VR’s 3 Big Problems
Have you ever wondered why VR games seem so underwhelming, despite the technology being straight out of sci-fi?
Well here’s what we discovered while making our own VR game: it takes 20x more effort to get basic actions, like moving and attacking, to work in VR.
They’ll suck up all of your development budget, leaving you with nothing left for the rest of the game.
But how’s that possible? How can these simple actions be so difficult?
Motion Sickness
First off, we have motion sickness, which happens when the player sees themselves move in VR, but doesn’t feel that movement in their inner ear.
It can also happen for seemingly random reasons, like a UI popping up in the wrong way or an enemy sword bouncing around in your peripheral vision.
This sounds pretty mundane, but motion sickness is a massive problem.
That’s because it’ll affect around 50% of players — and that really matters when gameplay, graphics, and narrative all become irrelevant the moment you feel like throwing up.
Even tiny amounts of motion sickness can stack up over longer play sessions to make players feel inexplicably uncomfortable, which is what they’ll remember when next deciding what to play.
So when we have a problem that’s so unpredictable and devastating, VR development turns into a never-ending battle against it.
Every change we make must be tested for motion sickness and many features will require additional, unexpected tweaks just to mitigate it.
This is why the only truly successful VR games have been those that either (a) don’t have any movement (Beat Saber) or (b) target kids, who are much less susceptible to motion sickness (Gorilla Tag, Animal Company, etc.).
Controlling Movement
Then, even if motion sickness weren’t a thing, there’s another problem with movement in VR: we still don't have any good options for how players control it.
That sounds ridiculous, so let’s go through a few of them, just to prove the point:
Teleporting breaks immersion and makes it very difficult to design meaningful platforming and combat challenges, since the player can always just teleport past everything
Running in place is hard to track accurately with the most common VR headsets and the motion is also too tedious and tiring to build a game around
Moving with your hands works great for the subset of games where that feels natural, like games where you play as a gorilla or you’re in zero gravity or permanently sprinting while parkouring around. But it feels clunky and unnatural for games outside of that.
Joystick movement doesn’t feel like you’re doing anything, which is a problem when every minute of nothing is much more costly in VR than on any other platform. There’s no way to tab out or look at your phone during downtime and keeping a headset on is inherently inconvenient, so the experience must constantly justify that inconvenience with something.
Because there are no good options by default, it means we’ll have to spend a lot of time designing custom movement systems that at least make you feel like you’re doing something.
And then we’ll have to add a lot of extra depth from other sources to make up for everything we lost be not being able to properly implement what just happens to be the most important action in all of videogames.
Just imagine trying to make a MOBA without the ability to sidestep enemy attacks or an FPS game without flanking. That's our life in VR. It’s a big reason why VR games feel so shallow.
Gesture Controls
Lastly, VR is at its best (and can only compete PC/console) when it feels like you're physically doing things yourself.
But it turns out that most videogame actions are super tedious, difficult, or plain impossible to do in real-life (fighting, looting, using spells, etc.).
So VR design becomes an exercise in finding the right, efficient motions to create a sufficient illusion of doing that thing.
Think “force grabbing” objects from afar, instead of having to bend over and pick them up manually.
But then we run into a problem: it’s very hard trying to separate those small, efficient motions from every other small motion the player might do.
To illustrate, let’s say we want to convert jumping into a more efficient motion, since actually jumping would be insanely tedious with a heavy headset on.
So now we’re looking for small head motions. But did the player’s head move because they wanted to jump…or because they stood up a bit while dodging…or because they moved upwards while swinging at an enemy…or because they were just stretching?
Telling small motions apart is already hard for one person, so imagine trying to do that for thousands of players, each with their own anatomical peculiarities and slightly different ways of doing those motions.
And getting this right really matters because games feel insanely clunky if you’re constantly accidentally doing the wrong thing or failing to do the right thing.
Then we run into another problem: since those illusory motions are arbitrarily smaller versions of the real motion, players won't naturally know what the exact right motion is.
So, even if our algorithms are perfect, we'll have to figure out how to teach them the exact right motions.
And this is surprisingly difficult for motions in 3D space, which have about a million times more ways to fail than pressing buttons on a 2D screen.
This basic gesture recognition problem is the reason why the few truly popular VR games have literally only one or two basic actions, like slicing blocks in Beat Saber or jumping around in Gorilla Tag.
Anything more and the game turns so clunky that only hardcore VR players will ever touch it.
The Result
When we sum up the above problems, implementing any action will take 20 iterations of playtesting and tweaking things…just to make it not feel terrible.
Now do that for attacking, blocking, dodging, drinking a potion, picking up objects, opening doors, interacting with NPCs, using every single spell, etc.
This is why most VR games still don’t feel like “real” games.
It’s not the headset hardware, nor the market, nor a lack of resources that holds VR back.
It’s wasting 3 months on just getting something stupid as swinging a sword to work. Or, in other words, it’s the black hole of basic actions.
But, despite there being a black hole in every development timeline, VR is still doing better than most people think: there are 25-30 million headsets out there and top games have more than 150,000 reviews on the Meta Quest store.
Clearly, there’s a lot of demand for the physicality and immersion that only VR can provide.
So imagine what VR will be like when we eventually do figure out better solutions for movement and controls.
We’d have games with the physicality and immersion of VR, as well as the depth and quality we’d expect from a PC game.
At that point, it's going to be hard for a lot of immersion-focused PC and console games to compete.
