Oculus CTO And Creator Of ‘Doom’ Says VR Just Coasting On Novelty

Right now, VR is coasting on the novelty of its new and seemingly innovative nature, video game legend John Carmack says. For those who don’t know, Carmack is the creator of “Doom” and the classic multiplayer shooting game “Quake.” Now, he is the CTO at Oculus, which gives his opinion a lot of weight in the industry. According to him, VR is currently coasting on novelty and it can’t survive this way.

Carmack’s comments about the current state of VR were made during the recently-concluded Oculus event, Business Insider reports. He offered constructive criticisms to developers where he stated that they will need to start pushing themselves to create better titles.

Right now, there is a clear shortage of revolutionary games that can create enough buzz about VR to attract the same number of customers as what consoles and even PC platforms are enjoying. Some of the best examples that placed current home gaming boxes on the map include “Super Mario” for SNES, “Final Fantasy” for PlayStation, and “Halo” for Xbox.

There is no equivalent to those games on VR right now, which is bad news when it comes to player retention. High-value titles are simply integral to keeping a platform’s user and make it grow. If VR developers can’t come up with something that will really hook players, “Oculus Rift,” “HTC Vive,” and even the “PS4 VR” will have a hard time remaining relevant.

As The Next Web notes, there are actually some promising titles already out on VR platforms, with more on the way. The upcoming “Batman: Arkham VR” and “Resident Evil 7” games are really good examples of this, though it would be difficult to judge their quality until they actually come out.

Another major concern that Carmack brought up is the matter of load times. Gamers are notoriously impatient and titles that take more than 30 seconds to load will more than certainly draw the ire of players and critics. So this is something that will need the attention of developers as well.