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VR Awards Take Place Next Week

RuneSR2
Grand Champion

vrawards-5-year-logo@2x.png

I guess you're participating as an official VR judge @kevinw729 ? 

 

More info about the VR Awards here:

 

https://www.vrfocus.com/2021/11/vr-awards-take-place-next-week-tickets-and-event-info-inside/

 

- and the titles I find most interesting 😊

 

VR Game of the Year

  • Archiact – DOOM 3: VR Edition
  • Electronic Arts Inc. – Star Wars: Squadrons
  • ILMxLAB – Star Wars/ Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge
  • Joy Way – STRIDE
  • MyDearest Inc. – ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos
  • MWM Interactive – Maskmaker
  • PotamWorks – Smash Drums
  • Resolution Games – Demeo
  • VR Factory Games Sp. z o.o. – Horror Bar VR
  • Wanadev – Ragnaröck
  • Wevr – Gnomes & Goblins
  • XR Games – Zombieland VR: Headshot Fever

 

Somehow Gnomes & Goblins really deserves to win, but Squadrons of course has the (much) bigger budget and is real Star Wars. Maskmaker may still be the most original game - and is very impressive. Not sure all the other games deserve to be on that list, lol.  

 

 

 

 

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Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

20 REPLIES 20

RuneSR2
Grand Champion

And the winners are:

 

VR Awards 2021 Winners

  • VR Film of the Year – 3DAR – Paper Birds
  • VR Social Influencer – ThrillSeeker
  • VR Hardware of the Year – HP – HP Reverb G2 Omnicept Edition
  • VR Game of the Year – Resolution Games – Demeo
  • VR Experience of the Year – ATLAS V & NO GHOST – Madrid Noir
  • VR Marketing of the Year – Geometry Ogilvy Japan – Shibuya Virtual Halloween
  • Rising VR Company of the Year: triple A code
  • Innovative VR Company of the Year – Virtualware
  • VR Education and Training of the Year – NORCAT – Vale VR
  • VR Healthcare of the Year – Osso VR – Osso VR – Cinematic VR Surgical Training Platform
  • Out-of-home VR Entertainment of the Year – Figment Productions Ltd.- Current, Rising
  • VR Social Impact Award – Accenture – AVEnueS – Race Equity in Child Welfare 
  • VR Enterprise Solution of the Year – Masters of Pie – Hyperbat – World’s First VR Design Review over 5G
  • VR Lifetime Achievement Award by Accenture – Tom Furness

 

Hmmmm, Deme... o...  😮

 

 

To be frank - can't really say nothing against that choice, I don't play such games - and maybe I'm misjudging the game and it's truly great - but I still do not play such games ... and I'm very stubborn/persistent ("extremely" says the wife) 😇

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

Anonymous
Not applicable

Nope don't think that would be a game for me either.

I played Demeo a few times, and even got to the final level. However, it is far from Game of the Year. It is very simplistic and has major balance issues. If  you check YouTube, people can walk through the whole game with a single over powered character despite the fact that this is meant to be challenging for a group of characters.

 

Clearly, Star Wars/ Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge and Star Wars: Squadrons are superior games in every regard. But as I said from the beginning, organizations like this do more to embrace bias than avoid it as part of their judging process. With SW:TGE being exclusive to Oculus and SW:S published by EA, there is no way that these titles were going to get proper votes from the judging panel.

 

Demeo is in extreme early access mode, whereas the Star Wars games have a very polished AAA feel. I am looking forward to the next Steam Awards to get something a bit more balanced and realistic.

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

Thanks for sharing. It was a great selection of titles to evaluate and judge, and we would like to congratulate all those that were nominated by the VR community.

Looking forward to a great event with key members from the community and nominated winning developers.
Honored to be part of such an important and established award panel, working alongside some amazing members of this growing community. 

https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959


@kevinw729 wrote:

Honored to be part of such an important and established award panel


 

That's the beautify of living during this Information Age: It is very easy to get established with just about any initiative imaginable. Just get a subreddit, a Facebook Page, a Twitter Account, and Web Domain... and bam! Established! 😁

 

Take The Verge as an example. This week we saw how The Verge, an established media outlet, retracted a statement due to it being false information.

 

Zenbane_0-1637440384941.png

 

 

The Verge may be "established" but their Brand reputation will always be in question.

 

Standing the test of time and building a true Brand reputation is the real challenge. And in this regard, AIXR (an independent body) has a long road ahead. VR is still in its infancy and the software ecosystem is quite small. Hence the reason Accenture wins nearly every year and the list of nominees is small with trivial applications.

 

Once VR is in hundreds of millions of homes globally, we will likely see larger and more regulated organizations come forward to represent the whole and true VR Community. In contrast to independent bodies that represent a select few members.

 

Brand reputation outweighs establishment, and entails more mechanisms to uphold the values that the organization is trying to demonstrate. Such as ensuring that members of the judging panel do not actively, and publicly, partake in activities that demonstrate strong biases for or against the very bodies of work in which they are supposed to be judging.

 

Anonymous
Not applicable

Should have had separate categories for Standalone GOTY and PC VR GOTY.

 

And this should have been held on 31st December at the earliest if not next year.

 

And Star Wars Squadrons not winning this thing is a travesty. If this was split into two categories like I've suggested Resident Evil 4 VR should have won the Standalone GOTY. Would also be nice to have had an Indie GOTY too.

Fully agree - it's like having Commodore Vic-20 games competing in the Amiga 500 category - it just provides noise. 

I do think the winner reflects that ordinary users have no clue about many of the games. They might never have played Gnomes & Goblins (which requires tons of gpu power for an optimal experience) and Squadrons (very high gpu requirements too). 

For content, nothing beats Squadrons, but it also has a way bigger budget that the other games. I wonder how many would care for Demeo had they first tried Squadrons on my rig - with the Index and RTX 3090. Of course Demeo is much more accessible for persons without means to enjoy proper VR. Squadrons really is a superb experience for high-end VR enthusiasts. 

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"


@RuneSR2 wrote:

I wonder how many would care for Demeo had they first tried Squadrons on my rig - with the Index and RTX 3090. Of course Demeo is much more accessible for persons without means to enjoy proper VR. Squadrons really is a superb experience for high-end VR enthusiasts. 


Nah, Index with a 3090 isn't "proper VR" compared to just a stand-alone VR unit at all. That argument can go both ways, and we can say that tetherless Quest is proper VR whereas a tethered Index "isn't proper VR." 


What you are doing here is mixing personal preference with the actual technical definitions. Ergo, just because one choose to care less about going tetherless and care more about visuals doesn't mean high-end visuals equate to proper VR.

 

This statement is far more proper:

Both Index and Quest offer proper VR, yet also meet the needs of those who have one personal preference over another.

 

Besides, Index still has worse SDE and Glare than Quest, giving Quest users a much "clearer" experience - even with PCVR titles - than Index users. So if visuals really are that important, a Quest with a 3090 can be arguably superior to an Index with a 3090. Both visually and hardware wise due to Quest's Tetherless PCVR capabilities.

 

 


@RuneSR2 wrote:

I do think the winner reflects that ordinary users have no clue about many of the games. They might never have played Gnomes & Goblins (which requires tons of gpu power for an optimal experience) and Squadrons (very high gpu requirements too). 


 

This doesn't seem accurate since it was not ordinary users selecting these winners, It was a handful of judges. So, I am not sure how one would see a judging panel choose a winner and then conclude that it must be all the actual consumers (ordinary users) making the choice. The consumers literally did not have a say in selecting these winners.

 

It would be more applicable to state that it is these judges who have no clue about many of the games. If we actually read the VR Awards site, they specifically state that when judging these games they are looking for many attributes about a piece of software. They are not just looking at the visuals, or even at the gameplay. They are trying to judge the manner in which VR interactions were implemented.

 

As best I can tell - using the VR Awards own words on its judging process - the fact that games like Squadrons are limited to head movement and a HOTAS, and thus do not take full advantage of all the inputs available with VR Hardware, it would not have ranked very high. And other titles where your VR HMD and Hand-Controllers are just used in standard/basic fashion leaves them ranking low as well.

 

Whereas Demeo requires a whole lot of VR Hardware interaction in order to engage in its environment.

 

With Demeo, the players are looking down in to a living board game. The players can use their hands to grow or shrink the entire play space. On top of using our hands to manipulate the characters, get loot, acquire and use skills, etc. The manner in which you look down in the board game also plays a big role in your strategy. Forcing you to move the play area around in order to get better view angles as part of your winning strategy.

 

Demeo is easily the one game that contains the most interactive VR inputs from the entire list. It does strive to offer players a way to engage in a video game in ways that are unique to VR as opposed to other titles which are no different than playing the game on a flat screen with a mouse and keyboard.

 

However, what the judges fail to realize (likely due to the judges not being VR enthusiast who play the games from that list for any significant length of time), is as follows:

  • Demeo's interactive VR inputs borrow heavily from previous titles, such as Brass Tactics. So while very interactive, it is a near copy/paste of other VR board game style software.
  • If you play Demeo for longer than 1 hour, you will start to suffer some neck pain since you are forced to look down the entire time. Even without a VR HMD atop your head, any human would get neck pain after looking down in that manner for too long. Your head must be angled straight down, which is different from playing a real board game, where your head can look straight forward quite often, or simply angled down slightly. Demeo is almost like looking down at your feet the whole time.
  • If you set aside the interactive VR inputs, Demeo turns out to be a board game with major balance issues and simply doesn't offer as much of a compelling experience as real board games available on the market today. Something like Monopoly or Risk is far more compelling.

 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time in Demeo, since I do love some turn-based combat. But after spending about 4-6 hours in the game, the world it offers started to get stale and cookie-cutter far too quickly. Especially considering other turn-based titles on the market (even outside of VR), such as the Xcom franchise.

 

Gnomes & Goblins seems like a fun title, but the hand-controller implementation is lacking. Watching gameplay videos from other users, your hands are invisible and appear more as translucent VR controllers. There's no way a game with that type of low-end VR hand implementations would win a VR Award.

 

Any flight SIM probably wouldn't win either since it relies so heavily on a HOTAS for just about everything.

 

Other titles on that list really had no chance of winning, such as the Ragnarock game which is a really bad Beat Saber clone.

 

It seems obvious to me that the proper winner would have been one of the following:

  • MyDearest Inc. – ALTDEUS: Beyond Chronos
  • ILMxLAB – Star Wars/ Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge

 

Both of those titles do a great job of implementing VR interactions than most games. And if we are to put a heavy emphasis on which title takes more advantage of VR controller interactions, then ALTDEUS gets the slight edge. 

 

ALTDEUS offers more originality and uniqueness than Demo, imo. That should have been the real winner. I think the average VR consumer, and VR Enthusiast, would have chosen ALTDEUS over the others if we are to use the same judging rules that the VR Awards organization claims to use.

 

2c. 😁

> They are not just looking at the visuals, or even at the gameplay. They are trying to judge the manner in which VR interactions were implemented.

 

Great point!

Examples are SuperHot and EchoVR. There you have a lot more VR interactions and interaction types. In Superhot you need to use full body movement (sit down, get up, stay in strange pose etc) in addition to hands and head movement. And in Echo VR you could attach/grip to any surface and even other player (is there any other VR game you could grip to other player?).  Ok you could not change other players speed or position (it is hard to do and not make sim sick) but you could interact and get advantage (in speed or position) for you own avatar.

 

I think we need some classifications or level of advancement for VR or even parts of VR:

- VR view (3dof/6dof, FOV ....)

- VR interactions (gamepad/keyboard, touch/hands, full body, ....)

- VR movement (joystick/front facing, 360/same place, free movement....)

- VR image (how detailed image will be, 360/3d photo better then rendered ...)

- VR interactive image (how detailed changing VR image is)

- VR sound (stereo/surround....)

- VR senses (basic vibration, hand gloves, hand stoppers, ...)

 

 Or something like that 🙂

 

Then we could rate ay type of VR/virtual "device". Like ... if you are looking for "Proper VR in visual quality" then it is definitely 3D cinema! No computer game can beat it. But it is poor VR in "interaction" same way.

 

And if you want "proper VR in interaction" you could have Quest 2 with addition of motion trackers to legs. Then you could move free without wires, jump on the trampoline, stand on hands upside down, go through "gates", walk half a kilometer etc  (some of it could be achieved with back pack PC).

 

And why all forgetting VR sound? :))

kevinw729
Honored Visionary

Great points, and your list is very similar to the Judging criteria we work to on each category, though you are missing a number of elements:

 

- Comparison to other titles in selection list
- Comparison to previous nominees
- Unique elements or features
etc.,

There are a couple of other elements for house keeping, but these considerations are all in the criteria used.

 

The reason for having senior judges that work in the industry is that they can apply these elements to the decision process.

 

Obviously each selection will be criticised by others on biases and leanings, but there is a growing momentum in the VR Awards and are proving a valuable talking point in growing market recognition. 

https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959