VR’s Black Hole

Have you ever wondered why VR games seem so underwhelming, despite 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. 

In other words, basic actions are a black hole that sucks up all of your development budget, leaving you with nothing for the rest of the game.

But how can these simple actions be so difficult?

Motion Sickness

First off, we have motion sickness, which happens when the player moves somewhere in VR without doing that movement in real life.

And 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.

That’s a huge problem, since gameplay, graphics, narrative, and everything else become completely irrelevant when 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 whether to play your game.

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.

That’s a lot of extra effort, especially if the motion sickness is subtle and therefore hard to find with quick tests and/or if your team doesn’t have someone who gets motion sick easily.

Controlling Movement

Secondly, we still don't have any good options for how players control movement in VR.

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 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 feels like nothing, which is a problem when every minute of nothing is another minute of strain from wearing a heavy headset. And when you can’t open up YouTube or talk to a friend during that nothingness. ‘Nothing’ is deadly in VR.

The lack of good options for movement means that we’ll have to spend a lot of time designing custom movement systems.

And then we’ll have to add a lot of extra depth from other sources to make up for the loss of one of the most important actions 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.

Motion 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 (fighting, looting, using spells, etc.) are super tedious, difficult, or impossible to do in real-life. 

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, instead of having to pick them up manually.

But trying to separate those small, efficient motions from every other small motion the player might do is very hard.

To illustrate, let’s say we want to convert jumping into a more efficient motion that wasn’t so insanely tedious with a heavy headset on.

Did you mean to do a small, jump-like motion or did you stand up after a dodge or did you move upwards as you swung at an enemy or were you just stretching?

And we have to somehow do that for players of vastly different armspans, heights, and generally just different ways of doing the motions. 

If we don't, players will keep accidentally doing the wrong thing or failing to do the right thing, which will feel insanely clunky. Especially since it’s YOU failing that action and not some character on a faraway screen.

And then, since those illusory motions are arbitrarily smaller versions of the real motion, players won't naturally know what the exact right motion is.

So, unless we want players to feel like they're randomly failing actions, we'll have to figure out how to teach them the right motion. 

And this is surprisingly difficult for motions in 3D space that have a million ways to fail at them.

The Result

When we sum up all of the above, 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.

So 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 motion 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 games to compete.

And that’s exactly what we’re trying to accomplish at Raikiri.