HTC Vive - First Few Days Impressions Part 2

Welcome to the second part of my "First Few Days" review of the HTC Vive.

In the first part, I focussed on the technology and ease of use, to come to the conclusion that you do need to have some general technical ability in order to get on with using the HTV Vive headset.

In this part, I am looking more at the actual experience of using the headset. What are the first experiences using the headset like? How do you get on with finding more stuff to do? What is the quality of what is out there?

The Lab - A great first VR experience

The Very First Experience - The Lab

If you read all the articles in the Internet about the HTC Vive headset itself, but also the best experiences there are, both types of article will repeatedly mention The Lab, even one year after the Vive headset has come out. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

The Good Thing About The Lab

It's a good thing because The Lab does demonstrate the very best of the VR World. It is a completely realistic feeling virtual world with plenty for you tinker and play around in. I highly recommend The Lab as being the very first thing you load up on your new headset because it genuinely does instill the real sense of actually being there, and it gives you a great taster of how the VR world can be utilised for a wide range of fun experiences, combined with the typical sense of comedy you get from some of Valve's signature offerings like Portal.

Xortex - A novel VR shoot-em-up

My favourite experiences are:

• Xortex - a shoot 'em up where you basically turn one of your hands into a spaceship and you fly around an arena dodging bullets and shooting back by moving your hand around and aiming at the baddies.
• Longbow - An archery game where your controllers are the bow and arrow and you have to defend your castle against the enemy hordes. There are no sight trails or cross-hairs to help you with this, you have to aim just using your own depth perception and hand-eye coordination and it works great!
• Secret Shop - Not a game as such, like Xortex and Longbow, but an experience. This is a great demonstration of another side of the VR experience, just looking around a virtual world and playing with stuff.

Longbow - your aim is your own

 

The Bad Things About The Lab

The reason that, 1 year after release, The Lab is still continually mentioned as one of the "must do" experiences and in various top 10 lists, is that it highlights the lack of comparable experiences available on the market.

Bearing in mind I haven't even had my HTC Vive for a week, obviously I have only just scratched the surface and so I am sure there are great experiences right at my fingertips that I just haven't looked at properly, but when you start diving through Steam and Viveport you start to understand that there are a lot of things on offer with quite high price tags to be gambling on things.

Trying Stuff Out

So obviously you will start with the free offerings, and this gives you a sense of the very wide-ranging levels of quality and gives you even more of a dilemma when it comes to finding more experiences to do.

Here are some of the things I have tried with a very short one/two sentence review.

Allumette - A short story/animation

• Allumette - A great little animation and story, but quite short. Good for free, and probably something great to show your wife/girlfriend, but I wouldn't pay for it.
• Everest VR - As a freeby bundled with the HTC Vive, Everest is a great "feels like you are there" experience and a fun way to spend half an hour. As a £10.99 experience you have to pay for, totally not worth it. It's a great experience, the fun is around the realistic conveyance of the Everest and the insight into the experience of climbing it, but it entails standing and listening for 5 minutes and then doing a very simple action, then standing for 5 minutes and doing a very simple action....
• Richie's Plank Experience - This is another bundled freeby, and as a freeby it is "okay." As a paid for experience I'd feel ripped off. It's an okay bit of fun for 5 minutes because it's free, but really it is quite amateurish.
• The Price of Freedom - This is a short-blast adventure game which basically consists of rummaging around finding things whilst having a simple story around it. The game was good, but it was very buggy. Again, great as a freeby on Steam, I wouldn't want to pay for it.
• Belko VR: An Escape Room Experiment - I've done Escape Rooms in real life and this game gives you a good experience of the same. The challenge is easy but fun. The time pressure adds to the fun element but it does have you bashing the walls as you forget where your room scale boundaries are. A great free experience that has a few minor glitches.

Everest VR - immersive but overpriced

So all the above was what gave me a sense that actually, once you start looking into it, you realise that there are not a wealth of truly immersive experiences that you are going to be happy signing yourself up for. The quality is lacking in a lot of them and/or a lot of them are really short. Everest VR is great as an experience, but £10.99 for 15-30 minutes of original experience? Really?

So, if you are like me, you start thinking about what is open to you. You've just spend £759 on the hardware (plus £20 on a HDMI/DVI cable in my case), you've tried the freebies, now you're left spending £5, £10, or £20 a time on 30 minute experiences? It doesn't add up to a good thing.

Thankfully, there are solutions to this.

The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed

This game deserves its own section in today's blog post, because it is exactly the type of game experience you bought your headset for.

The Gallery - Episode 1: Call of the Starseed is a completely immersive, fun, top quality, stable VR gaming experience. It gives you a great sense of fun in just presenting a world you are happy to wonder aimlessly around in and just try stuff out (and there are Steam achievements for various pointless-but-fun tasks).

Call of the Starseed - A true VR game

I must admit, I tried it because, like Everest VR, it is free bundled with the Vive, but unlike any of the other free experiences I have tried, with this one I would have been happy paying for it. It is still quite short, but at least it is 2 hours of gaming short rather than 15 minutes. Also, I am definitely going to be buying the further episodes as they are released. It's still true that £14.99 is still a fair amount to pay for a game much shorter than a triple-A non-VR game you might buy, but the fully immersive experience makes it worth it, at least until the market gets a bit more depth.

I'm looking forward to episode 2 of this game series to come out! In the meantime, here is a more in-depth review that largely reflects how I feel about this game.

VorpX

This is something I have mentioned in a previous post, and I won't go into detail yet because it is worthy of a post on its own, but with VorpX, this is something where if you can get to grips with setting it up, a fair investment of roughly £35 is going to give you hours, day and months of great time with your headset.

VR Mods to Existing Games

Doom 3 VR - time to poo yourself?

This is something I have yet to dive into, but I ready yestermod available for Doom 3 BFG Edition that makes it a 100% VR experience like the game was designed for it from the ground up. I look forward to trying that out and writing about it.
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To Sum Up

Even after 1 year, the VR market is rather thin on the ground. There are some reasonable but short free experiences, there are a previous few decent paid-for experiences (looking forward to looking deeper at Serious Sam in the future)....

But after a couple of days of looking at the true VR market, I have already switched to the Modding world in order to play my old games in VR.

This sums up the real problem with the VR market currently, there are no triple A experiences
. In the traditional gaming world we are used to paying £30 for rock-solid games that last 100 hours of play, not half that amount for 5% of the experience and bugs to contend with.

Converts old games into VR experiences

I still have absolutely no regrets about my HTC Vive purchase, largely thanks to VorpX at the moment it has to be said. Still, Fallout 4 VR Edition can't get here soon enough.

So this is why I think, if you are going to buy a VR headset today, you do need to have technical knowhow in order to get the best out of it. There just isn't enough instant access "it just works" experience out there without paying (another) arm and a leg to find it.