Diving in to the metaverse?

Good evening to all. I have just returned home with an exciting new toy! Okay let’s be honest, I bought it a few days ago but didn’t get around to writing about it until now. After watching numerous streamers and youtubers post hilarious clips and videos while visiting far off worlds and meeting the most interesting side of the internet I’ve seen since the 90’s, I decided to take the plunge and I picked up a Meta Quest 2 from my local Costco.

As I am a glasses wearer I was worried that I might not be able to even use the headset, much less with any degree of comfort. I am happy to report, that even without using the provided glasses spacer, I am able to wear the headset with my glasses very comfortably. The next thing I was worried about was being motion sick, or having some sort of vertigo. While I’ve never had severe cases of these things, I have been known to get car sick more than once. Again I am delighted to say that I have yet to have any outstanding issues. You really can’t get a sense for what the games feel like when you’re watching someone play VR. It honestly to me just looks like an act. Who in their right mind could think they were going to fall from the top of a building by taking one step forward. You know logically you are on the ground. However, it is a totally different feeling once you put the headset on. With the speakers placed right in your ear holes (this is a technical term I am sure of it,) you really do tend to forget that instead of standing on the edge of that amazing house over looking a cliff, with the wind breezing past you in your ears, you are actually standing around in your living room giving the neighbors all the gossip they need about the man in the torn underwear punching the air and screaming at nothing to get away from him. Remember to close your curtains.

Thus far I have been able to pick up a couple of games, and I will say each one has been quite the different experience. When you first put on the headset you are teleported in to this tutorial world that allows you to learn the controls while playing some basic game of shoot the target, hit the ball with a paddle, launch a rocket, etc. However after you’ve finished with that tutorial you are placed in to a small house in the woods. It was a beautiful cabin overlooking a vast expanse of the land spreading out below me. A fire crackling in the fireplace, and a nice… is that a bow? Yes yes it is. There is a hunting bow just sitting here… minutes later I am living my elven dreams shooting arrows at targets after 360 no scoping, neighborhood gossip be damned. After having turned nearly every piece of furniture in my virtual home in to a pincushion, I put down the bow and find I can actually rearrange all of the furniture. Promptly, I throw it all off of the cliff.

Next I decide I’ve learned the basic’s and its time to dive in to my first ‘real’ VR Game. So I load up VR Chat… If any of you have ‘played’ this game you already know where this is going. As soon as I load in here, I am taken to some sort of lobby world that helps me set up some basic controls and then teaches me the menu’s a bit. I am asked to choose an avatar, and I go with a suitably good looking robot. I then proceed in to a world. I, having very little idea what I was doing could not tell you the exact world I visited, I however can tell you that I was greeted with a cacophony of voices spread out in this room as it fades in from dark to daylight. I am excited to know that so many people are gathered to chat and share this new experience with me. That is, until the world finishes loading in, and in front of me is a Joe Biden with a bikini on doing a break dance for a cockroach and a giant snickers bar, vein intact. What?! This continues the farther I progress in to this world and I am met with the most bizarre set of characters I have ever seen. I am pretty sure I ate some bad cheese once that gave me a terrible fever and food poisoning and even those dreams couldn’t touch this. As much as I was out of place in this new world, I felt oddly nostalgic. This reminded me of a time when the internet as a whole was much more young and wild. A time where AOL Chat rooms were a thing, and you had this sense of excitement and wonder as you met new people from all over the world. Then Biden shows back up holding a MAGA hat out and asking me to donate.

After taking the time to come out of VR and showering to make sure I didn’t catch anything during my virtual foray, I decided I should maybe try a different game. I looked online to see if I already had any games that offered VR support, and to my surprise it seems I did not. What I did notice is that I have a huge steam library of multiplayer games, a whole category of MMO’s. I decided to look around and see if there was anything like this available on VR. A VR MMO? Hallelujah, there was! It was actually highly rated. As this would be my first paid game I wanted to make sure I did my due diligence and watched several YouTube reviews. After having convinced myself that even if I only played a couple of hours that $30 USD wasn’t too big of a price to try it out, I picked up Zenith: The Last City.

I can not say enough about this game. I ran in to so many people who seemed to be just like me, and trying it out. Right out of the tutorial I found myself in a sprawling city with several other confused looking adventurers. Someone, much braver than I, decided to speak up and ask the folks in the room if anyone wanted to join up for some questing. I raised my virtual hand and was sent a party invite. From there we spent about 4 hours running around outside the city learning how to use our weapons, skills, and in my case spells, in the real, virtual, world. The game has gesture controls built in for spell casters. As my party decided to take on a timed event with giant monsters charging at us, I stood in the back flailing my arms trying to get the correct spells to appear in my hands. More than once I hap-hazardly threw fire balls at my allies while trying to replenish their health, and doused myself with healing rain while at full hp. Meanwhile my compatriots were too, flailing about and laughing and shouting while swinging their swords mostly in the direction of the on coming enemy, mostly. Once we finished our event I was ACTUALLY a bit exhausted. So we decided to head back to the nearest town, where a higher level player had dropped a cooking station, and was virtually making us drinks and snacks. It looked pretty interesting from afar, but they asked if I wanted to give making a cookie a try. I said sure, and oh boy was I amazed. You have to actually grab the ingredients, put them in pans, flip the pans (without spilling the food) then put them in these stove things and turn the dial to match the indicator on the screen. Need something cut up? Grab the knife on the table and start chopping! It really felt like cooking! Eventually I had to bid my new friends fair well and with a bit of sadness I removed my headset. This is when I had my only surreal experience. It was quite something coming out of a virtual vibrant world filled with people, only to be greeted by my dogs quietly judging me from the couch.

Since then, I have picked up a couple more games I am excited to try out. Most notably Skyrim VR. I have played quite a bit of this game on PC, on Xbox, and on Switch, and now I will be stepping in to my character in the virtual world soon. I will make sure to give a good account here, as well as hopefully get some of it streamed or recorded on my video channels. If you have any questions about VR, or are considering buying a headset, I must recommend that you check your local Costco or Costco.com. Their return policy allows you to return the console if its not for you, for a full refund (minus anything you spent on games after you purchase it.) Otherwise feel free to ask me anything you’d like to know and I will be happy to answer. You can find me on discord as Pawn#0939 or on any of my socials listed at the top of the page! Good night and happy gaming everyone!

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