Ken and Roberta Williams Working on Colossal Cave Adventure Remake for VR and PC
Is it just me or is there a wider belief that VR will never be anything more than a niche? Facebook aka Meta has bet its future on this and I think it's a mistake.When people think of VR they think of the Matrix but that will never be because of the laws of physics. Latency is the big problem (unless such a network is very localized in the real world) but visually speaking, black is a problem. Black is a colour on computer displays but in the real world it's the absence of light. Another big visual problem: focus.Yet another problem: controls. In the real world you just think and act. In VR you have these controls to direct movement. That's never going to feel natural so you're pretty much predicated on a pure brain-computer interface for it to feel realistic.There's no killer app for VR (optimists will add "yet") and no hint of what one might be.Part of what made these old adventure games so compelling (IMHO) was the format: text. Games like Myst added images and can have an appeal all of their own but it's different to the text adventure game. The same goes for video (meaning rendered 3D graphics). I have doubts that this magic (which has a heavy dose of nostalgia) will translate to VR.For me the Infocom games (Zork in particular) will always be remembered fondly but part of the magic was the time and you can never step in the same river twice.