About a year ago, Sony secured the trademark rights to “VRPG”, which led many to assume that Sony might be working on an RPG for the PlayStation VR headset.
Now that PlayStation VR has been released, there is still no sign or sound of such an RPG. In fact, there is relatively little heard about RPGs for the headset. However, this does not mean that there isn’t a VR-RPG in development. Currently, it seems that Virtual Reality in gaming is more focused on fun mini-games or horror and space experiences. An MMORPG would be a fantastic idea.
An MMORPG as a Virtual Reality Game
Imagine interacting with thousands of players in a virtual world. Star Citizen for example would be perfect for something like this. You could actually sit in the cockpit of the ship, turn around, and scream commands at the crew. In the cities, you would run freely and engage in fierce battles with enemies in fiery shootouts on space stations. All of this as if you were truly there. You communicate with other players via microphone and experience adventures together.
However, many VR games also show that motion sickness still poses a significant problem. Being able to move freely in a virtual world can cause some players to feel nauseous when using a VR headset. This makes it challenging to create large, open game worlds that can be experienced in VR. The prototype of Fallout 4, for example, used a teleportation control method, where you point to the spot on the ground you want to go to and then appear there without having to walk. Many VR games adopt this movement scheme as it minimizes motion sickness.
There is still much to improve
Now imagine an MMORPG where players are constantly teleporting around. This would make it difficult to interact with them and would feel very strange in the game. There is still much to be done before players can truly explore open worlds in VR without feeling sick.
It could now indeed be the case that Sony is working on a VR-RPG, as this would simply be the next logical step for VR gaming, but there are many hurdles that developers must still overcome before such a game can truly work well.
More articles on PlayStation VR:
