John Romero on VR: "movement is the problem"

At Gamelab 2016 in Barcelona Gamereactor caught up with the legend of the FPS genre John Romero to talk about the state of the genre at the moment, specifically in terms of the development of VR.

Romero started by saying "well I don't think that VR is going to be really good for the FPS genre. Movement is the problem with VR, like moving yourself makes people sick. Looking around is great, there's no problem with using the VR headset as a mouse look, but as soon as you start moving forward your body's not physically moving but you're moving inside. There's a disconnect and people get sick".

He continued by saying "I believe that VR is going to be best for games and applications that are designed only for VR and probably can't be replicated on a different platform. Those will be the most powerful VR experiences and maybe people will port from there back out to a computer, but I think those will be the things that define why VR is here. ]

"But I don't think porting anything over to VR that makes you move around is going to be a success just because... there was already a sickness factor with Doom, it's called DIM (Doom Induced Motion sickness), with the immersion of 3D games and everything, so there's still this just playing a 3D game you can get sick, VR [is] just multiplied by 10".

For the future, Romero said "there's still a ton of research, learning and programming going into VR to try and solve these issues because they want the largest market possible and the only way to do it is to solve the issues. So for now I think that VR is not good for FPS but we might see some solutions in the future".