Is it weird that my first game completed with cutting edge VR technology is over 10 years old, and came out during the age of PS2, Gamecube, and the original Xbox? Maybe, but it was still amazing.
A friend recently bought an Oculus Rift DK2 and brought it to a gathering of friends for everyone to try. My first couple experiences using it (Titans of Space, Time Rifters, Body of the Night, Sight Line) left me desperate for more. Generously, my friend let me borrow the DK2 for over a month now, and I've been using it every day since. I've eagerly combed through
WeArVr.com and the
Oculus Share website for any game, demo, or "experience" that my computer could run. And while I've found many cool things to try, they are always short bite-sized experiences. What I really wanted, was a full featured game I could really sink my teeth into. I found that in Half-Life 2.
Getting HL2 working in VR was extremely easy. Valve ported the game to VR themselves, so all you have to do to get it working is download the free "Steam VR" tool from Steam, and then opt into the beta version of both Steam VR and HL2 by right-clicking them in your library, selecting the "Betas" tab, and choosing the beta option from drop down box. When you run Steam VR, it automatically loads the "Big Screen" version of Steam inside the Rift. It looks like a huge curved screen floating a few feet in front of you. Then just select HL2, and press the play button, and you're in. The process is the same for HL2 Episodes 1 & 2.
Half-Life 2 is
obviously a critical darling, and beloved by many gamers. I won't be reviewing why the game is good, because that's been done a thousand times. I'll be speaking strictly about how the game feels in VR.
When I first stepped off the train into City 17, I took a minute to just look around. I was trying to take in the sights and sounds around me, and feel a sense of presence. A sense of "being there". Throughout my 24 hours of playing HL2 and it's episodes, I never quite reached that pinnacle of VR. When people use the word "presence" to talk about VR, what I think they really mean is when the world around you feels real. The walls, the sky, the floor. I never felt that, but I did feel what I would call object presence. That is, objects in the game looked and moved convincingly enough that my brain would sometimes instinctively react as if they were real.
As I stood there in the City 17 train station looking around, a camera drone floated up to me at a startling speed. The 3D effect made me flinch as my brain was sure that it was about to run into me. I got the same feeling in the canal level where the giant smoke stack collapsed in front of my air-boat, when playing catch with Dog, when man-hacks came rushing at me, when super zombies would leap at my face, and many more. These things would cause me to cringe, reel back, or flinch.
I have a feeling the lack of world presence had more to do with the limitations of the Rift, my PC, and the input method than the game, though. Specifically, the relatively narrow FOV, some slight judder when turning my head, and using a keyboard+mouse, but those are topics for another discussion.
If you look at HL2 on a standard monitor, it's easy to see the game's age. Surfaces are very flat, textures are pretty low-res, characters are relatively low-poly. But when you strap on the Rift, those issues seem to disappear for the most part. I found myself surprised by how real some of the environments looked in spite of those aging graphics. The realistic look seemed to have more to do with realistic lighting and shadows than anything else. I suspect that because the floor and the walls fall more into your periphery when in VR, where you naturally don't see as much detail, those flat surfaces and low-res textures just aren't very noticeable.
Whatever the case, putting the Rift on and booting up the game was a treat every time, even without the sense of world presence. Even if you are cognizant of the fact you're seated and wearing a head-mounted display, that doesn't detract from the awesomeness of being enveloped by the game world. Combine enemies are no longer tiny dudes on a monitor, but life-sized threats that seem like they could touch you. Look around the room you're in right now. Imagine a 6ft tall Combine soldier standing in the room with you, and staring at you with those big glowing red goggles. That's how they feel in VR. Now if you're really brave, imagine some other enemies like zombies, or hunters.
In conclusion, if a 10 year old game that was released a year before the Xbox 360 came out, can be ported into an amazing VR experience, I really can't wait to see what modern games with all the graphical bells and whistles can pull off when they're made from scratch to be played on even more advanced displays like the Oculus Rift CV1.
The rig I played on, for the curious (it's old):
Intel Core 2 Duo 3.2GHz
4GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 512MB
Windows 8.1
No comments:
Post a Comment