elite dangerous

Virtual Reality

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Next Big Thing

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It feels like for the majority of my life, “Consumer Virtual Reality” has been roughly five years away…. or at least that is what the pundits are consistently saying.  Granted I have been hearing this for the last three decades of my life.  The 90s were really the era of this being the big thing, thanks to the popularity of movies like Lawnmower Man and the weekly reminder of just how amazing the Holodeck could be on Star Trek the Next Generation.  The problem has been however that what we are actually capable of delivering, versus what we are expecting…  has been a pretty huge gulf to cross.  The first time I touched anything I would consider virtual reality, were the extremely expensive Virtuality arcade machines from the roughly 1991.  You can see a screenshot of the type of graphics it delivered above.  Sure it felt cool to be wandering around a fully immersive 3D world, but the amount of disconnect between your actions and the half dozen polygons that represented your hand… was pretty massive.  The funny thing about this game is that apparently it was built on the Amiga 3000 as a hardware platform, which I guess only serves to show you just how advanced that system really was.

I guess for me Virtual Reality has been this failed promise for so long that I have doubted that it would actually really arrive.  I threw in a few other examples in the collage above like Sega Holosseum from 1991 that chose to go down the smoke and mirrors route of creating the approximation of holograms, rather than trying to wrap you in a virtual landscape.  In many ways it worked better, and playing the game felt like the 3D Chessboard from Star Wars.  Then we had the famous Nintendo false step of the Virtual Boy from 1995, that came with the least ergonomic way of playing the game.  I think the suggested method was to sit it on a kitchen counter or something…. and lean over to use it.  However for MOST of the people I knew that had one they would end up laying on the couch and letting the console rest on their face.  There were a bunch of negative effects of seeing the equivalent of gameboy quality graphics in red and black…. and the few times I used it I wound up with a nasty headache.  Around 2003 I remember a good friend of mine having 3D glasses that hooked to the PC and provided 1024×768 screens for each eye, but this ended up working the hell out of the video card… and the framerates suffered.  So basically…  there have been a lot of technologies that have arrived telling me that Virtual Reality is here….  only to not really be the case.

Arrived at a Cost

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It was roughly around this time last year that I got to play with the Oculus Rift for the first time.  At Pax South I was scheduled to do a media demo of Elite Dangerous, and the marketing guy asked if I had ever used a Rift, and upon hearing that I had not shuttled me towards one of the two machines that had them.  Granted there were around ten machines in total in the booth, and only two of them were hooked up and capable of using the Rift which immediately made me a bit suspicious.  Firstly… I suck horribly at space shooters…. and they loaded up a dog fighting scenario for me to play where I was put up against a computer ship.  The demo ended when either I killed the ship… or it killed me.  Needless to say my demo probably took twice the amount of time needed as the other players, but it was really somewhat amazing the first moment when I realized that while chasing this ship…. I could look up through the top of the canopy to trace its movement.  There was still the strange uncanny valley as I watched a set of hands move in the cockpit that were not my own.  The computer was furiously trying to guess what my hand movements might look like based on the controls I was pressing on the real world HOTAS setup.  After I destroyed the ship I asked the Marketing folks some questions, one of which was what sort of hardware they were running this demo on.  Not surprisingly they had it running on an Nvidia Titan X which is still currently a roughly $1200 video card….  so I started to temper my expectations.

Yesterday the prices were released for the first generation of the Oculus Rift released for public consumer consumption.  Granted at this point there have been several development kit models available for those daring enough to brave the potential issues of dealing with beta hardware.  I guess in my mind the price point that seemed reasonable was around $300, because that is what the Samsung Gear unit retails for… and what the supposed price point of the Sony PS4 VR unit will be.  I was not insanely shocked however when the pre-order price ended up at roughly double that amount $599.  If that $600 price tag were a turn key solution that you simply plugged into the HDMI out on your existing PC, then I guess in truth that would probably be well worth it.  However for the bulk of us…  we are likely running hardware that is significantly less snazzy than their requirements.  The minimum requirements listed are a Nvidia GTX 970 which is essentially a $350 video card.  However I would not expect full performance in games like Elite Dangerous on anything lower end than a 980 ti…  which pushes you into the roughly $650-700 price range on a video card.  So before you have touched the rest of your computer set up at all… you are out $1300 in just the Rift and a high end video card.  As much as I love this pipe dream, it is simply too expensive of one for me to even indulge the thought of.

Reality Sets In

The problem I have is that I have a $200 video card, not a $600 video card… and it is unlikely short of winning the lottery that I will ever be able to bring myself to spend that sort of money.  I am sure as time goes on, people will get better at writing VR game experiences, and additionally the cost of the hardware itself will come down by the time it reaches the third or fourth generation of the Rift.  For the time being, Nvidia gave some numbers that said rendering a game for a VR headset requires roughly seven times the amount of resources.  So essentially I have ruled out the Oculus Rift as something I will ever be able to afford.  I know my friend Scopique has been playing with some android VR options that supposedly allow you to create ghetto VR for the PC, and I am anxious to see how well these work out for him.  Personally I think my first likely footsteps into this is in the form of the Playstation VR, and I linked in a video above to show off that unit and a few of the games.  I already have the necessary hardware, namely in the form of a Playstation 4, and if the headset itself ends up being around $300 or even a little more… that becomes within the realm of possibility.  Given that I managed to get my PS4 for only $200, that would make the total outlay for the system in the $500-600 price range which seems reasonable.

Essentially I am going to be happy as hell for anyone who manages to pony up the money to get a Oculus Rift.  I’ve been watching another friend Qelric do videos every now and then showing off her beta hardware.  I hope she can somehow end up getting one of the production units, so I can continue to live vicariously through her experiences.  The problem is…  that pricetag… is pretty damned steep regardless.  The other big problem I have with the Rift so far is that I am not really seeing the killer apps other than Elite Dangerous.  Most of the games she has played with feel more like “tech demos” rather than fully fleshed out rich gaming experiences that would sell a unit.  RIGS on the other hand on the PSVR seems like exactly the sort of fun multiplayer hardware pushing experience that will get someone to add a headset to their Christmas list.  I think the Oculus Rift right now is a true “enthusiast” experience, but isn’t quite “consumer virtual reality” just yet, and it is going to take manufacturers building games for the platform to finally make it worth the purchase price.  In the time between however… I am going to continue being interesting in every bit of news I can find.  From what I am hearing the units are apparently sold out through May 2016 delivery, so it seems like plenty of folks are willing to plunk down for purchase, and I am anxious to see the sort of experiences especially the youtubers and streamers showcase using the magic box.

Day One

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The First Day

paxline It was pretty early on in the day when I had my first realization that I had no clue what I was getting myself in for.  I got up yesterday morning at 5:30, showered, blogged, ate the free complimentary hot breakfast (sausage and eggs) and started roaming towards the convention center around 8 am.  When I got there I noticed there was absolutely nothing for parking, and the garage across the street from the convention center had a massive line of cars backed up in both directions.  After not find any real alternatives I got in that line and waited, hoping the “Open” side on the side of the garage would not change.  I was quite literally in that line for an hour before I finally got in and parked on the roof of the parking lot.

I have to say I have never been quite so happy to be parking on a rain drenched roof in my life.  I made my way into the convention hall where I entered a line of people…  quite honestly not really knowing why I was lining up.  It turns out I was doing mostly okay since this was the line for the opening of the expo hall at 10 am, the area that I had planned on spending most of my day.  I mingled with folks standing in line waiting on things to happen.   They had us line up five across and the entire length of the hall.  When I got there I was towards the front of line three, so people had been there in theory since at least 7 am.  By the time the halls actually opened up there were I believe eight of these lines all waiting to stream into the convention hall like an invading army.  Most were in search of the illusive swag…  me I was mostly trying to get my bearings and figure out where my media appointments would be.

Go Gigantic

gigantic_scrimroom Gigantic is one of those titles that I have known about for some time.  The art style and character designs appealed to me, but when I had a friend describe it as a “MOBA” my brain closed down shop.  Right now I am engaged in both League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm for various reasons…  and I just did not feel like I had enough room for “yet another moba” in my life.  Gigantic however is only a moba in character and skill designs, but the rest of the game play borrow elements from many genres the biggest is that of the first person shooter.  A match feels like a fast paced objective based deathmatch.  The gameplay starts with two teams of champions defending their teams “Guardian” which are these insanely huge monsters at either end of the arena.  The goal of the game is to score three wounds on the opposing teams Guardian.  You can either do this by dealing damage directly, or sending summoned creatures in to fight for you.  The challenge is that when you are summoning a creature you can be interrupted by taking damage from the other team.

Where the game play gets interesting is when “The Clash” happens, which is an end game condition that keeps matches from going too long.  When this happens the game arena shrinks in size as your guardian moves up to actually start fighting directly with the enemy guardian.  At this same time it funnels the players into much tighter quarters.  There are a lot of nuance to the mechanics, and since I have only gotten to play a single match it is hard for me to guess at much of it.  My background is that of an MMO tank… and having played mostly that…  I have to say picking up The Margrave the “tanky”champion felt right at home.  He has a kit with a big ground slam, frontal cleave attack, channeled defensive, and a charge that  can be used to hit other players or simply cover ground.  I actually landed the first kill of the match because the controls felt so natural.  The biggest highlight of my trip through Gigantic land is that I got to meet and hang out with Lonrem, better known for his community role with Anook.  Apparently he has been in the Gigantic community for some time, and when they made a call for experienced players to help act as “coaches” for the convention he jumped.

Decay and Moonrise

Undead-Labs_1Color_KO_onDark After hanging out with the Gigantic folks it was time for me to go to the floor and talk to Undead Labs the first of my press appointments for the show.  I have to give huge credit to Sanya Weathers for being so awesome in setting this up.  I’ve long been a fan of the stuff Undead Labs is doing and I was a day one buyer of State of Decay on XBLA and then later re-bought the game when it came out on steam.  Since then each time it has gone on sale I have picked up copies for various people to keep spreading the game.  I describe it to my friends as “Fallout with zombies and base building”, and I was pleased to find out that the folks at Undead Labs are completely happy with that description.  What is coming out in April is what they were showing off at the show, the Year One Survival edition.  Since it is targeting the PC and XBox One they have gone back and re-mastered the entire game so that it looks glorious at 1080p.  Additionally as Breakdown and Lifeline were released a number of improvements were made to the gameplay in each expansion.  All of those quality of life changes have been applied to the entire game as a whole and you can also play all of the characters from Breakdown and Lifeline in the original game as well.  For folks who own the previous release of the game there is going to be a special veteran only character with a sword and a suppressed rifle.  I asked the million dollar question of what the future plans were for the franchise and if it would include multiplayer.  As expected they could not commit to anything concrete, but did say that multiplayer was their original goal and still something they very much want to happen.  They said that when they did it, they wanted to build a game from the ground up with multiplayer, not try and tack it on as an afterthought… and that much I definitely agree with.

combat_10 Also while in Undead Labs land I got to get my hands on Moonrise their new mobile targeted pet battle rpg.  The idea behind the game is that every so often a condition happens that cause the animals of the planet to get infected with a sickness and become “Lunari”.  You play the role as a Warden, a public servant of sorts that does battle with the enraged Lunari, curing them and turning them back into the peaceful Solari.  If you have ever played the game Jade Coccoon, it feels very similiar… and in talking to Richard Foge it seems like the team had not actually played that game until after folks like me started comparing Moonrise to it.  The game is highly influenced by Pokemon, but the game plays out in a much more realtime fashion.  Not only do you have to have the right combos at the ready..  you have to be able to play them in rapid succession without your opponent somehow throwing a monkey wrench in your plans.  When we got around to playing PVP I happened to have one of those monkey wrenches and I kept throwing it often.  The game plans on being free to play with its monetization focusing on speeding up actions.  However they did not want to build a game where the player spent all of their time waiting on something to free up to be able to continue.  The goal was to create a game where there was always something to do, and from the sounds of it keep the player from going into maintenance mode.  I definitely look forward to seeing the game launch which is started at “sometime 2015” on consoles, iOS, Android and supporting both phone and tablet form factors.

Uncanny Valley

elitedangerous The last media appointment of the day was with the folks at Frontier to show off Elite Dangerous.  I cannot explain how phenomenally bad I am at star ship flight simulator type games.  I can do relatively well when I am constrained by gravity…  but when you throw in that element of being able to fly upside down in the mix I get completely lost.  To make matters even more difficult, they opted to show me the game using the Occulus Rift, hardware I had as of yet not been able to play with.  To say it was disorienting is a bit of an understatement.  That said after sitting in this virtual cockpit for a bit I noticed myself doing things instinctively like looking up through the top of the canopy to follow smoke trails or looking down at the dashboard indicators.  The only thing that I found really disturbing was the render hands that took actions similar to mine but not quite mine.  When you fire your weapons, the hand in game would fire your weapons… when you raised the shield the hand in game would raise the shield.  The problem is the rest of the time the hand largely sat there lifeless.  It was a really cool experience and I quizzed them about their future plans.  They said they would not be happy until you could do everything you would want to do in the setting including planetary exploration.  That however will take a long time, and they are prepping the 1.1 patch to becoming soon and adding new content.

The first day was a whole for me was almost as disorienting as playing Elite Dangerous with the Occulus Rift.  I am not entirely certain what I was expecting, but the reality turned out to be all the more strange.  I wish I could catch and bottle some of the enthusiasm of some of the other participants.  The whole place has this “summer camp for dorks” feel to it that is magical, and please don’t misunderstand…  I am absolutely a dork, just a deeply jaded one at this point.  Maybe it is because I have friends on the other side of the looking glass, that makes me able to see that there really isn’t magic at work… just a lot of clever programming and determination.  I also am not in a rabid search for free stuff mode, that it seems most of the conventioneers are so there is that.  I think if I were going to do this again I would try and schedule my entire day with nothing but press appointments.  That is what I found interesting, talking face to face with the folks behind the games.  I guess after writing about games for so long my interests have become far more nuanced.  At this point its time to hit publish and get ready to go do day two where I am hopefully met by Ashgar and Rae.