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The secret to Beat Saber is that the player's physical and virtual world are locked together at all times. You're standing on a small platform and can't go anywhere. Thus, it doesn't cause nausea. Or disorientation. Or falls. Even when the player is in very active motion.[1]
I desperately want more games like Unseen Diplomacy, where you walk through an infinite hallway. In real life, you're just walking in circles, but it doesn't feel that way in VR!
I'm immune to VR motion sickness, but games without fake movement just feel so much more immersive!
The game "Tea for God" (https://www.google.com/search?q=tea+for+god&oq=tea+for+god) also has this strange behavior where the world curves around in a non-Euclidean / M.C. Escher-style fashion so that you feel like you're in a labyrinth, but you're actually in a ~8ft square in your living room.
"Tea for God" and "Unseen Diplomacy" are the only games I'm aware of that operate in this fashion, with "realistic" walking movement that doubles back on itself.
"Eye of the temple" is another one https://www.roadtovr.com/eye-of-the-temple-design-room-scale...
Eye of the Temple has some of the coolest VR-specific movement tricks I’ve ever seen.
If you’re getting close to your IRL boundary, it sets up a rolling log as part of a puzzle. To stay on a real forward-moving rolling log, you have to walk backwards to maintain balance. So in context of the game, you’re convincingly moving “forwards” while in reality you’re walking backwards.
Pretty sure I took off the headset and geeked out at everyone in the house first time I realized what was happening.
Eye of the Temple is different. It uses moving platforms, effectively a form of artificial movement, instead of non-euclidian space.
There's at least one more, Shattered Lights: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1057720/Shattered_Lights/
But I've played all three of these to death!
Another type of game with this characteristic is Table tennis simulators. Although the reduced field of view is a limitation, it just feels like wearing a strange helmet. Inner ear still matches the visual picture.
I've seen plenty of people try to lean on the table and fall over
When I got my headset forever ago my brothers girlfriend broke a controller by putting it down on the virtual table lol
I play with an actual dinner table in front of me around the same place as the virtual table. Hazardous for some games but helpful on this case!
That what makes it not bad, not what makes it good.
I would expand on that.
I'd say because the gameplay is so elegantly simple, most people can do kinda sorta well right from the get go. It feels extremely natural with almost no set up apart from height, just incredibly intuitive and frictionless.
That's not sufficient to explain Beat Saber's secert as pretty much every VR rythym game follows the same pattern but was not as successful
True.
Synth Riders is quite nice as well, and so is Pistol Whip. Both are "on rails" rather than standing on a platform. I'm not sure if that's what makes Beat Saber slightly more appealing though.
I wonder if a game where you ride inside of a mecha with free roaming capabilities would feel more natural.
That's the basis for a very common VR game(s) you see in VR arcades and such (or conventions). https://store.steampowered.com/app/334540/Vox_Machinae/ or https://store.steampowered.com/app/1192900/IRON_REBELLION/
Having played them, they were slightly disorienting at first but nowhere near as actual movement-based VR games.
No. The visual movement of the mech will not align with the inertia you feel irl and you'll get dizzy.
Not really.
Any game where your game-world movements don't match your real-world movements is what causes motion sickness.
It's as simple as that. If you're sitting in a mech, once the mech moves, you're likely to get sick, because you're moving in the game world, but not the real world.
There are ways to kind of fool your brain to make it work, but it's not 100%. For example, in Gorn, one of the movement options is to move an arm forward, then pull it back while holding the trigger, kind of like you're pulling the world. But if you alternate arms as you do it, your arms kind of simulate the swinging motion of walking, and that can be enough to drastically reduce or even eliminate the sickness.
And the worst part is that it goes both ways.
Brain expects movement (from visual stimuli) and doesn't feel any movement? Nausea. (VR sickness)
Brain expects stability (from visual stimuli) and feels movement? Nausea. (Sea sickness).
This is why when you're sea sick they tell you to watch the horizon, because if you watch the horizon, you can tell that the horizon is going up and down and your brain can correlate that to the motion.
There are also efforts to create patches that provide neural stimuli to fool your brain into thinking you've moved. Reportedly Valve has looked into those in the past.
Why wouldn’t the same thing apply when driving a car in RL, however?
It does. When your acceleration changes you feel it and if you don't you might get sick. If your acceleration is static there are no additional forces on you
Car sickness is very real though, only maybe not as much for the driver.
I never used to have it, but in modern cars where accelerations are much higher and you're much more disconnected from the outside in terms of how much you can see and hear, it's almost a certainty. This is especially true on the backseat where it can also get fairly claustrophobic.
For many people it does. However for most it does Not because you aren’t standing still. You’re actually moving.
Because in real life you do feel the effects of bends in the road, acceleration, breaking, and the terrain under your wheels.
You feel the acceleration and braking and turning when you’re in a real car.
In real life, you can feel the acceleration of the car.
Do you regularly play Beat Saber?
> So if Beat Saber scoring isn’t about timing, then how does it work? The scoring system is actually based on motion. In fact, it’s actually designed to make you move in specific ways if you want the highest score.
> The key scoring factors are how broad your swing is and how even your cut is through the center of the block. So Beat Saber throws these cubes at you and challenges you to swing broadly and precisely.
Oh. Coming from a rhythm game background, I couldn't figure out why I kept failing charts when I tried Beat Saber on my friend's VIVE. Now I finally understand what was happening. The experience was frustrating and disheartening. Maybe it wouldn't have been if I'd gone through the tutorial instead of picking up from my friend's game save?
"Maybe it wouldn't have been if I'd gone through the tutorial instead of picking up from my friend's game save?"
As far as I know this is not explained anywhere in the game itself. Coming from DDR I finally twigged that something was up when I did a full combo and realized I was still light years from the #1 score, and realized there must be more to it than that. Obvious in hindsight, but easy to miss. And I would not have guessed how much it wants your swing to be rather large; scoring [1] is 70 points for a 100 degree approach, 30 points for a 60 degree follow through, and 15 points based on accuracy in hitting the center. Nice in the sense that it creates a lot of headroom for high scores, but most people should not obsess over score too much. The swing sizes it "wants" get absurd pretty quickly as the boxes start coming faster.
It is literally explained in the first five minutes of the turorial
Or you can intuit from the score displayed after you cut each block
To be fair the tutorial wasn't always there. And when it was added I had no reason to go through it. Not the parent though.
This is the tutorial I got: https://youtu.be/EJIMULOXbYI
Maybe you have a different one on a different platform but there is no score discussion there.
Intuiting things at 3 blocks a second is a challenge.
It's explained 3-4 levels into the campaign, not the tutorial you linked
You won't fail out due to not hitting the blocks "right," other than direction. You fail from missing them (or hitting them the wrong way) or being in those box-hurt-zones, hitting the mines...and I think that's about it.
That said I always kind of wished it was based more on the the timing, if only because it feels good to hit the boxes in time with the beat. People tend to move around though and that'd throw that off.
It’s been so long I don’t remember if they explain the scoring system fully in a tutorial… but it becomes very intuitive if you _flow_ the direction the blocks want you to go in, with liberal follow through. Also, this makes way more sense at higher difficulties, because the lower ones are so slow that flow and follow through just isn’t intuitive.
I’m not at all interested in high score min/max, but I do confidently play most “dancey” expert+ (as in, not the ridiculous Camellia stuff), and this is how I think about the game.
Hah I also skipped the tutorial and was lost for a while the first time I played.
Its like playing Wii Tennis without swinging your arms.
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Beat Saber's reveal trailer is still one of the best I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIzRbI1JUe4
A tight 30 seconds of wordless, uncut gameplay that intuitively unveils the game mechanics while the simple track, just when it seems overly easy, crescendoes into the beat drop and trickier motions. The finishing touch is the missed note right before the hard cut to title.
So, building on this, we can view Beat Saber not as a music game, but as a *dance* game that figured out a reliable, precise way to track player movements.
It's interesting to note that similar movement-quantizing systems are at the core of numerous other hit games, most notably in Dance Dance Revolution but also to some extent Rock Band and Taiko no Tatsujin.
I completely agree that's a dance game. Similar way that Guitar Hero is a music playing game. It's not exactly a dance but delivers something close to dance feeling.
My brain can't dance, can't even perceive dance. When I see dancing champions perform, their movements make no sense to me and seem completely unrelated to the music they are dancing to. However when I played Beat Saber occasionally I feel glimpses of the feeling of dancing. That's pretty much as close to dancing as I can get.
To me it's almost more of a meditation game, similar to how Guitar Hero or other rhythm games could get when you got in the zone, but full body. On a hard track you don't have time to think, just move. If you get distracted, you might fail.
Flow state
This is as good a time as any to throw in a shameless plug and say that my sister, Sarah Kolb actually voiced the German tutorial for Beatsaber [1]. If you need a voice actress for German and English content, she’s your gal! [2]
[1] https://youtu.be/QNZh2lvd5gs [2] https://www.imsarahkolb.com
Alternative POV. I never "got" Beat Saber. It didn't "make me dance". I could stand in one spot and twist my wrists, barely moving my arms, at least as far as I played. Since it didn't hook me, I never got that far. Maybe higher levels are better.
My personal favorite VR rythym game is Audica. As for why it did poorly I can only guess that it's not that interesting on easy. On expert mode though, it requires (required) you to move your entire body as things come at you from all sides. It's got 2 basic movies, shoot and smash. When a target appears you shoot it to the beat. When a ball appears you smash it to the beat. It's also got sticky targets (you need to hold the trigger) during which it projects a beam. The beam's sound changes based on how tilt the controller which is nice touch.
When it first came out it required you to hold your hands out at arms length to get a good score. They removed that requirement and I get why but, like Beat Saber, the game is less fun the less required you are to move)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftH825-SeQ
Another one I liked was SynthRiders but it's far less polished. In particular, Audica, each track has been edited for game play, ending on a cresendo. In SynthWave, the songs are just the songs as released on the artist's CD. Many of them are too long and end really boringly compared to the edits in Audica.
Another issue with SynthRiders is they don't adjust the timing based on where you're standing so that it's pretty obvious the sounds are off the beat. The only way to fix that AFAICT is to walk forward or back and try to find the spot where the timing aligns. That's arguably just lazy design IMO because it ruins the experience when you feel like you're doing the right thing but the game's audio makes it sound like you're way behind/ahead
Still, I had a lot of run with it and it does do a good job of making you movie. Unfortuantely it didn't have many tracks I found appealing but those I did I played too many times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XaUdBgAHbM
I have friends who got into Pistol Whip. Didn't do it for me though.
Oh, and from the article, I agree that Until You Fall is an amazing game.
Audica is sick! I definitely enjoyed it a lot more than Beat Saber, for the reasons you give -- it feels way more technical, and (therefore?) much more satisfying to learn.
As someone who very much enjoys the hell out of rhythm based games (pump, vib ribbon, Cytus, etc) - Beat Saber is a great game, but apples-to-apples I actually prefer Sound Boxing which is basically DDR meets Tae Bo. It never got nearly the mainstream success as Beat Saber, but I found the motion to be a little more natural for your body - you also feel a little less like an air traffic controller on meth.
A large part of the "secret" (?) to its fun is that you can pirate all the music you actually want to listen to. If they had tried harder to stop that the game would've been forgotten in weeks.
I just wouldn’t have cared that much about getting a VR headset without beatsaber.
And when I got bored of beatsaber, I was bored of VR.
I got bored of Beat Saber and stopped using VR for a while...then I tried VRchat and developed what some would call an addition.
You should try Rez Infinite. Along with Beat Saber I'd say it's a "killer app" for VR gear.
I love Rez and have owned many versions (PS2, PS4, VR) including Rez Infinite. I loved it and the sound track is on my phone. That said, I found the game super easy. I cleared all 5 levels in a few hours. I got Rez Infinite and found it about the same. Cleared it in 1 play though. So while I still love it. It wasn't a game I went back to over and over.
Never cared about scoring in Beat Saber. To me the game stood out for two reasons:
1) multisensory experience - when you chop the block it's a music+visual+kinestetic experience (beat/flash/haptic). That alone was wildly satisfying and worth playing game for 2h hours.
2) simplicity of rules
The first thing later was replicated in may apps/games (one I enjoyed a lot is FitXR). But Beat Saber nailed it so good and early, that it's still unbeatable :)
Those aren't enough to explains Beat Saber's success. 9 of 10 VR rhythm games have the same 2 points.
The Path will reveal itself to you as you play. There is usually only one and it is correct.
Memorizing levels in Beatsaber isn't required to do VERY well. I very rarely ever play a level more than once in a session. And actually tend to struggle with highly repetitive "memory intense" sections of songs where it DOES become a rhythm game.
But if you follow the blocks they will lead you to where the next block will be.
Huh yeah I guess I never thought of it as not a rhythm game. At higher difficulty it’s really more of a DANCING game, if you think about what you’re doing with your body. I think the observation about the scoring system backs this up too, because it’s based on direction and speed of motion, not timing. Of course you need to have some timing mastery to hit the blocks, but the scoring is not based on it.
Beat Saber was the reason I bought a Quest 2. Now I actually find Synthriders to be a lot more fun. In Synth, if one person has purchased a song/map, everyone can play and players can create/share/upload maps and songs (there used to be a great free repository of songs that got taken down recently unfortunately).
Synth also removes some anxiety about playing in smaller spaces because AFAIK you're not encouraged to aim for big swings.
Synthriderz is still up, unless you meant something else?
Comment was deleted :(
In my opinion "Until you Fall" is the second best VR game after HL:Alyx.
good examples of the notion of 'instructed motion' as a separable design element, and how this drives players' emotions
Beat Saber is absolutely a rhythm game. It doesn't have the typical scoring system that is based on having an accurate timing, but it is far from the only one.
Guitar Hero, one of the best known rhythm game doesn't score based on timing accuracy. You hit a note or you don't, that's all, ut you still have to hit that note with a certain timing. Same thing for Beat Saber, you hit or you don't hit the note. If you want a high score, which is completely optional, as may just be interested in pass harder and harder songs, then there are other mechanisms at play. Guitar Hero has star power, Beat Saber has motion. That it is not pure timing doesn't make them less of rhythm games.
The article says that instead of being a rhythm game, Beat Saber is a "motion game" because it rewards precise and intentional motion. But it is the case for all rhythm games. For games about pushing buttons, the motion is rather basic, but take DDR for instance, even if it rewards timing, the key is how you move on the dance pad. Even if you hit the right arrows, bad movement will mess up your timing and drain your stamina. Even some pure button pushing game like, say, Jubeat is all about making the right movements.
The reason Beat Saber used motion for scoring instead of timing is, I think, that the smooth motion of the VR controllers didn't lend itself well to it. I mean, how to even judge timing? So instead, it judged motion, but it is not just a "motion game" like, say, Just Dance (which is also considered a rhythm game btw).
As for why is it so fun? There is no single thing. It took everything that worked, combined them, executed them well, and boom, a hit.
- Rhythm games are fun, you already have motion controls, motion controls + rhythm is dance, dancing is fun.
- Sabers just work in VR, there are plenty of VR games that feature some kind of sword.
- It is an active game, so it attracted those who want to exercise.
- It has an active modding community, and I thing the devs are smart about it. They tolerate it, without supporting it officially, so modders have a lot of freedom. Most of it is about the sharing of songs without having the right to do so after all.
- It is intuitive with a good learning curve. Most people just need a couple of songs to get comfortable on easy/medium difficulty, but the skill ceiling is high. For example, there is no special symbol to learn, just colors and directions, and on easier levels, they follow naturally (ex: blocks meant to be cut by the left saber are on the left).
- It is a VR game with no locomotion, it limits the risk of motion sickness.
Taken individually, none of these are special, but that's the combination that's great.
Edit: Another argument for "Beat Saber is a rhythm game" is that timing does matter. Unlike in most rhythm games, the timing window decreases as the notes/blocks move faster, simply because you have less time to cut them. Higher difficulties have the blocks move faster, making timing more critical.
You could absolutely use timing for scoring, just have it be when you first hit the block (or perhaps the midpoint of the block), and compare that to when it's charted.
The problem would be people walking forward/backward a bit. That'd throw all the timing off. I can only guess they tried various things to take that into account but then settled for a different type of scoring.
Oh, now as I hear about this concept of "instructed motion" I see why I liked fighting with Marauders in Doom Eternal (I think for everyone it is a acquired taste).
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I don’t really agree with the thesis that it’s about motion. I found myself moving less and less as I got better at beat saber. I didn’t care at all about the scoring, and if I did, it was about hit percentages and combos, not slicing accuracy.
It’s a good game with nice UX. It is most definitely a rhythm game. But you could get 99% of its value prop on an arcade machine setup sort of thing. It doesn’t need to be strapped to your head. It’s barely VR. The fact that it’s still pointed to as the best VR experience is proof that VR gaming is going nowhere.
Ha ha, the secret to Beat Saber’s fun is that they didn’t pay for the licenses to the music people make levels for, and now that Meta owns them, they are a very expensive target to sue.
They paid for licenses.
Certain songs will get taken down if you stream them, but they're still licensed.
https://beatsaber.com/faq.html
> Our aim is to release Content ID-free songs for future OSTs as well. However, we cannot guarantee that Content ID will be disabled for paid music packs since they are owned by our third-party partners. We value the work of artists and respect their decision to keep Content ID enabled for the music they create.
https://edm.com/features/inside-the-ambitious-quest-to-licen...
> The ambitious effort to activate Daft Punk in Beat Saber took over two years, according to Vickie Nauman, founder of the Los Angeles-based consultancy and advisory firm CrossBorderWorks. "The collaborative effort was between Beat Saber core team, Warner Music in London and Daft Punk crew," Nauman tells EDM.com.
> Nauman has worked with the title's developer, Beat Games, to execute the company's licensing deals since its early days as an independent gaming studio in Prague, a role in which she remained after Facebook (now Meta) acquired the studio in 2019.
I think op meant the custom songs, there are thousands of them, amoung which a lot are of very high quality gameplay wise. I've been playing beat saber since when it came out (so about 7 years I'd say), and while I do play an "official" song here and there, most of my playtime is on customs. While this custom content does play in their favor, they do not however make it trivial to access it (you have to mod your game, which is a bit involved on a quest headset), unlike some other games, so I guess a lot of buyers don't actually buy the game for the custom content
On PC you don't have to mod your game for custom songs.
Everyone I know playing beatsaber has the modded version :p
Beat Saber and Meta aren't responsible for that.
You won't get sued for that just like singing Taylor Swift in the shower is permissible.
I know, I'm just saying that a big part of what makes beat saber fun (to me) is in playing fan made songs.
I mean they are. They allow hundreds of thousands of players to sideload a modded APK in using their developer mode. This is detectable but they tacitly allow it because it sells a lot of copies of the game and the headset.
And I am thankful they do!
My web browser lets me pirate music, but Mozilla doesn't get sued for that.
There's zero liability for Beat Saber or Meta here. People distributing the pirated music would be liable.
MegaUpload got in some trouble for file sharing fwiw, so it's not impossible
They host the files. Beat saber does not.
Good point
MegaUpload was unarguably distributing content.
The RIAA is the biggest detriment to any music based games success. Either you pay lots of money for every additional song or most the player base are pirates.
Maybe someday one will be released with Spotify, YT Music, and Amazon Music integrations. Advertising that you just need to connect your accounts and can use anything. But I'm sure there are a lot of people working to make sure that never happens.
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Incorrect. I'm downvoting you, and I never use ChatGPT.
I can only wish that I make a game that people feel so passionately about but do not play.
That they're getting downvoted by someone who never uses ChatGPT does not refute the claim that they're getting downvoted by people who do.
Sure. The claim is just entirely baseless to start with.
Fwiw I think they were trying to make some broader point that downvoters were presumably downvoting because they are against piracy, but are hypocritical because they use ChatGPT which is even bigger copyright infringement.
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