You know what I think we need? (Repost from my original post in the General category)

[Conspiracy]

We need VR support! Sure, you can get it in VRChat, but I just think it would be cool to have regular players and VR players in the same lobby! Sure, it’d take forever and Workshop Creators would have to put in a little extra work, but I think it would be worth it! What are your thoughts? Put 'em in the comments!

[ilipitagaon]

VR forces the developers to work on a feature that can grab a very small audience.

They can, instead, work on a feature that can satisfy all Tower Unite players.

Naturally, we want the second option and that is why VR is not being developed.

[EvKem]

The game would need some major cuts, downgrades, and total reworks to work for VR.
VR titles really, REALLY need to be designed ground-up for VR. It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds.

[balianthemighty]

@EvKem

The game would need some major cuts, downgrades, and total reworks to work for VR.
VR titles really, REALLY need to be designed ground-up for VR. It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds.

Not really. There’s plenty of great flatscreen games that have added VR support. Just off the top of my head, Subnautica, Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion, Hellblade and Minecraft are all virtually identical to the flatscreen versions except for the menu system.

EDIT: It’s also still one of the few things from the Indiegogo that has gone unfulfilled.

[balianthemighty]

@ilipitagaon

VR forces the developers to work on a feature that can grab a very small audience.

They can, instead, work on a feature that can satisfy all Tower Unite players.

Naturally, we want the second option and that is why VR is not being developed.

By that logic, not everyone plays games on a Mac or Linux, so they should just not bother with those platforms either. VR support was promised in the Indiegogo and they have an obligation to everyone who backed, to add it. It’s not alright to promise someone something to get money out of them, and then slap them in the face with their own money and not make it.

[Cakemagic]

I mean, sure, you can just change the viewport, but there’s many different aspects that you have to change to make sure that the experience is enjoyable in VR.

From my time in VR in tower, I remember some glaring issues:

• Post Processing was way too bright

• All UI was completely unusable, because it was glued to your eyeballs or out of sight

• Gameworld gameplay was awful, Ballrace in particular was horrific and needed lots of VR love.

• Locomotion was awful. It’s just too jarring to walk around at that speed in VR, without some sort of bracer.

• Every single thing in the plaza, in the condos, and in the game worlds would need to be redone so that someone in VR can use it. This would take a very long time to implement for a not-so-big portion of players to utilize.

Not to mention that VR was promised at a time where VR was lightly understood, where games actually were just “slapping VR support” on their games, and it was thought that you could just tick a box and VR would work in your game!!! The Tower devs have learned that VR is something that has to have intention and know-how, and they don’t want to deliver a bad experience, if only to deliver the experience at all.

[AmGona]

This is planned I thought, but for after the game is out of Early Access.

[Arkive86]

As far as I’m aware, this is the current stance on VR (dated October 11th, 2016):

@Caboose700

VR isn’t a priority for the game at the the moment, and it is unknown if the feature will return in the future. When we were originally planning VR support, the VR landscape was a very different beast than it is now, and we would have to fully re-do complete sections of the game to support it.

Because of this, VR support isn’t our main focus, and while it could be added in a later update, there is nothing official on the pipeline at this time.

Also worth reading, from Matt (dated February 29th, 2016):

@Matt

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.)

[Caboose700]

The above is basically spot on, VR was in a totally different place when we first considered it, and we haven’t been and don’t have plans on developing the game with VR in mind. At the current point in time, we have no plans on integrating VR support.

[Plokit]

@balianthemighty

By that logic, not everyone plays games on a Mac or Linux, so they should just not bother with those platforms either.

Mac and Linux is a larger market than VR. Well, maybe not Linux gamers, but there are definitely more Mac gamers than there are VR gamers. Also, the whole game doesn’t have to be reworked from the ground up to work on Mac and Linux.

[balianthemighty]

@Plokit

@balianthemighty

By that logic, not everyone plays games on a Mac or Linux, so they should just not bother with those platforms either.

Mac and Linux is a larger market than VR. Well, maybe not Linux gamers, but there are definitely more Mac gamers than there are VR gamers. Also, the whole game doesn’t have to be reworked from the ground up to work on Mac and Linux.

Oh, I know. Was just calling out his dumb logic. He specifically said that they should work on features that all TU players could take advantage of. Keyword being all. Considering that no one on Mac or Linux can even play this game, Mac and Linux support is a feature that none of the current players can use, much less all of us. That’s all I was trying to say

[Plokit]

Ah, I see.

[ilipitagaon]

@balianthemighty

By that logic, not everyone plays games on a Mac or Linux, so they should just not bother with those platforms either. VR support was promised in the Indiegogo and they have an obligation to everyone who backed, to add it. It’s not alright to promise someone something to get money out of them, and then slap them in the face with their own money and not make it.

I said they can, and not that they should. For the foreseeable future, it should in the developer’s best interest to satisfy as much players as they can instead of working on a feature that only targets a very small target audience, for such feature that requires so much work.

And Mac/Linux has considerably larger player base than VR. Comparing VR to platform expansion that completely enables more players to actually play the entire game is incredibly dumb.

[balianthemighty]

@ilipitagaon

@balianthemighty

By that logic, not everyone plays games on a Mac or Linux, so they should just not bother with those platforms either. VR support was promised in the Indiegogo and they have an obligation to everyone who backed, to add it. It’s not alright to promise someone something to get money out of them, and then slap them in the face with their own money and not make it.

I said they can, and not that they should. For the foreseeable future, it should in the developer’s best interest to satisfy as much players as they can instead of working on a feature that only targets a very small target audience, for such feature that requires so much work.

And Mac/Linux has considerably larger player base than VR. Comparing VR to platform expansion that completely enables more players to actually play the entire game is incredibly dumb.

You said that VR isn’t being developed because they could, instead, work on a feature that satisfies all players.

That’s why I said that that logic is stupid. Mac and Linux versions wouldn’t benefit ALL players, either, so according to your own logic, they should work on those either.

[CalculatorSpoon]

The TU devs promised VR when absolutely nobody knew how hard it would be to actually add support for it. The devs would have to rework the whole game if they wanted to add full support for it. They’d have to spend a whole lot of time getting the headsets, learning to use them and code for them, reworking the parts of the game that’ll support VR, and then actually releasing it. I don’t understand why not including VR into TU is such a big issue.

[balianthemighty]

@CalculatorSpoon

The TU devs promised VR when absolutely nobody knew how hard it would be to actually add support for it. The devs would have to rework the whole game if they wanted to add full support for it. They’d have to spend a whole lot of time getting the headsets, learning to use them and code for them, reworking the parts of the game that’ll support VR, and then actually releasing it. I don’t understand why not including VR into TU is such a big issue.

If this wasn’t a crowdfunded game, it wouldn’t be. When you take someone’s money by promising them something, only to not deliver on said thing, that’s literally the definition of a scam.

[CalculatorSpoon]

It’s one small feature out of many, many others that were included to TU and will be included in the future. I would understand if TU was advertised as a VR-only game (or VR-centered), but it wasn’t. It’s not as much of a big deal as you’re making it out to be.

[ilipitagaon]

@balianthemighty

You said that VR isn’t being developed because they could, instead, work on a feature that satisfies all players.

That’s why I said that that logic is stupid. Mac and Linux versions wouldn’t benefit ALL players, either, so according to your own logic, they should work on those either.

You are picking on one little word for no reason at all. I feel stupid that I even have to point out what obviously “all” meant. Obviously, that can’t be true. By your technicality, no feature can satisfy “ALL” players. That’s obviously impossible.

I could have gone detail on what “all” player meant and note every specific case, but that’s a waste of time. Anyone with decent comprehensive skills should be able to know what it generally meant.

The point was to note that working on a feature like VR is most likely not in the developer’s best interest when they could work on stuff that all of the TU players now enjoy when it is released, especially when VR takes a lot of work to get it working right.

It’s not “my logic”, but it’s the truth and how commercial game development generally work. If they work on VR right now, it would only grab a small audience. So what do they do? They instead work on a feature that everyone has access to.

[CalculatorSpoon]

Well, in a way Mac and Linux support would satisfy all players. If someone uses Windows and wants to play TU with their 2 friends who use Linux and macOS they could all play it and have fun together.

VR, however, doesn’t satisfy all players. The small amount of people who actually have a headset compatible would have fun for a few minutes or hours, but they’ll probably go back to keyboard and mouse after a while and the people without the money to buy headsets will lose out on the fun.

[ilipitagaon]

Yeah, of course. I agree with you. I also agree that Mac and Linux supports are important. A few of my friends only have Mac and it would be great to have some fun time with them.

It was just odd that I had to point out it wasn’t about technicality on the definition of “all”, but just to help OP understand why VR would not be the the thing we need and why developers are working something else.