The co-creator of the original Xbox console, Seamus Blackley, said VR still doesn’t have a “killer app” yet and that’s why the technology hasn’t taken off.
Blackley spoke on the VideoGamer Podcast (via PC Guide) and had some strong words to say about VR and AR gaming.
“We’ve seen VR and AR not really take off, and if you’re a big fan, I’m sorry, but it’s just the fucking fact,” he said. “There is no killer app and nobody can put their finger on what a killer app could be.”
He continued: “Everybody has a different kind of personal fantasy and then, at least in my experience, when you are given the environment that you sort of fantasised about you’re like ‘OK’ and you just want to take the headset off, because it’s this hot, heavy thing. It’s weird and disappointing.”
Blackley said one of the key issues with VR “from a narrative standpoint” is that it offers “too much freedom”, and that illusion of freedom is undermined by the need for developers to provide narrative control.
“When you lower the structure so much for the player that they are in the headset and they look around everywhere, in principle as an elevator pitch that sounds great,” he said. “In practice, when we want to be entertained, we want a storyteller to control the narrative and to entertain us.
“To some extent you need [developers] to be able to control what you’re looking at,” he continued. “You need them to constrain you to the narrative which is not the thing you’re going to do. And there’s a small minority of guys who are going to scream and yell at them and want full control and that’s great, super cool, fine, guys but they enjoy having that control because they’re getting off on breaking that narrative control and they wouldn’t be getting off on it if it wasn’t there already, so it’s paradoxical.”
There have certainly been some great technical showcases for VR: Horizon Call of the Mountain launched with Sony’s PSVR2 to show off its capabilities, while Valve’s Half-Life Alyx has been celebrated by the few who have played it.
Synapse is another great VR game that “epitomises everything great about virtual reality”, as reads our review, while Beat Saber – available on almost every headset – is arguably VR’s “killer app”.
Yet Sony in particular is failing to support its PS VR2 headset – its recent PlayStation State of Play had no mention of the platform whatsoever. Astro Bot creative director Nicolas Doucet said last year there’s “no chance” of the game coming to PS VR2, and as Eurogamer’s Ian Higton wrote “it’s hard to stay excited about the PlayStation VR2 if even Astro Bot won’t wear one”, after starring in PS VR1 game Astro Bot: Rescue Mission.
fbq('init', '560747571485047');
fbq('track', 'PageView'); window.facebookPixelsDone = true;
window.dispatchEvent(new Event('BrockmanFacebookPixelsEnabled')); }
window.addEventListener('BrockmanTargetingCookiesAllowed', appendFacebookPixels);