8/6/2023 0 Comments X rebirth vr broken![]() It’s a medium for progress, not the progress itself. ![]() VR at its best shouldn’t replace real life, just modify it, giving us access to so much just out of reach physically, economically. Imagine 10 years ago trying to envision the way we use cellphones today. Someone at Facebook got the memo, and they purchased Oculus wholesale for $2 billion, signaling a promising, if unclear, future for virtual reality. ![]() It didn’t really matter what you did inside the goggles, really, just the act of immersion was awing. For the first time ever, one could casually wander through a comically realistic rendering of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment. The graphics were still basic but the experience was, surprisingly, lifelike. He raised some money and soon developed the Oculus Rift, his own version of a clunky headset. Then, two years ago, Palmer Luckey, a kid born during the waning days of VR’s late-20th-century golden era, put the pieces together using improved technology. Though still used in the sciences, those eager to bring VR to the masses found themselves overshadowed by a glitzier, more promising technological revolution: the internet. In the mid-’90s, VR as an industry basically closed up shop. The vision simply did not match the means. Though a true believer could immerse him or herself in the roughly built digital landscape, the chasm between that crude digital experience and the powerful subtly of real life was too great. At the time the personal computer was exploding, and VR acolytes found a curious population eager to see what the technology had to offer. The utopian ideals of a VR universe were revisited by a small crew of inventors in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But the concept was worth pursuing, and others did (especially the military, who have used virtual reality technology for war simulation for years). The promise of the idea was shrouded, concealed under clunky visuals. A definition of virtual reality has always been difficult to formulate - the concept of an alternative existence has been pawed at for centuries - but the closest modern ancestor came to life in the fifties, when a handful of visionaries saw the possibility for watching things on a screen that never ends, but the technology wasn’t yet good enough to justify the idea. Yes, it’s man meets machine, but what happens is strictly within the mind. ![]() Born of technology, virtual reality at its core is an organic experience. It’s the same escapism peddled by drugs, alcohol, sex, and art - throw off the shackles of the mundane through a metaphysical transportation to an altered state. Put on these goggles, go nowhere, and be transported anywhere. The promise of virtual reality has always been enormous. But even if they iron out the flaws, X: Rebirth is just so innately unlikable, and so deathly boring, that I think it may be beyond help.Seeing is Believing: The State of Virtual Reality There are more bugs and broken missions than I have space to list here, and save-file editing is almost always the go-to solution, which is just absurd when you realise they're charging £40 for the pleasure. Now imagine the exact opposite and you have X: Rebirth's charmless world. Think about how rich and full of character the Mass Effect universe is. It's only in the (dreadful) story that you'll find any excitement: its large-scale space battles are at least genuinely impressive to behold. The characters you talk to cycle through the same few dumb lines. There are countless stations, jobs, contracts and ways to make money, but it's all deeply tedious, and utterly free of personality. The biggest problem is that there's nothing fun to do.
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