PSVR2 | Review Thread
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You may be joking but I love to mow the lawn during Spring and Summer
It was in reference to an old Stephan king movie,
The lawnmower man, it had some VR in it.
Stephen King sued to have his name removed from the movie, since they just took the title from a two-page story he wrote and stuck it on a shitty, completely unrelated script.
It makes sense to talk about it, but docking points to it in a review is like telling people that a Ferrari is really bad because it's way too expensive.
The only comparable headsets tech-wise - and I use the word comparable very loosely here - either cost more (Meta Quest Pro) or require a PC. The HTC Vive Pro 2 and the Valve Index VR cost more and require beefy PCs. This is simply a way to devalue whats an excellent price for a device that could cost 50% more and still be well-positioned cost/spec-wise.
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Yep.
The price, the inclusion of a cable and that it isn't on PC are the biggest 'complaints' from 'people' online. Yet no complaints about the quantity or quality of the games or the tech inside the headset. We all know why.
Forbid, if they brag positively about it. Pappa Check won't come that month.
The PC Hamster Race just CAN’T STAND that console tech is pissing all over what’s currently available on PC.
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They can't even buy the PS5+VR2 equivalent on PC, which must rustle their jimmies even more. The last time I saw this level of PCMR melt-down was when the PS360 launched with multi-core CPUs while the PC were mainly on Single core. (IIRC)
The ones that weren’t melting down about PCs not having multiple cores yet were all riding Gabe the Hutt’s dick in the idiotic “multi core is bad for gaming! Single core and single thread for life!” camp.
True. Multi-core only became a commercial thing ~2005 and most people didn't have multi-core CPUs for a few years.
It was momentarily true, but the writing was on the wall, there is only so much you can do with a very fast core.
Which just proves devs are lazy.
Anything properly threaded and core-aware kills it in performance.
Forget the metaverse, Sony's PlayStation VR2 will make you a virtual reality believer again
Depending on who you ask, the PlayStation VR2 either represents the future of video gaming or is a spiritual successor to the Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad and SingStar microphone. What separates the successor to Sony’s original 2016 headset from those mainstays of any self-respecting mid-noughties student bedsit? Well, aside from the fact that the PS VR2 is a peripheral with the power to transport you untold worlds in a way that our own rendition of A-Ha’s "Take On Me" never could, it also comes with an asking price of £529.99 – that’s more expensive than the PS5 you’ll need to play it with.
However you look at it, the PS VR2 needs to be great to justify those demands. Certainly a lot better than its predecessor, which launched behind the virtual reality curve and struggled to compete with Meta’s 15 million-selling Oculus Quest 2 and Valve’s ultra-luxe Index for PC. Much to our own surprise and recurring delight, the PS VR2 is a headset that’s worth getting excited about. It’s easy to set up, gets rid of a lot of the faff that’s traditionally associated with this oft-temperamental tech and, most importantly, has a deep and varied roster of games to dig into from day one – including the thrilling Horizon Call of the Mountain. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s as good as it gets for VR in 2023 and that’s as much as anyone could reasonably expect.
VR made easy
As trite as it might sound, one of the greatest historical barriers to entry with any VR headset has been whether you can be bothered to get it out of the box or not. HTC’s original Vive demanded that you instal two 'Lighthouse' sensor boxes and an ocean of floor space for use before you could even think about strapping the thing on. The recent Meta Quest Pro costs £1,499, but has no real utility for those who don’t work at the most luxe 3D design and architecture agencies. Then there was the first PS VR, which wore like a Fisher-Price toy and relied on Sony’s PlayStation Move controllers from six years earlier on the PS3 to work.
Mercifully, the PS VR2 is nowhere near as demanding. Its four cameras for spatial awareness are embedded straight into the headset, it simply plugs into the PS5 via a single USB-C cable and remembers your surroundings between play sessions so you can dive straight into a Tetris Effect: Connected session in a few minutes or so. Granted, you’ll still need to clear away your coffee table, stray Coke cans and overly curious pets before striding around the middle of your living room, but that’s not a tall order. By far and away the most annoying aspect of using Sony’s latest creation was the 50/50 risk that our wife would be filming us for yet another ‘hilarious’ family WhatsApp video.
On a technical level, the most contentious aspect of this headset’s design is its wired nature. Why? Market leader Meta’s recent headsets have all been wireless giving users greater freedom to roam around The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners’ desolate landscapes and weave their way through the bullet-riddled levels of Superhot VR. In contrast, the PS VR2 is wired since it derives its power from the PS5’s considerable graphical heft, which seems like a perfectly sensible decision now we’ve actually used it. Combined with a high-resolution OLED display, 110-degree field of view and six-axis motion sensing system, the PS VR2 simply works in a way that both longtime virtual reality acolytes and curious newcomers will appreciate.
It’s also lightweight and largely comfortable to wear. Well, as comfortable to wear as sticking a giant screen directly in front of your eyeballs can be. Using any VR headset is a bit like a trip to Blackpool Pleasure Beach or visiting your brother’s newborn child – you’re there for a good time, not a long one.
Call Of The Mountain and beyond
All of which brings us to what you can actually do with the PlayStation VR2, and as it turns out that is quite a lot. Sony claims that over 100 games are in development for the system right now. Crucially, if you’ve never used one of these headsets before, the PS VR2 supports most of the format’s greatest hits straight out of the box – even if it’s not backwards compatible with pre-existing titles for the first PS VR. From the block-building splendour of Tetris Effect: Connected to Moss’ fairytale charms and No Man’s Sky’s endless intergalactic exploration, there’s little excuse for splashing out on this headset only to let it slowly gather dust under your telly.
As with any console launch, exclusives are a big part of the appeal here. To this end, Sony is offering up virtual reality versions of the already excellent horror spectacular Resident Evil Village and peerless driving simulator Gran Turismo 7, as well as a brand new title in the form of Horizon Call Of The Mountain. As a spin-off to the post-apocalyptic adventure series starring redhead action hero Aloy and a cornucopia of robot dinosaurs, HCOTM is not quite on par with Valve’s 2020 VR tour de force Half-Life: Alyx. It is however still a lot of fun, even if you don’t happen to be a huge fan of the franchise that inspired it.
The premise of HCOTM is simple: you have to climb up a mountain (and sometimes down it again) while occasionally pausing to fight the mechanical wildlife that populates it. In essence, it leans into the best bits of the Horizon games – shooting stuff with a bow and arrow and pure visual spectacle – while going easy on the deeply convoluted lore. It’s also disarmingly silly in a way that we’re very much here for. In the first hour or so, you’ll come across a multicoloured paint set that just so happens to be sitting in front of a giant rock wall, a pair of maracas and a set of rocks to stack on top of each other without them falling over. None of this has any bearing on plot, character development or the like, it’s just there to give you a bunch of stuff to do that isn’t possible with a standard DualSense controller in hand.
What's next for PlayStation VR?
For the most part, the PS VR2 nails its first impressions. There will be times when the sheer rush of leaping over a miles-high crevasse is tempered by a prompt that you’re in danger of punching your TV screen, but such fleeting frustrations are par for the course with what is still a nascent technology. The delirious grin you get from wearing this headset for an hour or so will outlast them by a long shot.
If there is a concern we have for the PS VR2, aside from its prohibitive price tag, it’s the extent to which Sony is going to support this headset in the long run. Given even the PS5 has just one first-party exclusive announced for 2023 – Insomniac Games Marvel's Spider-Man 2 – it would be naive to expect this shroud of ultra-secrecy to be abandoned for its accompanying peripheral. Still, one of these two products is a much easier sell than the other, and there seems little harm in reassuring would-be owners that there’s more to come for this product, such as a sequel to the revelatory 2018 platformer Astro Bot Rescue Mission or even a port of the PC exclusive Half-Life: Alyx. For now, the future of the PS VR2 is very much TBC.
It's not really laziness, it's the fact that the people in charge at game studios are 50+ years old and were trained in the 90s and 00s when multithreaded performance was still a novelty. It takes a long time to change the inertia of industry. Also, sometimes computing on a single thread is just the bottleneck due to the costs associated with certain game logic. It's not always possible to optimally fill every clock cycle across all your cores with meaningful work.