Why VR doesn't have AAA games yet

About two years ago Jason Rubin joined Oculus VR to lead software development for the company's much talked about Oculus Rift. But there was one problem.

"There was no software, really, just VR," he said during an interview last week. "The dev kits were only 14 to 16 months old. "It was always clear to me, coming from the console side, that you can't launch hardware without good games." So over the next two years, Rubin, head of Oculus worldwide studios, worked with developers inside and outside the company to make sure that when Oculus Rift was ready to go on sale it would have a robust, eclectic mix of games to launch alongside it. "My job is to find content that makes the Rift interesting to consumers," he said. "I have a budget and I went out and found people to makes the types of games that would fill the holes I saw we had in the launch lineup." Last week's three-day San Francisco press event for the Oculus Rift, which ran across the beginning of the Game Developers Conference, was in many ways a sign of how far Rubin's efforts have gone to fix those launch holes. The day-long events, set-up so that journalists could come in three waves to play through games on the headset, included more than 40 playable titles. Many of those games will launch on March 28 alongside the Rift. Holes Early on, one of the biggest holes Rubin found in the lineup for the virtual reality headset were games that played from a third-person perspective. "The reason why third-person games were a hold was because of VR purists, researchers and university professors," Rubin said. "From their standpoint, VR means a very specific thing. That thing is a holodeck and the holodeck is not in third person. "From their standpoint, third-person is somewhat of an abomination." But Rubin saw the value and potential in third-person games. While the game takes place in the third-person, with players controlling a character typically located on the landscape beneath or around them, the player still views the experience from a first-person perspective. The player essentially become the camera, but in the case of VR, it feels like you still have a presence in the game, looming over the world in which you are controlling the game's character.





That's in part because developers can tinker with the view, making the eyes further apart from each other, for instance, to tweak the scale and make the player feel like a giant. That third-person perspective can also be used for tabletop gaming. Airmech, for instance, has you controlling the real-time strategy game from the view of someone standing in front of a big hologram table. "It all just kind of works," Rubin said. Airmech is also an example of the other sort of work Rubin and his team has been doing. "Airmech was already working on Oculus," Rubin said. "The developers were going to make this small game and I said, 'Let's make this huge.'" The end result is a full-blown VR game bigger than the original that grabbed a lot of buzz at last week's event. In the case of Crytek's The Climb, Rubin suggested the opposite. "Crytek had an idea for a massive game," he said. "They were showing me it and then said, 'Then you're going to be climbing up stuff.'

"I said, 'This is amazing, a cliff totally works. Let's make it a climbing game.'" Initially, the developers were resistant to the idea, but Rubin convinced them. "It was this hole," he said. "We're still not even scratching the surface of what can be done. "But we do have enough variety and exciting content now so that everyone can say there's something for them." Currently, Oculus Studios only owns the IP for two of the launch titles: Hero Bound and Dead and Buried. "Those games wouldn't exist without Oculus Studios," Rubin said. The Zelda-like Hero Bound was developed by Gunfire Games, a studio made up almost entirely of staff from Darksiders' developer Vigil Games. He said Gunfire was teetering on the edge of collapse when Oculus hired them to create the game. "They probably would have gone under if Oculus hadn't stepped in," he said. Now, that studio is working on Chronos, a darker, more zoomed-in third-person action game that Gunfire owns. Controllers Unlike the HTC Vive VR headset, Oculus won't be launching with its controllers, instead it ships with an Xbox One wireless gamepad. The Oculus Touch controller will hit in the second half of the year. That creates a sort of second launch for the platform and another wave of games for Rubin and his team to cultivate. Rubin says he's not worried that the Rift will lose players to the Vive simply because it doesn't have its controller hitting with the headset. "There may be some people who say, 'I want hand tracking controls today.' Here is what I would say," he said. "I can say with confidence that this is an amazing launch lineup. Someone who gets [the Oculus Rift] has an incredible amount of stuff to do this year and flowing into next year. If I was launching a Touch product this month I wouldn't feel that way.