What I Hate About Virtual Reality (VR) – January 2025

As the head of a game studio focused on making Virtual Reality games, I understand that the technology is still relatively young and that there are still a lot of unsolved problems that need addressing. I believe a good number of those problems need to be fixed before Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality can have a reasonable shot at achieving mainstream success. What that means for us—unlike when we were making mobile games—is that we routinely get to struggle with cutting-edge problems and need to come up with our own solutions to them, and that is a big privilege.

In order to stay away from the mistakes VR game developers usually make, I have a list of everything I hate about the current state of VR, and it’s come in very handy every time we have set out to design a new VR game/experience. The list could be of great help to anyone trying to make a VR game that’s accessible to a large audience, and not just hardcore gamers. Here it is:

• Free movement with the thumbsticks is disorienting and dizzying and is a big no-no. I have seen some games try to lessen the motion sickness by adding a vignette effect, but it didn’t entirely solve the problem. For now, teleportation or no movement seem to be better options.
• Many of the very popular games require you to play standing up which is really fatiguing and it also limits how easy it is to pick up and get into the game frequently. It also prevents longer play sessions.
• The splash screen of even some of the best games is sometimes very low quality and/or the movement of it in relation to the player’s head is disorienting and laggy. It leaves a terrible first impression.
• The names and positions of the buttons on the controllers just can’t be memorized that well and games often expect you to press a specific one by just giving you the name without proper spatial indication in the virtual world of where to press. I almost lose my mind every time a VR game asks me via a text box to “Press B.”

• Hand tracking is still inaccurate but I understand it’s only going to get better and that it’s the future of Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality. At the moment, the simplest tasks require much patience to get right using your hands. A lot of effort needs to be put into designing interfaces built specifically for hand tracking interaction, and it’s very easy to mess it up.
• Computer software UI was originally modeled as 2D representations of real, physical panels, buttons, dials, etc. It is always puzzling to me when hand-tracked VR/MR games use 2D UI for interactions, when they can become much more intuitive and tactile experiences by going back to 3D and touchable/grabbable interfaces like ones that are used in the real world.

• The inventory systems where you store each item at somewhere specific on your body is hit-and-miss at the moment. Often it creates more problems than it solves. We need a much more intuitive implementation.
• Some games require long play sessions and even with the lighter Quest 3 that means my head is going to hurt a lot. The games with short levels are much more fun and accessible, e.g. Tentacular, Angry Birds VR. That said, this is going to be less of an issue as VR/MR devices become lighter and smaller.
• Many games, even ones trying to be particularly immersive (e.g. Metro Awakening), depict the player’s hands as being detached from their bodies, and that really hurts the immersion. Not being able to see your virtual body in VR has a similar effect.

• Often upon starting a game, its menus spawn behind you and you have to manually recenter to fix it. That is extremely frustrating. The least requirement is for the menus to follow the general direction you are facing.
• Games should do a better job of telling you whether they are a seated, standing, or room-scale experience, and would do well to allow the player to play in any way they are more comfortable with. It goes without saying that seated play is definitely what games should target if they want to reach as large an audience as possible.

As we at Dropout Games accumulate more first-hand experience with VR/MR, new items get added to the list and some that are no longer relevant get removed. Our goal is to create the most intuitive and accessible VR/MR experiences possible, and I will share more about the exciting stuff we are working on in the near future.