Teleporter: World of Gamers (Alpha)

Okay, so first of all, I loved the idea of building a VR space and bringing gamers together. I was in Discord channel of developers for a while. I downloaded the game in its first day on Steam and joined the opening ceremony. The community was awesome and we had a bunch of fun together. I really will come to the events in the next weeks as much as I can. I also loved that developers are very responsive. The whole team is 5 people with 2 coders, and they explain everything whenever you ask for it. They also take feedback very seriously and give importance to the community. The environments are well-designed but there are some features you probably wouldn’t understand how to use if the team wouldn’t show how. One of my favorite features is having your personal space caravan and being able to spend time in it watching games or playing keyboard or listening to music. It’s a good concept. But I really wanted to drive it from inside and I couldn’t :D It of course needs improvements but since the game is in alpha, and the developers are very responsive, I think it’s acceptable. I recommend you to download the game and join some events with the community. This is the best way to experience the game right now.

At first glance this seems like a decent idea with some compelling ideas/features built in. [i]However[/i], the game is riddled with terrible design flaws, the last one making the game literally unplayable. [*]I'm not even going to hold it against them to have a login requirement. While generally a bad idea to do this on an already established platform like Steam, the [i]way[/i] they implemented it is what is so stress-inducing and infuriating. It might seem like a "fun idea" on paper to have a player tap things out in a xylophone style way, but in practice this is legitimately one of the worst interfaces I've seen to date. [b]ESPECIALLY[/b] when it comes to something like account creation. If you [b]must[/b] have a account setup system, please just have them do it on their computer, and then email them a 1-time pin to associate the headset/Steam account to the in-game account. And keep the user logged in between sessions. I really don't want to have to type out on your madness xylophone my info every single time I want to quick jump in. [*]The actual arcade cabinet game you have to play to verify you're human (which wouldn't be necessary if you just linked the account via Steam like [i]other[/i] social VR games...) is extremely unreliable in controls. Randomly detaching the player's hand from the joystick, and requires overly exaggerated actions to pull of turns. When there's irl hardware to give you constraints to slam the joystick, this works just fine and is actually satisfying. But in VR at least in 2020 this [b]does not work[/b]. So at this point the devs have presented the player with 3-4 barriers entry. And I haven't even actually played the game yet, as the system says my info is invalid, but won't say why. After enough trials I was able to beat the raid boss and finally enter the actual game. [*]The last flaw is what gave me no choice but to stop (for now). Accessing your inventory requires you pressing a controller system button. Which opens up Steam VR's menu overlay. Meaning you can't access your in-game inventory. Ever. And the inventory is about as important as having a VR headset to begin with. It's required to be able to do anything in the game. And there isn't a way in-game to rebind the button. Steam VR does provide ways to completely remap the buttons of your controllers, but do you believe that this merits a full remapping of a system level button that, if done wrong, disables your ability to exit the game and go back to Steam VR? If there was a simple button rebinding system in game, or even better [b] don't use a system button to access your in-game menus[/b]. In the current state of this game I can't recommend it even though it is free. The stress-inducing account creation system alone makes it not even worth the hard drive space. Hopefully they update the game to remove these "features", but for now I have absolutely zero desire to put myself through that. Interface design should be fluid and intuitive, not a mini-game in itself that you can actually lose at. I'm keeping an eye out, but I'm not holding my breath for things this fundamental to be addressed.