Better Than Life

About thirteen or so years ago, I was introduced to the British sci-fi comedy show Red Dwarf. To briefly summarise it for those who have not seen it: David Lister, third-technician aboard the mining vessel Red Dwarf, is locked in stasis for illegally bringing a cat on board and ends up waking up three million years later after a radiation leak wipes out the rest of the crew.

Since the show started production in the 1980s, a lot of the general tech used on the show over the years is a hybrid of now-outdated technologies and predictions of how tech would evolve in both the near and far futures. For example, VHS tapes still exist but are now triangular. Sometimes their guesswork has come rather close to coming true even in today’s technological age. I can easily see the ship computer Holly being a logical evolution of smart devices like Alexa.  

A couple of episodes focused on the future of computer games. The episode Better Than Life introduced the Total Immersion Video Games, which put players directly into the games themselves. These have seen numerous different interpretations in the show, ranging from a small bike helmet-type device to large booths that players stood or reclined in, but the most notable is in the 1993 episode, Gunmen of the Apocalypse. In this episode, Artificial Reality games were shown being played using a headset and special gloves.

Roll forward twenty years, and this headset is one bit of tech which has become very real and publicly accessible. Virtual Reality is still quite a niche category in gaming, but it has been making more of a steady foothold over the past couple of years.

Since purchasing Squadrons, my curiosity for how it would look in VR got the better of me and so as of Christmas Day last year I now have my very own headset. Today's post is dedicated to giving it a bit of a review.

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General

Of the options available, I decided to go with the Oculus Rift S. The Quest 2 was cheaper and more recent, sure, but as I was going to be connecting the thing to my computer anyway, ultimately as much money would be spent on the Quest and its special linking cable as on the Rift S. As it is, I probably need to get a replacement cable sorted anyway as mine is rather finnicky and refuses to detect the headset unless it is disconnected and reconnected.

Always something!

Wearing it feels fine, and it is surprisingly comfortable given that it essentially involves strapping a boxy mini-computer screen to my face. It is of course a little bit weighty, but thankfully not distractingly so.

The "worst" thing about the headset is the necessity to connect it to a FaceBook account because that is something which Oculus requires nowadays. I am not at all a fan of the invasiveness of social media, even with as many privacy options as possible enabled, so this is very much a necessary evil from my perspective. Blast it all. 

Quite honestly, I do not have a lot to say about the headset itself beyond that. It is a clever bit of kit, but I am not one for delving into the ins-and-outs of technology and assessing them. Instead, I will shift my focus now to assessing the two games that I have played in VR.

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Skyrim VR

Given my history of taking any opportunity to dive back into Skyrim whenever it presents itself, I of course had to see what it was like in VR. Given that by now I do get tired of it quite quickly this was not meant to be a long-term investment; I was just interested to see how different the experience was.

Normally my Skyrim playthroughs see me playing with a stamina-based setup. You know the drill, bows, swords, shields, sneaking, all that stuff. Using magic never really appealed to me all that much and apart from when needed for the College of Winterhold storyline I barely touched my spells list.

For Skyrim VR, this changed. Wielding bows is fine and some good mods exist out there which really make using them a thing of beauty in this version of the game. However, the same cannot be said for swords. The sword experience is basically “swing wildly and just hope you eventually make contact”, which is very clunky and quite exhausting at times.

So, after a few dungeons, I stored away my sword, used console-commands to quickly up my Magicka, and brought out the spell book.

Oh, good Lord, what an experience that was! Normally, magic is sprayed out directly in front of you, but in VR you can just point your hands anywhere and just spray magic all over the place. Two enemies closing in on you on either side? No problem; just hit them both with two different fire streams!

Beyond the initial combat problems, the game itself worked relatively well in VR. I downloaded my usual set of mods (or at least, as many of them which were VR-compatible) as well as some specific VR ones. Notably, there is one which gives the player character an actual body where normally just their hands would be seen. It was so surreal looking down occasionally and seeing a body that was not mine moving around with me!

Honestly, though, while it was great seeing Tamriel from a more involved perspective, I have played it enough that seeing it in VR just felt "standard". No matter what, it was still just... Skyrim. Been there, done that, bought the metaphorical t-shirt. That is nothing against it as a VR game; this is entirely on me.

One thing which was rather disappointing about it as a VR game was the native resolution of the game itself on-screen. For some reason, the game was locked to a very narrow window. This had no impact whatsoever on actual gameplay within the headset but it meant that any footage and screenshots I was able to capture are much too thin for my liking (hence why no images from the game in this post as I was unable to work out how to amend this).

Of the remaining game mechanics, swimming was the only one which I found to be tedious. In fact, I would say it was an absolute nightmare due to the combination of swimming in VR and not having ever tried to swim in the first-person view before. On my last play-session before I uninstalled it, I almost drowned my poor Khajiit when she got stuck in what was meant to be an underwater shortcut in a dungeon. I did eventually manage to get her out, but it took about five minutes of struggle before I succeeded.

Something that Skyrim VR also made me realise is that I can still easily suffer from motion-sickness. I used to suffer from this a fair bit as a child, meaning that whenever I went to France with my parents for our summer holiday I had to wear special wristbands meant to reduce sea-sickness. This has not been an issue for several years and so I hoped that it was over-and-done with. Apparently not!

Though my time in Tamriel this time around was very brief, it was certainly one of the more memorable excursions.

Just avoid mentioning Frostbite Spiders to me for a while, okay?

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Squadrons

I have loved the starfighters of Star Wars for years, and in my childhood at school I would often daydream up little scenarios of flying around based on the films and on Activision’s Battlefront games. I do not know how I would have reacted if during those times I would have learned about a bit of technology helping me feel even a little bit that I was really in a ship and flying around, but I can imagine that I would have been extremely excited.

Squadrons is amazing in VR. While there is a fair bit of disconnect (notably the Republic ships’ layout has the pilot’s hands in different positions to my own in real life), it really does feel like I am in the cockpit of an X-wing or a TIE fighter and whizzing about. Much like Skyrim VR I do find it very surreal to look down and see someone else’s body beneath me, but at least this time the surrealness is lessened by "my" limbs not having free movement.

In terms of how playing in VR impacts my playstyle, not much has really changed for general flight. Since I have good muscle-memory I have adapted quite quickly to not being able to see my joysticks even in peripheral vision. The sense of scale is far more immediate when passing objects and it is thus quite awe-inspiring to fly alongside the hull of a Star Destroyer, so I do occasionally get quite distracted when in-flight and just taking it all in. 

Crashes are... slightly... more heart-stopping than they were before, of course...

VR does make keeping an eye on enemy players both much more involving and much more challenging than without. For the first, the ability to turn your head to track an enemy is wonderful and yet so surreal at the same time. For the second, this is where the customisable UI really comes into its own.

Without VR, the UI can be quite helpful in providing a good alternative for tracking foes than using the little radar, such as the “your target is in this direction!” arrow. However, once in VR, that is something of a detriment as trying to keep track of the arrow itself is an absolute pain in the posterior. Thus, I have now disabled that aspect of the UI and have steadily been training myself to use the cockpit’s radar.

The radar is easy enough to understand; it tracks targets in a wide cone in front of you and does at least keep targeted foes somewhere on it to show which direction you need to turn to find them. I believe that I finally have it cracked, but it took me a fair bit of time to get used to it.

VR does also lend itself to vastly different experiences depending on your faction. The New Republic ships have much greater visibility than the Imperial ships (the A-wing is ridiculously good for this), and more than once I have found myself reflexively looking around in the cockpit of a TIE as I would in a Republic ship only to realise a second later that I am just looking at more cockpit. Despite this, the standard TIE cockpit does lend itself quite well to occasionally seeing ships fly beneath your direct line-of-vision.

Best view, 10 / 10

While I have not noticed as much motion-sickness in Squadrons as I did in Skyrim VR, which I attribute to being seated as opposed to standing up, I have noticed it occasionally. Primarily, this kicks in if I choose to spectate a fellow ship after my own is destroyed as the spectating puts you in the third-vessel perspective and of course you are watching the other ship move without your input.

Not much else to say here, really, as I have already said a fair bit about Squadrons as a game and VR – while still of course having an impact – does not really radicalise how the game is played from my perspective. It enhances it, sure, but I would not say that VR is a "must-have" for enjoying Squadrons.

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Conclusion

While I have so far only experienced two games which I was already familiar with before acquiring a VR headset, I am mostly happy with the experiences I have had so far. It is of course a shame that Skyrim VR made me quite motion-sick but until I felt I needed to stop the sessions I had romping through Tamriel were decently enjoyable.

Squadrons of course was the game that I requested the Rift S for and so it is unsurprising that I am rather gushy about it in VR. It is almost every bit as fascinating as I hoped it would be and I absolutely love feeling nearly fully-immersed in a Star Wars game.

I will almost certainly start picking up some VR-exclusive games at some point and see what they are like. I find myself drawn to Job Simulator which I have seen videos of and it looks great fun. Mindshow is another one that sadly seems to be inaccessible right now but if ever that becomes available again I look forward to using it to create my own VR-animated scenarios.  

VR is not quite as involving as Red Dwarf’s TIGVs are yet, but I feel that within the next couple of decades it almost certainly will be. Technology is advancing at an incredibly fast rate nowadays, and I do not imagine that it will be slowing down anytime soon.