PLZ USE THE MOVE CONTROLLER ROTATION SETTING. If you are not you are missing out. Walk in the direction the PDA is pointing. Easy peasy.
I wanted to make a quick post giving you some information on the game and straightening out some stuff I have read in other posts. I want to preface this by saying I have not played the PSVR version myself, but I know the game inside out and have gotten some info from the porting studio, so expect some of this to be second hand information.
How long is it?
It's about 15 hours of story gameplay when play in VR at least. From the footage I have seen of people playing it so far on PSVR I would not be surprised if many people doubled that. If you wanna 100%. well don't. Or do. But it's gonna take forever.
What are the controls?
See this graphic for reference
- The game in VR is Move only.
- You can play it either using blink teleportation, or with Walking locomotion using the Moves, with two different approaches.
- #1 You press the right Move button to move forwards toward the camera, you are free to look around, and turn using snap turn with buttons.
- #2 You press the right Move button and move forward toward which ever direction the other Move controller (the in game PDA) is pointing. This allows you to strafe or go backwards, and is highly recommended! Turn this setting on in the options. (Use Move controller rotation)
- There is an in game teleportation gun/device which is used for puzzles. Do no get the controls confused between this and the teleportation locomotion.
- There is a small use timer, so the use button and dropp button needs to be held for half a second for stuff to change.
- When you point at stuff info about said stuff will be displayed on the PDA.
Gee, what's with all these convoluted buttons and stuff?
Well, the game was designed for flat screen PC gameplay. VR as we now it did not exist when most of the game was made. We are aware that the implementation when it comes to controls can feel a bit.. awful at first. But once you get past that hurdle, most people really enjoy or even love the game. Had the game been designed for VR from the ground up we surely would have done differently, but it would also have been 3 hours and 40 bucks instead.
How do I save?
Saving happens when you sleep, load a new area, or when you use a save tablet found scattered in the ruins.
I am not into crafting and survival
That's fine. You can set the difficulty to 0% at any time and those are turned off. You can set it to whatever number you feel comfortable with.
So what's the deal with the gawddamn dualshock!?
So, while the game has gamepad support built into it, unfortunately at this stage there are no plans to add DS4 support for VR. This is not because we nor the porting team are stupid in the head, but rather (from what I understand) because of a game engine/hardware problem that causes things to render erroneously when attached to the camera. It does not make it unplayable per se, but the lower frame rate would easily cause motion sickness and the certification process from Sony is super strict with those kinds of things and would never allow this. The hardware is already struggling to run the game as is. What do I know though I make sounds you know?
And Pro support?
The game already runs at higher FPS on the Pro compared to the standard PS4. Personally I am surprised that the standard can run Solus in VR at all. You could always ask the porting studio to up the graphics quality and sacrifice some FPS, but there is probably a good reason why they did not.
So is the game poorly optimised or something?
Oh no, not at all. It actually runs amazingly well on lower end laptops, and this is a game that is originally meant to be played on a flat screen with a beefy computer with everything on Ultra and it looks absolutely beautiful when doing so.
Then VR became a thing and suddenly and the fancy things we made became very expensive to render. In fact a new i5 with a GTX970 will have problems running Solus on the Vive unless most settings are set to low. A 1080Ti cannot run it at Ultra without dropping frames.
But Sir, I have seen games that looked crisper and better that ran better too in VR!
No need to call me sir, and secondly, sure of course. But there are a few things that sets a game like Solus apart from those. Such as the maps are huge and draw distance is as well We use almost no baked lighting due to having an actual day-and-night system, this means almost all light in the whole game is dynamic OMG. There is a procedural weather system, and the tide even moves in and out as the moons fly by in the distance. All of this is super taxing to render in VR, since you essentially need to do it twice, and at a higher FPS.
Another thing is that we use something called a deferred renderer. Deferred rendering allows us to do a bunch of cool things with Unreal engine that would not be possible otherwise, however this comes at a price in both performance and most noticeable in terms of aliasing. On a flat screen Temporal AA would solve this nicely, or even rendering at a higher resolution and then scaling down. But obviously that is not an option in VR. These new and shorter VR experiences that we have been seeing for the past year use something called Forward rendering. This type works much better for VR because it simplifies a lot of the rendering, and most importantly it allows for MSAA which is a type of anti aliasing which works really well in VR. Bottom line is, if you have the power you wanna go with Deferred but for VR Forward is the better choice. And no, you cannot change the rendering pipeline afterwards because the visuals would break throughout the whole game and needed to be retweaks and fixed.
TLDR: Use the Move controller rotation and point with the PDA in the direction you want to move. No DS4 support for now sorry. Don't get cold, don't get wet when cold, expect to die if you do. This also applies to the game.