(04-09-2014, 09:48 AM)droog Wrote: Is there any information regarding Oculus Rift support for SOMA?
Spoiler below!
Quote:GB: What’s becoming increasingly interesting as a potential tool for horror games is the Oculus Rift. As someone that’s crafted a lot of first-person horror experiences, have you given some thought to how this might intersect with what you guys have been creating?
Grip: I tried it out almost half a year ago, something like that. It’s a lot more effective than you think it would be, which is also the downside of it. It’s very easy to get sick in it. [laughs] There’s two [sides] to this.
I’m going to start with the bad stuff. For us, it’s two [things] that’s bad about it. First off, it’s visual effects. I’m not sure we could do any of the visual effects that we do. We do some zooming in when there’s a scary moment--we did it in Amnesia. There’s tons of this stuff. You change the field-of-view. I’m unsure how much of that you could really do in an Oculus Rift without making the player really, really dizzy. So I’m unsure. The thing is that those effects are not crucial, and you have other things in front of you when you’re using a Rift, but that’s designing two games in a way. You have to balance that sort of thing.
The other bad part is [considering] how we do interaction with this thing? I’ve tried Among the Sleep. The developers showed their game on the Oculus, and I tried it with their interface and it’s sort of cumbersome to use it. So I’m unsure. I only tried it for a few minutes, so I haven’t tested anything, but it seems that you need to simplify your interaction system in order for the player to be able to play a game for a long while. For instance, just to open a door [is hard], perhaps almost like some Heavy Rain-like [interaction]? When you’re near, an icon pops up in-game, when you’re in front of something. I’m unsure. But something like that, some simplified interaction system. So, again, that also means we have to do a different game, we have to design it from bottom up to be a Rift game.
But, then, on the other hand, there’s tons of good stuff. And the good stuff is VR stuff that, perhaps, not what you think about directly. First of all, it’s the peripheral vision. It’s so great for horror stuff. You can flicker stuff in the peripheral. How our brain works is that you’re very good at spotting movement in the peripheral, but you can’t spot any details at all. It’s exactly the thing we want out of a horror game. We can use that to our advantage. The player could be very aware that there’s stuff happening, but it can’t see it because it’s happening in the field-of-vision where they don’t have any possibility to see that happening. You can leverage that to your advantage.
The other stuff that’s cool is that you’re actually using gravity. You have the sense of balance, which is actually a sense of its own. You can use that to your advantage. For instance, I tried to the rollercoaster. Have you tried the rollercoaster?
GB: Oh, yeah.
Grip: I almost fell! [laughs] I’m afraid of heights, and it was just too much. I had to tear the helmet off me. “Shit, this is insane.” It’s all because of this sense of balance totally flips out on me. You can have this great vertigo scene in an Oculus. This sort of thing could be leveraged in a horror environment. So you could, perhaps, have the floor just slightly leaning. This kind of strange stuff, where you can’t peek up really, but your sense of balance is picking them up. So those kinds of things could be really cool for horror games.
But in the end, what I think is that it’s very important to remember that the best kind of horror--just like when you’re reading a book, it’s not like “oh, if this font was just a little bit crisper. It would be so much more scary” [laughs] Because it’s not happening in the pages, it’s happening in your mind. It’s the same with television and your computer monitor. It’s a feedback loop that you’re giving instructions to the computer, and the computer giving your something back. That collaborative work paints a mental picture in your mind. That’s where the scarier part happens. It’s when we leave gaps for the player to fill out, that’s when the true horror happens.
Even if Oculus Rift is just [has] the sense of presence grow a lot, you have the peripheral vision, you have the sense of balance, the monitor is in your face. Also, you have another feedback loop because your head movements start [influencing the game]. The virtual avatar you’re inhabiting, he reacts to your head movements. That adds another layer into how you’re building up your mental image of it all happening. But at the same time, it’s still the mental image that’s still the most important. It’s very easy to be very reliant on technology to building good horror, while most of the time, the best things are the things you cannot see.
That’s my thought process, but I’m very interested in using it. What we thought about doing, and I’m not sure if we’re gonna do it, but I really would be cool to, at least as a starting point, craft very specific Oculus Rift experiences. Then, have it along with the game or, perhaps, show off at some conference or something like that. That would be awesome. I have some ideas on how to do that. Then, you just do something that’s “this is made for use with this device.” That would be very cool to do. That has to take time from the bulk game, and I sort of want to get it done, as well. We’ll have to see what happens. [laughs]
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