I grabbed an Oculus Quest towards the end of 2019, attracted by its (relatively) affordable price, its untethered nature and it not needing to be powered by a nearby PC. Spoiler: it’s fantastic. Not least, the lack of faff and required technical know-how makes it a far more social, family affair rather than being an off-putting techie thing stuck next to my PC upstairs.
I wrote a couple of articles on storytelling in games a while back. You can find them here:
and
At the time I’d not experienced VR to any great extent, hence it being conspicious by its absence from those articles.
In terms of storytelling, VR often does as much to hinder it as help it. The ability to physically walk around in a game world is astonishing and engrossing, but is inevitably limited by the constraints of your house. In the UK in a typical house it’s rare to find a room large enough for the recommended 6'x6 which isn’t already crammed with furniture. As such, you’re constantly, incongruously bumping into the boundaries of the real world. Other than the Quest, VR requires you to be tethered by a bunch of irritating cables.
Non-VR games might be more abstracted with their need for a gamepad, but they’re more consistent in their input. Pushing an analogue stick to make a character walk isn’t as immersive as simply walking with your legs, but your brain quickly maps the abstracted control mechanism onto whatever the game is trying to do. VR, on the other hand, feels completely convincing but only in 10 seconds bursts — until you’re inevitably interrupted by cables or the real walls of your room.
One big exception to this is ‘cockpit games’. By which I mean anything which takes place inside a vehicle: driving games, spaceship games, flight sims etc…
