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Resident Evil 4 VR announced (Oculus Quest 2)

CamHostage

Member
I don't mean 1:1 boxing, that's a simple and straightforward job to make and not one I'm willing to play. I'm a gamer, not a fitness nut. I don't want to sweat in droves to enjoy a game. what I'm saying is that close quarters combat in VR definitely should be roomscale rather moving back and forth with analog stick. But they're still to find a proper mechanic for that: one that empowers the player in a whimsical way rather than requiring them to get in shape or whatever.

Well, heh, even if it were roomscale, you of course wouldn't be performing belly-to-belly suplexes or bicycle-kicking virtual characters in your living room... even spinning-heel kicks are questionable. (Unless, as you mentioned, it was specifically a fitness game or something where advanced aerial moves were part of the course.) And if they adapted melee from button presses to motion gestures, it still wouldn't work great because your first-person view would be of you like spinning in the air while sitting on your couch, or grabbing some Ganados and all you see is zombie belly followed by you looking straight up in the air while lying on your 'virtual' back...



If they did transpose melee into the RE4 VR combat system (would they really not have melee??), it would probably instead be something more reasonably physical, like a punch or a knife strike, or maybe a crane kick ala Karate Kid (that would let your "virtual legs" do an action and your view wouldn't spin or twist oddly, just a bit of extra head bobble; also a kick would keep your arms free so they wouldn't need to match the canned punch/knife animation and disrupt the VR immersion.) There is still the question, like you said earlier, of how you get into and out of close range of melee (melee was simply context-sensitive with a generous range in the old game that clicked into canned action; VR would have a tougher time "cheating" your body around the game geometry) and how well your VR sensors match to the combat of the character on-screen versus how physical you expect your hero to be, but some of that can be overcome.

I still don't understand though how the balance of the game is maintained, though. If there is no melee, that's a huge element lost from RE4. Combat is about stick-and-move, and about taking advantage of context actions to deal damage you've earned. Carefully shoot them in the knees and you have a few seconds to run over, hit the melee, trigger the attack, and see if you've gotten a kill and/or knocked back some surrounding enemies (or if a tentacle spawns from the crushed head and you need to bolt for your life!) Melee and knifing-while-down is part of the ammo conservation strategy. It's your only choice when resources start to dry up. It's how RE4 is made to play. You learn to be methodical in how you attack and when to headshot versus kneecap versus some boomstick room-clearance, and then your plan goes to shit and you panic, and that's fun. This, without melee, it would be... well, different, at the very least.

...Ultimately, the traditional Resident Evil 4 still exists, so if this plays differently (and IMO is going too far away from the original to be an authentic way to play,) so be it. Make it a VR blast-a-thon, give Leon as much ammo as the player wants, turn some QTEs into physical cranks and doors and whatever to make it feel more like you're there, frickin' let players move while aiming even... either play this or don't, it is what it is, whether or not it is "real" RE4

But that goes to my original point then: why remake RE4 in VR?

Why keep so slavishly to the original graphics and animation and level layout, why struggle to adapt everything that was third-person and cutscenes to somehow work in first-person, why throw out the carefully honed and award-winning play balance and combat tactics which end up being difficult/incompatible with the new format, why put up with all the limitations of a 15-year-old TV game, why spend several years on a port when you could have built a new game (using a lot of what people loved about RE4 even) created around VR play?
 
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Wonko_C

Member
After seeing how teleport works in RE4, I guess suplexes, kicks, etc. would just momentarily take you out of first person while Leon executes the animation. Personally I wouldn't mind that, It means I would get glimpses of a real-size Leon pulling off cool shit next to me.
 
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Buggy Loop

Member
New trailer! October 21st !!

Andy Samberg Ew GIF




Super hyped for this
 

Wonko_C

Member
Looks horrible
Videos of VR games never look as good as when inside the headset. Most importantly, people who have few or no experience with VR gaming probably don't realize how playing it will be a totally different experience than with traditional controls. Actions such as reloading aren't just scripted animations at the push of a button anymore. Players will actually have to empty the clip, grab a new one from their belts, and load it into the gun, such things will add a new level of tension to the game.
 
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Fermbiz

Gold Member
I just bought the Quest 2 last week and been playing Half-Life: Alyx wired via Oculus Link...I'm simply mind blown by that game. Sucks that RE4 is exclusive to Quest 2. I think its really lame, but I cant wait!!
 

Moses85

Member
Videos of VR games never look as good as when inside the headset. Most importantly, people who have few or no experience with VR gaming probably don't realize how playing it will be a totally different experience than with traditional controls. Actions such as reloading aren't just scripted animations at the push of a button anymore. Players will actually have to empty the clip, grab a new one from their belts, and load it into the gun, such things will add a new level of tension to the game.
I have a PSVR and played several games with it. This definitely looks weaker.
 

Moses85

Member
Games on the Quest 2 generally look worse than PS4 games, BUT run at a significantly higher resolution than PSVR games, which is arguably more important.
This GCN graphics would run on PSVR also great. We arent Talking about a HL Alyx here.
 
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FunkMiller

Gold Member
I just bought the Quest 2 last week and been playing Half-Life: Alyx wired via Oculus Link...I'm simply mind blown by that game. Sucks that RE4 is exclusive to Quest 2. I think its really lame, but I cant wait!!

pick up a spare 5ghz router and you can use Airlink without an internet connection for wireless PC vr.
 

Wonko_C

Member

I'm not liking how the game handles third person actions: (climbing ladders, getting grabbed, and I supposse melee will be the same) the game switches to a 2D screen in front of you, it should just pull the camera back behind Leon, like one of the locomotion options they previously showed:

ezgif-3-b42edfedbe17.gif
 
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CamHostage

Member
Can you only teleport move in this game, or can I use the analogue stick to walk like normal?

There's different modes of play. You can move freely, or you can teleport, depending on how you prefer to play and your sensitivity to motion sickness. (I don't think they've commented on what options do/do not exist as far as moving and shooting? I've seen something that looked like walking while the gun is drawn, which is not how RE4's combat works, but maybe I just misunderstood what I saw. In general, VR tends to work well with stick-and-move gunplay, so it would make sense to preserve the way the game is designed to play for the VR conversion, but some motion in your VR space might work too.)

I'm not liking how the game handles third person actions: (climbing ladders, getting grabbed, and I supposse melee will be the same) the game switches to a 2D screen in front of you, it should just pull the camera back behind Leon, like one of the locomotion options they previously showed:
ezgif-3-b42edfedbe17.gif


Many of these third-person actions have cinematic direction to them of specific camera angles and movement/cuts/inserts to frame the action. So, having the camera slip back behind your character and showing the back of Leon's head while he's struggling not to get his face chewed off wouldn't be a great experience. Nor would it make any sense for you to have full VR perspective but you're not moving while Krauser drops out of nowhere from the sky. They could have totally redesigned the QTE moments to be something else in VR, but there's so many of them (some just very simple actions like ladders and windows, but others are big chunks of the boss encounters and storytelling,) and the game benefits from that cinematic flair interjected every now and again, so I'm not sure how they could have redone all of those sequences and made them all work inside VR space. At least as a Theater Display, it still is Resident Evil 4 intact in VR, not a studio's reimagining of it, for better or not.

Otherwise, I agree, the cinematic camera is a frustrating compromise in its own right (especially since it's inside a little Theater Display box, with just dark void around it instead of the actual world where the action is taking place, although if you could look around during a QTE, that might be bad or disorienting too?) As as been mentioned a few times, Armature had a lot of no-single-best-choice decisions they had to work through to transfer RE4 into VR.)
 
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Wonko_C

Member
There's different modes of play. You can move freely, or you can teleport, depending on how you prefer to play and your sensitivity to motion sickness. (I don't think they've commented on what options do/do not exist as far as moving and shooting? I've seen something that looked like walking while the gun is drawn, which is not how RE4's combat works, but maybe I just misunderstood what I saw. In general, VR tends to work well with stick-and-move gunplay, so it would make sense to preserve the way the game is designed to play for the VR conversion, but some motion in your VR space might work too.)
It would feel weird/out of place not being able to freely move your hands while walking, that includes aiming and shooting. I guess this fundamentally changes the game design but being in VR by itself changes the game design already. It'll probably trivialize combat if I'm gonna be circle-strafing around while gunning down those Ganados, LOL.

Many of these third-person actions have cinematic direction to them of specific camera angles and movement/cuts/inserts to frame the action. So, having the camera slip back behind your character and showing the back of Leon's head while he's struggling not to get his face chewed off wouldn't be a great experience. Nor would it make any sense for you to have full VR perspective but you're not moving while Krauser drops out of nowhere from the sky. They could have totally redesigned the QTE moments to be something else in VR, but there's so many of them (some just very simple actions like ladders and windows, but others are big chunks of the boss encounters and storytelling,) and the game benefits from that cinematic flair interjected every now and again, so I'm not sure how they could have redone all of those sequences and made them all work inside VR space. At least as a Theater Display, it still is Resident Evil 4 intact in VR, not a studio's reimagining of it, for better or not.

Otherwise, I agree, the cinematic camera is a frustrating compromise in its own right (especially since it's inside a little Theater Display box, with just dark void around it instead of the actual world where the action is taking place, although if you could look around during a QTE, that might be bad or disorienting too?) As as been mentioned a few times, Armature had a lot of no-single-best-choice decisions they had to work through to transfer RE4 into VR.)
I totally forgot about the cinematics and long QTEs, it's understandable why they went this route, then.
 
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CamHostage

Member
I totally forgot about the cinematics and long QTEs, it's understandable why they went this route, then.

I mean, long QTEs or not, they didn't need to cut away to a little insert camera just for a ladder. I guess if they had started changing cutscenes, though, it would have gotten complicated as far as where to stop or what's best for the game as being a version of RE4, even if it is now in VR. Again, lots of no-single-best-choices in making this project, they could have done some things that could have been cool in VR but when you think about what actually would happen and how it'd play if they started to make some changes to the simple cutscenes, they would not be so simple.

(Even something as basic as the ladder sequences, those do have a certain pace to them, so it could have upset the play balance a bit if they converted it VR and had you actually climbing the ladder. Like, you could have stalled halfway up and looked around a bit, for instance, and the AI would just sit there unless the developers added a ladder attack too, but then if they did let you get hit on a ladder, that hurts the strategy of the evade... VR'ing ain't easy. )
 
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MacReady13

Member
I'm happy to be able to walk about freely in the game world. I want it to feel as much like the original as possible. Plus, warping to areas would completely take me out of the game. Really looking forward to this!
 

Tygeezy

Member
Just a small warning, if you play Half Alyx after this, it'll feel like you are moving at a snail's pace.
In Resident Evil 4, you move pretty fast, faster than most VR games.
Walking dead saints and sinnners is even more painfully slow.
 
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