u/Cricket — Cricket [he/him]

Those first two seem like must haves if you are at all interested in (realistic?) fighting in VR. TTOTF for boxing (including both multiplayer and passthrough so you can see your opponent in your own room) and Dragon Fist for punching and kicking (with full body tracking if you have the hardware for that). Underdogs is supposed to be great, but I'm not a fan of the whole mecha concept.

Oh, I did not realize that about Dirt Rally 2.0! I'm glad I haven't bought it yet then. Yikes. I have Dirt Rally 1.0 already.

I think flight sims would be another great use if you're into that. I hear lots of good things about VTOL VR.

It just seems like there are so many good VR games that I'm often surprised when I hear people say that there are no games.

I went through the Steam store “great on frame” listings as well as the overall VR listings, and IMO it’s quite a mixed bag. There’s fairly good variety but many of the “overwhelmingly positive” titles are relatively old, like even 2017-2022. And many of the newer titles don’t seem to have a lot of players yet.

One thing I've started to be disappointed by as I start to look for titles is that there seem to be several VR games that are exclusive to either Meta Quest or PSVR. As if the VR market weren't small enough, they had to go and divvy it up to be even smaller. SMH.

I've wanted to play Thrill of The Fight and Dragon Fist like forever. Hopefully there will be some kind of reasonable full body tracking solution for the Frame at some point, because I think that playing a Kung Fu game with full body tracking (punches and kicks) would be amazing.

I would also like to try Dirt Rally in VR, as well as Kayak VR: Mirage because it looks amazing and relaxing. I also just found out about Ocean Rift. That looks good, but I hope that it works with the Frame.

Other than that, some AR games on the Quest look amazing and I hope that they eventually make their way to the Frame.

The reservation email didn’t explain things very clearly, so when I got it, I wasn’t immediately excited.

Same here, but after I saw some of the email screenshots here showing what the waitlist message looked like, then I realized I had been lucky.

Yeah, I don't see an official sale event listed, but when I when I went looking for VR games on Steam over the last couple of days, most of them were 50% off. I saw a mention of this going until September 21st, but I'm not sure if that was just one game or publisher.

lol, nice one!

Let's see what the real situation is with the alleged screen door effect. I searched around and the only first-hand report of it that I could find was from https://www.roadtovr.com/steam-frame-hands-on-valve-vr-headset-index-2/

On reading it, it sounds like much less of an issue than people are making it out to be, using the qualifier "somewhat" and reiterating that they need to spend more time looking through it to be sure (emphasis mine):

When I put on Steam Frame for the first time I was looking at Half-Life: Alyx streamed from a PC in the same room from Frame’s dedicated streaming dongle.

Considering the Frame’s 4.6MP (2,160 × 2,160) per-eye resolution, I was expecting an image that looked similar to Quest 3’s display, which is 4.5MP (2,064 × 2,208). But I was surprised that the first thing I noticed was a **somewhat visible screen-door effect** (SDE), which is caused by the unlit space between pixels.

Considering I haven’t (yet) been able to test Frame side-by-side with Quest 3, there’s two explanations for the **somewhat apparent SDE**. Either I’m completely spoiled by the high resolution displays of headsets like Vision Pro and Galaxy XR, or (more likely) Frame’s LCD has a lower fill-factor than Quest 3’s LCD, even though they have a very similar number of pixels and field-of-view.

Thankfully, most other aspects of the image looked great. In my short time with the headset, it seemed like Frame’s custom pancake optics have similar performance to those of Quest 3, which have lead the industry for quite some time. Similar to Quest 3, the ‘sweet spot’ (area of maximum clarity) appeared to be very wide, spanning nearly edge-to-edge. I also didn’t notice any obvious chromatic aberration (separation of colors), ghosting, or motion blur. Granted, I didn’t get to hand-pick the content I was looking at, so **I still want to spend more time looking through the headset to be sure of all of these early observations**.

What do you mean by "a bunch of mobile crap", by the way? I don't see how the Frame won't benefit the same way from buying a new GPU?

Thanks, I had not heard, but that makes sense. Hardware that sells a lot of units gets cheaper to manufacture as time goes by.

Yikes, that's not good about the bad screen door effect! I hope they fix it before release. I thought that this was a solved problem in VR, so I don't see why they wouldn't.

Yeah, it seems that they have different color and graphics face plates, but what looked really cool to me was the actual live display front panel showing machine vitals. Someone in comments mentioned that it's e-ink. Very interesting.

The LED strip? It's on the units that have already been tested and demo'd. What looks really interesting is the (presumably optional) front panel display that shows machine vitals. I've only seen that mentioned on some articles and videos.

Where did you hear about the very bad screen door effect?

Regarding the price, as far as I know, Meta only sells the Quest 3 for $500 because they sell every unit at a significant loss. I don't imagine that Valve can afford or wants to do that. I recall reading that any other company would need to sell the Quest 3 for 2-3x the price in order to make money. In other words, Meta has been "dumping" to dominate the market.

As far as Steam layer getting cloned onto the Quest 3, I think Meta would do everything in their power to keep that from happening.

basically assume about ps5 performance

Thanks for estimating that will be similar to PS5 performance.

All 3 new announced hardware looks good to me! Although I would probably have less need for the Machine because I already have a (old) gaming PC. I'll have to compare benchmarks. I'm most excited for the VR set.

Awesome post, thank you! I'm a huge fan of rally in general and bought Art of Rally pretty much when it was released. Here are some other cool driving and rally games that come to mind:

GeneRally 2: top-down arcade racer in early access, sequel to a popular freeware game from the early 2000s. It has a track editor and probably nice arcade physics like its precursor.

Driver): retro Playstation 2 title that lets you be the badass getaway driver of 70s movies. If you haven't heard of this, it's so good in terms of emulating those types of movie scenes.

Rally Trophy: retro rally sim that focuses on historic rally cars from the 60s and 70s, i.e., mostly 2WD and RWD.

Mobil 1 Rally Championship: retro rally sim that was known from what I recall for having realistic full-length stages of the real British Rally Championship. We're talking 20, 30+ minute stages from what I remember reading. I think that this is really cool and wish that there would be more games like this. There used to be mods that fixed issues with some aspects of the physics on it.

Xpand Rally: it seems that one unique feature of this retro rally game was that it included a track editor so that you could edit the game's stages or design brand new ones.

Finally, a game that's not about driving at all, but about being a rally mechanic: Rally Mechanic Simulator. I just discovered this recently and it looks interesting.

**Note**: this thread is on the Steam Deck community but I'm not sure about the compatibility of any of these games with that. Check before buying.