News PS4

Surgeon Simulator: Experience Reality Developer Addresses PSVR Version Launch Issues

PlayStation VR

As we reported yesterday, Bossa Studios’ Surgeon Simulator didn’t get off to the greatest of starts on PlayStation VR, with its movement tracking being described as ‘unplayable’ by many players.

Today, a spokesman for the developer got in touch with Power Up Gaming to admit that it “had got things wrong”, and wanted to “address the issue head on” by releasing a patch in the near future. It also provided a full statement from Bossa CEO Henrique Olifiers, which is as follows:

“Raise your hand if you got it wrong!

A childhood friend of mine had a saying that went like this: ‘Life is what happens when something you thought you nailed, goes wrong’. If that’s so, then game development is the closest analogy to living that there is, as things you thought were done and dusted come back to bite you a lot more than you’d like.

Case in point, our control scheme for Surgeon Simulator: ER on PlayStation VR. When we hit on the idea of ditching absolute tracking in favour of a relative one (in that when you move your hands X amount in real space, that translate into 2X on VR) we had found a great way of making the experience feel more ‘surgeony’, by taking players out of their comfort zones, requiring them to learn something new to deal with the game.

Great on paper, not so much in-game now it seems, as we have been getting a fair bit of feedback on this. When you’re immersed in an idea for as long as we have, it’s easy to lose perspective and make a error of judgement that someone looking with fresh eyes can immediately pick up on.

With our excuses out of the way, now it’s time to look into a proper fix. An easy one is to restore the absolute tracking of the hands just like we have on the Vive and Oculus versions, and roll it out to the PSVR as soon as possible. We’ll also tweak the ‘skeleton hand’ that appears when your virtual hand collides with an object, making it more gracious – meaning that your hand will need to get really stuck into something before you see the skeleton, as opposed to seeing it triggered upon every tiny collision.

In other words, yep, you are right: controls on the PSVR can be made way better with a few changes, and since this is the popular request, it’s our job to fix it (and do it quick).

Sorry for the trouble, don’t hate us for too long, we’ll get it right. And huge thanks for letting us know how to improve the game we love… After all, that should always be the number one priority in anything we do.

You Might Also Like