I’ve been thinking about my next game, which is a graphic adventure game, but the perspective is first person because it will be in VR.
I have played many Lucas Arts games and Sierra quest series and such, where the main character talks in first person, but the perspective is not.
Now in VR, you really get immersed in it and you feel and act like yourself. So would it make sense to have narration in a different voice, like hearing your own thoughts and commenting on things when you pick them up, or react to situations around you when the game is trying to put the player in the shoes of the character in first person? Or would it break some sort of weird storytelling design?
I rather wonder if you should put words in the player’s mouth. Let them experience it and use their own thoughts. Your job would just to create the story through the environment and items/clues they find as they explore.
Agree with Teila - although a different approach could be to provide an inner demon - inner angel type narration, or maybe a repressed/split personality that talks to the player while they are experiencing the game.
Maybe, but I wonder if that would break immersion. VR is rather like playing the game in 1st person, you are yourself for the most part or you are taking on the role of someone else. By having an angel/demon/split personality, you are forcing the player to play the character your way, not their way.
Some might like that, but others might find it annoying.
This is good advice. So this game would simulate a person with some vision impairment, I would render portions of the scene in monochrome outline to represent a sense of 3d space as they get close. It would rely heavily on audio queues.
As I expected, you have confirmed that putting narration and voices during interaction for the main character would probably make it super annoying. I will have to convey it in different ways.
I agree, although I was suggesting a more - contrary inner voice. Like the demon soul character in Darksiders who talks to you as you play - usually opposing the decisions you as War choose to make.
It could be an interesting spin within a VR experience.
I do wonder about some of these assumptions. Sure, first person is the most obvious choice for VR, but I’m not sure it’s the right one. First person brings a huge associated weight of baggage around how players expect to interact with the game. Which inevitably breaks things when the interaction doesn’t work as things do in the real world.
And yet I wonder if that’s the right way to do VR. We’ve gone for immersion in most of the experiments so far. But perhaps a clear layer of abstraction would actually help with VR and VR sickness.
Anyway, just spitballing. Apologies for a post that’s not especially useful to the OP.
I agree, I would like to see more vr titles not in first person view points. I’m sure there could be some really creative game mechanics applied to it.
As one who gets VR sickness, it has nothing to do with the immersion. It is the movement. I get sick soon after moving the avatar, far before I feel immersed. In fact, I find the headset breaks my immersion. It feels so big.
Right. You get sick when the avatar moves. What I’m thinking about is not having an avatar at all. I’m not referring to immersion where you ‘get into’ the game, rather immersion where your senses get into the game.
My thought is that VR sickness comes from a disconnect between what your body is feeling and what your eyes are seeing. It seems to be an uncanny valley type scenario, VR tech is close enough to reality to make your eyes accept the input as real, but not close enough to make the rest of your body accept it.
If my thought pattern is right, there seem to be two basic ways to approach VR sickness. One is to up the tech and immersion to get right to reality. That’s expensive and limiting.
The other is to move further away from reality. Give the user very obvious visual feedback to let them know they are playing a game.
In a sense it’s the same problem motion control faced. It was close enough to normal human movement that it lead to frustration and annoyance when natural movements didn’t work. On the other hand players can abstract away the controller as a tool, even though the movements are very unnatural.
There are flying games and others that have no avatar and people still get sick. So not sure although it would be interesting to try.
Not sure how letting one know they are playing a game helps either. Flying around as a bird pooping on people is still a game and it has no connection to reality, but still would make me sick. (that is really a friend’s vr game, btw.)
There is a talk on VR sickness. But yes, it’s about any artificial movement in VR would cause sickness.
So it’s best to not give a sense of movement except when the player moves. In fact, anything that doesn’t match to the player physical movement leads to sickness. Have you ever had your image in your VR headset freeze? That makes me sick when i turn my head and the image follows me.
One way to resolve that I see in the Google Earth VR is that when you fly around, it restricts your POV range. So your peripheral vision is not engaged
I’ve written a couple short pitch documents with similar concepts.
Wonder how well the motion would feel to those who are susceptible to sickness if they played a god-like game like Populous or an RTS? The initial thought is this isn’t utilizing VR as it was meant to be used, but I believe this could give the player a more divine like feeling than standard games in these genres.
One example I was able to pull up - http://store.steampowered.com/app/525680/
I remember in the early days of mobile gaming tilt controls were all the rage. And despite them being ‘the way the device was meant to be used’. They never really worked well, and were always awkward and frustrating. Eventually they went away.
It may well be that head tracking goes the same way eventually.
In my opinion, things should be in VR only if it makes sense to be in VR and provides experiences that you cannot achieve elsewhere. Even with applications in VR. I see all these code editors in VR. How does that make sense? How would having it in VR make it easier to code as opposed to doing it on a desktop?
But anyway, one thing that VR brings to the table is a sense of scale, peripheral vision and being present. WIth that in mind, horror games comes to mind.
Can’t repro that with a 40 inch monitor, no matter how curved it is.
But we are digressing here from my original topic.
It would be very awkward, imho. I can sit at my computer and play an rts game, have a nice big screen, no sweaty mask on my face…or the alternative…sitting in a chair moving my tiny houses around with my eyes. Yuck. Sorry, I would rather use my computer.
