Where Are All Of The VR RPGs?
Seriously, where are all of the good VR RPGs?
Okay, sure, you might be thinking that there are “real” VR RPGs out there. You might point to The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners as an early example, or maybe Skydance’s Behemoth or even Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR.
Well the Bethesda VR ports are only decent with a ton of mods so they don’t really count. I’m talking about out of the box VR RPG games with meaningful choices and character customization, but made for Virtual Reality.
Take games like Baldur’s Gate 3 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as more recent examples. Games that give you expansive choices, a huge world to explore, and a path of character progression and story exploration that isn’t just a linear series of challenges. Are there any Virtual Reality games that really give you the same level of world immersion and personal choice as those do?
There Are Some VR Games That Are Close To Being Roleplaying Games in Virtual Reality
The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners might be close… but it’s really more of a survival game with a good story than a real RPG.
The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is superb, but it’s not a VR RPG.
Sure there are some story choices that are meant to feel impactful, but you don’t really customize your character, just decide which upgrades to invest in until you’ve got them all.
Maybe you’d point to A Township Tale or Asgard’s Wrath 2 as VR RPGs worth mentioning. Still… where’s the in depth character customization? Where are the decisions that affect the story and world? These games come closer, but they just aren’t quite there.
These VR games all really just give you multiple avenues to get to the same result. Even Medieval Dynasty VR doesn’t give you greater choice than where to build your first settlement.
Crafting doesn’t make a VR RPG, though some crafting systems, like in Medieval Dynasty VR, are pretty great.
Oh, and before Legendary Tales is mentioned… it’s just too shallow and linear of a game to be an RPG. The same goes for Grimlord. You do get stat choices, but these games are just so damn linear at the end of the game that you never get that RPG feeling of exploring a huge world. They’re more binary choices between more health or more damage. Nothing that feels like you’re creating your own vision of a character exploring the world you are presented with.
At the end of the day the choices in those games really boil down to whether you use a bow or a sword or magic. Is this really a bigger choice than what gun you use in a VR survival shooter? Maybe I’m being too picky there, and as much as I love those games they just don’t give much of that RPG feeling.
So What Would A True Virtual Reality RPG look like?
It’s hard to define a genre, so let’s look at a supremely popular recent example for some inspiration. Baldur’s Gate 3.
In this game you get to choose your character and class and background. There are meaningful characters you interact with, and how you interact with them decides what happens in the story and what challenges you need to overcome.
You have equipment and items and stats that are all meaningful and impact what you can do and how you do it. Do you smash your way through the door or lockpick it?
Maybe something like Into The Radius can argue that your choice of equipment as you progress through the game makes it an RPG. Despite Into The Radius being a superb VR game, it’s just still not an RPG. It does give you a great world to explore, but no characters to interact with and no meaningful progression choices that can’t just be changed by grinding out more missions and artifacts for a different piece of equipment.
Into The Radius lets you customize your equipment… but those are the only meaningful roleplaying choices you get.
If you don’t agree with the premise of this article you might start seeing what I mean. There is so much potential for a Roleplaying Game in Virtual Reality.
Low strength score? Then maybe if you try to pick up a huge hammer your VR arms are barely able to move it. High perception score? Then secret doors and tunnels are highlighted or interactable when they otherwise wouldn’t be. Sided with one character over another? Then you get a completely different mission depending on who you picked, and the content of that mission reflects the type of character you decided to side with.
VR games that are RPG-lite don’t make you make meaningful choices with long lasting impact. They more just end up with your grinding to the same conclusion.
Orbus VR is probably the closest thing that we have to a real VR RPG, but its an inherently Multiplayer experience, being a VR MMORPG and all. There’s even Morrowind VR, but it’s a mod and doesn’t really count either.
Why? There are so many ways in which VR specifically can be leveraged to create new and interesting RPG mechanics that haven’t been thought of or utilized yet. Years ago I had hoped that the first big Virtual Reality RPG was just right around the corner, but every project I’ve kept my eye on or hoped for has flopped or been stuck in development hell with a buggy and forgettable demo.
The first developer to put the Roleplaying into RPG in a game made for Virtual Reality will have a true hit on their hands. I just wish we would have already seen one by now.
If I’m wrong and there’s an example out there that I haven’t seen or somehow forgotten about then please let me know. I’d absolutely love to be proven wrong.
