Holopoint: vr archery with the Vive’s wands.
Fantastic contraptions: build crazy awesome vehicle & make it roll
Hover Junkers: Roomscale ships multiplayer fighting and shooting.
Selfie Tennis: Solo tennis in ‘unicorn land’.
From all this we can notice a lot of games where you are seated in a cockpit and move
with it. The main reason behind this is because it greatly reduces motion sickness.
Nevertheless, the experience is pleasant and the gameplay works very well. This is the best
way to start experiencing VR games. Some of them are: Time Machine, Hover Junkers,
EVE Valkyrie and Gran turismo, just to name a few of the vast majority.
Next, there are many ‘turret’ games where you stay on spot and do stuff but do not
change location by an inch with the controllers. This is also because of motion sickness, if
there is no cabin to fool the mind while moving, then user will probably get sick. Therefore:
no movement. Some of them are: Fantastic Contraptions, Gunjack, Brookhaven
Experiment Surgeon Simulator and Job Simulator.
Some games do overcome this limit a little bit by allowing the player teleport itself
somewhere else instantly. This method is 100% motion sickness proof and works wonders.
However, it isn’t very immersive. Some of them are: Budget Cuts, Farlands and Bullet Train.
Other games allow you to move freely on ground and rotate the camera as much as you
want. They can heavily induce motion sickness to non-experienced players but are a
breath of fresh air in freedom of movement for those it doesn’t affect. Some of them are:
Technolust, Adr1ft, Robinson the Journey and POLLEN.
More heavy games break the ground and allow the player to swing tree to tree or move
freely in the 3 directions. They would be expected to induce instant motion sickness.
However, in the case of Windlands I’ve only heard great opinions. And having personally
played Subnautica for more than 15hours, I can give an insight of my experience. The first
3-4 hours were harsh when rotating the camera with the stick. However, after the 8h mark
I’d only feel a minor discomfort probably due to the poor optimization of the game for VR,
and the low resolution of the DK2. By now I can dive in for 3h straight before having to
surface again, not because of feeling bad, but because of my way of playing. Of course,
adaptability is different for everyone.
Overall, all of these games are in first person view. Third person games and top-down
games such as Darksouls, Starcraft2 or Diablo3 are nowhere to be found. There aren’t any
frenetic first person shooters like Titanfall or COD either. There is however a ‘Super Mario 3D
world WiiU’ (3
rd
person platformer) like called Lucky’s Tale. No 3d or 2d Turn Based Game.
There is a flappy bird like 2d demo sidescroller called Bubble Inferno, but no real 2d
games. Tabletop games such as chess and Hearthstone are on their way
v
. We may also
soon be expecting bowling, pool, mini-golf and wack-a-mole type of arcade games
where you can interact with your hands like you would outside of VR.
As of today, still many common games types are missing in VR. This is not surprising
however, as VR still faces many problems; starting with motion sickness, the resource cost
is also higher, there aren’t enough devices out there for companies to want to support or
make such games, some genres would have no or almost no benefit of going VR, the
freedom of camera could break the rules for some, others would suffer from the display
resolutions, but above all, VR is still very young. Some of these games will come very soon,