Why isn’t there a AAA FPS Shooter game made for VR that is like Counter Strike?
Some people think that this type of game would sell VR headsets like crazy. So why doesn’t it exist yet?
Why are we seeing FPS like games with this teleport system?
For me using teleport in an FPS like game is weird and (again for me during a demo) it was sickening, but perhaps because I was doing it a lot (on Oculus Touch) and perhaps because it was an early version of the software. At the same time moving forward with a forward button can also be sickening, strafing is double sickening and it doesn’t look right in VR (I was playing a VR demo in the Vive that didn’t have room scale support). I have also tried a 360 treadmill and strafing was really weird, running forwards and backwards worked great but I never felt like I was able to walk normally, stand normally, and move normally. It was like being the grip of a weird machine that did not accomplish the goal of making you feel like you were walking in VR.
There are a lot of new ideas about how to do FPS in VR without creating motion sickness for a large number of people. There is a game that lets you fly around on a floating rig (Hover Junkers) that represents your predefined room space on the Vive. It is an FPS of sorts, but it’s not like Call of Duty in that you are not running around buildings with a forward button and a gun sight.
Shooting people in VR feels different, its more visceral at first, more gut wrenching, but over time it can become less interesting.
There is one FPS like game that I really like on the Playstation VR called London Heist but they solve the problem of movement by having you not go anywhere except you can move around where you are, so in one scene you are in a basement in a chair about to be shot, when a phone call arrives letting you know you get to live to go on one more mission, next thing you are behind a desk, you have to steal a diamond, and people start to shoot at you. In another scene you are sitting in a car, on the freeway, and people on other vehicles, dressed in black clothing, on black motorbikes or black cars start to fire guns at you and you have to fire back.
I have a few new ideas about things that can be done, that I am not going to share in this post but what I am thinking of is just another new way to do a shooter, it’s still not the same thing as Call of Duty style gaming.
Until we can trick the inner ear into thinking we are actually moving with the forward button the true AAA Call of Duty like FPS will continue to make a large number of people sick, and as long as that happens developers probably will not build that exact game for VR.
Luckily there are people who are working on solving the inner ear problem with audio technology. So pending the invention of a new technology we might be able to do some ultra cool stuff in VR that isn’t ultra cool yet with today’s tech.
(the fact that I write a book when I reply to people is why I decided to write articles on medium and my website actually.)
