VR SUCKS... or does it???

yeah same

my take on the PS4 Pro is the same as like high end Macs; the base models are totally respectable mass market entry points to ecosystems you probably want to be in, but their version of “high-end” is so middling that if it becomes something you think you need, you may as well go right back out of that ecosystem

I can’t really imagine that Pro isn’t still a fair bit worse than PC headsets and as noticeable as the difference is, it’s not really a big deal in practice

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yeah, these are all my thoughts on the PSVR, as well. had you asked me a year ago where i thought VR was headed, i’d have pointed to a trash can.

getting a PSVR completely changed my mind about what the medium is capable of right now. and the Black Friday entry point of $199 was perfect. i think if they can get it closer to there as the MSRP, they’ll really have something explosive.

As far as I’m concerned Astro Bot is the killer app of PSVR and I hope it actually moves weight (i don’t think it has) because nothing would make me happier than seeing it become VR’s mario and we get all kinds of sequels out of it. So many cool gimmicks and ideas in one game that never even approach overstaying their welcome, I just want more of all of it.

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Astro Bot is what finally made me give up saying “OK but surely RE7 and Polybius and AC7 will all come to PC VR and I’ve already played enough wipeout and and”

Good job Japan Studio

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I dunno if I’m ever going to own a VR headset because I feel like it would be depressing/disorienting to stop playing and take it off to a silent apartment when you’re home alone, and if somebody is home with you, rude and alienating to them.

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yeah I was hesitant for the same reason (also why I liked the PC stuff being very physical and brief) but if I’m sitting on the couch with my wife I’ll play something less intense like wipeout with one earbud out or I’ll wait until the cat and and dog have already fallen asleep on me or something

or if not the spectator screen is extremely worth watching

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I might have mentioned this in another thread, but I introduced my niece and nephew to VR recently. They took turns playing Astro Bot. My niece is about five years old, and she became frightened when she looked down off the edge of a platform and said she didn’t want to play anymore.

But as soon as she removed the headset and realized that she was still in the living room, she changed her mind and put it back on. A few minutes later, the same thing happened again.

I also have a basic PS4. I haven’t noticed any issues with performance and I guess I simply don’t know what I’m missing when it comes to higher resolution.

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Yeah, playing on a regular ps4 has been fine.

Getting a pro at this point seems silly, surely the ps5 is on the horizon and it would be nuts if the sold a bunch of psvr’s, built an install base, and threw it in the garbage by making the next gen incompatible. The only special hardware needed is the camera port.

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the way I’d describe the resolution difference vs. PC (which I think has more to do with the headset itself only being 1080p than it does with base PS4 vs. PS4 Pro performance) is that you’re usually like … more aware of the edges of objects that you’re trying to focus on in the middle distance, simply because the DPI is lower. it strains my eyes a little more when the colour palette hasn’t been designed to work around it – RE7 in particular definitely makes me feel slightly nearsighted in a way that seems directly attributable to the hardware, but that’s not exactly a bad thing for the atmosphere.

and I think I’ve already said that this is such a nonissue on my Lenovo (which is 2880 x 1440 rather than the PSVR’s straight 1080p) that it seems pretty clear in hindsight that the baseline resolution needed to totally eliminate these effects is only slightly higher than what PSVR offers right now.

performance is fine other than that, because I’m pretty sure you straight up can’t ship a VR game that drops frames or it’ll make people too nauseous

tetris effect is the only thing where the resolution has bothered me, and i guess that’s mostly because you are focused on a static 2d object rather than 3d models.

i watched a vid a while back about a prototype headset that used dual screens (or could have been 2 per eye?), one super high dpi but small, and a larger more typical VR res screen, and then used mirrors and shit to reflect them both into your eyeballs with the image of the high res screen only appearing in the middle of your vision; seems like a neat way to piggyback on biology to get past resolution issues with plausible rendering power

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I think the real problem is rendering resolution, not the screen resolution, which coasts along cell phone tech, and we’ve got foveated rendering in PSVR – it’s rendering the center at much higher resolution than the edges already. It’s just brutal to run 60-fps-plus with a transformation for each eye even with the bucket of tricks.

Astro Bot is fantastic. It feels like a cross between Super Mario Sunshine and 3D Land, and it showcases all of the hardware features while remaining natural, not forced.

The boss at the end of the Thumper demo is a lot freakier looking than I expected, but I guess that’s where they got the rhythm horror genre from. Otherwise, it looks beautiful and vibrant in VR and I will definitely pick it up once I’ve gotten through the pack-ins for the bundle I got.

What’s the verdict on Skyrim VR without Move controllers?

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Right, the PS4 (even Pro) is pretty weak by VR standards. I was a bit surprised Sony decided to push to make PSVR a thing given that, in the first place, the hardware seemed deliberately underpowered to keep costs down.

Like the reconstruction techniques the enhanced consoles use to present a 4k-acceptable image, they still seem to be able to work up usable shortcuts that you never see on PC. It’s good that these assumptions of minimum power keep being wrong under known environments.

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and now that it’s obtainable for relatively cheap (easily <$200 during a sale or secondhand) the library being so fantastic makes the resolution very easy to overlook

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I finally beat the ‘final boss’ in Racket Fury today. had to take a shower afterward. goddamn.

it’s gonna be patched for online play sometime soon, so, yeah, uh if anybody wants to play online VR ping pong once that happens, let’s do it

Superhot: holy shit

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yyyuuuuuuuup

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