Having spent the last week and a half with the quest 2 as my first VR headset I gotta say I'm blown away by the package. From Beat Saber standalone to modded with custom songs to wired and even fully wireless pc-based VR this thing has handled just about everything I could hope to throw at it.
Getting the negatives out of the way: Now I had previously messed around a bit with my roommate's Index, but I see very little difference in screen quality, with maybe black levels/banding in darker games like Alien Isolation being the only other minor disappointment besides the narrower FOV that I noticed. I do think that the Knuckles' palm-centered strap needs to be industry standard moving forward, however, as I do miss the natural feeling of just opening and closing my hands to pick up and drop things in games like HL:A. Given how fiddly the finger tracking was on knuckles though I don't really miss that here, at least. There's also very little that seems to take advantage of hand tracking, and even that seems real finicky in stuff that does, relegating it strictly to the realm of gimmick and maybe desperation convenience for navigating without the controllers. I also wish the battery life were a bit better without having to buy the $115 strap and case addon (though the included AA batteries don't seem to have lost practically any charge in the controllers in the meantime), but it's been fine enough for 3.5-ish hour play sessions off the grid and of course it's not an issue with a properly long USB cable (which REALLY should have just come in the box, Oculus, but I'll give ya'll a pass given the overall price tag)
Otherwise the tracking has been solid, with maybe a small handful of times in beat saber where it seemed to break down slightly in certain situations at the edges of the headset periphery and if the controllers get too close to the headset with bow/arrow and backpack inventory type actions, but these are relatively uncommon and hardly game-breaking. In Beat Saber in particular as probably the worst-case scenario I've gone from normal/hard to expert/expert+ capability within that timespan and have S-ranked a handful of tracks at expert. It certainly seems by my experience then that inside-out optical tracking is more than good enough for VR at this point, and I see no reason for the average consumer to ever need something like Lighthouse given the cost savings and the ease of setup. And I think the latter point can't be emphasized enough, really, the ability to just pop on the headset and go with maybe 15 seconds of setup required is the real triumph here, both in my own home and bringing it over to a friend's place. Even going with a fully wireless PCVR streaming setup a room and a half away from my desktop the added latency was nearly imperceptible, and being able to freely roam around my living room space instead of being confined to the small area around my computer desk and managing a dangling cable is just a huge boon to this thing's usability. Using this thing on a regular basis is just easy, in every conceivable way. And then being able to also natively mirror the headset to a chromecast at any time with 2 button presses is just icing on the cake for sharing the experience with others. And I gotta say again, wirelessly streaming PCVR via virtual desktop has worked far better than it had any right to (granted I have Nighthawk X4S router and a Wifi 6 card with an external antenna that helps). Once Wifi 6E hits critical mass then fully wireless VR will be the default, i have no doubt.
On the software side of things, admittedly outside of Beat Saber I haven't done much on Quest-native apps. Beat Saber is my most played software by far as of now, though, and is probably the most transcendant and distinctly VR-only experience I've had. I'd be lying if I said I didn't buy it partly in hopes to also supplement my cardio, because man you can really work up a sweat (and a back ache if you're not careful). Alien Isolation and Half Life Alyx have both been similarly stellar experiences thus far. Brass Tactics has also been pretty good, though surprisingly difficult. Thumper definitely gains a bit in VR, but not as big of a difference in VR really. Minecraft VR (and the Java based Vivecraft) has felt similarly underwhelming, along with Overload, though I've not spent as much time in these as the others. Tabletop Simulator felt pretty janky, but that game has never had the friendliest UI anyway. DolphinVR was pretty compelling where it worked, Pikmin in particular, but definitely begs for proper integration, support, and optimization outside of the 4 year old branch it's been stuck in. This was also one of the few areas though where it might have been more a limitation of my PC hardware. I managed to grab a 3080 but I'm still stuck on a 4770K and 8GB of 1866MHz DDR3, so I imagine performance will improve once I get a proper CPU/mobo update (waiting to see what intel has with Rocket lake before I commit). HL:A also had performance hitches likely for the same reason. I was also disappointed to learn that HelixVision doesn't currently work with 3080 capable drivers as I was particularly looking forward to sprucing up my current Witcher 3 playthrough. In fact, weirdly, attempting to stream TW3 in 2D via Virtual Desktop was maybe the only thing I attempted where the FPS dropped to completely unplayable for some reason, even though I get a solid 90+ FPS maxed out on my desktop proper. I also noticed that Beat Saber on quest native seemed to stutter consistently if I had my headphones connected via bluetooth instead of wired, so I'm wondering if it might've been similar interference from my switch pro controller I had hooked up.
Overall couldn't be much happier with the investment. Just hope that there's progress on a jailbreak so I can remove the FB profile requirement at some point.
For some reason I have just gotten really into Beat Saber. Now the arrows on the boxes have started to disappear. The fuckers.
I had to quit the campaign once I got to the point where i had to have a set number of misses or like an exact combo, forcing you to intermittently play badly. Just not fun, really ruined the campaign for me.
