Doom 3 VR, my experience and thoughts

So I recently bought a Rift and decided to play some Doom 3 BFG edition with the fantastic VR mod that makes the rift work with it. So far I have somewhat mixed feelings on VR/Rift. On one hand, the actual tech is fucking amazing. You really do feel like you are actually standing in the middle of a Doom 3 level, and thanks to touch you actually get to use your hands to move the weapons around like you would in real life. This is the closest I have ever come to actually feeling like I was in a real video game. Now for the bad:

Simply put, as realistic as VR is we are not yet at a point where it's that comfortable to use. I can't stand using the thing for more than 30 min at a time before I have to take a break because of sweating and eye strain. In addition the resolution while not terrible isn't anywhere near as good as if you were using an actual good monitor and it's not hard to tell. It also doesn't help that you have to have the sensors in fairly exact locations. I was using this thing while visiting my parent's place and my brother moved one of my sensors to a slightly different location to play something else near the TV and it fucked everything and I had to reset the whole damn thing.

Basically: Awesome tech with tons of potential, but currently too much pain to actually play for any decent lenghts of time. I can see myself playing this every now and then but 90% of my game time will be spent on an actual monitor with mouse and keyboard. I will probably replay Doom 3 and the expansions with VR at least once to re-experience the world in VR but after that I probably won't do it again.

Awesome! Too bad it's still too expensive for me. Also, it's a shame developers aren't adopting it more. I haven't seen people talk about it during the last year. I guess it never really took off.

I wonder how Doom 2016 would feel. Could you try it and report? How about Classic Doom with a few mapsets?

5 hours ago, DooM_RO said:

I wonder how Doom 2016 would feel. Could you try it and report? How about Classic Doom with a few mapsets?

Doom 2016 doesn't have any VR support, though I heard they experimented with a special version for VR which sadly I hear is just a railshooter rather than the actual game. Honestly I am not sure how such a super fast paced game could work with VR since ever the original Doom can feel a bit sick at times when things get too hectic.

As for the original Dooms, they work in VR. I have tried both the original Doom, Brutal Doom and also Brutal Doom 64 in VR. Brutal Doom 64 works best out of all the old school Dooms because of it's more realistic textures and smoother sprites, though Doom 3 BFG is by far the most realistic experience since you can use the touch controllers to actually hold and move your guns in an extremely realistic way. To bad playing for more than 30 min is a pain because of sweating and eye strain. That is like the single biggest problem I have with VR right now.

It would be cool if you recorded yourself while playing the game and giving us your impressions. 

How does classic Doom feel in VR? Is it weird?

6 hours ago, DooM_RO said:

It would be cool if you recorded yourself while playing the game and giving us your impressions. 

 

How does classic Doom feel in VR? Is it weird?

There are already videos of people playing Doom and Doom 3 VR on youtube. Frankly it isn't possible to demonstrate what VR is like by just showing a video of yourself playing since you can't actually see the VR without the helmet.

The original Doom plays fine with VR. The only real problem is that since the gun models are sprites the HUD just kinda floats in the middle of the screen. This is less of a problem with Brutal Doom 64 since the hud is located beneath you so you can't see it unless you look down but even then the gun sprite is located at the center of the screen. It's not the end of the world however. Unlike Doom 3 there is no touch controller support so instead you use the controller (you technically could probably use the keyboard but I play standing with a controller) to move and the headset to aim (where you look the crosshair points). It's pretty fun but not as ideal as Doom 3 where you use the touch controller to actually hold the guns. Doom 3 honestly has the most advanced VR i have seen so far, like the game was actually designed for it. Not only do you use touch to move the guns but your whole body is actually fully animated, meaning that the guns don't actually just float in thin air but are actually held in your harms which themselves are connected to the rest of your body. If you look downwards you can actually see your torso. Granted that if you move your arms in certain ways it can lead to some goofy looking arm animations. There is also an option to manually use GUI computer screen with your actual fingers, but I personally just use the point and click method since it's faster.

The problem with VR in classic Doom is that no ports that support it have head/neck positioning like was added to Doom 3 BFG Edition for this exact purpose. It's otherwise just as good as when I played HL2 and BFG Edition.

It's a shame that there doesn't seem to be any software support for the DK1 anymore (the only HMD I have), not even HL2 supports it anymore in updates. That being said, I boycott Oculus now, they will never see a penny from me again and I encourage others to do the same. I don't like that Fuckerburg owns them now, or the gradual Facebook-centric walled-garden they implied the Oculus ecosystem would become over time.

Credit to Palmer for successfully getting VR going again, but I lost all respect for him after he revealed his arrogance (bragging about wealth in a condescending way) and campaigning for that orange puppet that is currently fucking everything up in the US.

As for Carmack, I don't know enough about the lawsuit to really comment, but having looked into it, it seems a bit less cut-and-dry than at first. What a mess.