Virtual reality is almost here
I've strapped a bunch of VR games to our heads at events like PAX and E3 over the past few years, and we've also tried existing games and demos with our Oculus Rift dev kits. This is a list of our favorite games and experiences so far, which we'll update as the consumer hardware is released and beyond.
Elite: Dangerous
The first commercial game to offer native VR support, Elite: Dangerous is still the best example of the power of the tech to date. Strapped into the detailed cockpits of its ships, from bulky battleships to nimble fighters, dogfights are intense. It’s like being in the best Star Wars space battle ever. It’s also practical, because you can move your head to track enemy ships as they scream past you. Look down and you’ll see your pilot’s body, and their hands will mirror your own if you’re playing with a flight stick. You can even stand up and walk around your cockpit, providing it’s big enough to do so and you have a DK2 with positional tracking enabled.
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Virtual reality can whisk you away to fantastic, unimaginable worlds, but it’s testament to the power of the tech that even driving a truck down a German motorway can be a mindblowing experience. Euro Truck Simulator 2 is a genuinely brilliant game, and has native support for the Oculus Rift. The game is, as the title suggests, about driving trucks around Europe, delivering goods between depots, and obeying the rules of the road. It’s oddly hypnotising, despite the seemingly boring subject matter, and a polished, well-made game to boot.
And the VR support is fantastic. The detailed cockpits of the trucks, which are all replicas of real-world heavy goods vehicles, give you a powerful feeling of being in a physical, three-dimensional space. You can look up and see the sky moving past through the sunroof, or lean out of the window if you need to squeeze through a tight spot with an oversized load.
Discovering Space
This game, made by a single developer in their spare time, lets you explore our own solar system in a ship that can fly at many times the speed of light. This means you can hop from Earth to Jupiter in just a few seconds. The distances are realistic, giving you a clear, and quite humbling, picture of where the planets are relative to each other. When you approach one it feels massive, dwarfing your ship. There’s nothing else to do in Discovering Space but, well, discover, so you might want to stick with Elite: Dangerous if it’s combat and excitement you’re after. But if you have any interest in astronomy or just want to feel insignificant, it’s a must play.
Minecraft
Speaking about his work to bring official Oculus Rift support to Minecraft (well, the Windows 10 version, anyway), John Carmack said he has memories of "being inside" the game, as if it was something that really happened to him. That's a really fascinating prospect: that after being present in a virtual world for long enough, it can be internalized as a real experience.
Minecraft's openness and easy-to-read world seem to make it ripe for creating that sense of presence, which is interesting, as it demonstrates that we don't need photorealistic graphics in VR to accept what's around us. We've noted the same thing in other VR games: sometimes, stylized graphics keep us from noticing incongruities that would be distracting if the graphics strove for realism and just missed.
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