To be fair, if you want to play Alyx you can also use the Valve Index. So no Meta involved

At typically more than 2x the cost. I've played Alyx on both, the Index is absolutely not a 2x better experience.

I'm no fan of their corporate parent either, but the value proposition on Quest 2 for general purpose PC VR gaming (especially prior to this price increase) was remarkable given size of subsidy Meta were prepared to make on price.

It was 3x the cost now only 2.5x.

It's a bit baffling that the Index is still as expensive as it is, it's three years old and has never gone on sale even once nevermind had a permanent price cut. In a vacuum it's worth what people are willing to pay, but Valve are a software company selling hardware to promote their ecosystem, which they're ceding to the much more affordable Oculus ecosystem by keeping the premium price.

It's still a nice headset but it's showing it's age, the Quest 2 has higher resolution screens and the ability to stream PC VR wirelessly is a killer feature which the Index doesn't support.

No only that, but it's perpetually out of stock in most regions as well.

or an HP reverb G2, or HTC vive or one of dozens of other non meta vr sets...

that said a cheap quest 2 second hand with virtual desktop makes for probably the best wireless experience / dollar you can have

To add to that: Even though the Pico brand is now owned by Bytedance (TikTok) I really enjoy their Pico Neo 3 (it's a hardware equivalent to the Quest 2, actually due to active cooling it has a bit more performance headroom).

The wireless streaming works great. There is no account setup whatsoever. Null, nada, nichts. You can just boot up the HMD and you're good to go.

I find it strange when people hail them as a more privacy-friendly alternative to Meta though.

Personally I think ByteDance (and TikTok in particular) is an even worse company than Facebook ever was. It's like they learned from Facebook and made it worse.

They dropped the requirement to have a Facebook account for Meta Quest 2 a few weeks ago.

By requiring a Meta account as I recall. Not much of an improvement.

Presumably this would mean if you’re banned on Facebook, that wouldn’t lock you out of your device. That was one of the bigger sticking points at least.

Personally, I never want Meta to leverage my game usage on Facebook or any of their other platforms. I like Steam being an independent platform that has no motivation to share my information with socials - I really don't want random relatives asking me about my gaming habits.

The fact that it was made by Facebook was worrying - the fact that it required a Facebook account made it a non-starter.

For the same reason, while I do enjoy the occasional twitch stream - some of my favorite streamers have moved to FB... thus I have stopped watching them because I don't like making it easy for socials to track and broadcast my every waking moment.

If Meta is anything like Google (and it is), we're not far off from getting locked out of Facebook bricking your VR gear.

HN is lousy with stories about people getting tagged by faulty "AI" in one Google program and getting blitzed out of all the others.

The risk is too high that Meta will follow suit one day soon.

My kid one time had some sort of name calling swearing match on the PS4 which was tied into my email and my credit card and all my games. I found out because all of a sudden I had a 30 day suspension on the account and could not play any of my downloaded games properly. Not a big fan of digital games and threat of being locked out temporarily or possible permanently for one wrong move.

Yes, from a Facebook Account to a Meta Account...

Don’t worry, they renamed the tables and everything!

"Let me hold your wallet".

"No way!"

"OK, then just let me hold everything that's in it."