The defining thing about modern consumer virtual reality tech, a concept that is fast approaching its tenth birthday, is that the people who are into it are very into it, and nearly everybody else is not.
Example: In this line of work, I've spent years being attacked for not owning a VR headset. PR would hassle me because I couldn't play the games they were repping. Colleagues would bug me about the virtues of playing a slightly less boring version of Elite. Readers would berate me for ignoring whatever huge VR exclusive they were enjoying but nobody else even knew about because nobody else had a VR headset.
Regardless of the messenger, or the particulars of the message, the gist was always the same: people would passionately tell me I was a video games journalist and critic, and that I really should own a virtual reality headset. To which I would usually reply "Yes, but you are a huge weirdo, I'm not buying one of these things because they're really expensive, and I wouldn't get much in return", something I have long believed but which, given the tech's continued existence on the fringes of the medium--even among professional critics--most others seem to as well.
It's not like I've never used VR! I've used it a bunch, across work events and at friends’ places. I've fussed over HTC Vive sensors in the corner of the room, I've dragged bunches of wires across a bedroom floor, I've marvelled at how Beat Saber really is as good as people say it is.
But there's a big difference between enjoying a VR headset in a brief moment of time elsewhere and getting one myself, and whenever it came time to consider doing the latter, I just never felt like it was even remotely worth it. Until now, anyway, because all of this is to say that last week, after a Herculean effort on the part of my kids that lasted well over a year, I relented and got a Quest 3 (note: I didn't buy it, it’s a work loaner so that somebody here can play VR games).
And...it's fine? My experience with the thing a week into it is that it's exactly what I expected it to be. It can be fun when the technology is employed correctly. It's a cool party trick. And it's still, for all the advances made over the past decade, something that exists, and deserves to exist, on the fringes.
Those zealots I mentioned in the opening paragraph, the long-term VR evangelists who are committed to dragging headsets into the mainstream, would have us all convinced that virtual reality is just one price cut, one new feature or one killer exclusive away from smashing through its enthusiast ceiling and becoming as indispensable as a mouse or keyboard. If you've spent any amount of time among gaming communities online, and PC gaming in particular, you've no doubt met a bunch of these folks.
I've always thought those people were wrong, and now that I've got a Quest 3 in the house, I know they're wrong. If I think of a gaming setup like a house, a VR headset is like a swimming pool: cool to have if you can afford it, fun at parties and a pain to look after, but definitely not something you need to eat, sleep and live in the house itself.
For the record, some of the stuff I've played over the last week includes:
Automobilista 2 - VR was cool for like 13 seconds until I realised I had to focus on the middle of the screen to drive properly, which kinda defeated the point.
Beat Saber - A tremendous rhythm game let down by the fact I already had it on Steam and then had to buy it for the Quest itself and the stores don't carry over purchases)
Gorilla Tag - OK this is mostly my kid playing this, but if you ever wanted to know what it was like to live inside a N64 game, this has you covered
Star Wars Squadrons - The game I was most looking forward to playing, only I can't play it at all because there's some weird EA account bug that prevents the game from loading on loads of VR headsets, and none of the provided advice from EA on how to fix it works.
Superhot - There's a bit in the tutorial where you literally dodge a bullet and can watch it go past you like Neo and it's maybe a Top 5 All Time Great Video Game Moments for me in my entire life.
I think the one game that best sums up the VR experience in all its glory (and frustration), though, is Half-Life: Alyx. Having held off from trying out the various mods available for non-VR users over the years, I'd never played it once, and was so excited to finally get to play--let's allow this sentence to wash over us all for a second, since I think the significance of this has been lost over the years since it was released--a brand new Half-Life game.
Parts of Alyx are magical. Brand new video game experiences that left me breathless. Manually tuning an old AM radio with my hands, throwing glass bottles at neighbouring buildings, the opening minutes spent on a balcony overlooking CIty 17 are a tour de force of everything VR is capable of.
Then you're instantly reminded of everything it can't do. The entire Alyx experience is undermined by the fact the VR headset only immerses you fully in its world provided you're standing still. Once you need to move, a VR headset is out of ideas. You can either teleport instantly to another spot on the floor or slide around like it's Half-Life On Ice, both of which are cumbersome and suck when compared to even basic thumbstick-driven movement in a normal first-person game, let alone mouse + keyboard controls.
I appreciate that VR tech has improved greatly over the last few years. The Quest 3 is a deeply impressive piece of hardware in the ways I could talk about it during a launch review event: it's comfortable, has great screens and a surprisingly pleasant user interface.
But the tech can only improve so far. The problem with VR, the thing keeping it on the sidelines whenever we talk about video games as a wider thing, isn't incremental limitations on its screen resolution or the number of wires sticking out of it. It's not some mythical "killer app". It's the shortcomings of the idea of a headset itself, which promise perfect immersion in some ways (visuals) then rob us of it in others (movement). They were a problem all the way back when I first tried a HTC Vive in 2016; they're a problem in 2024 on the Quest 3, and will remain a problem for the foreseeable future.
So if you, like me, have always been wary of VR's promises vs its cost, I can tell you (especially since I didn’t actually pay for this unit) that in 2024 the needle hasn't moved much closer to this stuff being an essential purchase for most people. Then again, neither are swimming pools, and for anyone who can afford one--or who knows someone who can--those are fun too.
