Half-Life 2 Writer on VR Games: We're At Pong Level, Only Scratching the Surface

An anonymous reader writes: Valve's Chet Faliszek has been in the video game industry for a long time, and his writing has been instrumental for games like Half-life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Valve is now developing a virtual reality headset, and Faliszek was on hand at a VR-centric conference where he spoke about how the technology is coming along. He said, "None of us know what the hell we are doing. We're still just scratching the surface of VR. We still haven't found out what VR is, and that's fine. We've been making movies in pretty much the same way for 100 years, TV for 60 years and videogames for 40. VR has only really been [in development] for about a year, so we're at Pong level." One of the obstacles holding VR devices back right now is getting the hardware up to snuff. Faliszek says, "There's one thing you can't do and that's make people sick. It has to run at 90 frames per second. Any lower and people feel sick. Telling people they will be ok 'Once you get your VR legs' is a wholly wrong idea. If people need to get used to it then that's failure."

Comments

I'd be happy with fullhd per eye + 60fps

[gl4ss]

yeah, it would be enough, really. I've used the rift(ks). half life 2 worked fine with it. surprisingly it was better to play with just a HACK than with the official tf2 shit! why? they fucked up the control options for the official(like 5 choices and none of them traditional kb+mouse! all had to try to stuff in head control for up / down and separate aiming from head movement or other weird things)

also what many of these journos forget is that some people will get sick from just looking someone else play doom.

the vr is already more on the doom level than pong. resolution sucks. also comparably to doom, plenty of researchers are trying to invent new controllers, walking around the room and shit. in reality, the vr headset games are best played with just a xbox controller or kb+mouse. also they're the least taxing. you don't want to be waving your hands around for 8 hours+ anyways - all their alternative control schemes are for _casual_ gaming! and who the fuck who is into casual gaming is going to invest into a vr headset for home? nobody. you want something you can play with all night long.

also due to this researcher obsession with control/head movement schemes and them getting it wrong time after time, the games that work best right now are simulator games with steering wheels or joysticks - and it's WAY beyond pong.