my long dark VR experience

[bbennett2]

I thought I would share my experience with playing the game in vr. I know that rift support was one of the planned features(and one of the reasons I backed the game) so I thought I would give my input on how the game plays now. Knowing of course that rift support is way down on the to do list.

My setup:

trinus gyre app on my Nexus 5

modified google cardboard box

GTX 970

Tridef 3d

PS4 controller

The first thing I've got to say is that holy crap you have to try this out! The game is gorgeous imo, but the beauty gets kicked up a notch or 2 when you are looking around in vr. the depth to the snowflakes, trees, etc. plus that sky is just incredible! I obviously can't get the framerate high enough on my phone to be on par with the dk2 or gearvr, but it was good enough to have a fun experience in the long dark. Below are some positives and negatives of my experience

Positives:

The pacing of the game is perfect for VR. The slow pace kept me from feeling any nausea for quite a while. It was very intuitive to simply look at a pack of matches on a counter, click a button to pick them up and continue searching the building

Negatives:

The biggest issue I had was that I couldn't see the entire screen. I had the game setup for 1920X2160 resolution and had the FOV at 90. Even with this setup, I was unable to see a lot of the screen in the google cardboard. The rift will obviously have a better fov, but with the cardboard, I was unable to see the most important parts of the user interface. For example: I had the distinct pleasure of stumbling onto a bear while playing in vr. obviously I had to pester it until it attacked me. Seeing the bear charge me was freaking unbelievably cool! I managed to survive, however I couldn't see the lower right corner that told me I was freezing and my health was at 5%. In the menus, the screen is static, so I could not see anything on the lower right section (which is usually where the use/eat/harvest/equip buttons are.

Other things I noticed:

the doors in buildings seem a little skinny(they were real skinny til I fixed my resolution, so could easily just be on my end) and I felt a lot taller than I am in real life (I'm 5'7" and I felt closer to 6' in the game).

I started off sitting on my couch and playing with a mouse and keyboard. I would use the mouse to adjust my view so my head was always facing forward when I walked around. This was a big mistake as I found myself getting sick. The feeling of my vision moving while my head wasn't is too much. I then stood up and mapped the keys to my ps4 controller. this was a much much better experience.

suggestions for future vr implementation:

the only issue I had was being able to see the entire ui. Once that is possible, I will never play the game any other way!