And I'm actually spitballing ideas with a friend who has professional fitness qualifications for either a VR or AR fitness app. All this alongside my next VR game which I explicitly intend to be a very physical experience - I mentioned swords above.
My guess is that focusing on VR as a fitness aid would actually be extremely profitable, and will be extremely profitable for the companies that do it. I'm in this for the art, not the money primarily, or I'd definitely have that on the shortlist as a higher priority.
After all: a VR-equipped PC and headset is pretty expensive as a toy, but it's pretty cheap compared to a treadmill or a decent multigym, or even a couple of years' gym subscription.
]]>Whether, in the long run, they'll be successful is something I'm not sure about. We'll see over time!
]]>(Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live in a world where the phrase "conventional eSports" has meaning :) )
Most of the popular eSports are either free apps (DOTA, LoL) or accessible for one comparatively affordable purchase (Overwatch, Rocket League). Many of them have millions/tens of millions of active users.
There's no requirement to be a member of "tabletennisverse" if you want to compete in Eleven, for example, on the VR end. You just buy and download Eleven and associated software, and get going. Likewise, aside from a (free) Steam subscription, no need to be a member of MOBAverse to play DOTA.
The economics of eSports strongly encourage the creators of those games to make them as accessible as possible: inverse square law strongly applies. So I doubt we'll see many more barriers than exist in the eSport scene currently.
]]>It's a piece of cycle-based hardware used as a VR fitness gaming platform.
]]>Speaking as someone currently actively developing a melee-based VR game, there is precisely zero chance I allow players to fight by flicking their fingers. Full arm motion will be required. I want this thing to feel like a swordfight, not Thumb Wars.
It is, of course, possible that the first eSport in VR that gets popular is a stationary one, but judging from the successful titles in the medium so far (like Echo Arena and GORN), I doubt it.
]]>On the subject of the competence of your opponents: it's worth noting that the most successful VR melee combat simulator so far, GORN, has completely, laughably incompetent opponents. That seems to have been part of its charm - en masse they still provide a reasonable threat, but you also feel like a badass whilst fighting them.
]]>Very, very cool - that could be huge.
]]>In the discussion of my last post, Philippa Cowderoy and Geoff Hart brought up an interesting question around esports in VR. Will e-sports in VR ever become a thing?
I was actually there at the start of the dawn of esports as a whole - I ran "News From The Front", a website which covered the competitive Quake scene back in 1996. (It may actually have been the first dedicated esports news site in the world.) And more recently, I've gotten back into PvP games and esports with the game DOTA2, which has consumed an enormous amount of my time over the last year or so.
And, of course, I'm a virtual reality developer by trade - my first VR game, the horror/rpg Left-Hand Path, left Early Access and entered full release last Friday. I should stress at this point that I don't have a professional dog in the esports race: I'm mostly interested in creating single-player experiences, often with heavy RPG bents. Whilst Left-Hand Path is certainly difficult, inspired as it is by Dark Souls, it's not PvP, and my next major game will probably also be a single-player experience. So I have no financial interest in pushing the whole VR esport concept.
Nonetheless, the esport question is fascinating to me. In five years, will we be seeing the equivalent of The International in VR?
In fact, there's been an esport tournament in VR in just the last week.
]]> Eleven, the spookily-accurate VR table tennis sim, just held its first Virtual Reality tournament, in which 32 players around the world competed in a completely virtual space. From all reports, the tournament went off very well, and more similar contests are likely to be on the way.Meanwhile, other VR games are already popular and esport-ready. Onward, which is essentially Counterstrike in VR, has a peak concurrent player count of around 100 every day, making it one of the 10 or 11 most popular VR experiences on Steam of any kind. Players report spending hours in-game sniping at each other.
And Echo Arena, a weird-but-cool zero-G Frisbee game, is probably even more popular. Concurrent player numbers are hard to acquire because it's on the Oculus platform, but it has certainly sold well and gotten breathlessly positive reviews even from non-gamers.
Many other VR games boast popular coop modes, from zombie-blaster Arizona Sunshine to forearm-punishing archery game Elven Assassin. Some of them are even effectively coop-only: the king of those experiences is the blisteringly popular Star Trek: Bridge Crew, as immortalised in this Penny Arcade comic strip
There are already a lot of people in VR competing or cooperating.
These things simultaneously are computer games - fast, fun, violent, and not limited by reality - and aren't computer games. They're physical experiences, using an interface that's far, far closer to Real Life than the gamepad-mediated world of computer gaming.
The crossover makes games like Eleven or Sports Bar VR (a pool simulator) incredibly powerful. If you can play table tennis, you can play Eleven. Absolutely no computer gaming experience required. And the experience is very much like playing table tennis with a friend - it feels right, it's fun, it's a good social experience - but doesn't require the two of you to be present in the same physical space.
Added to that, head-and-hands visualisation of another person turns out to be surprisingly powerful in communicating presence. It's much better even than a video call in many ways: these abstract avatars combined with voice give a very strong illusion that you're in the same physical space. A good physical representation of the space you're in helps even more, as does a powerful shared context - that's why table tennis, pool, or Star Trek all work so well.
So if nothing else, VR offers the chance to play pool with your friends on another continent, whenever you want. That's a pretty world-changing offer all by itself.
VR is also, by its nature, physical. For some people that's a downside: they want to play games at rest, sitting on a couch. But for other people - and I'm very much in this category - having a video game which actually requires you to move your body is a massive plus. These esports are sports - I've sweated so much playing gladiatorial game GORN that my headset started having problems with the sweat drips.
That's a hell of a lot of fun, but more than that, it's an effective form of exercise. You can get "gassed" boxing opponents in Thrill Of The Fight almost as much as in real life: I've watched a Tae Kwon Do black belt play that game, and he was definitely puffing and sweating after a few rounds.
But at the same time, it's still a game. There's none of the tedium of running on a treadmill - even if you are literally running on a treadmill. Just like playing a real-life sport, it's very easy to get lost in the experience - in fact, even more so than most sports. And unlike real-life sports, these VR esports have far less physical limitations and are available whenever you want to play them. I can't jump up and play a game of zero-G Frisbee, or a tense round of gladiatorial combat, in real life - but I can be doing either of those things in five minutes from the desk at which I'm currently sitting.
That's not only cool and fun, but also pretty impactful on physical fitness. If I'd spent all the hours that I spent playing DOTA last year doing something requiring physical activity, I'd be athlete-level fit. (Particularly given the competitive gamer mantra of "git gud". If you tie the DOTA world's MMR rating to their physical fitness, there would actually be a noticable world uptick in fitness amongst that demographic.)
Indeed, my work on Left-Hand Path has definitely impacted my physical fitness. It's not primarily designed as a fitness game, but dodging away from monsters, rapidly drawing symbols in the air, and squatting to touch your staff to the ground for various rituals all adds up. I would not be surprised if my move from animation (sedentary as hell) to VR has added a couple of years to my life expectancy.
A couple of commenters asked about injury potential, and I've been asked elsewhere about fatigue in VR too. As far as I'm concerned, fatigue is a feature not a bug, for the reasons listed above. I like gaming anyway, but if it also happens to cause a reduction in my likely all-cause mortality, that's a pretty good bonus.
And as for injury: VR gaming won't end up more intense than equivalent real-world sports. If the populace at large is safe playing football, or rugby, or training Brazilian Jujitsu, they'll be OK doing equivalent things in VR too. (Although we may have to start building in "seriously, go get a glass of water" warnings!)
As mentioned above, I can already call my friends in New York and challenge them to a casual game of table tennis. That's considerably world-changing. In a world where people move around more and more, and travel is both ecologically dodgy and increasingly expensive, being able to hang out with friends around the world in a well-simulated physical space is pretty astonishing, and as time moves forward I think it'll be one of the major selling points of VR.
Microsoft just bought the social VR app Altspace, and the equivalent Rec Room is gathering VC funding at a rate of knots. VR tournaments are just getting started, and they'll get bigger and bigger - not least because, as physical sports, they'll make pretty good viewing too. If the guys making Echo Arena aren't working on a broadcaster / spectator mode I'd be very surprised.
(It may be noted that another key problem in 2017 is loneliness, and engaging in physical sports with other people is an excellent way of making new friends. )
There's no reason that the social esports have to be limited to high-physical-activity, either. Poker would be a very obvious candidate for a VR edition, and a VR poker game would overcome many of the issues of playing poker online. There's still enough physical movement to attempt to read opponents - eye trackers are just around the corner too - and in VR it will be a much more social experience than playing on a flat screen. (This is another one of those "if I wanted to be really, really rich..." moments - but I'm busy! Also, some Googling turns up the first VR casino, which has already appeared.)
Tracked peripherals are just on the cusp of arriving too, and they're going to have a massive impact. I've had the developer versions of HTC's "tracker" pucks for a few months now, which allow you to add physical objects to your VR space and track them to milimeter accuracy, and they're enormously powerful.
Just being able to track your feet adds a whole new level of interaction and immersion. But more than that, you can use them to track objects for esports. Here's an article about tracking a golf putter, for example - it's immediately clear that the increase in quality of experience is huge.
Indeed, I can see golf alone pushing the popularity of VR some way. It's expensive, it has a large, fanatical fanbase, and VR's very well-suited to simulating it.
And then you've got the total-immersion stuff. The first VR MMO is just around the corner, promising a release into Early Access in December. It already has a small but extremely enthusiastic community, and I'd expect that to explode once it arrives.
An MMO in VR will be a totally different experience to one on a computer, with a great deal more physical presence. I'd expect people to make friends more easily, grief and flame less, and feel more like they're physically present with each other. This could be the thing that sparks an explosion in VR uptake as a whole - after all, MMOs like WoW have form for that sort of exponential growth. And as it develops, it'll start to evolve away from the conventional MMO, and more into something that combines the best parts of MMOs and "field LARP" experiences like the UK's Empire LARP.
Beyond that? The major esports companies must at least be keeping tabs on VR - it's a toss-up as to which game attracts a signficant prize money tournament, but it'll happen. I'd guess that event is 2-3 years away, perhaps less.
And then we'll have a new form of esport. It won't replace flat-screen gaming - instead, it'll be something entirely new. Probably something that doesn't even draw from the same pool of players as conventional esports. We may see one or more physical sports develop a thriving esport arm - my money's on golf or table tennis there.
It'll be an exciting - and sweaty - evolution.
What do you think? Will VR esports become a thing? If so, when, what and why?
]]>It's already been significantly improved - the number of people who experience nausea with the Vive is very small, for example. It's night-and-day compared with phone-in-headset VR or earlier generations of the Oculus. Gabe Newell is on record saying it's around zero percent, and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that less people get sick in the Vive than in regular flat-screen FPSes.
But I know it's also still an active area of research. I don't know too many details of the specifics, though.
]]>One of the most popular games in VR at the moment is GORN, which is literally a gladiatorial simulator. It has a semi-competitive mode, too. I've so far heard of very few people injuring themselves playing it - I've played it for hours myself and haven't injured myself. (I'm not unfit, and I've studied martial arts and body mechanics, but I'm by no means a professional athlete.
Another very popular game is Thrill Of The Fight, a decidedly non-dumbed-down boxing game. I'm at least semi-competent as a boxer, and I haven't completed it yet (albeit I've not put a lot of time into it). Again, it's popular, again, a lot of people who play it aren't trained, and again, I haven't heard of an epidemic of injuries.
Finally, there's an actual nascent VR e-Sport. In fact, there's two of them: Echo Arena and Onward. The former is basically zero-G Frisbee, whilst the latter is for all intents and purposes Counterstrike VR. Both very popular in the VR crowd, not all of whom are highly trained athletes (although a few people are), neither producing many reports of injuries.
Hmm - an article on VR and esports would be interesting. I might do that...
]]>So this looks really cool from that point of view.
It also makes a lot of sense. Audio is considerably more significant in VR than it is in "flat" content, and it's hard to get right. Authoring that experience right in VR sounds like a smart way to go.
]]>I make games and game-like experiences in VR for the same reason Charlie writes books: I love telling stories and creating worlds. The money's also nice, but I'd be doing this anyway.
If you're looking at VR as a technology, and you don't have the "I have to use this to tell stories" urge, then there are applications for it which are likely to be considerably more lucrative and arguably more world-changing. From medicine to simulation, the possibilities are huge.
]]>RTSes less so, largely because there's not a good one in VR yet. Out Of Ammo did OK, but it's not full-fledged yet. But when one arrives I do expect it to be massively popular.
There's one non-obvious issue with RTS in VR, though, which I discovered by watching DOTA in VR: the viewpoint leads to lots and lots of looking downward. VR headsets are quite well-balanced, but they're also not super-light: if you spend a lot of time looking downward, you end up with a sore neck.
]]>What sort of cues can VR devs use for people who don't have stereo depth perception? I'll bear it in mind in future games.
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