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.
Yeah. If it was still standalone Oculus and they’d support Linux I would’ve almost certainly bought one already. On the other hand, it would’ve been very unlikely to be as cheap as they are with Facebook, since they obviously wanted to push them to the masses as a dependency for their push into VR (which so far failed epically).
If valve makes HL3 vr only im gonna go and shit all over there office
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.
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.
Don’t get me wrong, I like VR and Alyx was incredible…but Valve, can we get some normal games?
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
