How is Boneworks sitting at 87% positive reviews on steam with all the problems? I get sick pretty quickly in VR so I skipped it but the majority of players don't seem to have a problem.
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Highly anticipated VR title Boneworks is a collection of VR sins
- Thread starter Deleted member 12790
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Yeah like, the game is super fun and it does a lot of things well but, i'm sitting here right now feeling pretty sick for the second time, after just an hour and a half of boneworks.
It would be nice if we could save at any time, so I could just play in much smaller bursts imo.
But yeah i was surprised it ignored literally everything people have preached about VR development (even basic stuff like, vignetting for analog locomotion, etc)
It would be nice if we could save at any time, so I could just play in much smaller bursts imo.
But yeah i was surprised it ignored literally everything people have preached about VR development (even basic stuff like, vignetting for analog locomotion, etc)
Maybe most players have the ability to adapt to VR sickness, which is being reflected in the positive reviews? Either that, or a lot of people are blaming themselves for motion sickness instead of knocking the game for it.
yeah exactly, Brandon started rocketjump then left to start this company.
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The number of "I didn't get sick, so nobody gets sick" posts ITT are incredibly frustrating. Threads like this make me want to leave the board entirely. Why spend my time talking to people who will ignore well funded research for nebulous reasons? No, people getting sick is not bullshit.
I'm honestly surprised you haven't given up out of frustration. I've seen so many people not get what you're talking about before and insist you're wrong.
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I should be able to try this game on saturday or so. I'll give my opinion then. I dont know all the science that goes on behind the scenes to make things less sickly, so I'll take your work on it.
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Like, I can very, very easily keep going. But, as someone who follows VR, this is an abnormally high amount of chatter about a release making people Motion Sick. VR games normally do not have this many people rushing to talk about they make them sick, at least not for years. This IS making people sicker than normal, and it's not because of locomotion, it's because of the IK Physics.
Let's talk bluntly about VR legs. It's like spice tolerance. You can learn a number of coping methods to avoid getting simulator sick, some consciously, some subconsciously, but there will remain experiences that can make anyone simulator sick.
You'll end up getting less simulator sick than when you started, but you cannot expect to go from extremely sensitive to sim sickness to immune to it. In the case of BONEWORKS you can probably learn to avoid any and all interactions that move the player's in game head unexpectedly, if such a thing is possible.
But that's not good design.
You'll end up getting less simulator sick than when you started, but you cannot expect to go from extremely sensitive to sim sickness to immune to it. In the case of BONEWORKS you can probably learn to avoid any and all interactions that move the player's in game head unexpectedly, if such a thing is possible.
But that's not good design.
I'm sorry, but this really does come off as condescending. I don't believe anyone has said that 'nobody gets sick'. What people are saying is that for those who are not getting sick (seemingly the majority judging by the positive reception the game is getting), the 'sins' committed are worth the experience they are getting.
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And, if you don't get sick from playing the game, great. This topic isn't about you. It's about the people who ARE getting sick from the game, which are in higher than normal quantities. It's like going into a thread about how color choices make games harder for color blind people, and announcing loudly that you aren't color blind and thus don't see the problem, and thus the problem is made up. Just... ridiculous.
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The sins they commit aren't the reason people are enjoying the game. What they enjoy about the game, and not doing the things that are making an abnormally high number of people sick, are not mutually exclusive.
I like the spicy food analogy. Not everyone can handle spicy food. That doesn't mean that food should never be spicy. Some people love it. It would be a pretty sad world if all food was bland.
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NOBODY IS SAYING FOOD SHOULD NEVER BE SPICY. Going with the spicy food analogy, it's defending the practice of feeding you spicy food through your nose, as though that's the only way one can ingest spicy food. If you like spicy food, great, there are proper ways to eat it that won't make a good number of people, you know, inhale spice and get sick.
You keep saying that the game would be as enjoyable without the IK physics. That may be true for some, but not others. I personally have found that no other game has given as much as a sense of presence. I can't say for certain that that's due to the physical IK model, but I'm not going to discount the possibility either.
I'm sure the developers didn't just add it in to annoy people. They had a vision, and they stuck to it. It may go against conventional norms, it may make some people feel motion sickness, but I don't think anyone should be presumptions enough to say that they did it wrong.
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That's not what I'm saying at all. I've said repeatedly that you can have your IK and your physics all you want. The way they accomplish this is wrong. There are other ways to do just that, without making an abnormally large number of people sick, that are functionally equivalent.
It's not presumptuous at all. The way the game works, your virtual body does things you did not intend for it to do. And no, I'm not talking about your arm bending weirdly. This is more akin to playing a 2D game with a traditional controller, and having your character move in the wrong direction when you move the analog stick. That is certainly wrong. Their IK physics implementation is causing the positional tracking to fail. The position of your character in the game isn't matching your inputs. And that's much more concerning in VR, as doing that makes a lot of people sick.
being like this is the entire point of the game, it's biggest selling point and with 2k reviews already and a very positive rating I think the OP can only learn some lessons from the Boneworks team :)
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"It's not a bug, it's a feature" applied to a thing that makes people sick is really, really poor design. I've been giving the team the benefit of the doubt that the problems in the game are not the intended effects. I think this defense is actually pretty insulting to the developers.
not really, the game has puzzles and secrets that require you climbing around, jumping etc, it's what makes the game shine, you can't just win 'em all, it's a shame it's not playable from some people, but it's also experimental and interesting and going against rules set so far it's a deliberate design choice
No, that was not the point of the game. The game is a sandbox story game where you can play with the physics to beat it. The problem is... physics are hard.
A lot of the problems are caused by bugged physics that create motion sickness problems,and I hope they are not intentional. In the tutorial area they do poke fun at some of the more traditional VR methods, but they showcase stuff that should be doable without fucking up a ton of people.
Not really, because some of the interactions are also caused between hands and heads (as walls might repell you from hitting them).
Other games have done that without causing these problems. Again, it is mostly due to issues with physics.
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there are definitely bugs, like shown in some of the videos, but it's not poor design, it's deliberate design that is selling a ton so far, you can design your game in a different way but there's not a single truth about game design, and definitely you're not holding it, sorry. making a thread titled this way is a good conversation starter but basically saying that something is bad only because it's not designed like you would have it's sign of a narrow vision
I'm confused - so you're saying the issue is the physics and not the display of full body parts. If that's the case, how do you 'fix' the physics if the game is entirely designed around it? lol
the shaky camera bugs are definitely an issue, in a normal game it's a minor annoyance, in vr it can cause severe motion sickness, but it's still a bug, not a design choice
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A bug is an unintentional side effect. The exact opposite of a "deliberate design." A bug, by definition, cannot be deliberate.
Things that make abnormally high amounts of people sick are poor designs.
you can fix the issues caused by that specific implementation, but the game is indeed designed around that feature and it's the main selling point
I've been sick all week so haven't had a chance to play it yet, guess I can always refund it if it gets me ill.
so you can agree that the ones you linked are bugs and not poor design choices then. I don't think anyone designed the camera to be super shaky but only sometimes and go crazy when clipping with some objects. have you even played the game? it's completely fine 99% of the time
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The interaction is reversed from how it should be. The player should be a physical object that interacts with the world, this game does it backwards. The world interacts with the physical player. The cardinal sin of VR design is taking camera control way from the player's head. You can decouple the head physics from the arm physics. It's not a big deal if your arms are being swayed by physical interaction. Your hand brushing up against a wall should not cause your head to move. Aside from making people sick, that is also not how physical interaction works in the real world. Decoupling something like that is actually pretty simple.
Krej is not the one setting this nor does he have a narrow vision. HE just notices some stuff that goes against some of the bases that have been developed during more than half a decade of VR design to avoid causing motion sickness on people in VR (one of the most importants parts of VR).
As you said... they can fix those issues and they should. They should have thought about it when designing around the feature and put worst case scenario options to avoid that.
You can make it so that some interactions dont affect your POV which is what causes most of the motion sickness problems. The feeling is similar to when you turn around very fast and stop and feel the world shake.
Displaying full parts have an issue of you not feeling confortable (to soe people) because you are unable to put your body image in the game, but it is not that bad.
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Yes I've played the game, I had it preordered since the moment the store page went up.
How anyone could claim that motion sickness isn't a big deal in VR is beyond me
it's not that easy, they should have hired a QA team and tested every possible case? or spent more months on making the game risking to then compete with hl alyx? maybe, they are doing fine anyway though. I think they released in the perfect moment, there are bugs, they'll probably fix them now that the game is out there and more bugs gets noticed. This is just how development works, sometimes you can fix everything, sometimes you cannot fix even stuff you know it's there and you really care about because there are higher priorities (like the game not working at all, crashing etc), game development is not easy, trust me :P
check the steam reviews and you'll understand, no one is saying motion sickness is not a big deal, it's an issue. still seems that overall people are really enjoying this game
I mean I think part of the problem is that their QA team / people that they let playtest seems to be mostly consisting of people that do not usually experience motion sickness, because they have an easy triggering condition around 10 minutes into the game (museum climbing and then the first puzzle).
And as I said, my hope nw is that they acknowledge some of the issues and start patching it (as they seemingly patched some support today)
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The past several years of VR have been about iteration and collaboration among VR developers to mitigate the need for QA teams to find this kind of fault. The problems I'm outlining in this topic aren't new, they're things that have been heavily discussed for years now. These weren't unknown problems.
There's one comfort solution that involves using a static, low-opacity grid or particle cloud to ground players in their space- basically, when the game tries to convey that you're moving when you're really not, the grid provides the truth about the player's position in real world space and that lets the player reject the fake movement that would normally confuse the brain and cause nausea.
Yeah I think this is the kind of stuff thats a big bummer about Boneworks IK implementation. The sickness this will cause many first time players has a large potential to cause bad press for VR as a whole and potentially cool interest in the whole medium.
big yikes
These two things aren't mutually exclusive
This is a constructive criticism thread. Not a "game sold well so idgaf if people are vomiting after 10 minutes of playing it" thread.
not gonna lie I've been thinking about this game all day and can't wait to get back into it. It really sucks that it's so inherently inaccessible, and I have to wonder what this game would lose if the simulated physics never moved the player's camera. Like, keep the foot height stuff. Keep the Gorn-style delayed arms. Keep the jumping, even. But maybe externally-forced head movement could be reconciled by occasional blinking to a ghost head instead of continuous movement or something?
regardless get that FOV reduction in there at least
regardless get that FOV reduction in there at least
It will be interesting to see if reviews change when people get further into the game, when a lot of the camera control concerns outlined in this thread are more prevalent. Lot of the reviews last night were with very small amounts of time put in.
wow the community spent years checking how physical simulated bodies and climbing stuff is implemented in boneworks? :) /sarcam
these aren't unknown problems but they wanted to make an experimental game, you can consider it badly designed but this kind of stuff is exactly what a lot of people want from vr, there are plenty of enthusiasts that will stomach short sessions if that means playing a game that finally delivers on the vr dreams we all had in the 90s, Boneworks makes a ton right, it's definitely wonky, there's no reason for the arms IK looking so bad besides the fact that they weren't skilled enough I guess, but the fact that throws away the book and makes something that gets people excited is important, this could be actually one of the most important vr releases so far design wise, and people will take notice and start getting inspired by it. Probably even people at valve got inspired by it already if you believe the rumors
the FOV reduction could go a long way, I think they focused on getting the game done first and they got really used to it
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Yes, they did. This is using unity. Like, literally those very things.
you have a very odd idea of game development if you mean that by using the same engine as others then you can just slap stuff in your game