Romero: Virtual Reality Is A Fad
John Romero, co-founder of id Software and designer of DOOM and Quake and now creative director for the Games and Playable Media Masters degree program at UC Santa Cruz, revealed a strong opinion against VR in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
He went as far as calling Virtual Reality a fad, and a step back from where games are nowadays, since it requires isolation while right now every game is going social; he also thinks that it should be included with any PC to become truly popular, but this will never happen.
The only way to hope that it’ll be popular is to include it with every computer sold. And being on PC there’s no way - you’d have to get in with Apple or somebody that can actually have it built in because everyone else is like a free agent. I can’t see VR being the next big thing for games because we’ve had many of these peripherals that were non-standard come through - the early ’90s until now there’s always a weird peripheral to do something.
VR is going away from the way games are being developed and pushed as they go back into multiplayer and social stuff. VR is kind of a step back, it’s a fad. Maybe in the future there will be a better VR that gets you out of isolation mode.
Ultimately, Romero believes that Virtual Reality will only appeal to a niche, much like the Steel Battalion controller did.
The fact that it encloses you or makes you do something different than what you’re used to naturally doing also makes it a hard thing to adopt. Even though I’m excited about VR and how cool games look, I can’t see it becoming the way people always play games. I can see it being like Steel Battalion - if I’m going to play that game I’m only playing it with that controller… I can’t see every game being able to translate that experience to VR, because VR right now works best if you’re just sitting. If you’re inside of a cockpit, that’s cool, but if you’re supposed to be running around a world and you can’t physically run but you can look around, it’s a weird disconnect and it doesn’t feel right. I think we’re still waiting for the holodeck
Obviously, big companies such as Sony and Facebook (which recently acquired Oculus) looking to make Virtual Reality a huge phenomenon would beg to differ. It’s true that VR will have to fight through quite a few issues in order to become popular, and it is unclear yet if it will be strong enough to beat the competition of 4K gaming, which isn’t that far away now. Whose side are you on?