Ace Combat 7's Looking Top Gun on PlayStation VR

Great, another tacked on mode rather than the full game supporting VR.

Expect CEX trade in prices to plummet by mid point of this year when everyone gets bored of tacked on modes and frankly, cash grab hour long titles.

@Neolit Yes without a shadow of a doubt. I paid over £400 in total for the device and move controllers for reasonably full length titles.

Not hour long tacked on modes or £20/30 2 hour long games.

@Neolit Thats not the problem though really is it? Take GT Sport, Trackmania and now this as an example.

Why can they have a side version of the game that supports VR and not just the full game? Its ridiculous that VR support is added for select "special" missions rather than in standard gameplay.

Theres no real good reason for it. If the game engine already works in VR, then there's very little additional cost to allow you to play the game in VR. Unless the hardware just isnt good enough and Resi Evil seems to suggest that not the problem. Infact id go as far as saying that creating these special modes adds more cost to the development as the missions or whatever need to be created from scratch.

@get2sammyb to be honest.. no one really wants to play FF XV in VR fully anyway, its just going to be a tacked on tech demo, there no option to play first person in the normal game so no one is really missing anything. My point above stands though. Its messy the way games are getting VR support just now. The only one thats committed to being able to play normally and in VR is Resident Evil.

These games have all been touted before PSVR's launch as being VR games in development for PSVR. They're really not, they're added side modes. No different from 'Bonus content' An afterthought if you will. Lots of people are going to be rightly annoyed with these announcements.

@Neolit No offence but thats absolute tripe in terms of the games ive mentioned.. "more costly enterprise as you have to think of your game in spherical 360 terms"

Yes completely, in terms of an platformer or even a shooter, fair enough. Ill give you that. You need to design the game to work in VR. Which explains why a lot of devs have went down the slightly lazy/easy route of on rails shooters.

A racing game or flight shooter that has the mode already in the game tucked away. Absolutely 100% not. You have to be completely blinkered to believe that. A racing track is a racing track, the cars are just reskins of the same thing with different speeds/handling etc. Having some of the tracks or whatever in VR is absolutely no different from having them all.

Keep in mind that you can play Ace combat and GT Sport in pilot/driver view and pan the view with commonly the right analogue stick. The only difference in VR is using your head. Those games should be the easiest to add full VR support.

Racing games and flight sims are the easiest of all to implement in VR simply because the cockpit camera view is already there and has been for years.. its just controlling the head XYZ position with your actual head rather than an analogue stick. Theres literally no real work needing done apart from optimising the graphics engine to accommodate the processing of two images for both eyes to give a stereoscopic view instead of one. IE to a TV.

"no, absolutely no offence, except yes. C'mon no need for that, just state your point of view without qualifying someone else's." What?!

What I was saying wasnt a sarcastic dig at you.. you seem to have taken great offence, my apologies. Have a Snickers.

My point was that you were saying that these games specifically mentioned require additional thought and testing to see if they work in a 3d space.

My argument is that they really dont. The camera view is already in the game so its not as if they need to make the game work from an in game vehicle view other than making the graphics engine stick to the 60fps limit on all the tracks(GT)/missions(ace combat)

Its a cop out to just leave out the rest of the game and just have a bonus mode with VR support. Especially in titles that require very little work in theory to work in VR and I dont feel its acceptable to be of the view that, its the first iteration of the device so we'll just accept the fact that VR support is shoddy in titles that were marked as being in development for VR when the device was announced.

VR is either ready for the big time or its not, if devs keep supporting VR in this way then the likelihood is people will have a bad taste from VR and not bother IF PSVR 2 happens.

@solocapers - I'm not certain it's a case of simply adapting existing cameras for VR tacked-on modes, as evidenced by Driveclub - but evidently it can and should be done.

An interesting debate here, but I have to chip in and say that when Sony release PSVR as a seperate PlayStation system, they need to back it up with dedicated, AAA-quality titles both first and third party, at full-length, campaign-sized experiences.

Especially at £450 with all the controllers etc, plus the PS4.

I'm very hopeful re future PSVR releases as full-length campaigns, but certainly agree Sony needs to do more to support it with proper releases - and as a die-hard Vita supporter, they have to learn from that easily impressive technical marvel which didn't get the right support.

@Galvatron it kinda is though in reality. The only stopping point is making the game work at 60fps while retaining as much graphical fidelity as possible. That's the only problem with driveclub VR. The tracks are a blurry mess.

The impression I get is that the standard ps4 just isn't capable of pushing the graphics required to display essentially 2 images in a high enough detail at medium to long distances. The pro is then held back by having no exclusivity.

Which is why we are seeing these add-ons to the main game where they can better control what is seen in game. I suspect GT sport will heavily feature tracks with tunnels in VR for example.

So that then boils down to the ps4 being incapable for such games just now which wasn't exactly made clear in the buildup.. especially given the driveclub VR screenshots which were deceptive to say the least and helped sell the unit for racing/cockpit styled fans such as myself.

That makes sense and explains why games like job sim etc look sharp as their viewing range is some what limited and loss of detail is harder to see.

It seems like each day, I'm more and more glad I didn't invest in PSVR. This looks cool and all, but I would rather see games implement VR into the full game rather than these side projects.

I second @Neolit's oppinion. And if early adopters of the PSVR have thought that Sony will bring a plethora of multiple hours long, full fledged games to it, they are definitily missinformed. No developer made that assumption. There are not even a handfull on the other VR platforms aswell. Elite Dangerous and Minecraft comes to mind. But I doubt, that one wants to play them for hours in VR.

VR is all about a new experience and more immersive gaming. I think that this is what PSVR has already showcased and is truly capable of. Batman VR, Robinson, Holoball and Rez Infinite are games where even Vive and Rift Owners are left in the cold...

All in all, its no news that early adopters pay more and get less of whats to come. But we are the avantgarde to push things forward.

@solocapers you might want to check r/PSVR but here is something frst hand from developers:

"[–]viveaddict
I've done a few VR jams now and a bunch of experimental titles. Here's one way to think about VR development for the non developers in the audience:
Imagine you are writing an email where after every letter you type you have to stand up, walk over to your VR gear, put on and ensure everything hardware wise is working and then carefully review what you've written in the VR headset. Upon confirmation you must sit down and type one letter and repeat the process over.
Oh and in the middle of writing your email your email program crashes, and this doesn't even include setting the font, or reviewing and edit of your email to ensure that... well, it makes sense.
You invite a friend over to read your email who asks why you wrote an email about dogecoin to the president of FIFA, when you thought you wrote a brilliant poem to the love of your life.
Why are there so many wave shooters? Because they are easy to test."

"[–]LiftoffLabsVR
A related question might be, "why can't developers just port my favorite console/PC games to VR?" Well it's because of all these things we've discussed already and I'll paste part of a reply from another thread here:
Depending on the engine it might technically be easy to flip a switch and activate VR mode for your scene cameras. It's just a checkbox in Unity for instance. Of course that's ignoring all the work it takes to port an older game up to the most recent version of a given engine (which can in some cases be impossible).
Performance is a major problem for existing games – a game built for 30hz at 1080P is just not going to be optimized for 90hz rendering to two eyes. This alone is enough to stop a VR port in its tracks. Performance on PS4 in particular is already a challenge for games coming from PC based VR. You'd be amazed at all the tricks Owlchemy Labs pulled to get Job Simulator running well, and that's a cartoony game.
If you have some interest in the kinds of adaptations that have to be made in a best case scenario, here's an interesting talk about Minecraft. Minecraft is already first person and has a cartoony look that makes it easier to optimize. And still even after all the updates they made, I can only play games with motion like this for a few minutes before I have to stop and take a break for a couple of hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_SHuosEORw
Ideally VR games are designed around keeping the player immobile and having action happen around them, and come to them. That's a major break from AAA gaming conventions over the past 20 years."