Valve Index now available in Canada ! Here are the prices !

[Sauron]

12 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

There was a severe lack of games that were compelling for more than a few hours each

That's a huge part of the problem, you don't get to wave it away

12 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

but the hardware was 100% fine. I still use my CV1 3-5 hours a week minimum and it still works pretty much flawlessly despite more instances than I'd like to admit of punching myself in the face. 

Simply working a couple of years later is the bare minimum, it would be ridiculous if it just spontaneously broke... and it was nowhere near good enough to justify the price. The resolution was noticeably low, the refresh rate not high enough, the headset itself was heavy and clunky, it had cables everywhere, there were no motion controls and all this for a handful of barely passable games. Oh, and it made a lot of people sick because it's just not that immersive. It feels like what it is, a screen strapped to your face.

 

It works pretty well for racing sims but that's only appealing to the kind of people who already had 3 monitors and even then the loss of quality is pretty disappointing.

8 hours ago, Thaldor said:

And don't even get me started with CPUs, 5% increase per generation and that's the "development" for which people are peeing honey.

Unlike a lot of youtubers would have you believe, there are people who run things that aren't games and that run significantly faster on ryzen 3k than on ryzen 2k.

9 hours ago, Derangel said:

Every damn super market chain in the US has a bunch of VR stuff in their electronics sections. From cheap mobile VR crap all the way up to high-end headsets.

Going by that logic, 10 years ago you'd have thought 3D TVs would have been a massive success considering every store was full of them at one point and every major manufacturer was hell bent on releasing as many of them as possible. The 3DS sold pretty well, I guess 3D screens are the future... oh wait.

[TechyBen]

4 hours ago, realpetertdm said:

Team Fortress 2 had microtransactions at least since 2010 (Mann-conomy update, which added new cosmetics, trading and the Mann Co. Store). 

 

I don't really get what you're trying to say with TF2. Are you trying to say that Valve copied the microtransaction system from OW/Fortnite? If someone copied something it's Blizzard/Epic who did it.

 

Artifact was a collaboration between Richard Garfield (creater of MTG) and Valve, where they tried to mimic the styles of an actual tabletop card game (where you need to buy cards). Hardly a cash grab. Poor economic model? Sure. But a cash grab? Not really, considering the amount of effort that went into Artifact.

Huh, what? You read my post backwards. Fortnight and Overwatch took off where TF2 and CS:source lost out (CS had gun game/last man standing that is now super over the top popular, TF2 had the bright colours and microtransactions, and they even had "Garry's mod" which is practically Fortnight already lol).

Valve killed their community, the other games went crazy with it. Though IMO, I hate those kind of cash grabs anyhow.

 

But Valve did miss out on that opportunity, making TF2 what Overwatch and Fortnight are now. Those two beat them to it, while they were arguing over not making HL3.

 

IMO, along with Scrolls form Mahjong, a lot at the time were expecting card games to be the next big thing, and it flopped across the board, with the exception of Hearthstone. Again, chasing popularity/money/marketing, and not "just do a good job at what you are good at (they were at the store and at FPS games, with Portal 2 proof of that).

[realpetertdm]

59 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

Huh, what? You read my post backwards. Fortnight and Overwatch took off where TF2 and CS:source lost out (CS had gun game/last man standing that is now super over the top popular, TF2 had the bright colours and microtransactions, and they even had "Garry's mod" which is practically Fortnight already lol).

Valve killed their community, the other games went crazy with it. Though IMO, I hate those kind of cash grabs anyhow.

 

But Valve did miss out on that opportunity, making TF2 what Overwatch and Fortnight are now. Those two beat them to it, while they were arguing over not making HL3.

 

IMO, along with Scrolls form Mahjong, a lot at the time were expecting card games to be the next big thing, and it flopped across the board, with the exception of Hearthstone. Again, chasing popularity/money/marketing, and not "just do a good job at what you are good at (they were at the store and at FPS games, with Portal 2 proof of that).

How did Valve kill their communities? Dota 2 & CSGO are still going strong with massive communities, TF2 has 300k followers on their subreddit despite being 12 years old.

 

Valve is good at making singleplayer FPS, multiplayer FPS, MOBAs and more, shown by their massive success in Half-Life/Portal, CS/TF2 and Dota.

 

What kind of opportunity did Valve miss again? Valve's big focus was on VR since at least 2016, probably even more before that. 

Just because a company made a game in the same genre as another doesn't mean it's a cash grab. By that logic anything can be a cash grab.

[Klovnious]

Hope it will be available in Norway soon.

[dizmo]

18 hours ago, Waffles13 said:

If you're comparing the original Vive to the Oculus CV1, then neither is objectively better. There are some slight differences in FOV and perceived screen door effect, but generally speaking the specs are roughly on par. The Vive theoretically has better tracking (largely just because it only needs two base stations and they don't use nearly the same USB bandwidth as Oculus's cameras. Meanwhile the Oculus is more lightweight and comfortable, it has built in headphones and the Touch controllers are way more comfortable than the Vive wands, but then again they don't have touchpads which can be much more useful in certain situations. 

 

I've owned both and overall hardware wise I pretty dramatically prefer the Oculus just on comfort alone, but realistically they are pretty much on par. 

 

In terms of games, 98% of VR games are completely cross compatible out of the box, and and the few Oculus exclusives can be played relatively easy on a Vive using some third party software. If you go back and play some of the early SteamVR games that came out before the Oculus Touch controllers and didn't get updated, you can get a bit of control weirdness, but generally speaking every game worth playing is totally playable on any headset that supports SteamVR (aka all of them). 

No matter how good tracking cameras get, they can't track objects that are occluded by other objects. You can have the highest res, most accurate trackers in the world, but if they are on the headset and you put your hand behind your back, or crouch down and its blocked by your leg, then it won't be a good experience. Some day maybe we'll see a major new form of tracking that uses magnetic waves or something crazy to give you un-occuludable tracking, but until then there's no way for inside out tracking to give equivalent results to multiple, externally placed cameras/base stations. 

 

If you're referring to my statement that it'll never be mainstream, then I think that you maybe be slightly biased due to being part of a more enthusiast market. You and I may be way into the idea of having a VR room where we strap on a headset and block out the world for hours at a time, but most normal people aren't going to see that as more than a novelty.

 

Even if phone based VR got to a point where it had the same games and capabilities of desktop headsets, there's a huge subset of the market that would scoff at the idea of strapping a device to their face and looking like a doof. And make no mistake, you look like a doof. 

 

Maybe in a full (human) generation or two the general attitude towards VR will be way more accepting, but unless we get full neural interfaces or something similar there is always going to be a physical and logistical issue in the minds of lots of people in order to set up a VR space. 

 

Also, in terms of "Valve is fully behind it", it took them three years to even announce a first party VR game that isn't just a tech demo. And even then, they were "fully behind" the Steam Link as well as the Steam Controller, and I don't see either of those setting the world on fire. 

 

To be clear, I'm very bullish on VR overall and if I wasn't saving up for a full desktop rebuild I may have bought an Index already. But this mentality that VR needs to "break through to the mainstream" just seems like a wildly flawed perspective on what VR is. And honestly, all of my best and most memorable experiences in VR have been playing wildly niche games with next to zero mainstream appeal (H3VR, Jet Island, etc). 

The original Vive, sure, but when compared to the Index it seems to fall drastically behind.

 

Good to know that they haven't started creating two walled gardens when it comes to games, that would really end up killing VR.

 

I'm not bias at all; I actually don't really care if VR succeeds or not. It was interesting, but I wasn't a huge fan, and it's not something I'd invest in anytime soon.

 

You think it's going to take a full human generation or TWO? I don't think you really fully grasp what you just said. There's tons of people alive today, that were alive before computers even existed. Think about how far they've come. Using just storage as an example, the first hard drive weighed over a ton and held 5MB of data. Now, you can get a 1TB microSD card and it weighs 0.25 grams. In 10 years, SnapDragon chips will likely be able to power VR games perfectly fine. Solid state batteries will be making their way to mass production, and who knows what the state of screens will be. This will make for extremely light, compact VR headsets, standalone from a PC.

 

4 hours ago, Thaldor said:

Saying that "Valve is fully behind it" is kind of a long shot. Valve is fully behind it and Gaben has stated that he will do anything to make the VR a thing, but they don't plan to burn money on it and try to actually be smart with it. Even with Index you can see that they are holding back and a lot and make moves that are better for the consumer and cheaper for them, like they didn't rush out another thing that directly and completely competes against everything else on the market but made a thing that has it's own kinks and is fully adapted their SteamVR "standards" (SteamVR1.0 is basicly HTC Vive and IIRC SteamVR1.5-2.0 is Vive Pro while Index is complete 2.0 with full support to 1.0) which brings the consumer friendly, if you have Vive or Vive Pro (or IIRC Pimax, they did support Vives tracking(?)) you have options to just buy the controllers with/without headset, you don't need to pay for the basestations.

Very unlike what Facebook... Oculus is doing by throwing probably huge sums to develop the inside-out-tracking and making everything mobile, which in the long run (let's say 10-20 years) doesn't seem to be the best place to put your money currently because we will need to re-invent those again and probably again (the mobile hardware is expiring faster than fast, even the wireless tech is currently not developed to the bar where we can call it better than a hackjob of WiFi and it would be probably better for the wallet to wait for something like Bluetooth 6.0 or something that is perfect latency and bandwidth wise for the VR use, same for the inside-out-tracking, cameras just aren't anywhere near optimal solution but since we currently don't have anything better to handle the job as they want it to be done). I don't mean developing them is stupid, but currently they seem to be very futile because we just don't have the tech to make them the best they could be and all that money could be invested into things that we can still really improve and what we have tech to improve (like better the screens and especially the lenses, there's stuff that can be improved a lot and all it takes is tries tries and tries to find the best way to get the image to the eyes, or then the controllers, we still probably have a lot of tech that could make the controllers better, Valve just demonstrated that they can get "finger-tracking" into the controllers which is kind of cool, but it's still not probably the best that we can currently do) and probably company that makes VR things isn't probably the best company to start to create their own wireless-standard from ground up or start developing their own camera sensors and even in hindsight the best things in VR development have become when someone looked back and thought "can we use this?" like Leap Motion was completely dead before someone took one and glued it to the face of a VR headset and went "oh, cool, I have hand tracking" and in that sentence I can say that I'm really trying to find a Essential Reality P5 Glove because that thing might be the cheapest almost complete hand-tracking system for Vive/Vive Pro that doesn't need line of sight to work (yes, it has awful IR-tracking, but that's not what I'm after, what I'm after is that thing with added Vive Tracker could be something awesome because how small it is and how it "tracks" your fingers).

Haha, what? You kind of contradicted what you said there (bolded text above).

 

[Cheddle]

Reading page one of this thread has reduced my IQ

[Vode]

Why, if I type in "Half Life Alyx" in Duckduckgo, are the majority of pictures fanfiction nudes? WTF! Lol