Hey everyone.
Poppy from Bossa Studios here, the creators of Surgeon Simulator.
We noticed quite a few posts on here about our VR game, Surgeon Simulator ER, and wanted to create a new thread to address the concerns, and also to let you know what we plan to do with the issues that many of you have raised with us. We have a message from Henrique Olifiers, the CEO of Bossa, right below. If you have any questions or concerns about the game, please ask.
Here's Henrique's bit...
Raise your hand if you got it wrong!
A childhood friend of mine had a saying that went like this: Life is what happens when something you thought you nailed, goes wrong. If thats so, then game development is the closest analogy to living that there is, as things you thought were done and dusted come back to bite you a lot more than youd like.
Case in point, our control scheme for Surgeon Simulator: ER on PlayStation VR. When we hit on the idea of ditching absolute tracking in favour of a relative one (in that when you move your hands X amount in real space, that translate into 2X on VR) we had found a great way of making the experience feel more surgeony, by taking players out of their comfort zones, requiring them to learn something new to deal with the game.
Great on paper, not so much in-game now it seems, as we have been getting a fair bit of feedback on this. When youre immersed in an idea for as long as we have, its easy to lose perspective and make a error of judgement that someone looking with fresh eyes can immediately pick up on.
With our excuses out of the way, now its time to look into a proper fix. An easy one is to restore the absolute tracking of the hands just like we have on the Vive and Oculus versions, and roll it out to the PSVR as soon as possible. Well also tweak the skeleton hand that appears when your virtual hand collides with an object, making it more gracious - meaning that your hand will need to get really stuck into something before you see the skeleton, as opposed to seeing it triggered upon every tiny collision.
In other words, yep, you are right: controls on the PSVR can be made way better with a few changes, and since this is the popular request, its our job to fix it (and do it quick).
Sorry for the trouble, dont hate us for too long, well get it right. And huge thanks for letting us know how to improve the game we love... After all, that should always be the number one priority in anything we do.
Cheers, Henrique and the Bossa team