Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The state of virtual reality at E3 2016”.
This could have been the biggest e3 for virtual reality. Ever the oculus rift and HTC vive just came out the spring and PlayStation VR is just a few months away. So it’s time for all these companies to really get serious about putting out a catalog that can get people excited about the platform. Did that happen? Well, it wasn’t a bad year, but it’s not one that should convince anybody that virtual reality is already here. Well, let’s talk about the exciting stuff. First oculus came to e3 with a slate of games for touch promising will get more than 30 when it comes out.
Later this year, Sony announced an official date for PlayStation VR October 13th and HTC well, okay, HTC didn’t really do anything, but they had a neat mixed reality. Booth oculus has hands down showing the most polished, interesting VR games at e3. Every game there had some kind of cool premise: you’re rock climbing you’re in a wizard duel, you’re playing tennis with Tron disks. The problem is nobody’s gon na get to play these games for a long time. Oculus is still working through its oculus rift back order, and it didn’t say when touch is coming, it suggested it could be late this year. In any case, PC gaming is a pretty exclusive club already, and then you add virtual reality to that and it gets even smaller. Oculus is the company whose games I want everybody to be playing, but it’s the most elusive platform in existence.
Sony says we’ll get 50 PlayStation VR games before the end of 2016 and it’s been the best at bringing huge, exciting franchises to virtual reality. It’S going to have games from Star Wars, Battlefront the Batman, Arkham series, Final Fantasy and Resident Evil to name a few. But when you actually try them out, they weren’t as much fun as they sound.
The Batman and Final Fantasy games are basically short add-ons and, while Resident Evil is cool and totally playable, it’s also pretty much the same inside VR and outside it. Also PlayStation VR, as technical limitations really start coming through everything, looks a little bit muddy compared to the rift in vive on the bright side. Psvr is definitely the most accessible platform and the PlayStation neo, while it wasn’t announced at e3, could give it a graphical boost. It’S the only tethered headset that stands a chance of being more than a niche product, and it has a few titles with real potential, including the robot basketball game, Riggs and Robinson. The journey, a cool sci-fi dinosaur game for Crytek HTC, was at e3, but the only really notable announcement was the fallout 4 is coming to vibe next year. That’S a big deal, but the demo we saw just had one small area and not very many features. It’S a proof of concept, just like almost everything else on the vibe in the absolute best universe valve would have shown up and introduced a new half-life for virtual reality or something, but it hasn’t made a big announcement at e3 for years and 2016 was no exception.
Yes, there are other VR headsets v3, but they’re, mostly for special cases, like theme parks and not things. People want to buy and take home and nothing. I saw offered a clearly better experience than the rift vibe or psvr. Microsoft is supposed to be getting into the virtual reality game next year with its Scorpio console, but it didn’t actually say what headsets it’s going to support. Maybe the best sign for VR at e3 was that we got a new and pretty cool game announced for all major VR platforms, that was Star Trek, bridge crew, a cooperative game where you play four members of a Starfleet ship’s crew.
It’S part of a big beloved series, it’s developed by a major publisher, Ubisoft and it’s the kind of game that can appeal to all kinds of people, not just hyper skilled players or fans of a specific genre. Most of the things we saw at e3 are in a pretty early stage and we’ll be hearing more soon at places like quick con games, comm and oculus is big Developer Conference. The very start of the platforms, like usually isn’t the best part of it just remember, games like rise for the Xbox, and it can take years to develop a really good game inside or outside of VR.
We’Ve got at least a few more months until PlayStation VR and Touch come out before the first generation of VR hardware has started, but this year’s show definitely didn’t give us enough to submit VR s future and with headsets already going on sale. The clock is running down. It’S got a lot of time, this e3 of covering VR and absolutely everything else games related. If you want to see it, you can check us out at the verge comm or subscribe at youtube.com, slash The Verge .