There’s a game called Climbey (https://store.steampowered.com/app/520010/Climbey/), that was kind of like this. I had a ton of fun playing it, but it’s pretty much like you said: this game worked for me, not so much for some of my friends who’d get nauseous as soon as they had to move (let alone look down).

That final comment about needing play testers that suffer from motion sickness is spot on. I played Star Wars Squadrons in VR and with the ship’s frame around me, I could play that game for hours with the only problem being my own sweaty face. When my friend tried it out though, he could barely play for a few minutes before the motion sickness would set in and he’d have to break.

I hope someone figures out something that lets more people play cool VR games, because it’s been a bummer that it seems like a 50/50 shot whether someone will be able to play the game without feeling sick.

Man, I’m excited to try this out. I hope stealthing is given first-class treatment and not shoved to the side for combat.

I played a TON of Payday 2 when it first came out, stopped playing a little before the company put in microtransactions, and when I came back a year or so later, it felt like stealth had become an after-thought. Maybe I just came back at a weird time, or I couldn’t figure it out anymore, but I’ve been worried that Payday 3 is going to lean into the action and less into the stealth.

The Payday 2 stealth progression through the art heist was one of the coolest things I’d played, until they added the train heist and that fusion generator thing. Those were absolutely intense, and I loved figuring those out.

In case people come at me, since people get really worked up about these games, I’m not saying it was a bad video game. Just explaining why the first one was a really special game to me, but the second just fell flat for me.

For me, it felt like the first game had something original to say and did it really, really well, but the second’s story was just another “revenge: dig two graves” story, with the bonus that Ellie murders a million people before the game decides that revenge doesn’t solve anything. It felt like the game missed its own point for the sake of the gameplay—gameplay that didn’t feel original to me like the first game did.

Comparing the second to the first one, where I felt like the game introduced NPCs that didn’t have simple scripted one-liners … when I killed someone, holy shit, I felt bad about it. That person had a family, and even though it may have been justified, murder still felt bad. I thought the first game was really good at making a point that killing a person is very different than killing a monster.

The second game didn’t seem to introduce anything new, and on top of that, the main plot’s message was in conflict with the practical genocide Ellie was committing on her way.

Something worth considering with client side rendering, is the idea that the user may not be able to tell the difference between “still rendering” and “done”, making me want that final “order of correctness” flow to have a branch for client side rendering that includes a “maybe?” in case there’s a server connection somewhere that’s slow or broken.

I’m sure I’m getting too pedantic because this post isn’t about best practices for implementing it, and I’m currently bitter about a tool I have to use that does it poorly, having no difference between “fetching information” (aka, still rendering), “no information to fetch” (aka, done rendering), and “connection broken, please refresh” (aka, reboot the server, AGAIN).