johnvivant wrote: Shenmue is ideal for VR because:
- already has a built-in first person mode for both adventure and fighting modes
- has built in 'focus on object' mode
- there is very little lateral motion, so motion sickness unlikely
- graphics are more basic than modern games which makes it easier for hardware to handle the 3D.
VR doesn't need to be first person, and I think if they actually wanted to do VR they could leave it exactly how it is now with a third person view and holding a trigger to go first person. Personally, I'd prefer if it would remain 3rd person in VR, although I can understand why some people would prefer it first person for the exploration standpoint. I think making fighting first person would make it much more difficult to play instead of better, because you'd actually need to look around to see if someone was coming after you from behind.
I've been playing around with Playstation VR the past 2 days, and one of the mini-games that comes with the free "Playroom VR" game is a 3rd-person puzzle platformer where you play as a little robot that controls very similar to Clank from the Ratchet & Clank series. The game is third person where you are basically the camera looking slightly down towards the level, it kind of feels like you're watching a board game or something. As the character moves forward, the camera will follow, but you're free to look all around the level from the point where you (as the camera) are, even behind you. This was one of my favorite surprises when trying out the headset, because I hadn't read about this little game in advance.
I think when it comes to VR, it's important to consider whether the experience (in both gameplay and control) will be easier, the same, or harder than playing without VR. If it won't be the same or better with VR, then it's probably not worth doing. A good example of a game being better with VR is Rez. Rez is so much easier to control in VR because you can turn your head to target enemies that fly offscreen. It also helps significantly for the final boss because you can turn your head to target those drone things that hover around the rings and eventually start firing at you. I found that I was able to defeat the bosses much more easily in VR than when playing on the TV.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, although it's really cool to be able to look around the inside of the car you're sitting in, I think Driveclub is an example of a game that isn't as good in VR as the original. I found the fact that you're sitting in a car with all of this stuff around you (turning steering wheel, screen in front of the dash board with stuff that would normally be on a HUD) to be distracting. Perhaps it's because I lack stereoscopic vision and thus would prefer to see it in 3rd person, but I found it to be more difficult to drive more precisely due to the not being able to see the car from the outside view. I have seen reviews where people say they like being in the car better, so it's clearly not annoying for everyone. At the moment I don't have an example more terrible than that, but I'm sure that something like a first person shooter would probably be worse in VR as well, only because of turning. If you're turning with an analog stick, it's going to cause a lot of motion sickness. But you can't turn physically, because that would get annoying after a while and the camera can't see your controller if you're facing away from it.