Lei Feng Network (search "Lei Feng Net" public concern) : Author Tiber River, VR industry practitioners, the first game to learn. Perhaps you do not agree this article is different from the mainstream view impression, but this does not hinder you understand the reasons behind these views. Because we think that the process of exploring why "first-person VR games have no future" is much more interesting and will inspire current VR practitioners. Welcome to discuss the message.
Last weekend I had the opportunity to experience the recent hot VR game "Black Shield." This work, which won the HTC Vive Content Awards in China, does have very powerful graphics and fine arts. The game mechanics are first-person shooters – it seems to be a very natural idea for playing games in virtual reality.
Black Shield has excellent pictures and fine arts
However, after experiencing "Black Shield", I have further strengthened my thinking: First-person games have no future in VR, at least not at present.
It seems to be arguing against all developers who are doing VR games. The reason why Virtual Reality can shake everyone is its unprecedented immersive experience. Our imagining of VR is our role in the game as if we were a real person, and we can experience what the character sees and hears. In this case, developers are particularly normal for VR first-person games.
| Top level, why the experience is not so good?Black Shield is one of the typical examples . The screen and art of the game are the top level of current VR games, and the game mechanism also respects VR. Based on the traditional FPS, it has made a lot of VR attempts, and strives to make a varied and rich VR gaming experience. But after about 15 minutes of experience is over, as a long-term core player, I don't think this is a comprehensive "good" game experience . Here I also ask myself a sentence: Why?
The biggest problem lies in the mechanics of the game. Although VR brings an unprecedented sense of immersion, VR's interaction mechanism is still at a very limited stage. We can get into a world similar to the first person, but there we don't even know where to put our hands and feet: With the current VR interactive solutions, we really have no way to reflect our body in VR.
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In traditional FPS games, the player has been trained very well, there is a set of conventional operating methods (mouse and keyboard / handle), from a game to another game, even the keys will not have much change. The mechanism design and interaction design of the game is a process of mutual adaptation and adaptation. At the end, it is stable to the optimal solution of the greatest common divisor. Many unnecessary interaction mechanisms and designs are abandoned in later versions.
For example, early FPS games often had a left/right stance, but with the rise of the host FPS, this design was slowly abandoned. Admittedly, there are some high-end FPS, or first-person simulation games such as the “Armed Assault†series that add a lot of complex interactions for the Gameplay mechanism (in this series, for example, head orientation and body orientation are different), but That's only a handful. But in VR, the whole story is completely different.
The ambiguity of this interaction is reflected in the game, that is, the interaction mechanism of the entire game can only rely on the handle of Vive. Players visually feel that they have entered another world, but are completely bound by their hands and feet.
Here is an example of a small design in the game: In the beginning of the game, the system requires the player to pick up a dagger and puncture the eggs on the ground. In traditional FPS, this is simplified and reduced to a similar mechanism to shooting : the player also targets the eggs, then presses the button and the character waves the dagger to attack the eggs.
In real life (or ideal virtual reality game), we took over the dagger sent by the NPC and then waved the dagger to attack the eggs ourselves. This is our experience in real life. In "Black Shield", we need to reach out to the virtual dagger by holding the handle, and then grab the handle trigger button to get the dagger, then wave the handle to puncture the eggs on the ground ... The whole process is very unnatural, and let People do not feel like games, but they are like labor.
The entire interaction is not as simple as the traditional FPS. Players only need to press a few buttons to complete, nor do they naturally have to learn from the players without having to learn from everyday experience. Players need to learn arbitrarily and intuitively, and they are not simple and convenient game mechanisms to complete the game. In the game process, they must always remind themselves that this is not a reality, cultivate a new set of reflections, and they must always worry that they will Will not hit the wall... To be honest, this is not a simple job, and it is hard to say that it is a meaningful job.
And worse, the more diverse Gameplay you want to introduce, the more incompatible interactions you have to design, and the learning curve is further lengthened. And Black Shield did exactly that. Shooting with a dagger is not the same as shooting with a gun. Shooting and releasing a gun is not the same. Using the same common tools, you need to learn several different usages, and you must remember how each game/each skill operates differently. 5 minutes of experience + 10 minutes of teaching, as a veteran player can also get started quickly, for a experience of those who have no experience in the game, the teaching process may become more difficult.
Job Simulator is difficult to classify it into any traditional game category, but the operation of this game is hardly natural
So, can we lower the threshold by simplifying the game mechanics in VR first-person games? This is feasible. It can be said that many of the current VR first-person games that are already online have already taken note of this problem and tried to solve it. But this leads to another bigger problem:
The monotony of the game mechanics.
The current VR first-person game, the vast majority of gameplay and 20 years ago, there is no essential difference between the "shoot beach landing" shooting game, which is also the characteristics of VR.
Due to the physiological nature of human beings, the movement of the visual field and the movement of the body must be matched in VR; therefore, the conventional movement of traditional first-person games is not feasible in VR. This causes the player's degree of freedom in the VR game to actually be greatly reduced. In the past, we could run and sprint around the map in the game, but now we only have a few square meters of space to move around, and there is no way to jump in and out of the game. Moreover, how many players can really like the protagonist of the game can never tire of running to fight? Can you stay breathless for up to half an hour?
Throughout the traditional FPS, the gameplay of this type of game is generally two large categories: in a single machine, to attract players through map design and enemies, or to attract players through powerful scene performances and plots; multiplayer games It is through good map design and weapon system that players can repeatedly play tirelessly on a map.
But the first-person VR game is tantamount to abandoning this type of core gameplay. There is no way to move, most of the design of FPS is no longer true. Traditional stand-up shooting games certainly have fun, but its fun is based on completely different mechanisms than FPS. From this point of view, VR's first-person shooter game may be closer to Gameplay in the traditional horizontal/vertical shooting game, and can only work on the weapon system/enemy combination. But its design possibilities are greatly reduced.
This is the basic problem of the current first-person VR game: VR brings unprecedented immersion, but players are deprived of the interaction.
VR as a whole has not yet found a mature interaction paradigm, paradox game. I believe that under the gradual progress of technology, VR will bring more natural and intuitive interaction until it is no different from real life. You shoot with a gun and you really shoot with a gun, not Hold a "like but not too like" handle to shoot. At present, it is not a good choice to be a first-person VR game.
Archery games are also a popular category in Vive games, but its problem is that the game is very shallow.
Third-person games do not have this problem. The player is no longer the character itself; the player is merely a floating camera vision, which avoids many problems of the first-person VR game, and at the same time, it can continue the mature game mechanism and interaction design of the traditional third-person game. Although, we can say that such games deprive the general public of the imagination of VR immersion, but this is a better future for players.
| So, how good is the game of VR design it?I'm here to try to summarize the elements needed for a few good VR games. In other words, if the VR game does not have these elements, then it can only be limited to the VR experience hall and VR playground, providing a short-term stimulation and freshness, and can not provide stable long-term quality experience. Even in the range of a VR experience hall of 30-60 square meters, the things that can be done and the experience that is obtained are very limited, and it is difficult to call it a cross-time experience.
First, VR games cannot bring players a bad experience.
There are a lot of games this one did not achieve - just as said, VR's traits require that the experience of the body movement and the experience of the person's field of vision match, walk 100 meters in the VR, the experiencer himself must walk 100 meters Otherwise, the experiencer will feel sick. Therefore, forced movements and shot transitions can no longer occur in the game. There are quite a few VR games I have seen that violate this principle. This is the situation of the first person. The third person will be much better.
Second, VR games make players feel comfortable.
Comfort consists of many things: After a certain period of time, the game is not allowed to fatigue; the game does not require players to perform intense activities; the game does not allow the player to be in danger of being injured in reality, and so on. Traditional gamers don't feel tired for playing one day (it is because they sit on the sofa...). VR games want the player to invest more time and money than the current full demo status. This is necessary. .
Third, Gameplay mechanisms and interactions in VR games do not require too complicated learning and start-up curves.
There are two paths to achieve this: either, still follow the design of traditional games, use traditional game mechanisms such as third-person platform actions to VR; or, from scratch, design an extremely natural and intuitive interaction mechanism that does not require learning. . The former, we have VR versions of many traditional third-person games that are now on Oculus (such as "Lucky's Tale"). It is still established as a traditional game; the latter, we have Valve in "The Lab." The Xortex arcade bee game in the experience, there is almost no threshold for any players to enter the game immediately understand their operating mechanism.
Xortex is actually a 3D bee
Fourth, VR games need to be replayable.
Many current VR "games" are more like games than Demos. Once the player/experiencer understands the mechanics of the game, the game quickly loses playability because it does not give the player a richer gaming experience. Replayability has two factors: First, the richness and depth of the Gameplay mechanism of the game. For example, the ACT game, why players can repeatedly hit a fixed level, is that the action system can not be completely excavated in a simple or even several games, summed up, that is "easy to use, difficult to master." The second factor is multiplayer. If VR games can be born like DotA, or step back, a simple and straightforward battle game like "Royal War" will greatly increase the replayability of VR games.
Fifth, VR games are different from traditional games.
In the first-person game, VR did a completely different feeling, but it weakened the gameplay; in the third-person VR game, the VR headshot is equivalent to a player who can freely control the top-angle camera, so how to use such a brand-new The degree of freedom to design a game is a part of the game designer who needs to think about it. Many current third-person VR games can hardly be said to have a difference from traditional third-person games. This is not an excellent design. For example, the use of VR's freedom of view of the player to increase the level of diversity, can make people feel that such games can only appear in VR, but not in other places.
Lucky's Tale is a very traditional third-person platform action game
Every revolutionary new technology will destroy the old paradigm, absorb its essence, and abandon its dross. But this process will inevitably cause damage to this category itself. The development of the movie is like this: As early as the era of silent film, if you want to make the story clear without dialogue, you need very powerful video narrative skills. The invention of the audio film led directors and actors to focus on dialogue and ignore images. Later, the transition from black and white to color, the transition from the ordinary screen to the wide screen has undergone a similar process.
The same is true for the gaming industry. The listing of new consoles will often result in a series of broadcast games, which can be seen as the phenomenon that developers cannot adapt to the new era and impair gameplay . VR is the latest revolutionary new technology. Many of our imaginations for VR games will not come true in the near future (say, within five years). We cannot completely abandon the traditional game mechanics to re-imagin a game for VR - and this is exactly the same. VR game developers are doing. I admire the pioneers' efforts, but the vast majority of them will become martyrs.
For players and game developers, the best path is still to inherit the traditional game category, use VR to explore how to combine these traditional game mechanics with the characteristics of VR to produce some new experiences. As a 20-year-old player and a VR practitioner, I hope that VR games will bring us a richer and more varied experience. After all, VR games still have to be brought home.
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