There’s no shortage of speculation when it comes to all things Valve. Tyler McVicker, YouTuber and one of the leading voices dedicated to deciphering Valve’s various internal developments, however now reports that not only is the company’s long-awaited standalone VR headset still coming, but it may arrive alongside its own Half-Life game.
Valve’s much hyped standalone, known only as ‘Deckard’, is “still very much in production,” McVicker maintains, saying that according to his sources that Valve “still intend[s] on shipping this piece of hardware.
The standalone wasn’t a rumor, it was verified to exist (via copyright documents). That being said, I’ve held out on buying a standalone VR so I could get this one to upgrade from the Index
Yup!
I’d consider the Quest if it wasn’t owned by Meta.
No way I’d buy that hardware.
Me too. I was disappointed by Sonys software support for the PSVR2 and I don’t want a Quest because it’s from Facebook.
Pico 4 Ultra?
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I am waiting for this as well. We are in need of a solid index replacement.
I’ve still got an Oculus CV1 with touch controllers. It’s never seemed like a good time to upgrade before. I’m feeling the hype for this.
If valve makes HL3 vr only im gonna go and shit all over there office
Out of excitement?
Out of excrement
Beat me to it!
Only if its also for non vr, then maybe also a little pee
How do you actually make this work without making a separate game that just uses the same maps and weapons? Even then things won’t be designed in a way that you’d like, and a lot of what makes the experience good would be lost.
You basically have to make a second game based on the VR game. This is why nobody really does that.
2D games translate to VR either by providing virtual controls like in space, flight, and driving sims. Or they haphazardly stick cardboard cutout models that float through everything like in skyrim/fallout 4 VR.
Well made VR games with proper physics, like Boneworks, HL:Alyx, or Blade and Sorcery require an amount of input that you can’t get outside of VR.
To get the same amount of control you get in a well made vr game from KB+M you’d basically be playing QWOP.
There’s no way to get an equivalent of:
- 3 3D Positional+Rotational inputs
- capacitive finger tracking
- face buttons w/ capacitive thumb tracking
- analog sticks
On a standard gamepad or kb+m. That’s before we talk about full-body tracking. If you make a game that really takes advantage of all of that, there’s no way to make it translate well.
Well they had 20+ years to figure that out
Also this is a very serious reply to a poop and pee comment
Theres no way to get an equivalent of; 3 3D Positional+Rotational inputs
Someone never played Jurassic Park: Trespasser and it shows.
Also:
Analog sticks
lolwut? Just use a controller.
It really comes down to how the game is designed. It wouldn’t feel as cool since you’re not actually using your body, but there’s no reason it couldn’t work as any other FPS already does and then also have the full VR experience too for those with the hardware. Plenty of games do this.
The point wasn’t the analog sticks on their own, it was being able to coordinate all of them, or an equivalent, in unison.
It’s like… beyond-analogue-sticks AND you still have two analogue sticks you can use while using the 3.5d super analogue sticks that are your whole ass arms.
VR is nuts.
Out of excrement, presumably.
Edit: I hate that the default sort isn’t oldest first; I was beaten to the punch.
Why must the market go standalone? Mobile processing power won’t be even close to good enough for a long time, I would like some more high-end tethered options such as the Bigscreen Beyond
wireless tethering with some stand alone capability is the sweet spot in my opinion, would be nice to be able to use it on the go but with full fidelity tethered to a gaming PC at home.
I don’t know. I really don’t like the idea of carrying around a whole other computer an well as tracking cameras and a battery on your face when using the headset in tethered mode. The opposite of that is exactly what I like about the Beyond: strip away absolutely everything you can in order to optimize for tethered usage.
Well there is a reason for this: Tethering is what valve wants to get rid of and it’s obvious to me that it needs to be gone to make VR viable. I’ll explain a bit of why without making a whole post.
My first thing is just that many people have avoided the Quest due to its ecosystem being owned by Meta. And the platform is very closed down. So your current options are either to buy an extremely expensive PC >$500 and a PC headset of at least $500 to $1000 and then run PC VR. This is cost prohibitive and Valve knows it. The Deckard would do the same thing the steam deck did for PC gaming. Make it approachable.
Second point is that VR games vary in experiences. Some are high fidelity. But many of the good ones aren’t. The fidelity is in the interaction and not the graphics. That type of thing is what the Quest excels at and what Deckard will do even better at.
And then I think it confines developers into developing for a set spec of hardware which again solves many of the inherent PC challenges. Verified for Deckard could be a thing.
Lastly it enables wireless streaming which will probably be enabled by WiFi 7 standards. Even with a 6e standard router, the bandwidth is pretty good. And to most people, they won’t need a tether to enjoy it anymore.
This is a fair point, there’d likely have to be some comfort sacrificed in terms of heat or weight.
I suppose if push came to shove I’d want minimal computer hardware in the headset that could handle wireless tethering but would be willing to give up standalone usage.
I was about to write this exact comment.
Even if I hardly ever play standalone, it’s nice to have the option.
Also the ability to wander around an arbitrarily large play space is nice too.
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Having a cable running down your back breaks immersion.
And you’d be surprised how much Meta is limiting the XR2 in the quest 3. You can bump the resolution pretty high with quest game optimizer.
Don’t get me wrong, I like VR and Alyx was incredible…but Valve, can we get some normal games?
Yep. Card games, mobas. Mobas but fps. VR games. Updated engines for all 20+ year old games. You want a new IP or new sequel? Psh. That valve is dead.
half-life: alyx - episode 2
That’ll be it though. No Half-Life Alyx Episode 3.
half life: alyx - episode 2, part 2
then we will get half life: kleiner
I’d play the shit out of half life Kleiner.
That dude definitely saw some wild shit escaping from black mesa, fleeing north america during the xen portal storms, seven hour war, and the subsequent occcupation of the combine and his relocation to city 17 somewhere in Russia. His adventure spans like…10 or 15 years.
“Oh dear god… I’m that motherfucker that fucked up this whole experiment.”
Damn it, I just realized if they release the Deckard there won’t be another VR headset from them.
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That’s true. And then maybe Index 2 Episode One.
Hmm. The only thing that worries me is that a mobile VR headset will be a big step back in processing power. The index is great because it’s basically just a monitor. I hope their next headset is streaming from a desktop, so it’s not ewaste with a potato-looking VR game six or eight years down the line.
Mobile VR is the obvious next step for VR. You just won’t have as good of an experience with a cable unless you have a very dedicated setup
It’s most definitively gonna allow for streaming via Wi-Fi
How do you mean “next step”? There are plenty of mobile headsets, and there are plenty of wired headsets. The next step, as with most technologies like this, is to improve on the more popular one. So better battery life, higher res, and faster.
RIP code name vader. Long live deck hard!
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Intermediate format.
That’s all it’ll take to crack VR wide open. Just have some simplified geometry representation, which the headset itself can render at 240 Hz and millisecond-old tracking… and have games emit that. Then it genuinely does not matter how slow or distant the other hardware is. Are you doing VR gaming in the cloud, for some ungodly reason? Fantastic, nothing’s gonna make you ill, even if switches activate half a second after you poke them. Is your PC a Commodore 64 with USB-C? The world’s gonna crawl in slow motion, but you’ll be able to walk around smoothly and watch it all update.
This is the same problem that framebuffering solved. CRTs needed many refreshes per second - software couldn’t guarantee that. So instead of generating pixels as-they-appear, we used a simpler format that’d obviously get displayed in time, and had programs write to that format. Now you can get a sluggish framerate or tearing or whatever… but your screen never rolls, and there’s no hard limit on complexity.
VR needs many perspectives per second - and software can’t guarantee that. Reprojection is the right idea but a partial solution. We need to take it seriously for these problems to be solved. Even a shitty approach like scaled floating dots instead of regular pixels would let some PS2-grade hardware push hundreds of frames per second.
