If I have enough disposable income and I'd like to jump into VR at home for the first time, is Index the right choice? I've seen some of you talking about VR legs but I think that's related to specific game types and play time, not which headset you choose, right?
Neither the Index or Oculus are available right now anyway, so there's no rush. All of my vacation plans for the year are dead, so I'm using that to justify finally getting into expensive ass VR.
PSVR is a good entry level VR imo. Astrobot is amazing, Beat Saber is great on it, and it has some of the other stuff (I'd imagine Superhot VR would be just as good there). You definitely get motion sickness/VR legs on the lower quality games. My PSVR broke after hundreds of hours over 3 years because the thin cables got damaged. They made a version 2 PSVR in 2018 which fixed the cable issue and is the version you'd get in any bundles from the last 2 years. Bundles with games are around $400.
Quest sounds awesome too. Might be better for the price. (I think it's $400 as well). Library is comparable. But man Astrobot is so good. Wireless is definitely a game changer.
Index is wayyyyyy better than PSVR and from my experience VR legs aren't a thing on it because it's so sharp and smooth and that really reduces motion sickness a lot. That said it's fucking expensive at a grand. It also doesn't have Astrobot, but it does have Alyx. And yeah, who knows about the build quality. The trigger button on one of my Index controllers is making a springy noise after a week. If we weren't in the middle of a pandemic I'd probably send the controller back just in case (a little spring noise on clicks isn't the end of the world and you can't hear it with audio).
And then there's the big elephant in the room across all the platforms. VR is fucking niche. We're like 4 years into VR now and it still feels like year 1 of a new console with pretty sporadic releases of quality content. The audience numbers just aren't large enough for devs to prioritize making VR games unfortunately. Even indie games, which should be picking up the slack and you'd think with all the creative indie stuff and graphics being less of a concern in VR that there'd be great VR games, but there's just not a lot of quality indie content for VR. Indie devs would still rather make a non-VR game to a 1000x bigger audience.
Also most VR games are about 1-2 hours long with the meaty ones being like 4-6 hours. They're also more expensive than non-VR games (usually like $20-40 for a 5 hour or less game).
Imo, if you buy a VR machine, you'll play and beat every quality VR game that exists from the first 4 years of VR within 6 months and probably spend $200-500 on software in addition to the hardware. After that point the VR machine will sit in a closet and you'll pick it up once every 2-4 months to play something interesting/cool/good that you'll beat and be over it in a day or two and then it goes back in the closet. The exception is if you're one of the Beat Saber players like some of us where you play Beat Saber a few times or more a week. That's the only reason I've turned on my PSVR in like 6 months is almost daily Beat Saber playing.
Also Japan hasn't really gotten on VR. There's a few throwaway titles which generally aren't good, but otherwise VR is primarily a western thing which is a shame since Japanese developers bring a lot of unique titles in gaming.
I see the market eventually changing and becoming more like the console/pc market of constant releases, but because of the costs I still see this as at least 5 years away if not 10. And there will be new and better revisions of VR every two years (PSVR2 should be out in a couple years for instance).
Basically, I think VR is pretty cool and if you're ok with the disposable income and throwing some money to have some fun for a few months and here and there, then it's worth it. But for most people I still wouldn't recommend it for a few more years.