Although we’ve talked about VR support in the past, it’s something that’s going to need to be re-discussed going into the future.
At the core, yes, it’s completely possible for us to integrate HMD support. It’s already integrated at a basic level. It sounds awesome, why wouldn’t you want to be put into a world like this?
But here’s the thing—when we talked about integrating VR into Tower, “room scale” wasn’t even common terminology, it was back in the day when people thought you could just tack on the support, and your game would be a sitting experience; much like how Valve integrated Oculus support for TF2. However, as you may have tried yourself, a fast-paced FPS in a sitting experience is NOT a great combo for VR. Hence why last time I checked, VR in TF2 is broken and somewhat abandoned. The experience just isn’t enjoyable. As we’ve learned, VR is something you need to design the core of your game around, not something you can tack on at the end.
In practicality, as much as we’d want it to be, Tower Unite isn’t 100% designed for VR. You can’t walk around the plaza at room scale, nor your condo. It’s just inherently incompatible, it’s too big. To an extent, some of the features of Tower are VR friendly, like the theater, some of the game worlds, and a couple others, but there isn’t a practical way to integrate VR and Non-VR. This presents a conundrum where we’d have like Semi-VR support where you’d have to take your HMD on and off during a complete sitting experience. I recall watching someone play GMT virus with an Oculus, and they fell out of the chair when the virus got close because it was so terrifying (in a bad way, it was like a cheap jump scare)
I guess it depends what you’re looking for in a VR game. If you want to be totally 100% immersed, that’s probably not possible with Tower. We do think that the concept of a social VR game is intriguing, but at the same time, we want to focus on games more than the social part.
You COULD straight up just have HMD support, but I don’t consider that as true VR. I want to be immersed.
(These are just my thoughts, this is something we haven’t discussed internally for quite a while now. I can say though that it probably won’t be a feature available at Early Access Launch.)