With the speed at which news comes out in the gaming industry we sometimes miss important or news worthy things. Some of these things we want to talk about in a way that is both easy for you guys and allows us to get all the facts together as some of these stories develop quickly. Sometimes we also just cover topics that we find interesting and want to discuss.
HTC Vive Pro HMD retail price $799
HTC has announced the price of the new HTC Vive Pro. With the announcement of the $799 USD and the ability to pre-order the Vive Pro HMD now we also see a price reduction of the Vive to $499 USD. The Vive Pro HMDs purchased before June 3rd 2018 will begin shipping April 5th 2018 so it looks like customers will be getting these new Vive Pro HMDs in their hands quite soon. Also from the release we get info specs of the new HTC Vive Pro HMD “The Vive Pro comes with dual-OLED displays, making for a crisper image resolution of 2880 x 1600 combined, a 78% increase in resolution over the current Vive HMD.” With these new specs and the price drop on the original HTC Vive it looks to be an interest time for the VR space.
Source: http://indieobscura.com/article/2237/htc-announces-new-upgraded-vive-pro-vr-headset
Wiggin’s thoughts on the subject : Well this is quite interesting because I’m conflicted how I feel about this. This seems to be a version 2 of the HTC Vive and while I’m glad they are making an improvement to the original hardware and increasing the resolution they are asking $799 USD for the new headset. As someone who doesn’t have one already I feel like I’d be more inclined to get the new one with higher resolution but the new headset doesn’t come with a base station and controllers so it looks like the cost would be closer to $1300 for a new customer starting out. That seems a bit steep and that’s assuming you already have a computer capable of running VR at a reasonable frame rate. This now feels like less than an upgrade and feels more like a redo on the side of HTC. I feel few are going to want to dump another $800 on a new headset every couple of years, and that brings up how often are we going to see hardware iterations and are they each going to cost this much ? For an already niche market it seems counterproductive to keep the cost of entry so high. For me personally I’d love to try one for some of the sim games I enjoy as I feel it would add a huge increase to immersion. However the catch for me is that I get motion sick and spending that much on a device to potentially get sick from it isn’t that great of a proposition. I would think the higher resolution would be less likely to cause motion sickness, plus who doesn’t want a higher resolution when the screen is in your face. So I’m excited to see that HTC has increased the resolution and added other features to its updated headset but it still doesn’t make sense to me from a consumer stand point as the price of entry is still extremely high. I’ll keep my eyes open for other alternatives that are a bit more reasonably priced.
Star Wars Battlefront 2 update
Wednesday March 21st Star Wars Battlefront 2 got the update which it needed more/less from the launch of the game. Instead of the “pay-to-win” mechanic it has now gone to the classic progression system that it needed with the only thing monetized being skins, of which right now there are none except hero’s who already had multiple outfits to begin with.
Source: https://www.ea.com/games/starwars/battlefront/battlefront-2/multiplayer/progression
Ozzy’s Thoughts: My original post about this update was worrisome simply because I have no faith in EA/Dice anymore that I figured that the new progression system would be painfully slow or just not really worth it or something along the lines of “pay to win” would still be there although changed to “base xp: (number) booster: 300% xp increase. Booster only available by paying for it” or something else crappy along those lines. As of right now, I don’t see that happening and I’m actually quite okay with the new progression system since it seems to level up almost too quickly. Granted this doesn’t get me the weapons I wanted, still have to kill people, which is fine. The one thing I wasn’t expecting was the fact that I can now actually get hits on people with this update. There was also some kind of lag on both ends. Either I was lagging and couldn’t hit things or the people I was shooting at were lagging across my screen. Now my favorite heavy pistol is actually worth using.
This is by no means saying this is worth getting now and I’m still not entirely enjoying it and I’m still not holding my breath that they won’t try something else stupid down the line but now it feels like a proper game.
