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
The first and most important reason is motion sickness: many players will feel sick when they see themselves move in VR, but don’t feel that movement in their inner ears.
This sounds pretty mundane, but it’s an existential problem for the entire technology.
That’s because, no matter how good the game is otherwise, the player will simply take off the headset the moment they start feeling sick. And many will never try VR again after that.
Even tiny amounts of motion sickness can stack up over time to make the player feel inexplicably uncomfortable or irritated — which is what they’ll remember about your game when next deciding what to play.
So, considering that over half the world’s population will feel sick from any amount of movement in VR, I think you can understand why VR still hasn’t hit the mainstream.
From a developer’s perspective, it gets even worse, since the human motion processing system can mistakenly “see” movement where none actually exists.
This means that random things can actually create motion sickness as well, like a UI element popping up in the wrong way or an enemy sword bouncing around in the player’s peripheral vision.
Because the problem is so unpredictable and devastating, every change we make must be tested for motion sickness and many features will require additional, unexpected tweaks.
And let’s not even talk about all the things we’re missing out on by not being able to do proper movement.
This is why almost all of the top VR games have been those that:
Don’t have any movement (Beat Saber, Superhot, Golf+, Gym Class, etc.)
Have some movement, but don’t rely on it for gameplay (VR Chat, Rec Room, arguably Blade and Sorcery’s sandbox mode, etc.)
Or target young kids, who are much less susceptible to motion sickness (Gorilla Tag, Animal Company, UG, Yeeps, etc.)
Controlling Movement
Other than motion sickness, there’s another major problem with movement in VR: we still don't 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 current 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 when you’re a gorilla, floating 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 a VR experience must constantly justify that inconvenience with something.
Because nothing works out of the box, developers have to spend a lot of time coming up with custom movement systems that at least make you feel like you’re doing something.
And then they’ll have to add a lot of extra depth from other sources to make up for everything they lost by not being able to properly implement movement.
Why? Because movement just happens to be the most important action in all of videogames — it’s what the player is doing >90% of the time in everything from Minecraft to Red Dead Redemption and League of Legends.
So 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 and it’s a big reason why VR games feel so shallow.
Gesture Controls
Lastly, VR is at its best (and can only compete with PC/console) when it feels like you're physically doing things yourself.
Put another way, casting a Final Fantasy spell or throwing out a Hadouken is a lot more satisfying when it’s you doing it, rather than some character on a screen.
But it turns out it’s hard to create that feeling when most videogame actions are super tedious, difficult, or just 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 something.
Think pulling objects from afar with force powers, instead of having to bend over and pick them up manually.
But, when we try to do this, we quickly run into a problem: it’s unreasonably hard 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?
In fact, tracking a jump-like motion is so stupidly difficult that VR developers have stopped trying and just make you jump with a button press (despite knowing perfectly well that this just makes jumping feel like a worse version of what you’d find in a PC game).
So it’s already hard to tell small motions apart for one person. Now imagine imagine trying to do that for thousands of players, each with their own anatomical peculiarities and slightly different ways of doing those motions.
And imagine doing so when they think they’re doing the right thing, but actually just doing a half-assed motion with their hand off by an absurd 30 centimeters and 60 degrees (because nobody does anything resembling the right motion when they’re doing it for the 434th time, while tired and concentrating on enemies).
Then add sensor noise and the fact that your hand flies at >3 meters per second during a proper arm swing, meaning that it’ll take your hand just 66 milliseconds to travel the 20 centimeters of meaningful motion we’re trying to track.
This problem sounds so trivial that nobody outside of the industry ever believes me when I say this, but trying to reliably tell whether you did something as simple as a jab versus a hook versus an uppercut is basically impossible with current technology.
It’s so hard that even big tech companies like Meta still can’t track motions well enough to make it feel like the system “just works”, despite having basically infinite resources and engineering talent.
And getting motion controls right really matters, since games feel insanely clunky if you’re constantly doing the wrong thing or failing to do the right thing — especially when it’s you messing up and not just some character on a faraway screen.
The only reason you won’t experience this in most modern VR games is that developers have learned to simplify their games to make things more manageable.
It’s why seemingly all of the most popular VR games are built around just one or two basic actions, like slicing blocks in Beat Saber or jumping around in Gorilla Tag.
If developers try to add the full breadth of actions that players would expect from a PC or console game, the game quickly turns so clunky that only hardcore VR players will ever touch it (or then it takes 5 years to develop 10 hours worth of content).
The Result
When we combine the difficulties of movement and motion controls in VR, 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 this black hole, 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 or console game.
It would be you running around Azeroth, riding zeppelins, and casting frostbolts, rather than a character you’re controlling.
At that point, it's going to be hard for a lot of immersion-focused PC and console games to compete.
