Traditional FPS games resort to things which are actually at least as restrictive, if not more so, to work in a screen + traditional controls setting:
- Making you move a mouse or twiddle a stick to look around.
- Forcing you to look and aim in the same direction.
- Either don't let you lean around obstacles, or only give you very limited leaning options by pressing buttons.
- Make you press a button to duck/crouch, and only give you one or two levels of ducking.
There's a lot more where that came from, and you start to realize it when you play in VR.
Compared to that, in a fully immersive VR FPS, you look by looking, turn by turning, aim by aiming, crouch by crouching, and lean by leaning.
Seriously, try to think about this without preconceptions.
If what you're alluding to is a change of customer perspective on VR that leads to current VR type games being accepted as the new gaming baseline, favoring 1:1 translation of body input over locomotion as we know it in today's games, I'm still not seeing it.
The limits you describe of "traditional" games are there, but what you describe as restrictive are
engineering solutions to the problems. They have one thing in common:
They work.
A plane doesn't flap its wings to generate lift and thrust, a PC's hardware doesn't model a human brain to do its computations. They are all limited in many aspectes compared to the "real thing", but they
get the job done and done in ways that the real thing cannot hope to.
As much as you realize that those are engineering solutions after playing VR games, as little can wearing a VR headset and having motion controllers - even hypothetical perfect ones without lag, inaccuracies etc. - overcome some hard limitations: You're still you. And you are in your couple of m^2 living room, stuffed with furniture and build decidedly differently from your virtual world. This precludes you from replicating current 1st person character game mechanics. They're more likely than not beyond
your capabilities as a human and most certainly beyond
your living room's potential to replicate sprinting down a corridor, jumping over a chasm and cineastically sliding behind a chest high wall to take cover from alien fire. Yet, a huge part of current games' attraction is free realtime movement through the game world and doing all these unrealistic actions with your character. Not pointing on the ground 20 meters away and being teleported there.
Unless VR overcomes the locomotion issues then, presenting working engineering solutions to replicate the capabilities game characters currently have in non-VR games, the best scenario I can see for it, is to cement itself as a niche technology with games specifically designed for it and as goto display device of choice for sim-ers. But that's not what I'd describe as VR being "the future."
Who knows? Maybe all the change it needs is to gradually move away from first person games to third person games, where you don't have the vomit inducing experience that the game hero's acrobatics would be otherwise, but don't have to live without them either. That'd be a much less radical paradigm shift than limiting all your game characters movement to 3 or 4 m^2 and teleportation otherwise.
"But you can take cover 1:1?" Haven't the Wii and Kinect already shown, that this isn't exactly what the market wants for its "AAA" gaming entertainment?
Incidentally, I do think that VR maybe in some combination with AR is "the future". But I very strongly doubt that games resorting to teleporting your character around are. There will be either a solution to locomotion for VR games that also works without VR, or a paradigm shift to avoid sickness issues.
