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Among Us VR - Launch Trailer
Have you ever heard of the game, ‘Among Us’?
‘Among Us’, the representative work of the U.S. game company Innersloth, and one of the most sensational works in the mobile game market, has been released as a VR version on November 10th. ‘Among Us VR’ supports lots of platforms such as Steam VR, PS VR, and Meta Quest2, and can be purchased at around USD 9.99 at Steam and Meta Quest Store.
Google Play - Among Us
If you never heard of Among Us before, here’s a short introduction - Among Us is a video game which reinterprets the board game ‘Mafia Game’, where Crewmates, the innocent citizen, carry out various missions on a worn-down spaceship and also eject suspicious Imposters (the ‘space mafia’) among them.
If the Imposter kills a crewmate, the body remains on the spot, and anyone who finds the body can summon everyone for an emergency meeting. After a moment of reasoning, the crew takes a majority vote to eject one suspected member out of the ship.
The winning conditions of the game are quite simple. Crewmates win if they complete all the missions or find all the imposters. Imposters win if they outnumber (or even-number) the crewmates or a critical sabotage fails to be addressed.
The gameplay and world of Among Us VR is the same as the original, mobile version. However, as the platform is based on VR, it has a special immersive twist. We would like to talk about our firsthand experience playing Among Us VR with a Meta Quest 2, and also its differences from the mobile version.
Among Us VR 체험기
Immersion Out of This World
I was greeted with a familiar galactic setting when I first booted up the game. I could see the crewmates of Among Us VR spacewalking with the mysterious music all around me. I knew where this place was right away. I was now inside what once was behind a flat 2D screen, the title screen of Among Us. When I looked down at my hands, I saw the red hands of the red crewmate. If my flipped my hand holding the controller, the virtual rend hand followed suit.
After being matched with other player, you will be on standby with the players at the 'cafeteria', the starting point of the game. While in the mobile version you moved around with a joystick across two axes, in Among Us VR you could roam around freely in a 3D space, interacting with the environment in a first-person point of view, while waiting for the game to start.
When a certain number of people gather, the game is started by the room manager. After that, as we know well, each of us will be assigned a role and perform your duties. If you are a crewmate, you can press the controller's trigger to clear tasks, and if you are an imposter, you can remove the crewmate with that trigger.
As the game went on a dead body was found, and all players were summoned to the cafeteria. The meeting with a large number of people in VR was special. Spacial audio, as well as the presence of people in a large meeting place inside a spacecraft traveling through quiet space, embodied not only the direction of sound but also the distance, enabling three-dimensional and immersive communication. Additionally, the hand-held controllers fed back real-life hand gestures simultaneously and even enabled non-verbal expressions.
The game is based on voice chat, but it also supports a quite limited chat function known as the 'Quick Chat'. Quick Chat enables players to select and send comments within a given choice. In the mobile version, the Quick Chat was disregarded as it restricting freedom with no additional benefits, but in the case of the VR, typing with a controller was inconvenient and is a factor which made players less immersive, so Quick Chat was reborn as convenient tool to help players to focus on the game.
As mentioned above, Among Us VR combined the various points that allowed me to be abosorbed in the virtual world, and made them feel like I was in the real worldd. In other words, it caused a Suspension of Disbelief. Suspension of Disbelief means that users become immersive in the virtual world and do not care about the fact that the world is virtual. This is also the ultimate goal of VR.
Attempts to offer better user experiences
While players interact with the virtual environment in real-time while blocked from reality, they experience ‘Spatial Presence’ - they feel as if they truly exist in the virtual world, detached from reality. VR technology may have provided an innovative sense of immersion. However, VR still has a huge challenge up ahead. ‘Cyber Sickness’ or ‘VR Sickness’ makes it difficult for users to play VR games for a long period.
Cyber sickness has different causes from traditional motion sickness. While common motion sickness (caused by transportation and rides) is caused by stimulation of the vestibular organ responsible for the sense of balance, cyber sickness comes from the inconsistency between visual information and vestibular information from motion.
Specifically, hardware factors such as response time, viewing angle, optical distortion, and tracking errors in the VR environment, as well as content factors such as cut editing, camera movement, and rotation are factors that can give rise to inconsistencies, which in turn cause cyber sickness. Users may experience symptoms such as discomfort, nausea, dizziness, spatial disorientation, pallor, sweating, headache, vomiting, and more.
Among Us VR recognized the above problem and tried to mitigate it as much as possible. One example is a vignette setting, which shows a stationary grid world outside the game. The joystick attached to the controller supports continuous rotation (the view of the character gradually rotating in the desired direction) and snap rotation (rotating by a predetermined angle) for horizontal rotation movements, allowing fine control of rotation and angle. Efforts to reduce cyber sickness also include support for head-based movement options mentioned briefly above.
Since players are more sensitive to motion sickness in VR when they repeat simple actions with their posture fixed or when their bodies’ rotation radius is bigger, providing snap turn and head-based movement options in order to reduce the rotation radius is one of the most effective ways to reduce cyber sickness. Among us VR provides both Snap Turn and Smooth Turn movement options, and in my experience the former had a relatively smaller rotation radius and was much more comfortable.
Wrapping up
VR still clearly has technical limitations such as cyber sickness. However, it is impressive that Among Us VR has tried to overcome its limits. It is designed not only to provide a sense of immersion beyond the original version (mobile application), but also designed to promote a better user experience. The next step for InnerSloth may be supporting cross-platform, treading the same path as VRchat - a social VR platform game based on virtual reality - securing more sussy imposters. We believe more games like Among Us VR will lay a path to a new explosion of VR content.