I totally want to play this.
Love those games. Bringing them to a larger audience is ultimately a good thing, but I think they’ll lose quite a bit of their impact without the VR aspect.
To be honest while I loved the first, midway through the second one even the VR wow factor wasn’t enough to get me excited. There’s that one awesome moment where you see your reflection in a mirror. That has stuck with me but I barely remember anything else about the game.
I did finish it, I don’t regret buying it, but I would never play it flatscreen.
I’ve loved following VR the last few years, watching developers figure out in real-time what makes a good game in a headset, but it really does feel like it’s really on the way out. Moss is one of the big successes of the VR years and it’s now being excised from the medium. People are going to look back on VR in a few years time as a really weird niche of the games industry, like gaming’s very own Galápagos of ideas that never took over the mainstream the way people thought they might in 2016.
The Steam Frame has a good chance of changing that like the Steam Deck did for handheld computer gaming. Partly because it bridges the gap between PC gaming and handheld gaming because the early Rift and Vive were strictly PC based which excluded people who didn’t have the best gaming rigs and these headsets weren’t cheap either. And then Meta comes along as does Pico but they focus on handheld gaming which is cheaper but doesn’t allow the best graphics or long term games, more mobile style games than anything else.
But the Steam Frame has a chance to make a better bridge between the two since it is a PC at its core and runs Linux and doesn’t need a dedicated PC to play games.
I’m optimistic, anyway.
I’m still a bit skeptical, if only because the Steam Frame still won’t solve the issues a lot of people have about limited space to use VR, the associated cost, and just VR’s overall utility.
The current economy sucks, a lot of folks can’t afford more than one or two dedicated gaming devices, and VR is a hard sell when PC and handheld gaming will always get preference. It’s not dead and it won’t be going anywhere, but I don’t see it evolving out of “niche” status anytime soon.
