I feel like the value of this article would be greatly increased by including a video of gameplay of the game in question. I have no idea what Nighttime Terror is or what it looks like.
I had a chance to play with the HTC VIVE for a few hours yesterday, and I can tell you, my mind was blown. I was ready to do away with the whole VR thing as just another gimmick like 3D TV, but boy, was I wrong.<p>It's very responsive, fairly high resolution and 90Hz framerate; the two controllers make the whole experience complete.<p>A few things to recommend if you can try a HTC VIVE:<p><pre><code> AudioShield
Space Pirate Trainer
Hover Junkers
Paper Cuts</code></pre>
Carmack's critiques are interesting for what they don't say. There's very little about how VR interacts with the gameplay.
VR doesn't seem to have been exploited much in these first person shooters. They seem to have standard game mechanics.<p>One could have a VR game where you're being followed, and have to keep looking behind you to try to spot your tails. But when you look back, your tails notice if you;re too obvious or look too long, and take evasive action or swap with a different tail. None of the mentioned games seem to tie where you look with game mechanics like that.<p>The detailed discussions of aliasing vs stereo vision would apply to any 3D display. Any artifact that's different for each eye is really annoying. Also, why did someone release a 30FPS VR anything? There are arguments over minimal acceptable frame rate in VR, but the numbers are around 100FPS and this is well known.<p>Menus in VR suck. No surprise there. It probably would have been better to ship the thing with a game controller, so the user could use the controls without looking at them.<p>Carmack seems to like a dark world. Grey borders good, white clouds bad. Whether that's his Doom bias or a problem with the Oculus Rift isn't clear. In GTA V, you can climb a mountain and see the whole game world, clouds and all. That should look good in VR. If it doesn't, the current headgear has a problem.