I’m excited about the opportunities that VR is bringing to the gaming world. While I’ve only tried the PSVR, I’m excited to see that even in it’s initial state, the device does a really good job of providing an immersive experience. As many reviews have pointed out, it does suffer from a very faint screen door effect but I find this is not that distracting. The tracking is very well done with no noticeable latency so when you look around, you truly feel like you’re in another world.
The main drawbacks I see at this point are the visuals. Although the screen does have HD resolution, it’s still not quite as sharp as your tv. I’m guessing that this is somehow related to the screen door effect but again, it’s not far off. It’s just not going to be look quite as sharp. The other main area that could use improvement is with the field of view. With the PSVR, it feels like you’re looking into the virtual world through a scuba mask. It still feels very immersive but don’t expect to put on the PSVR and feel like you’ve been transported somewhere else.
Aside from these minor drawbacks, the PSVR does give a truly great VR experience for the price. I loaded up The Deep demo on our dev kit and have to say that although I knew this was not real, I still felt a bit anxious when the shark cage came apart and this massive shark came lunging at me. I knew it wasn’t real but my brain still wasn’t happy about it. I tried several of the space fighter sims on the demo disc along with the Battlezone remake.
Of the bunch, I liked Battlezone the best until I played Until Dawn: Rush of Blood. I quickly realized that the horror genre really will benefit the most from VR. There’s so much potential to really take horror games to a new level and I think this sort of thing is what VR needs to take off. A lot of publishers have simply added VR onto an existing game and while that’s great, it doesn’t always add value to the experience.
I think that as developers come up with new and interesting things to do with VR, gamers will see the value in it. If VR gains momentum, I think we’ll see the 2nd round of hardware improve on the field of view and the sharpness and that’s when things will really get interesting.
After the patch for Honor and Duty releases, we’ll be announcing our next game which will be a VR game. We already have a protoype in the works with VR working and we think a Q1 2017 release is very likely.
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