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Oculus Quest Is A Dream For Beat Saber Fans
This week, Oculus detailed the release date and price for its updated VR headset tech, the Rift S. You can Read our impressions here. However, Oculus’s other headset – the Oculus Quest – solves one problem the Rift doesn’t: you no longer have to worry about tangling yourself up in cords.
The Quest was announced last year, but this week we had another chance to go hands-on with the Quest at a GDC event, and I walked away impressed by the Quest’s comfort and the level of performance. The Rift S might be capable of displaying more demanding games (since it’s tied to your PC gaming rig), but the all-in-one Quest isn’t a total pushover.
The Oculus Quest features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and provides a resolution of 1600x1440 per eye with a 72Hz refresh rate. The experiences I had on the Quest looked on par with most of the games on the VR market today. Oculus hasn’t announced all of the headset's 50 launch titles, but some of them include: Superhot VR, Dead and Buried II, Moss, Robo Recall, and, of course, Beat Saber.
In fact, if you already have a VR setup, you might already have some Quest games, because Oculus has enabled both cross-buy and cross-play between the Quest and Rift platforms. This functionality is dependent on the whims of developers, but hopefully you’ll be able to stop playing many of your games on the Rift and then pick up a Quest and carry on from your last save.
A few high-end experiences – such as Asgard’s Wrath and Stormland – won’t be available on Quest, but the Quest is still a tempting offer because it is a complete VR package. You don’t need to set up extra sensors, and more importantly you don’t have to connect to an external PC. This might not seem like a big deal, but it actually does make a difference. While playing Beat Saber, I was struck with an added sense of freedom I’ve never had playing the game before. Even though I’m used to being attached to a cord when I play most VR games, it still inhibits your actions and occasionally gets in the way. I loved going cordless and I don’t really want to go back.
The Oculus Quest will release later this spring for $399 (64GB), and comes packed with two Touch controllers.
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