Last week, I reported on the announcement of Rollercoaster Dreams, a new amusement park management simulator for PlayStation VR from a developer named Bimboosoft. I say reported, I really mean mocked; as I dug into the game and the developer’s history, it quickly became apparent to me that it was not going to be a good VR experience for many, many reasons.
The first, most obvious sign was the trailer, which showcased several moments that looked positively dreadful to experience in a headset. Then there was the discovery of the fact that Rollercoaster Dreams is actually a sequel of sorts to Bimboosoft’s last amusement park game, Rollercoaster World for PS2, which wasn’t well received. In fact, everyone that had played that game seemed to think Dreams looked pretty much identical in features and visual fidelity.
Finally, there was the fact the developer’s other work included what looked to be an Asteroids clone that used Star Wars ship designs. It was all starting to look a little hokey, so I decided to call it out.
I’d expected my write up to upset some readers, which I would completely understand. I was talking about a game I hadn’t played, but I trusted in my past, plentiful experience with VR roller coasters in saying it looked nausea-inducing and made almost completely without VR in mind. Sure enough, I got to have a good talk (my first, in fact) with a great writer named Blake Harris, author of the Console Wars book and the writer of our really rather great feature on the origins of Lucky’s Tale.
At first, Blake didn’t understand how I could write something so scathing without playing the game, something I repeatedly asked before reassuring myself as I wrote the piece. As I laid out my explanation to him, however, it became clear to me I wanted to talk more broadly about why, sometimes, you have to show some tough love for the good of our industry.
Comments on the PlayStation Blog posts that announced Rollercoaster Dreams consisted of a good amount of people saying it was a great idea for VR. When I first tried the Oculus Rift well over two years ago now, I too immediately thought VR rides would be great fun.
Then I tried some, and they were my introduction to the cruel world of simulation sickness.
Not all VR coasters are bad, but the ones I tried then made my stomach churn with every corner, and my head sway with every twist. They made me feel absolutely awful and, having at first been completely sold on VR, it caused me to again doubt its viability for the consumer market. And this is coming from someone that knew they were still going to support VR and help it grow no matter what. I was not the type of person that was going to touch it once and then give up on it if the experience was bad.
A lot of people that try PlayStation VR for the first time in October, however, aren’t going to be so forgiving.
So I have to make sure people are trying, say, Battlezone as their first VR experience and not Rollercoaster Dreams. I have to try my hardest to make sure people are educated on the fact that this type of experience can really ruin your day and your impressions of the technology as a whole. Sometimes that means a detailed breakdown of individual elements, sometimes it means using humor to highlight just how ill-fitting a game is for VR. That piece fell into the latter category.
VR doesn’t have the luxury of age and institution just yet. It’s not like films, books, or games where everyone knows that one bad egg doesn’t mean a rotten batch. We can’t afford millions of people having a terrible VR experience for their first time and then associating that with every kind of experience and headset from then on. I know people that won’t even try VR because they’ve heard it could make them sick, and others that really doubt it will ever become mainstream because of it.
Palmer Luckey said it best in one of his Reddit posts from years past; bad VR poisons the well for everyone. Experiences that aren’t up to par are inescapable; they already exist on Rift, Vive and Gear. But it’s my job to get you and anyone else to steer clear of those games.
Sorry if you don’t always like the way I go about it, but I have our best intentions at heart.
