Sean Wallbridge
My Life in VR
It’s been a while since I did one of these so I thought I would do a quick recap. It’s no longer my life In the Rift because I have the Rift and the Vive! I was lucky enough to snag both earlier on through massive F5ing during preorder times. I’m going to skip over the whole shipping debacle as it just makes me angry and I have them now so no point in reliving that hell. While I had the DK1 & DK2 so I was pretty familiar with the CV1 when I got it the Vive was a whole other matter. I had never demoed room scale VR until I got the unit. I emptied out my beloved den/office/bar and turned it into a VR room. I just barely met the minimum specification for the Vive room scale, but was still blown away by the experience that felt fresh and new to me. I had been an old hand at VR for years now, but that was like I was experiencing it again in a whole new way. I quickly stopped using my shiny new Oculus CV1 and started using the Vive. I have however now done a 360 and have started using my CV1 more. Here is what I have been playing lately.
Oculus:
Subnautica: Link
I had bought this game ages ago and never played it do to the early access and poor VR support, but now that it was a release game I thought I would give it another shot. This game is amazing in VR due to the underwater setting and the scuba face mask works perfectly with the Rifts POV. Swimming around and exploring the deep wonders of this game is breathtaking. The one huge problem is that it’s majorly broken in VR. Once you get to the mid game mark and need to build subs and larger bases it becomes unplayable in VR. The mobile vehicle bay is unusable, the Seamoth doesn’t dock properly with the Moonpool, you can’t run indoors/on land, controller support sucks, inventory movement is broken and the list goes on. A few of these issues can be resolved by playing in non VR mode, but really what’s the point then. The developers are really good at patching bugs, but don’t seem to be giving VR much love lately, but I’m hopeful.
Vive:
Pool Nation VR: Link
Its pool in VR! Very polished and fun even for me who isn’t a fan of pool. The performance needs some work even on my 980ti, but it’s acceptable with various settings to change to help. The real draw is breaking beer bottles and throwing them around. The physics seem pretty good and it has multiplayer if that’s your thing.
