AAA games on Oculus Rift are years away, says dev
VR may stay virtual a while longer
It will be years until we see console-style games supported on Oculus Rift according to the designer of upcoming Xbox One/PS4 free-runner Dying Light.
"How long do I think it will take games to adapt to Oculus Rift? Honestly, years," said Maciej Binkowski, Techland's lead designer of Dying Light, to TrustedReviews in an interview.
"To get it to a point where gamers can comfortably play for three hours on a couch, I think it's going to take years. Not just from the technological game perspective, but from the hardware too."
Need more power
One of the most serious issues for the future of Oculus Rift VR games is that frame rates need to be incredibly high to offer a good experience and avoid the insta-nausea effect that many feel on first trying the headset.
The Oculus Rift DK2 prototype is designed to run at 75 frames per second to avoid motion blur while some reports suggest the final consumer version will need rates as high as 90 frames per second.
Consider, then, that Techland has just announced Dying Light will perform at just 30 frames per second on console and you can understand Binkowski's lack of enthusiasm about Oculus Rift's future.
"With that level of complexity like Dying Light, I think it's going to take years," said Binkowski.
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He suggests that for the time being, Oculus Rift support will be limited to "a certain kind of project [made] especially for Oculus from the ground up."
This is bad news too for the Sony Morpheus, a PS4 virtual reality headset shown off at multiple gaming shows in 2014.
Perhaps we shouldn't be expecting much more than indie curiosities to turn up on VR headsets any time soon. Still, with no firm word on a release date for either headset, there's no guarantee either Oculus Rift or Morpheus is going to land in anything like its current state.
Andrew is a freelance journalist and has been writing and editing for some of the UK's top tech and lifestyle publications including TrustedReviews, Stuff, T3, TechRadar, Lifehacker and others.