Physics-based emergent gameplay is still the most compelling aspect of most VR titles. HL2 pioneered and popularized it.
'Gravgun to gravgloves' is the three-word short story of Valve.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Gaben in a 20 year secret project to make grabbing stuff from further than you can reach in to a whole ass experience.
Physics-based emergent gameplay is still the most compelling aspect of most VR titles.
Ehh, at least on foot. I played "The Key", which is a short serious game about a serious topic (don't wanna spoiler it) and there isn't really all THAT much gameplay in the traditional sense but it did hit me a lot harder than if it was on flatscreen
SPOILERS FOR THAT GAME
spoiler
It's very artsy and full of allegories and stuff for loss and it turns out in the end it's about the experience of refugees. It's all very much couched in weird artsy fever dream aesthetic up until the reveal, in which it transports you into a very realistic bombed out middle eastern house and gotta be honest, that hit like a ton of bricks
The sense of 'presence' in a space is the other special component of VR. I've only had a chance to play a few demos a few years ago, but the sense of scale and space is really profound compared to a screen. I think stuff like that could be really cool, but it doesn't fit well with the mainstream gamer preconceptions of a VR game. One of the early demos featured being underwater as a blue whale swam overhead, and it was intense. Thanks for the info about The Key.
I wish more devs would go hard on that. Stick the players in tesseracts, do all that stuff that Superliminal and the old Prey did. 720 degree circles, rooms that are longer when you cross north to south than south to north. You could get really fucking weird with space and presence in ways that are impossible in real life.
I think the medium is still very restricted - Economically it's very marginal with a limited audience. The tools are still quite limited. And the artistic language of VR is not mature at all.
Something like Star Trek Away Mission scenarios could be really cool with that type of stuff. VR escape mission with friends would be a good evolution of all these coop survival games.
I imagine a lot of devs are cautious about that kind of thing because of VR sickness.
The road of progress is paved with the bones of cowards.
The road of progress is paved with ~~the bones of cowards.~~ buckets of sick
[[ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIR_2t9TskQ)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIR_2t9TskQ)
Okay I have no idea wtf my pc is doing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIR_2t9TskQ
Try this one.
VR earth bending is what the cool kids are doing right now.
Dreams in "Bionic Commando" 
Kinda ironic how Alyx is the complete inverse of this with the desktop mod.
What's wrong with it? I haven't dug too much into it but from what I heard it was received quite well
The gunplay is serviceable, but afaik none of the puzzles could be translated into desktop play, so there are significant chunks of the game just kind of glossed over.
I just finished HL2 playing through the quest 2, and it was amazing. By far the most fun I've had playing a game in years. I had always meant to give HL2 another play through after about 10 years, and that was the best way to do it. It really is something else panicking when trying to reload the shotgun surrounded by enemies, and running away instead of just blowing your way through like you used to. Or in my case, paniking and ejecting the magazine out your gun by mistake when trying to reload and winning the award for most stupid death...
Gmod Youtube-Poops over to SFM all the assets are still relevant now due to skibidi toilet
The only object I understood in that sentence was GMod what was everything else
Youtube-Poops were a once common internet funny video genre, often accompanied by stop motion visuals via Gmod, that hinged on cutting together sounds to make characters say words (there's more to it but that's the gist)
Assets are the stuff you see in a game. Like the citadel or the g-man or whatever
SFM is source film maker, a tool where you can use all kinds of assets (but it basically comes with the Valve stuff) to animate all sorts of stuff.
Skibidi Toilet is I the Gen Alpha thing, where SFM and HL2 assets are used to tell some kind of story about some dystopian future where the skibidi toilets rule, or something? It's a whole thing. Think like Slenderman, or Ben drowned if you're that old, just as videos.
Skibidi itself is a song by russian band little big that gets remixed for these videos, allthough I could not tell you for the life of me how all of it found its way together. There's also the camera men on the good side (I believe) that do seem to take inspiration from siren head
The skibidi toilets are doing a proletarian revolution against the media and surveillance apparatus of the capitalist state
I call all the good-guys media people bc there's cameras, speakers, and TVs. I like that it's more a surreal action-adventure than the older horror stuff. Like SCP has grown in to a saturday morning superhero cartoon.
I want to get a plunger-guy poster before the fad wears off.
Man I sure am tempted to buy myself a Quest 2 but then I'd also need to get a new GPU...
I want to get VR but I want to upgrade my pc more before doing it. I know I could do some VR (rtx 3060 12gb, ryzen 7 7700x) but because there aren't that many games I realy want beyond HL:A, upgrading to a 4070ti or better seems a better use of my cash.
I remember trying a VR version of HL2 on a Oculus DK2 years ago, I'll have to give it another go now.
How's gunplay in VR without a gun-shaped thing to hold?
How's gunplay in VR without a gun-shaped thing to hold?
It's pretty good on index controllers with an index headset. My biggest issue is not being able to hold the gun steady enough to aim at distant targets. It's worse in in-to-the-radius bc you're shooting at featureless black shadow people from a distance and you have limited ammo so you can't just spray and hope for hits. It works well in other games though. If you want more stable aim there are bunch of adjustable "VR Stocks" you can get but the price varies from "print it yourself/at the library" to like 200$ for the really fancy ones.