Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
A new update for the Nintendo Switch version of Doom has added motion controls, as well as a new party option for multiplayer. The game originally came out in 2016 and was ported to the Switch late last year.
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The Nintendo Switch has a remarkable quality — Switch players seem shockingly interested in buying their favorite games a second time.
The post Playing games on the Nintendo Switch is so nice, you’ll buy your games twice appeared first on Digital Trends.
The name Doom carries a great weight of expectation in video game circles. One part technical showcase, one part genre-defining milestone – with a giant dash of adrenaline for good measure – the series is rightly feted as one of the cherished elders of gaming. What it never had much of a story to tell, with a back-of-a-napkin premise that was ample support for the on-screen carnage. In recent years, it’s the story of the studio that Doom built that ‘s taken the spotlight, especially in VR circles where ex-id alumni John Carmack and Michael Abrash have become prominent figures. Then of course there’s the matter of the rather public multi-million-dollar spat between Zenimax and Oculus—but we won’t get into that. Independent from this dramatic backdrop, can Doom VFR live up to its heritage?
DOOM VFR Details:
Official Site
PlayStation Store
SteamDeveloper: id Software
Available On: PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift
Reviewed On: HTC Vive
Release Date: December 1st, 2017
Can you remember the terror of the original Doom? Inching toward a corner, you hear the collection of beasts in the next room that all want to claw, blast, or pummel you into mush. Can you remember desperate retreats, with just a sliver of health left, heart pounding in your chest? Can you remember the chilling effect of a looming Cacodemon passing ahead, and the panic of a Pinkie rushing toward you? Did you try the 2016 reboot that recaptured the frenzied spirit of the original and reinvigorated it to its now resplendently modern glory? Because I do. Does the first VR entry for the franchise capture that same spirit? Well, sort of.
You won’t be playing as ‘Doom Guy’. You’re just some random staffer who comes off second best with a charging monster in the opening moments of the game and finds his consciousness transferred into a cybernetic body. What follows is a fairly insipid, though impressively-rendered trek through a greatest hits collection of locales from Doom 2016.
Not to mince words: Doom VFR is a bit of a mess at the moment.
The developers have flirted with a variety of VR controls and interactions, but haven’t really polished any of them to the same level as their contemporaries. My list of gripes are are follows: you have inconsistent teleporting, a halfway-to-full locomotion scheme called ‘dash’ that handles forward/backward and sideways movement, the glitchy interactions with things in the world, the out-of-whack sense of scale, listless gunplay, and clipping that renders close-up combat impossible.
In its quieter moments it almost feels like a museum, or one of the companion VR experiences you get around big Hollywood movie releases. There is a hub area with models of all the enemy units that can be picked up and examined, but you can’t tilt or turn the model because it stays resolutely facing in the same direction. It’s a small thing, but indicative of its mouse/joypad roots and possibly that PSVR was the lead platform. It’s also representative of the many instances where only the bare minimum effort has been applied in the transition to VR.
But, let’s face it, you’re not playing Doom VFR to look at some models or for a story or for character development. This is still Doom, and it enjoys many of the benefits of being in that world. The bestiary, for a start, remains a collection of some of the best bad guys ever to grace a shooter. Everything that was good about Doom 2016’s monsters is good in Doom VFR – the combination of movement styles, attack patterns, and armaments is thrillingly dizzying in a busy encounter. Spinning round to see a Hell Knight coming right for you will nicely trigger a spike of adrenaline and a fight or flight (mainly the latter) reaction.
The upgrade systems for the player and the weapons comes across in modified form for this VFR outing. Health, slow-motion, and ammo can each be upgraded in three stages, and the weapons can be modified to either improve their effectiveness or unlock alternate fire modes that are triggered by the right hand controller grip button. Many of these feel far more satisfying than the base modes of fire, and it’s worth seeking out some of the hidden upgrade stations to make sure you get to try them all out.
Not everything makes a smooth transition into VR though. The weapons lack the heft you feel in the flat screen version – here there’s no real difference in feel from a shotgun to a pistol to a gauss rifle. The lack of impact reactions from the bad guys really sticks out like a sore thumb in VR, a constant unwanted reminder that they’re all basically just bullet sponges waiting for a health pool to empty before exploding into bloody geysers of gibs. But oh, what gibs they are. The viscera and particle systems in particular stand out in Doom VFR, with the handsome rendering of the the game world in general coming over to VR with surprisingly few compromises. A drop in poly count here, a carefully curated lack of long view distances there, and a general reduction in headcount of the bad guys.
As with the 2016 reboot, combat encounters become an exercise in constant motion and triage: whittle away at some of the Imps, take down a Cacodemon, scour the floor for armour pickups, whittle away at some Possessed, go toe-to-toe with a Hell Knight, dodge around the Revenant, find some health… The downside of this – and the choice to use teleportation as the primary control mode on the Vive version – is that the encounters become abstract things in your mind. They’re not visceral any more, they’re just puzzles to unpick. Should that particular switch be flicked in your brain, a lot of the majesty of the setting and the horror of the bad guys somewhat diminishes. With a few upgrades under your belt, the encounters suddenly become much easier, and you will find yourself deftly teleporting out of the way of a charging enemy without the spike of fear such a sight might previously have induced.
The added wrinkle of VR locomotion makes earlier encounters tougher than they might otherwise be – the inability to reset the camera by turning or re-centering is particularly galling in the busier encounters, as is the dodgy teleporting – but if you surrender yourself to flinging about in a room-scale setup, you can grow into the rhythms of the combat and your own need to be very nimble in spinning around to line up kill shots. People playing with a front-facing VR system like the default Rift setup or the PSVR may well find themselves very easily overwhelmed. Some encounters can last for quite a while, and death will take you right back to the start which can grate if it’s the controls at fault rather than one’s own reactions.
With five difficulty settings—two available only after the game has been beaten on earlier settings—players of every skill level should find a challenge that works for them; On the ‘Hurt Me Plenty’ setting I needed a good few attempts to clear the larger encounters but it felt challenging and fair in the main.
The largest factor in making victory in the hectic combat possible is the addition of slow motion/time dilation as a game mechanic. This really pays off when the combat environments give the player room to dart around. While it could do with cribbing a few more lessons from Robo Recall (2017), it’s a sensible choice given the rapid pace that Doom VFR’s encounters play out at. When the bad guy headcount ramps up, being able to dip into slow-motion to change weapons or relocate is absolutely essential and feels like exactly what the Doom combat in VR needed.
There’s also a crowd-control blast that pushes enemies away if you find yourself surrounded, which is a neat workaround for the clipping issue with weapons and up-close bad guys. It’s attached to the Vive’s left grip button however, which isn’t the easiest thing to trigger, and in the thick of battle often didn’t quite work out for me.
In fact the controls in general were just a little too glitchy to ever gel. The lack of full locomotion will be an instant black mark to a certain set of players, but the combination of dash and teleport worked well for me… when they worked. The Vive trackpad (or mine at least) has a strange habit of ignoring some trackpad clicks unless very carefully executed, which makes retreat more fraught than it needed to be and often triggered a dash when I wanted a teleport and vice versa. The teleporting – which zooms you to the next location rather than blink you there, which is a nice variation – has a destination marker that has a habit of phasing in and out. One second a destination is reachable, the next it isn’t. Given that the best way to get health in the game is to stagger an opponent and then telefrag them, this can have serious consequences to the flow of battle. Many’s the time I’d staggered a massive enemy, but couldn’t execute the telefrag before they came back to life.
It’s a shame that the real Doom VFR doesn’t really reveal itself until the second half of the game. At around three-and-a-half hours for a complete run-through, including time to hunt down some collectibles, the earlier areas really are the poorest in the game and somewhat tarnish the package. Once I had a few upgrades, had grown competent with the vagaries of the teleporting, and the game had finally opened up into larger combat arenas – with interesting verticality and sight lines – you could see the DNA of Doom 2016 dragged kicking and screaming into the VR realm. The price at least isn’t at the upper end of the spectrum ($30), and if you feel you might get some replay value from the higher difficulties you can probably double the run time.
At its best Doom VFR really is a very exciting and incredibly fast-paced experience, with thrilling moments of heroism against seemingly insurmountable odds. There is a lot to be said for standing at the feet of a Baron of Hell and looking up at its multi-storey frame and fighting back a shudder. At its best Doom VFR deserves to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its forebears. Unfortunately for Doom VFR, its best is fleeting, its flaws many, and just as it shows its quality, it’s all over.
You can kill immersion in VR in many ways, and 45 seconds spent failing to press a button in a lift was the low point for me with Doom VFR. The motion controller tracking didn’t seem to know where I was pointing inside the game; the laser pointer wouldn’t actually appear unless I stood in a particular spot but the game’s teleport didn’t want to play ball.
There’s also an odd sense of wrongness to the scale of the world and the things in it. An early example comes in one scene where you have to use a handheld fire extinguisher to calm a raging inferno (because nothing screams “Doom” more than observing the fire safety regs). Despite the flames appearing to be quite a way down a central shaft, in the ill-fated complex the small handheld extinguisher appears to blast out an improbable cloud of foam that easily reaches the flames. Perhaps it’s a Future Space Fire Extinguisher™, I’m not really up on the Doom lore as it applies to hazard equipment.
It isn’t until the game reaches (spoiler warning) “the hot place” that it manages to elicit a sense of awe and a sense of place, with its eerie otherworldly outcroppings and demonic aesthetic. Prior to that, the nondescript corridors of a science complex don’t offer the most evocative of settings.
Doom VFR is at its worst when it tries to be a VR game – with all the trivial non-Doom interactions some developers feel they need to shoehorn into it – and at its best and most immersive when it remembers to be a Doom game.
Despite my gripes with inconsistent teleporting, it ultimately does the job comfort-wise. It’s not a blink, but the rapid transitions from point-to-point were very comfortable as they were always moving in the direction I was looking. The lateral dashes threaten to be uncomfortable – and I’m sure individual tolerances will vary – but I was not unduly affected by them.
There are some moments (like standing on jump pads, or getting punted by a Hell Knight) where you might be suddenly thrust on an arcing backwards trajectory and that can make the stomach heave a little, but they’re rare moments and mostly predictable. There are also a handful of glass lifts, and a selection of vertiginous drops, that might rattle those susceptible to such things.
Lefties might struggle with the hard coded functionality – teleporting on the left hand controller and shooting on the right. You can just swap the controllers in the real world over if you don’t mind the hands being the wrong way around in the game, but you would think this is something that might be patched in.
Not unique to Doom VFR is the room-scale issue with trailing cables. Without the ability to re-center the view, you will spend a lot of time getting turned around and tangled if you haven’t developed a ’sixth sense of stepping’ to avoid the cabling.
The post ‘DOOM VFR’ Review – Hell Can Wait appeared first on Road to VR.
The burning question at the top of every Oculus Rift owner’s mind ever since E3 this year has been: Will DOOM VFR and Fallout 4 VR work on the Oculus Rift, natively, through Steam? Bethesda has been careful with their language ever since these games were announced and the Store pages clearly list only HTC Vive. But now, at long last, we finally have the answer to the first half of that question: No, it does not appear that you can play DOOM VFR with an Oculus Rift, at least at this moment.
After we published our full review of the PSVR edition of the game, Bethesda sent us a download code for the Steam version. Officially, the Steam Store Page only lists HTC Vive as a supported headset and it looks like that was intentional.
Anyone that’s tried playing a Vive game with a Rift successfully in the past probably assumed it would “just work” with the Rift, but we’ve found otherwise. When I load the game up on my Vive I get a series of splash screens and logos, photosentitivity warnings, and a loading screen. After that the main menu appears. When I try it using my Oculus Rift however, the game boots me back to the SteamVR Home space in between the loading screen and the main menu.
It never finishes launching the game.
Update: We’ve tested the same version of Doom VFR with a Lenovo Windows-based VR headset and it worked. The analog stick does nothing but the trackpad works just as it does on Vive. If you decide you want to try this with a Windows-based VR headset you need a VR Ready PC with high-end specifications, at least for now.
We’ve reached out to Bethesda for a comment, but to understand the situation you have to know that Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax, is currently undergoing an ugly legal battle with Oculus’s parent company, Facebook. We’ve covered that case and ensuing trial plenty but we don’t know if that was a contributing factor to preventing Rift access to the game. Ideally, support will arrive sooner rather than later. And the community will undoubtedly try hacking a solution together if an official one isn’t supported.
Back when the Rift was on Kickstarter and John Carmack still worked at Id (which is also owned by ZeniMax), a modified version of Doom 3: BFG was originally promised as a title to be shipped with the Oculus Rift. But the game never came to Rift officially and Carmack took his VR expertise to Oculus and became their chief technology officer. ZeniMax eventually sued. From our report covering the verdict in the case earlier this year:
The legal battle between ZeniMax Media and Oculus VR has a verdict from the jury. In the first of many questions put to the jury, they decided Oculus did not misappropriate trade secrets.
The jury, however, also decided that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey failed to comply with a non-disclosure agreement he signed, as did Oculus by extension. Oculus and its co-founders Luckey and Iribe were found to owe ZeniMax $500 million as a result of copyright infringement and “false designation.” We’ve uploaded the full 90-page document the jury filled out here.
Have you tried playing DOOM VFR on a Rift yet? Let us know down in the comments below! We will continue updating this story once we find out more.
Note: Additional context added regarding the legal battle between Oculus and Bethesda parent company ZeniMax. Also added that we tested it successfully with Windows VR.
Editor’s Note: A lot of the issues we encountered with Doom VFR on PSVR were down to the limitations of the headset and the controllers. As such, we’ve decided to assign a score just to the PSVR version for now and will update this article with Vive impressions (and potentially a change in score) once we’ve had a chance to try it out.
There probably isn’t a better barometer for how far gaming has come in the past two and a half decades than Doom VFR. It’s nearly 24 years ago to the day that the original classic revolutionized gaming with its 3D first-person view that rooted players in the center of the action and now id Software is bringing us closer to the demon-slaying than ever before with one of the first full VR first-person shooters (FPSs) based on an AAA franchise.
For all our fond memories of Doom 1993, though, it’s easy to forget that it didn’t have all the answers; you couldn’t look up and down, for example, and the game technically only provided the illusion of being in 3D with clever graphical trickery. Somewhat fittingly, Doom VFR is much the same story.
Rather than creating an original adventure from scratch, id has remixed the campaign from the excellent 2016 reboot for Doom VFR. It takes about a quarter of the locations and, from what I can remember, all of the enemies and weapons, dresses them up in a fresh but instantly forgettable story and tweaks the controls to make it as immersive and as comfortable as possible inside a VR headset. The result is a handful of levels forming a two to four-hour-long campaign depending on the difficulty you pick (I played on hard). Each of these will see you travel to different locations at the Union Aerospace Corporation on Mars, which is overrun by demons of all shapes and sizes. Without spoiling anything, you’ll later visit another location seen in the 2016 campaign.
It’s a shame not to be getting an all-new game or a full port of last year’s shooter (Bethesda has ported all of Skyrim and Fallout 4 to VR), though it’s certainly better than nothing. On the bright side, it means that this is a VR game already built upon a rock-solid foundation; Doom VFR’s enemy variety is unmatched in VR and every encounter has its own twists and turns, be it through the sheer overwhelming odds or the verticality of an environment that keeps you on the run.
You’ll blast baddies back to hell with one of three control setups. Firstly, the game’s seemingly designed for two handheld motion controllers (either Move on PSVR or the wands on Vive), which allow you to wield one gun with your right hand and a grenade/grenade launcher with your left. You can also play with a DualShock 4 or gamepad, which assigns aiming of both weapons to head-tracking or, on PSVR, you can use the new Aim controller to handle your right gun, while the left hand is still assigned to your head. Movement also comes in three flavors: a primary teleport mechanic (which can be used to teleport into stunned enemies to shower yourself in their blood), a quick dash to avoid incoming fire, and smooth locomotion for those that can stomach it on compatible controllers.
How much you enjoy Doom VFR is largely going to depend on what platform you play it on and with what controller. Though it was seemingly first designed with it in mind, the Move controls on PSVR are easily the worst way to play thanks to some truly woeful implementation. For starters, there’s no option to turn in increments on the controllers, instead only turning 180 degrees at a time. This gives you just enough freedom to navigate the facility with the teleport option (there’s no smooth locomotion for Move), but in circular rooms it’s incredibly awkward to use, especially in the rush of battle. PSVR’s limited tracking means that, if you fight an enemy off to the side you’ll have to deal with jittery weapons that are more difficult to aim. Vive’s 360 degree tracking, meanwhile, makes this much less of a problem.
Dashing on Move is assigned to the face buttons on the left controller, which themselves don’t actually represent a direction. I often needed to dash out of the way of a heavy hitter, only to press the wrong button and jump right into the enemy, leading to a quick death (though another button smartly pushes enemies surrounding you away by a few meters). When it works, the Move controller feels great, especially as you unleash a storm of chaingun fire into a crowd of shambling zombies, but there are just far too many speedbumps getting in the way of the experience. It’s clear the game was designed with the teleporting, dual-wielding setup in mind but, seeing as Doom requires you to be on the move at all times, smooth locomotion is much more preferable than having to constantly jump across a room (though I would use this mechanic to avoid enemy attacks).
The Aim controller fares just a little better, though it’s still stiff. Its implementation feels very last minute; I couldn’t aim down the sights of a gun without it clipping into my face, and it’s extremely off-putting to see your grenade hand lifelessly attached to the left side of the screen. It’s disappointing id didn’t go back and retool the game to work much more naturally with Aim like Vertigo Games did for Arizona Sunshine; holding a heavy assault rifle in your hands should feel empowering, but it instead comes off as clumsy. The dual analog sticks mean you can use smooth locomotion which makes the game drastically easier (and much more fun) than if you just rely on the teleporting.
In the end, I surprisingly settled on just the standard DualShock 4 controls for the PSVR version. It’s the most solid, dependable way to play the game, with full locomotion and a much better button layout than on either Aim or Move. It allows you to rediscover a bit of that satisfying combat flow that made the original tick, with a few new additions of its own. Teleporting behind a charging enemy, for example, and then quick-turning and firing a rocket into their backs is extremely satisfying. Playing this way gives the game an existential crisis, though, as it essentially means you’re now just playing a shorter, blurrier version of a great shooter from last year. Sadly, that’s about the best the game can muster on PSVR.
There are moments of VR awesomeness to be had, of course; blowing the head off of a Baron of Hell and watching its entire body slam down in front of you had me wanting to high-five the nearest person, while blasting enemies mid-air as you spring off of a launch pad will have you cackling with laughter. But these instances aren’t enough to overlook the far more common moments in which you’re fighting the game’s controls more than you are its demons.
(Editor’s Note: As explained above, this review is solely focused on the PSVR version right now. Additional impressions will be added here once we’ve had hands-on time with the Vive version.)
Whereas last year’s game expertly paced its action, slowly introducing one new enemy or a different weapon at a time, VFR’s short run time throws you in at the deep end from the start. The bulk of enemy types, which teleport into battles set in arena-style locations, show up within the first hour and you’ll find a new gun to play with every 20 minutes or so. It’s like a whirlwind tour of hell, and I often wished the game would take a little time to slow things down, though there are the same secrets and collectibles from last year’s game to hunt for. I also encountered a handful of glitches — one that forced me to reset and replay a 15 minute section — and the UI is somewhat poorly integrated. Objectives, for example, are suck to the left side of the screen and if you try to turn to look at them, they just move further away.
While Skyrim VR made a great case for the VR port, Doom VFR brings us back to the drawing board. On PSVR, the game has its moments, largely thanks to the foundations it was built upon with the 2016 original. In the end, though, the real fight is with its awkward control setups that eventually led me back to play with just a standard gamepad. Though the foundations of a hugely enjoyable shooter are intact, VFR’s struggle with the platform’s limitations makes it feel like the VR support is holding it back more than anything.
Doom VRF, id Software’s upcoming standalone VR game, is nearly here, coming December 1st for PSVR and HTC Vive. It looks like the studio is turning up the nostalgia to 11 with the latest revelation that the game will also feature classic maps lifted from the original Doom (1993).
Confirmed by IGN, both ‘Toxic Refinery’ and ‘Nuclear Plant’ will be available to play at launch.
According to IGN, the maps are unlocked by playing through the main campaign, although it’s currently unclear how this will be achieved, be it an Easter egg hunt like the 2016 Doom or a simple unlocking once you’ve completed the game.
While the 4-minute gameplay video below features teleportation, free movement is also an option throughout the entire game, which the studio calls ‘dash’ movement. That ought to kindle the nostalgia a little better than teleporting around from spot to spot. And yes – just like the original, the enemies are in all the right spots waiting for you to breeze on by, albeit the new baddies in their higher-resolution 3D glory.
Doom VFR is Bethesda’s second big IP revival. Unlike Skyrim VR for PSVR, which is a VR port of the 2011 title, the new VR Doom game is a built from the ground-up for VR headsets, and features a unique story line.
It not only features support for motion controllers, but in the case of PSVR it also supports DualShock 4 controllers and PS Aim. Check out our hands-on with Doom VFR’s Aim support here.
The post ‘Doom VFR’ is Coming with Classic ‘Doom’ Maps, Gameplay Video Here appeared first on Road to VR.
This week I got the chance to play a whole suite of upcoming PlayStation VR (PSVR) titles at a private PlayStation press event in San Francisco, CA. In addition to trying Skyrim VR with full locomotion, Bethesda also brought DOOM VFR running on PSVR along with a PS Aim controller. I was a huge fan of the controller when I reviewed it (and Farpoint) and have loved it with Arizona Sunshine, ROM: Extraction, and other games since, but DOOM’s PS Aim support I’m a bit unsure about.
For those unaware, DOOM VFR is a completely new VR game that’s built from the ground up specifically to be played with VR headsets. It still takes place in the same universe as 2016’s DOOM reboot and even features a lot of the same locations, enemies, and weapons, but it’s a new adventure that’s designed to take advantage of VR’s unique capabilities. We went hands-on with the game at E3 earlier this year and then again at QuakeCon, so you can read those previews for more details on the game as a whole. The highlight of our latest demo this week though was the PS Aim support.
Both of our previous demos were using standard motion controllers so the introduction of a plastic rifle accessory was a big change. From the get-go it’s a bit jarring because in DOOM VFR your character is actually dual-wielding. In your left hand there was a grenade launcher-type device I could activate using the front-most L1 button on the Aim controller. It felt weird to press a button at the end of a rifle to shoot something out of a gun in my left hand.
This also means that in the real world I’m holding a two-handed PS Aim rifle, but in the game world the primary weapon in my right hand is not a dual-wielded weapon at all. Firing a pistol by pulling the trigger on my PS Aim controller feels a bit odd, but I look past that pretty quickly.
One of the major roadblocks is the complexity of the controls. Remembering where buttons on the controller are, what they do, how to turn, how to teleport, how to strafe, which button is for which weapon, pulling up the weapon wheel, etc. It’s a lot to take in for a foreign input device. One of the strengths of Farpoint is how it made you forget you were holding a gun controller, but DOOM VFR constantly reminded me.
Another big gripe is the way movement works. When using the Vive wands or PS Move controllers it feels fine to teleport around. You point, you click, and boom — you’re moving across the map. It felt like a needed compromise for a game that’s usually so fast-paced. But when I’m holding the PS Aim controller (a hunk of plastic with two analog sticks) it feels like a missed opportunity to not let me do more. Telefragging is still super satisfying (teleporting “into” an enemy and watching them explode like a piñata full of blood) but I’d take the ability to actually kite enemies and circle strafe any day of the week.
DOOM VFR is a game that’s been built with teleporting and VR in mind so it can be as polished and cohesive as possible when it releases, but the PS Aim support didn’t blow me away. Despite the aforementioned issues though, it was still a ton of fun to actually aim down the sights of a gun in the DOOM universe. Pulling the trigger on my Dualshock 4 is fine and dandy, but nothing quite beats holding a gun in your hands when playing a game like DOOM.
DOOM VFR is set to release on December 1st, 2017 for HTC Vive and PSVR. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Aim Controller, Bethesda, doom, Doom VFR
Doom VFR, Id Software’s made-for-VR Doom franchise game, is launching soon on all major VR platforms, including PSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift. PSVR users better dust off their PS Aim controllers from the last time they played Farpoint (2017) though, because Doom VFR is putting its iconic guns in your own two hands.
Bethesda, Id Software’s parent company, confirmed with us that the game will support DualShock, PS Move, and PS Aim at a special Sony event yesterday, and gave Road to VR executive editor Ben Lang a chance to go hands-on with the PS Aim integration. Lang says that the newfound ease in two-handed shooting was a clear highlight.
Compared to playing Doom VFR with motion controllers, I quite preferred the feel of the PS Aim controller which brings more intuitive aiming and makes wielding some of the game’s massive two-handed weapons, like the Plasma Rifle, feel far more natural. Holding a weapon like the Plasma Rifle in a single hand hand (with Move controllers) just feels wrong from an immersion standpoint since (in VR) it lacks the mass implied by its form.
Although Lang calls its game engine “well suited from a performance standpoint for Doom’s classic speedy gameplay,” there are a few niggling bits that may take some time to get used to when moving around the virtual hellscape with Aim.
In my time with the game I felt like the supremely awkward control scheme on the PS Aim controller—which equally blends buttons, sticks, head aiming, and controller aiming—prevented me from feeling in tune with the fluid gameplay pace that the developers are trying to build. Sure, more time with the game would make me more capable with the controls, but there’s an immersion penalty for unintuitive interactions in VR, and it felt like a total overhaul of the user interaction design would greatly benefit the game.
To its credit, according to Lang, Doom VFR “looks absolutely gorgeous on PlayStation VR, easily qualifying as one of the system’s best looking titles.”
We first saw Doom VFR at E3 2016 where it was featured alongside Bethesda’s other big release heading to headsets soon, Fallout 4 VR (Skyrim VR was announced a year later). Doom VFR represents Bethesda’s/id’s first made-for-VR title which doesn’t retroactively support VR headsets. The story is a unique addition to Doom (2016) that lets you play as a cybernetic survivor who is activated by the UAC to fight the demon invasion, maintain order, and prevent catastrophic failure at the Mars facility.
Doom VFR is launching December 1st, and we’ll be bringing you our review then, so set your calendars for what promises to be the hottest winter on record.
The post ‘Doom VFR’ PlayStation Aim Support Isn’t Perfect, but It Is Welcomed appeared first on Road to VR.
There are tons of great video game soundtracks out there, covering a huge number of genres. Here are some of the very best video game soundtracks you can stream for free anytime on Spotify.
The post Here are the 10 best video game soundtracks you can stream on Spotify appeared first on Digital Trends.
Bethesda and Id Software are bringing the acclaimed 2016 shooter reboot Doom to the Nintendo Switch this November. The game includes both the campaign and multiplayer, though SnapMap has been omitted.
The post ‘Doom’ blasts its way onto Nintendo Switch this November appeared first on Digital Trends.