No Man's Sky VR First Steps - VR Gameplay Valve Index
13No Man's Sky VR is a decent port to VR with some major flaws. It's still fun but it's lacking a lot of polish.
Lets start with the first thing you're going to see as an observer or launching from the desktop like me. The mirror window. It's kinda garbage. Not absolute dumpster fire since it doesn't have the black mask around it but it's pretty close. There's no reason to have the mirror window be side by side as the only option. It just looks bad, feels lazy and is typically an indication of the experience to follow.
We then follow that up with my roughly 20'x 20' play space being reduced to about 2' x 2' of actual playable space before I get a pop up telling me to return to my play space. This PSVR approach to PCVR is definitely not appreciated. I have a large play space, I want to move around while I play! This issue is only compounded by the fact that the HUD is also only forward facing. Again, this feels lazy and kinda half assed. One solution to rule all the various headsets. Too bad all the headsets aren't created equally and using the lowest common denominator in this case screws over those who want a full room scale experience.
While we're on the subject of UI... Overall the UI is a mixed bag. I liked how the menus were simply on our wrists. It felt high tech and sci-fi-ish. I would have picked a different orientation for them but that's not super important. What IS important is that interacting with these menus prevents you from walking. What happens when a sentinel patrol wanders up while you're mining and you need to switch to your weapon? In the flat version you would do that in a single button press while dodging lasers and running for cover. In the VR version, due to the quirks of the UI, you have to stop all movement, point at your right hand, select the mining laser and toggle through it till you get to your boltcaster or whatever weapon you have installed. All while the sentinels are turning you into a laser pin cushion.
I've never liked the UI in No Man's Sky tbh though. It's always been some console, hybrid, jank that just never felt good to me. I was hoping VR would move away from it but it's kinda just made it worse by introducing another thing to hybridize/splice into the mix. It is something you can eventually adjust to, however it is pretty much the antithesis of intuitive. Yes, I'm looking at you 'quick' menu... -,-
Controlls have some much brighter points. It is still very much a double edged sword though. Combat, scanning, mining and building are all done very well. I loved activating the scanner by lifting my head to my hand and clicking grip. It felt like I was interacting with my exosuit. We need more interactions like this! Physically pointing my weapons to fight and or mine felt so much better than it does on a flat screen with a M/KB. It's just more engaging. Building. Simple, direct, effective. Very well done from what I got to experience so far.
On the flip side we have things like interacting with containers. The first container I tried to grab something out of physically moved me in front of it, which thus put me half underground. This is not a desired or comfortable mechanic. Why can't there simply be a UI element spawned in front of me like when I open the menu? This would make far more sense than trying to move the player around to get a specific view. This is a flat game mindset that needs to die for VR. Outside of this scenario though, the grip and pull mechanic did grow on me.
Melee attacks seem to randomly just happen as you're walking along. The sensitivity here is tuned way to high. Also, you apparently have psychic sings as you can hit things that are a half dozen feet away from you each time you swing.
Those are just a couple of the outright bad mechanics. There are also things like navigating in your ship that were less outright bad and more clunky and awkward. The floaty star ship virtual HOTAS setup is both overly sensitive and no where near precise enough. It works but it doesn't feel that great.
So yeah, some of what they did felt really good and others just fell flat on their face for one reason or another.
There's definitely more to mention but this is a very large game and one sitting is hardly enough to do the game justice. Overall the biggest issues are controls and UI and I've got mixed feelings with both. No Man's Sky is likely still worth picking up for VR as we don't have much in the way of survival, sandbox, building games. Definitely a worth purchase while it's on sale.
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