The Open Worlds of VR
With the coming of room-scale VR, a number of experiences were released that neatly encapsulate the player within their environment. The trick to doing so successfully is to make the spacial limitation contextually plausible. Take the example of an office cubicle from Job Simulator, the operating table in Surgeon Simulator, or my own ne’er-to-be-released title Osaka Capsule Hotel Tycoon. In each game, it makes sense to stay within your room scale borders since the goals of the games require it. When done well, this element presents itself as a feature rather than a bug and urge to look about, see the next cubicle, are somewhat suppressed.
In Bartle’s Taxonomy of Player Types, these types of games appeal to Achievers since they are given a rigid goal and feel the satisfaction of completing them, but the Explorers may feel less satiation within their room-scale confines and wish to walk around, maybe visit the secretary down the hall to ask about their kids or go to the break room to commit arson. This gamer archetype is likely to feel happier in 2017 as more open world experiences are on the way.
High Fidelity is one such experience from Second Life founder and open-world guru Phillip Rosedale. And it’s in Beta now. As they tweak the system and work out bugs, Hi-Fi is poised to offer the experience of world building and self-determination. Visitors are given a tablet which gives them god-like power over the domain. They can customize themselves, build structures, or purchase items from the marketplace. During my own visit, I used my immense power to get a ping-pong gun, so I could cheat in a game of table tennis. Though there are good looking environments in place, there’s an incompleteness to much of it, a blanket invitation for content creators to fill the space, making it a testament to their collective self-expression.
This year will also give us the virtual world platform Sansar, which is from Linden Labs and purported to the VR iteration of Second Life. Currently, they are letting batches of developers into the space. Certainly, these early entrants will serve as role models to the horde of plebs waiting outside their gates. Allowing experts to set the standard for your environment may prove to be wise since it will promote a general high quality for the entire virtual world. Based on our experience of Second Life, we can expect some visitors to take up residence on a semi-permanent basis, so they may develop cultures and subcultures while working within their digital economy.
For open-world fans content to explore and interact with someone else’s vision, Fallout 4 VR can’t be too far from release as the developers claim that it’s playable from start to finish.
While these VR experiences come from reputable and well-funded developers, one hopes that improvements to processing power will inevitably make them more accessible to creative teams and more open for the rest of us.
