Oculus Rift: First Impressions

I’ve never used Oculus, it was never something I thought would work or rated so much. I was sceptical that you’d be able to slip into a world just by putting on goggles and having a game projected straight into your eyes. So it was with some apprehension I approached the Oculus stand at Paris Games Week 14, in conjunction with Game Connection Europe 14, and tried to get to grips with VR. Was it really going to change the gaming landscape? Was it a gimmick that just made you nauseous and didn’t really add anything to gaming?

Putting on the goggles was an initial fear as I wear glasses and wasn’t quite sure if I’d have to refocus the goggles once they were on. Luckily you can put the goggles on over the glasses and there’s no fiddling around trying to get the focus right and there is enough room for the goggles and your glasses to be reasonably comfortable.

The first game found me strapped in a cockpit of a spacecraft for upcoming space-sim Valkyrie, a dogfighting bonanza brought to you by the same guys that brought you EVE: Online. EVE: Valkyrie was probably a good place to start, having no vertical and horizontal axis in space meant that I could really explore Oculus without the worry of flying in a straight line.

But it was the initial launch from the ship (because it’s multiplayer you’re waiting for everyone else to get ready before launching from the ship) that was incredible. You find yourself in a cockpit of an aircraft waiting for launch. As you’re waiting you start looking around, literally, and it’s incredible how much detail the Oculus delivers. I didn’t find it disorienting at all, in fact, it felt very natural seconds after looking around. What was interesting to note was that Oculus (or it could be Valkyrie specifically) was able to simulate peripheral vision very subtly. Initially I thought the graphics were a little dodgy, but I noticed that as I moved my head around to see what was going on, the parts of the cockpit that had seemed a little out of focus were coming into focus when I looked directly at them. Furthermore, there was no noticeable latency so looking around really was in real time. And for a flight sim of any description this is key, a split second can be the difference between victory of defeat.

I don’t want to talk too much about the flight sim itself, but it’s fair to say that Valkyrie looks amazing and that it works really well with Oculus. It’s such a relief to be able to look around in your cockpit without having to use a button to look behind, to the side and to the top of you. It makes it a lot easier to track the enemy and to pursue them. Equally, it means you can focus more on the instruments in your cockpit (which we’ll come on to with War Thunder) without having to take your eyes off the enemy.

But with driving games it’s a little different. I managed to jump on Assetto Corsa, a vintage car race was the order of the day for me and it was nice to be sitting in a convertible on a race track as the sun beamed down, but there’s something about the steering wheel set up that didn’t impress me. It also felt as though there was a tiny delay between image in Oculus and the movement of my head. I might be knocking it because I was actually doing well initially, but came last in the end! I think, given a controller rather than a steering wheel set up, I would have been more comfortable.

But it was War Thunder that really did it for me. War Thunder, a FTP flight sim game available on PC and on the PS4 and is cross-platform (meaning that gamers can take each other on no matter what platform you’re playing on) was the clear winner for me. Although Valkyrie was great fun, it was the element of reality which War Thunder brought, something I’d not felt having played it on the PS4. With Oculus it suddenly came to life. The graphics weren’t as strong as in Valkyrie, but it’s early days with War Thunder.

Taking off from an airfield somewhere in the south of England in the iconic Spitfire was a joy in itself. The cockpit was accurate and the instruments all displayed the information you need to keep flying. The flight stick set up was great, and there was a throttle control too, so a full HOTAS set up.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to have the game in full sim mode, but I did manage to do some low level flying and managed to crash land the aircraft on a carrier. I’d circled it three or four times before executing a Top Gun style fly by and then dumping the aircraft on the deck. The great thing about flying in a real aircraft, as opposed to a space craft, was that gravity was at play and it was possible to see how Oculus worked where knowing your axis orientation was important. Again, there was hardly any latency and it’s such a liberating experience to fly with no restrictions.

I was very impressed.

And I was very impressed with Oculus. I didn’t expect it to be as established and as good as it was. Project Morpheus has a lot to live up to and it’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft get involved with the VR race, or whether they’ll adopt Oculus as an add-on (especially if it’s going to be used on Windows platforms).

We’ve got a full interview with the Gaijin guys, developers of War Thunder, coming later in the week, so there’ll be more details on War Thunder then, so keep your eyes open for that.

But for now, if you’re worried about Oculus, you shouldn’t be. It looks great and plays better than you’d hoped it would.