Should I get a Quest 3, or wait for Valve Index 2 / "Deckard"?

[temps]

I currently have a Valve Index, so I'm not sure if the Quest 3 offers much of an improvement for me with regard to playing Half-Life: Alyx; but I'm thinking about getting a Quest 3 to play all those standalone Quest exclusive VR games, and because the mobility would allow me to move my VR gaming to areas of my house that have a lot more open space for room-scale VR.

What are the best standalone single-player Quest exclusive games that you think would make it worth getting the Quest 3 for a person in my situation?

Or alternately, maybe I should wait for the rumored Valve Index 2 / "Deckard" which may or may not be coming soon? Then again... that wouldn't let me play Quest-exclusive standalone games, I suppose...

[Gracey Face]

The Quest 3 is 6 and 6e compatible but the bandwidth maxes out below 1Gbps (and I have seen people saying that practically it maxes out at ~6-700Mbps due to the chip) which means you only need Wifi 5, and assuming it's been less than a decade since you bought it then the repeater should be wifi 5.


That being said you can actually take the index as far as you want. All you need is signal repeaters. You can daisy chain them together to make a connection as long as you want. Hell I have a 30 series Nvidia GPU and you need signal repeaters on them to just play any PCVR headset (that doesn't have a fibre displayport cable) because the cards have weak displayport outputs.

[Gracey Face]

Originally posted by IanL:

Someone posted a video a few years back of someone playing with a Quest on a beach in the early morning when the beach was empty. Looked amazing fun, that kind of freedom is definitely enticing but not exactly practical for most people.

Having a much larger play area for room scale is something I've always wished for, I only have about 2.5 meters square, but most of us adapt to the space we have available and manage to utilise some room scale. The issue though as you point out is always the appearance of boundary markers breaking that immersion. Your tool shed would make a huge difference to your room scale experience I'd have thought and from my point of view would be a big factor in a decision at this point, given there is no actual confirmation of Deckard yet alone a timescale.

It looks good but if you take the headset off it will almost immediately damage the screens and will supposedly fairly quickly damage the inside out cameras. That's why meta's official stance is that you should never take your quest outside of your house unless it is in a opaque box or bag.

[[Unofficial] Sagedavid]

Can we play Quest3 wireless with WIFI connected to PC?

[temps]

Originally posted by IanL:

I believe that standalone games once installed on the headset can be played anywhere and unless the game requires an internet connection the lack of WiFi connectivity shouldn't be an issue.

And isn't there a pretty good chance of a problem there? I mean that new standalone Quest 3 game for example, Assassin's Creed Nexus I think It's called... is made by Ubisoft, a company famous in the PC gaming community for requiring constant internet connections even to play single player games on the PC. (As a form of DRM). So I guess maybe I might have a problem taking some of these standalone games out to the tool shed to play without internet using the Quest 3 like I'm imagining (there is no wifi or electrical outlets there).

Have any of you tried using your Quest 2 or Quest 3 to play standalone games in areas without wifi? Is the lack of internet connection a problem for some/all standalone Quest games?

I just checked the Assassin's Creed game, it looks like people seem to say internet is not required for the Quest version, but if anyone knows if wifi is required in the general case for a "typical" Quest 2/3 game that would be good to know.

Originally posted by Gracey Face:

Instead of a quest 3 a suggestion would be to get a quest pro. It has a screen that gets near true blacks and it has self tracking controllers that are almost as accurate (and in some circumstances more accurate) than lighthouse tracked.

The want for better colors was one of the biggest reservations I had about the Quest 3. I was super disappointed to see it wasn't OLED like the original Quest. Having played some games on an OLED tv I can definitely appreciate the complaints of many people about LCD colors appearing "washed out." Nevertheless, I have a hard time feeling it's justified to pay for an older headset costing double the price that has a lower resolution and FOV than the Quest 3... especially if I want to be sure to keep enough money saved for a future Deckard release from Valve that may come sooner than expected.

Even moreso when I consider the lack of popularity of the Quest Pro VR headset will probably translate into it being less well supported by Meta and by game developers going forward.

[Arasine]

Seeing as literally no AAA games other than Alyx, have been released in all the years of VR. What is the point in upgrading? A computer without software is a door stop. VR headsets with 1990's quality mobile games are not worth the investment. I only switch mine on now to explore places in Google Earth.

[temps]

Originally posted by Arasine:

Seeing as literally no AAA games other than Alyx, have been released in all the years of VR. What is the point in upgrading?

There were many other AAA VR games mentioned earlier in the thread.

Originally posted by Arasine:

VR headsets with 1990's quality mobile games are not worth the investment. I only switch mine on now to explore places in Google Earth.

Quest 3 standalone VR graphics are like 2010 PC graphics, not 1990's PC graphics. And with the help of VR, that's good enough to have a great time.

[Arasine]

Originally posted by temps:

Originally posted by Arasine:

Seeing as literally no AAA games other than Alyx, have been released in all the years of VR. What is the point in upgrading?

There were many other AAA VR games mentioned earlier in the thread.

Originally posted by Arasine:

VR headsets with 1990's quality mobile games are not worth the investment. I only switch mine on now to explore places in Google Earth.

Quest 3 standalone VR graphics are like 2010 PC graphics, not 1990's PC graphics. And with the help of VR, that's good enough to have a great time.

Those other games are not AAA VR games.
When VR gets a Red Dead 2 or the like ill change my mind. At the moment the VR section of steam looks like the AppStore from 20 years ago.
Even games with better graphics are ridiculously shallow compared to regular games. Do you think Arizona Sunshine would be well reviewed if it was a regular game? Its childs play, like all the other VR games out. We need software to catch up with hardware for once..

[temps]

Originally posted by Arasine:

Originally posted by temps:

There were many other AAA VR games mentioned earlier in the thread.



Quest 3 standalone VR graphics are like 2010 PC graphics, not 1990's PC graphics. And with the help of VR, that's good enough to have a great time.

Those other games are not AAA VR games.
When VR gets a Red Dead 2 or the like ill change my mind.

LOL Asgard's Wrath 2 is not AAA? Lone Echo 2 is not AAA? Half-Life: Alyx is not AAA? Assassin's Creed Nexus VR is not AAA? Star Wars: Squadrons is not AAA? Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is not AAA? The Vader Immortal trilogy is not AAA? The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is not AAA?

Sometimes what amazes me even more than the ignorance of those who cling to their flatscreens is their closed-mindedness: they cling to the idea that a game has to be AAA in order to be good. They act like it doesn't matter how high the review score goes for some indie VR game like Beat Saber and just assume it will be garbage unless it comes spoon-fed to them by a huge corporate developer like EA and branded with franchise names they recognize.

It's especially ironic coming from someone on Steam where many of the most popular hit games here started out as mods produced by small-time devs.

Beat Saber, for example, was an indie game when it was created before being bought out by Meta. And yet you have all these people like "but it's not AAA! but it's not AAA! where's muh MADDEN 2024 and Call of the Battlefield 2024? HuuuuuuuuH? Not enuf tripple AY so it's not worth TRYING."

[IanL]

Never ceases to amaze me how people manufacture their excuses for not being part of something. It always takes early adopters to move any technology forwards to get to the point where others might want to join, but you'd think those that don't become one of them would at least have some respect for those that do.

In all fairness I wouldn't class all of those games as AAA either, as they don't all have the depth of game play we've come to expect from modern AAA games despite possibly matching the graphical quality. But that doesn't mean they are not fun to play especially in an enhanced immersive medium like VR, because most of them are. It's worth the price of a cheap headset alone to play Skyrim VR with its 400+ hours which is prime entertainment for less than 1$/hour, but even Skyrim is hardly a state of the art AAA game these days.

I would strongly discount, as I've mentioned elsewhere, Vader Immortal which I personally rate as an awful game unless you are literally a die hard Star Wars fan who has to experience everything the franchise has ever thrown at them. It's a clunky primarily cinematic experience with the worst combat I have ever experienced in a game.

The VR marketplace is currently still too small to interest the accountants of the big AAA companies to seriously service the VR market, and let's face it they are completely profit and shareholder driven and not about to sacrifice any profit to forward new technologies when they can just keep churning out more of the same with little risk.

But it is very much a mindset thing, early adopters of new technology tend to be forward looking people who are prepared to invest in moving technology on whilst accepting it's initial limitations because the two invariably go hand in hand.

[temps]

Originally posted by IanL:

Never ceases to amaze me how people manufacture their excuses for not being part of something. It always takes early adopters to move any technology forwards to get to the point where others might want to join, but you'd think those that don't become one of them would at least have some respect for those that do.

In all fairness I wouldn't class all of those games as AAA either, as they don't all have the depth of game play we've come to expect from modern AAA games despite possibly matching the graphical quality. But that doesn't mean they are not fun to play especially in an enhanced immersive medium like VR, because most of them are. It's worth the price of a cheap headset alone to play Skyrim VR with its 400+ hours which is prime entertainment for less than 1$/hour, but even Skyrim is hardly a state of the art AAA game these days.

In some sense I agree I guess something like Skyrim VR couldn't rightly be classified as a AAA VR game considering it wasn't built for the medium. On the other hand, you don't always need to have a game built from the ground up for VR to have something that really plays nicely in VR (Star Wars: Squadrons, for example, is pure bliss with a HOTAS setup, and I think it's way more fun in VR with a HOTAS setup than it plays as a flat game.)

Still there are lots of other games that could rightly be called AAA VR games listed there, such as Asgard's Wrath 2. I think a lot of people don't really think that counts as AAA though because it isn't a franchise they are used to playing and recognizing.

There is a certain reluctance most people have to trying a game set in a new game universe they aren't familiar with. It's one reason Star Wars games sell so well -- everyone has a fairly high familiarity with that universe and its lore before they even go into whatever the next Star Wars game is, and they don't want to try anything new so a relatively new franchise like Asgard's Wrath that they aren't familiar with (particularly on a game medium they aren't familiar with like VR) is viewed as unappealing.

[IanL]

Absolutely, there are many VR games that are absolutely worth playing for anyone with a genuine open mind and realistic expectations and not simply locked into a set of established AAA franchises with a cult like adherence to them.

Unfortunately I will probably never get to experience Asgard's Wrath 2 as it wasn't made for PCVR and is locked behind the Meta walled garden.

[temps]

Originally posted by IanL:

Unfortunately I will probably never get to experience Asgard's Wrath 2 as it wasn't made for PCVR and is locked behind the Meta walled garden.

You're boycotting Meta?

[IanL]

No, I'm just stating that unlike Valve they have never embraced a more open VR approach, instead choosing initially to lock their games to their PCVR headsets and subsequently developing them to exclusively run standalone on their newer headsets. As I have two VR systems, neither of which is a Meta one, and they took a decision to abandon PCVR game development completely, I will probably never play it, unlike AW1 which I bought and played via Revive along with many others.

The one thing I will say is they have helped produce some quality VR games via their financial support which has acted as a big incentive for would be buyers of their hardware. They were not afraid to throw money at VR to ensure a substantial presence in the marketplace and do offer good value for many.

[Arasine]

Originally posted by temps:

Originally posted by Arasine:

Those other games are not AAA VR games.
When VR gets a Red Dead 2 or the like ill change my mind.

LOL Asgard's Wrath 2 is not AAA? Lone Echo 2 is not AAA? Half-Life: Alyx is not AAA? Assassin's Creed Nexus VR is not AAA? Star Wars: Squadrons is not AAA? Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is not AAA? The Vader Immortal trilogy is not AAA? The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is not AAA?

Sometimes what amazes me even more than the ignorance of those who cling to their flatscreens is their closed-mindedness: they cling to the idea that a game has to be AAA in order to be good. They act like it doesn't matter how high the review score goes for some indie VR game like Beat Saber and just assume it will be garbage unless it comes spoon-fed to them by a huge corporate developer like EA and branded with franchise names they recognize.

It's especially ironic coming from someone on Steam where many of the most popular hit games here started out as mods produced by small-time devs.

Beat Saber, for example, was an indie game when it was created before being bought out by Meta. And yet you have all these people like "but it's not AAA! but it's not AAA! where's muh MADDEN 2024 and Call of the Battlefield 2024? HuuuuuuuuH? Not enuf tripple AY so it's not worth TRYING."

Alyx is AAA, the others not at all..as I said in my post that you obviously diddnt read. For this reason, its not worth further discussing with you as youre one of 'those' people who reply without reading.

[temps]

Originally posted by Arasine:

Originally posted by temps:

LOL Asgard's Wrath 2 is not AAA? Lone Echo 2 is not AAA? Half-Life: Alyx is not AAA? Assassin's Creed Nexus VR is not AAA? Star Wars: Squadrons is not AAA? Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is not AAA? The Vader Immortal trilogy is not AAA? The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is not AAA?

Sometimes what amazes me even more than the ignorance of those who cling to their flatscreens is their closed-mindedness: they cling to the idea that a game has to be AAA in order to be good. They act like it doesn't matter how high the review score goes for some indie VR game like Beat Saber and just assume it will be garbage unless it comes spoon-fed to them by a huge corporate developer like EA and branded with franchise names they recognize.

It's especially ironic coming from someone on Steam where many of the most popular hit games here started out as mods produced by small-time devs.

Beat Saber, for example, was an indie game when it was created before being bought out by Meta. And yet you have all these people like "but it's not AAA! but it's not AAA! where's muh MADDEN 2024 and Call of the Battlefield 2024? HuuuuuuuuH? Not enuf tripple AY so it's not worth TRYING."

Alyx is AAA, the others not at all..as I said in my post that you obviously diddnt read. For this reason, its not worth further discussing with you as youre one of 'those' people who reply without reading.

Okay, well you are simply wrong and apparently don't know what AAA means. Here's a gaming media source making clear Asgard's Wrath 2 is a "AAA" game:

As Sanzaru Games' first release post-acquisition, the game stands as Meta's first big bet on AAA gaming for standalone virtual reality.

Source: https://www.uploadvr.com/asgards-wrath-2-review/