One of the biggest goals within the gaming industry is to make the gaming experience feel as natural as possible. Playing a game should feel as natural as bobbing your head or dancing to your favorite song. For gamers, this means playing a game with fluid controls, great visuals, and storyline or purpose: a gamer wants to feel as much part of the game as any actual character or player in the game. It’s always been believed that Virtual Reality gaming would be the highest-level gaming that could actually achieve this ideal experience. After all, you can’t get any closer to being in a videogame than by literally being in it. Movies and shows like Tron, The Matrix, Scooby Doo Cyber Chase, and Digimon have all pushed the idea of VR gaming into the minds of gamers alike. This long awaited goal of making VR gaming a reality is one that’s quickly popularity.
In 2014 gamers were given a look at the Oculus Rift, a VR head-mounted display system. The Rift had quickly gained recognition as popular videogame commentators showed off gameplay footage through this VR system.
2015 will be the year of VR gaming. Not only will the Rift be available to the public, but a few more exciting projects recently revealed at the Gamer Developer Con will also make an appearance. The projects being most talked are Valve and HTC’s Vive, SONY’s Morpheus, and Sulon’s Cortex. But will it even matter at this point?
It’s great that VR gaming is finally becoming a legitimate thing within the gaming industry. But at this point, how will these systems compare to the powerhouses that are the next-gen consoles? Pound for pound, these VR systems cannot hold up against the PS4 or the Xbox One. VR gaming will not have better visuals (maybe at first) than the next-gen systems, nor will they have as wide of a game selection as them. Not only that, but since VR gaming is fairly fresh concept that’s still being worked on, who’s to say that there won’t be as many bugs that would still need to be worked on.
As I said, 2015 will be the year of VR gaming, but this trend won’t last long. I simply cannot believe that this will make as much of an impact as it could’ve maybe 5-10 years ago. VR gaming will definitely have to pull out some amazing feats in order to one-up current gaming consoles. If that can be done, then VR gaming might just be ideal form of gaming in the future.