LOL, Zuck's metaverse would like a word...

I cannot tell which one is real, can you?

TBH, I never tried VR and when I intended to try VR as I hear good things about Half Life: Alyx I was not able to find a VR centre close to me that has not failed yet. The few I found, all gone.

I also have been reading from VR advocates about how it can actually be nice for working because you can have very large view field, as if using multiple large monitors in a distraction-free environment.

However for me VR has become this picture of Zuk and I bet I'm not alone because it is so iconic and icons assume the functions of the actual thing in the absence of it. Maybe they shouldn't have been promoting Metaverse to people who don't have the equipment and can't give it a fair go.

Think of VR as a really good arcade on-rails shooter game and that's the gist of Half Life Alyx. It's a good game. But it also left me feeling very disappointed.

* You won't move much. You'll peek in and out of cover, which is fun, but you won't actually "move" around all that much for most encounters. People really like ducking in and out of cover to shoot at things, and again, that is genuinely fun.

* Some enemies break this mold and require you to move; doing extremely telegraphed attacks that pretty much just require you to move to anywhere that isn't exactly where you're standing at that moment. Specifically just enough that you need to use the controller inputs to move rather than stepping physically. If you stop to think about why the game is designed this way, it's because people are bad at moving irl, and this is about all they can handle.

* In general all enemies have this feel of an on rails shooter though, and you have no way to interact with them besides throwing grenades and shooting. You can't melee and a lot of enemies stand just a little too far to seem realistic so that they don't do weird overlaps with your camera.

* There's some physical interaction stuff that is good. Stuff that in other games would have been "Press X to do Y" is now a physical machine you need to move around with your hands, especially reloading. But it's also very limited because most of the game is a static mesh that you can't really do anything with.

So... yeah, I enjoyed it but it made me pessimistic for the future. I think they worked hard to deal with VR's limitations but they are same damn high walls.

The downside of allowing these interactions is that they feel very unreal and “physics sim”-ish, almost dreamlike due to weightlessness. For a game with a serious story, it might be immersion-breaking. But I had an amazing time just experiencing it as its own thing.

You can physically hit enemies but it's a very limited system. If you play with it for a bit you'll probably come to the conclusion that "fighting" is impractical and the best option is to hold forward movement and stab people with your arm outstretched. Because your input movement is wayyyy more maneuverable than your physical movement. Trying to two hand a large weapon is difficult because your hands don't lock to the object irl but they try to in game and you rarely get satisfying bonks with the sweet spot of a weapon. You can grapple enemies, but it's a stretch to say you're grappling. They simply become rag dolls that don't do anything once you grab them. You can also grab them with one hand and punch them with the other but it takes FOREVER.

And lastly, while I grinded through the nausea and didn't feel like puking by the end of it, it still was vaguely unpleasant to climb and jump. It's a good example of physical presence in video games. it'll be hard to do better than that but it still kind of sucks

They all forget to mention that you need to put a big goofy computer on your head

To be indistinguishable, though, not quite there yet. Then again, the valve index is still visually nearly, if not the, top of the line, and 3 years old, and it sounds like valve, meta, apple, and some more smaller players are still working on a true next gen, where "gen" is something that feels wholly, indisputably superior to previous offerings. Vive is also still trying but also not doing anything revolutionary. We are however simultaneously on the brink of consumer-level extremely high fidelity, high speed, cable-matching wireless video, and being able to strap sufficient computer power into the headset itself, and no-extra-equipment, compromise-free tracking. VR is absolutely a guaranteed long term growth market

At the time of writing (the quietest period in the week for online gaming worldwide), it is currently 54th place in terms of people playing on steam right now.

None of the 53 games above it require/recommend a dedicated peripheral to play.

VR won't hit 1 million simultaneous users in anything until VR displays can render high quality text on a quad (think a screen or piece of paper) and/or provide haptic feedback.

VR is still held back by today's technology for the most interesting uses, but is still acceptable enough for a social space to thrive.

It’s all early days but I think OP is very correct. 20k is comparatively impressive but absolutely shows how limited in scope a “runaway” success looks like. Think of it this way. Traditional console/PC games every year have several AAA titles that sell millions of copies each and have millions of people playing online. Compared with VR where Beat Saber is basically the #1 game for several years. That’s a massive marketplace to sell into with a long track record of winning formula (that’s why gameplay and business modes aren’t innovated on too much). That kind of stuff hasn’t happened for VR yet. Note that I’m not saying it won’t.

Also I wouldn’t look at Steam numbers here - Quest, which is the number 1 VR headset in the world, doesn’t make its analytics visible there [1]. VRChat is top 10 but Beat Saber is more popular I think. So the conclusion is that VRChat is the #1 VR game for PCVR which is a comparatively stagnant market and doesn’t speak to the broader ecosystem.

[1] https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/section/31585546237...

Computers are now capable of learning and creating new knowledge entirely on their own and with no human help. By scanning the enormous content of the Internet, some computers "know" literally every single piece of public information (every scientific discovery, every book and movie, every public statement, etc.) generated by human beings.

I don't know what the deletion of predictions means, but Wikipedia editors in general seem to dislike checklists.

I wonder what was up with this one.