‘Doom VFR’ Pre-order Available for $30, a Separate “standalone VR game” from ‘Doom’

That’ll be a deciding factor in buying it, myself, and probably for a lot of other people too. I’ve been a fan of Doom since the first one released on the PC over 2 decades ago, and as I was watching the video released at E3 last night, I couldn’t help but think that this looks like it’s nothing more than “Doom In Name Only”… that they used the setting and graphical assets from Doom 2016, but that they don’t share anything beyond that, especially in terms of how Doom VFR will play.

I was just saying on another posting about Skyrim for PSVR that really, what needs to happen is Sony and maybe even Bethesda should get together and develop a new controller to deprecate the Move controllers to replace them with something more similar to the Oculus Touch controllers, which aside from ‘Move Controller’ like functionality, they also have an analog stick, per controller. Something like that, where you would still have full motion controls but also have a pair of analog sticks, that would allow for all kinds of advanced environment interaction while allowing for gamepad-like movement. I think that type of controller would be perfect for this game, as well as Skyrim-VR and Fallout 4 VR. Not only would it solve that issue, but it would open up a much better controller interface for games that have yet to go to production.

I don’t have the controls on hand to verify, so I’ll have to refer to anyone else that actually owns the Oculus Touch controls for reference to the quality of the controller, but the design itself seems a winner to me and I think it’d make a great template for the standard for VR controllers, much the same way that the original PS1 dual shock controller set the basic design template that other manufacturers followed for roughly 2 decades –while Microsoft’s controls use a different particular button arrangement and thicker controller body, the overall format is the same with two analog stick separated to each side, a dpad on the left along with the stick, 14 buttons, etc.

The Aim controller is great for games that can make use of it, and I think Doom VFR could have been one of the games that could have, if its developers had decided to go that way. I honestly don’t understand why they didn’t go with the Aim, since it would allow for full locomotion plus accurate aiming –except for this one scene in the video for Doom VFR, which shows a pair of claw-like-gripping-devices, which is obviously being controlled by a pair of Move controllers; That scene tells me that the Aim controller just wouldn’t suffice unless the game were seriously retooled; something that’s pretty unlikely now that they’re already showing off gameplay footage –by the point that’s happening, the basic form of the game’s engine is done and it’s now down to filling in all of the content and working out the kinks.