In case you missed it, and what Headcrab have you been hiding under?, Valve and HTC have announced a Virtual headset (sources: LG1, LG2, VT, Eg1 and EG2) and it seems most people are pretty excited about it.
Me? MEH! Why? Because I am poor. No matter how cool this thing is and I am sure it’s freaking awesome, I am not going to be able to go out and buy it. Therefore, I am doing my best to ignore it.
You, on the other hand, might be wetting you pants in excitement.
Far be it from me to tell the future (although I did predict the Steambox over 8 years ago), I can’t believe that HL3 won’t come with some features or elements that take advantage of the VR headset.
I’m not saying that it will be an exclusive release for VR or that it won’t be fun without it, just that those with it might get an even better experience.
What are your thoughts?
My thoughts are that Valve is only concentrating on hardware nowadays to keep their Steam monopoly alive and they don’t really care about games anymore. If some of their concepts fail due to bigger competition Valve could easily go under and there might never be a HL game again!
I agree. They should just finish the Half-Life 2 story before they go down the same way as 3D Realms. I would not be happy if Gearbox would be assigned to finish and release Episode 3 :P.
I’m pretty sure Gearbox’s reputation is so irrevocably tarnished at this point that they wouldn’t be allowed within 100 miles of making official Half-Life content.
It’s one thing to release some critical flops, like Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever. But when the accusations start flying that you misappropriated funds and pulled a bait-and-switch with the publishers, to the point where actual legal battles are pending, that’s a pretty serious offense that makes people think twice about doing business with you.
I think the more exciting news this week is that Source 2 will be released to developers to use in their upcoming projects.
I too would like to see Valve put more action into game development rather than all this tech development, but Steam has pretty much guaranteed that they will never run out of money ever again. Even if they blow billions on these hardware pieces, like the VR headset, SteamBox and new controller, Valve could shrug it off easily, because of the consistent — and growing — revenue that Steam brings in.
Will we ever see HL3 or L4D3 or Portal 3? Probably, but not soon enough for me.
I’m ambivalent about it. Though, after years of watching Oculus drag its feet, get bought out by Facebook and still not have a commercially available product, I welcome a serious competitor that can finally move VR forward and get it into the hands of the buying public in a reasonable time.
VR doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, though. Although it’s an entirely different technology, I don’t find myself using the 3D effect on my Nintendo 3DS very often. It’s a fun novelty, but it gets tiresome to look at for long chunks of time. I can’t help but feel these VR headsets will be similar. The sensory overload will make games more tiresome to play.
I voted “A Little”. The thing is, no I won’t be buying any of their hardware products, as I have a fully functional PC and also fully functional knowledge of how to properly upgrade it when needed. The products they are making seem to be more directed at getting the console gamers to start using PC products because frankly, they’re outright better in almost all ways – it’s nice having a dedicated machine that can do games, but the quality of those games video, the responsiveness and a lot of other tech limitations means that the ‘average’ PC game is going to out-perform the ‘average’ console. Plus, the bigger draw is the ability to use mods, something which consoles just do not get to do with very, very rare exceptions.
So on one hand, I am glad they’re doing this. It’s a good bridge between console and pc playing. On the other, I have zero interest in it for myself.
Specific to the VR news, I don’t care in the slightest about that. It has never been rolling well enough to even be called a ‘fad’. I don’t see it becoming anything more than a fad, even when it does get going – because people will simply NOT buy into the machinery enough to make it wide-spread. It’s nice to think about the ways it can be used, but … gaming isn’t among them. Surgical knowledge, training, etc – those things are practical uses of the technology that I’d rather see out and about, but for gaming it just seems expensive and illogical.
MEH! I guess overall is my reaction. I mean, I never been used to buy gaming hardware. I can almost say I am not very prone to consoles or anything like that. Possibly because when i was a kid I never get anything far from the old 16bits NES.
So no i am not really excited about that. I prefer to spend 1000USD on a cool smartphone, or 1500 USD in a gaming PC, than in a gaming hardware.
Yeah I may be a kill joy guy but, I like to play in my old PC and that is just my style. I can say I am so much more excited to play GTA V once it is released on PC with that hallucinating FPS perspective!!
I also hope this hardware project wont be a massive failure for HTC and Valve, like it was the classic fail of the Virtual Boy from NINTENDO.
I am cautiously excited about this, actually. Judging by their history, Valve knows what they’re doing, and hopefully this holds for the hardware they are working on too. In any case, competition in the VR world is a good thing.
People seem to be impressed by what they saw at GDC. I’ll probably end up buying it, assuming it works with HL2 and the episodes. At the very least I expect an awesome new way to play those games.
I will never ever aquire or even try a pair of VR googles. I like to see what is going on around me. Now I can just turn my head a bit and quickly back at the screen, but with those googles, you are “trapped” in the gameworld and if you take them off, you might miss something.
In short, I want to seperate real-life and gameworlds.
For me the great problem is the technology itself, its been about for a long time but never has excited the mass market just like the much older 3D films. I first experienced VR in the late 1980’s in Leicester Sq in London. Two were sit in simulators and one was a stand in with a hand held gun (stick with a button on). The thing they had in common was a bulky headset.
A quarter of a century later the headsets haven’t reduced by a significant amount and the software is not the quantum leap it should have been compared to other technologies. 3D films have been about for way, way longer and they have failed to gain mass and lasting appeal but we still get excited (for a while) when a company announces a new VR/3D product.
Until a company can come up with a headset that is almost as compact as a set of spectacles with photo realistic images it just ain’t going to gain mass appeal. And this is where VR/3D (yes I know I started a sentence with ‘and’) have to converge, but they can’t!
any use of VR tech outside of gaming?
More than we probably realize.
Considerably more outside of gaming than will ever be reasonable to make an entire system for its use in them.
Right now, there are medical procedures which utilize scans to create 3-d renders, which are manipulated by the surgeons and such to get better views – like the inside of a skull with a tumor in a difficult position.
The ‘head gear VR’ thing though… I don’t think that’ll take off regardless. And certainly the ‘walking on a treadmill’ thing… lolnope. Maybe for people as enthusiastic about dance dance revolution as they are call of duty. But those are not exactly what I’d consider ‘crossover communities’…
I never cared for the VR tech nor do I care about it now. I doubt it will become a thing, but we’ll see. Valve should focus more on games and less on tech.
I am actually pretty excited to see it. I got to try out the original Oculus Rift recently, and while its flaws are immediately apparent (the resolution is really low, and a lack of body tracking makes you feel like a floating head) but it was easy to see the potential in the technology. If the HTC/Valve demo is as good as the press is saying, then I can’t wait to see what can be done with it.
Admittedly the hardware cost is going to be a big problem and there are still some big hurdles for it to overcome, but I think there is a lot more possibility to VR than the failed 3D craze.
I don’t need “glasses” to play a game.