Yesterday Roblox finally launched a VR version of its for Meta Quest. I’ve immediately tried it to see how it feels, and if this can be one of the killer apps of VR. Here below you can find my review of it.
Roblox on Quest
Roblox has partnered with Meta and just launched a VR version of its super-popular app on the Meta Quest Store. I consider this to be a very important piece of news for VR: Roblox has more than 60M daily users and most of them are very young people. A release for Quest likely means that new generations will not only have more awareness towards VR in the future but also that some of these people will want to have a Quest as a holiday gift to be able to enter into their Roblox creations. I think that Roblox will contribute to giving Quest 3 a very solid holiday season.
There is one big caveat, though: Roblox has just launched but is in Beta. And in fact, the app is currently not available on the main store, but only through the indie App Lab store. It’s very important to read my review considering this factor: the VR version available today is not the final one, that is coming in a few months. Now there is only a preliminary version that is being improved every week by the Roblox engineers.
Notwithstanding that the app is only on App Lab (and so is not discoverable), it has already received more than 1200 reviews in just one day, a result that I guess no other VR experience on App Lab ever had. This shows how much Roblox is popular and how its massive audience can benefit VR. If it is having 1200 reviews at launch on App Lab, imagine what can happen when it launches on the main store!
Now that is clear to all of us why Roblox is a big deal, let’s see what have been my impressions of it.
How to login to Roblox on Quest
While I was having a look at the App Lab page on Roblox, I saw many people complaining about its login procedure. I couldn’t understand why until I opened the application.
In VR, after launching Roblox, the only thing I found in front of me was a 2D menu with a single button saying “Login with another device”. I was pretty confused: I expected the classical Login+Registration procedure, asking for the usual username and password, but actually, there was nothing of that. I did not understand what I had to do.
If you find yourself in the same situation, I will tell you how you can exit from this quicksand: go open the browser on your PC, mobile phone, or whatever other device that you have on the same Wi-Fi as your headset. Then on this device, you log in on Roblox on the Roblox website and then you either follow this link or you click on the Settings cog in the upper right corner of your Roblox user page and then select the second option, which is Quick Login.
Whatever of the two routes you follow, you will end by opening a page where you can enter a magic code. Now get back to the VR headset, and click on the only Login button you can click, and it will show you a popup with a code (something like A67FG). Take this code and enter it into the webpage on your computer that is expecting a magic code. Confirm the code on the webpage, then get back to the headset and in a few seconds you should be logged in. (If something is not clear, refer to the Youtube video I have linked above)
Let’s say this is not exactly the smooth login procedure I was expecting, and the VR community agrees with me.
Main Menu
As soon as I logged in, I saw the main menu in 2D in front of me, as a curved screen. At this moment, I realized that it was not only the login procedure, but the whole application that was very rough. The environment around me in the main menu was a simple place just made of cubes with the lighting that was clearly off: it was dark and also felt inconsistent across the different parts of the scene. The environment was also flickering in some places. Not to mention the fact that having just a few cubes around you as the home space was not that exciting: I expected something more than a few cubes and a stock skybox from a Roblox menu space. These cubes were running at around 45 FPS when the Quest apps should run at least at 72.
As soon as I entered, I tried to configure my avatar, but there was something off with that, too: the interface on the right with which I could choose my customizations didn’t work very well. There was a menu through which to choose what I wanted to change (e.g. head, hair, accessories, etc…) and it did show only a few visible options. To see the other ones that were off-screen, I tried to swipe it like I usually do in all the VR applications, by “grabbing” and moving the menu with my controllers, but it didn’t work. I had to point at the menu and use the thumbstick to scroll it horizontally, which was something very unusual.
My avatar customizations were very limited because I had no Robux (if I have money, I spent it in blackjack and hookers [cit] not in Roblox customizations), but anyway, I tried to make my avatar cute. Even in this, the experience was not optimal, because sometimes the system put two items one on top of the other: for instance, I already had one hat by default, and when I clicked on another hat to use this new one, actually, Roblox activated both. So in the end, I had a hat in a hat, something which would have made Xbit happy, but that was actually horrible to see.
After my avatar customizations, I had a tour of the 2D main menu, which seemed to offer the main functionalities expected from it, like letting you navigate the available worlds, make new friends, see chat with other players, modify the settings, etc… I tried to click on the “Settings” button and it told me that “this feature is not available yet”, giving me another proof of the incompleteness of this game on Quest.
While I was browsing around, I had a weird sensation of “void”: after focusing a bit on this sensation, I understood that the problem was that there was literally no audio in the menu scene. Not even an ambient sound, a white noise, nothing. I feared it was a problem with my device, but actually, the audio of my Quest Pro was fine… it was just that the home space had no sound, which was quite disturbing. Remember that audio makes a lot of the impression of a VR experience, and the total lack of sound makes a world feel totally empty.
If I tried to put my controllers between my eyes and the curved menu, they disappeared: this is because most probably the development team made the menu with an OVROverlay to increase the visibility of its UI, but it has not tackled the problem that an OVROverlay gets superimposed on top of the other things, and so it is painted also on top of the controllers (that should be in front of it). This is another bug to be fixed.
The most interesting tab of the menu was the Home, because there I could find a selection of VR- compatible worlds which I guess had been hand-picked by the Roblox team. And this is where I started my tests with the platform.
VR Input
The first experience I tried was called “VR tutorial”. It was a simple world with a little window on the right that explained to me the basics of Roblox UX in VR. The movement and rotation of the user in the Roblox ecosystem happen always with the thumbsticks of the controllers. The A button is used to jump. The trigger to interact.
To try to accommodate the needs of different kinds of users, Roblox offers two locomotion modes:
- Third-person: you see the camera staying slightly back and on the left of your character. When you move your character using your left thumbstick (which lets you both rotate and walk), the camera stays still, and you see yourself moving from the outside. When you stop moving your character, your point of view teleports on the back of the avatar again
- First-person: you embody your character and your point of view is the same as its head. Movement happens like in all VR games with smooth locomotion: one of the thumbsticks is used for walking and the other one is used to snap-rotate. There is a small tunneling vignette to reduce the sickness effect while moving.
You switch between the two modes by clicking your right thumbstick.
The thing that puzzled me the most was that the First-person mode had no avateering: I couldn’t see my body and not even my hands. I just could see the Meta Touch controllers in front of me. This was surely an immersion killer. Probably the Roblox team has still not found the right formula to properly show the rough Roblox avatars in first-person VR, and so for now it is hiding the avatars.
A good thing that the Roblox team added is the safety bubble: you can decide to have a small “safety zone” around you that people can not enter so that they can not harass you. This is a safety standard in VR, and in fact, we of VRROOM also added it to our VR concerts platform. The bubble can be always on, always off, or on only when interacting with non-friends.
When you are in a VR experience and not in the main menu, you have always a small contextual menu in the lower part of your vision field. Here there are some buttons to activate/deactivate the safety bubble, exit the current experience, activate some emotes (i.e. predefined animations of the avatar, like dancing), show the HUD UI, and chat with other players.
I liked the idea of the small menu, I’ve found it very handy to perform common operations, like enabling/disabling the UI of the worlds, which sometimes can be very cluttering in VR, or exiting a world I wasn’t liking. I used it a lot, and being it on the lower-bottom of my field of vision, it was totally unobtrusive.
UI input
As highlighted in the previous paragraph, also the UI had some weird input management. Panels could be scrolled with the thumbstick, but the scrolling amination did not feel smooth. When I had to type some input, Roblox opened the Meta Quest system keyboard, which was shown superimposed onto the VR app but at a different depth from it, creating a depth mismatch for my eyes. But my favorite moment was (and will always be) when I launched the app: before I pressed the trigger on one of my controllers, the default pointing mechanism was via the head orientation, something I didn’t see in a virtual reality application since the times of Gear VR.
Trying VR experiences
I had a tour of some VR experiences I was suggested on the home menu. I tried some VR tag games, some shooters, some exploration worlds, and also some weird shit. Roblox has something like 15M worlds, and even if they are not all VR-compatible, it means that the content I could try was almost infinite. This is something that can be very beneficial for VR because its users can spend a lot of time in this application because there is always something new to do. This is the kind of huge application that can increase the retention of VR headsets.
Notice that of course, you can enter only in the VR-compatible worlds: the non-VR-compatible ones are not even listed, and if they must be listed because they are in your favorite list, then they appear as non-compatible and you have no way to enter them.
All the content was very Roblox-like: made with simple geometrical shapes, simple textures, and a bit rough around the edges. Plus in every world, there were a lot of things that could be bought with Robux. The impression I had is that everything still looked a lot like a mobile/PC experience ported to a VR headset.
The problem is that those simple flat-colored spaces, which can look fun on a mobile phone, look very crappy in a VR headset: the environments can feel empty, the scenery simplistic, and the textures can look blurry and grainy. In the time I tested the application for this review, I have found no environment that seemed interesting for me to explore. Plus everything was glitchy, with flickering here and there, and a framerate that sometimes dropped to 40FPS or even less. Aliasing was a good friend everywhere, and so were all sorts of artifacts.
Also, the UX still showed a lot of reminiscence from PC: sometimes when pointing at an object, I could see “Press E to activate”, which is what Roblox usually shows on PC. I had access to some experimental VR hardware in my career, but I never had a controller with an “E” button on it, so I guess it was referring to the keyboard of the PC. When I tried to interact with something, it was clear in some experiences that the interaction was not working properly because it was made for another device.
Talking about interactions, in some shooter games, while I was shooting, by error the virtual rays of my controllers activated the button to exit from the experience in the quick menu on the bottom. This is a problem because of course if I’m interacting with the game, I shouldn’t be trigger by error the main menu of the application.
All the writings that I could find in the games, and all the UIs coming out from the contextual menus, were all horizontally stretched as if a 4:3 image had been converted to 16:9. This looked really like a gross bug.
Notwithstanding all these technical issues, I can say I had fun going around Roblox. The sheer number of worlds made sure that if I didn’t like something, I could go to another better world. I was surprised to see how many VR-compatible experience there already were. And all of them worked: I had no problem in using my controllers to navigate in these worlds and interact with the elements in them.
The multiplayer shooting games were rough but still nice to play. I found a world where I could have enormous jumps and it did me feel the worst falling-down sensation I had in my whole VR life (something like falling down a 400m skyscraper: the virtual fall was so strong that my ears closed down during it). I interacted with some weird beings. I found myself surrounded by the hands and the bodies of the other users that were interacting with objects in VR. I drew a dick on the floor. Every experience was very Roblox, so clunky and rough, but still, there were many things to do, and it was nice spending a few minutes in it.
I’m not a frequent user of Roblox, so I was surprised to see how every world offered a lot of things on sale. It seemed that even the crappiest of the world was made to make money. The fun thing was that when I tried to test the In-App-Purchase system to buy Robux, the Meta Quest OS answered that I wasn’t authorized to perform that operation. It’s weird because I’ve already used my Quest Pro to buy items (e.g. in AmazeVR), so there must be some problems with the IAP engine integration.
Comfort
This is how Roblox engineers describe the comfort for VR users in their app:
Between the flickering, the worlds that were made for PC with huge movements of the player, the jumps, and the low framerate, Roblox on Quest is a vomit machine. If you are very sensitive to virtual sickness, please wait for the official version before playing this game.
Anyway, the engineers tried to add some comfort options to locomotion, so at least we should appreciate that.
Availability
You can find Roblox on the Meta Quest Store App Lab. It is free to play at this link: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/5804350719675181/
Final impressions
The release of Roblox on Meta Quest was clearly rushed: it is incomplete and full of bugs. Plus many features are still made for PC/mobile and have not been completely ported to VR. Some of the errors are pretty noticeable and could be solved easily by the team (e.g. the lighting of the main menu scene), so I wonder why they haven’t fixed them.
I wondered why Roblox wanted to launch it this fast and I thought that there may have been various reasons. One is that it desperately needs feedback from its users, so it is launching an open beta to get feedback as soon as possible to prepare at best its future launch on the Meta Store. This is what usually many startups do… the strange thing here is that Roblox is an established brand, not a startup with a new product. Another reason may be that Meta pushed to have it as soon as possible to please its investors or to start getting the attention of preteens who can start asking their parents for a Quest for Christmas.
In the current status, the beta is very rough, but honestly, I’m not judging it: as a developer, I know that when something is launched in beta, it is clearly a bugged product. A beta is a flawed product that is launched to start getting the feedback from the users, so it is normal it is full of problems. I’m sure that Roblox is going to improve its VR version considerably in the next few months. I’m so not criticizing it too much for its bugs, especially the framerate, which is very hard to fix. Just remember, if you are going to try it, that it is still rough around the edges.
I found the application promising, because playing in VR is always fun, even if I have to say that when the environments are so rough (like in most indie worlds on Roblox), the immersivity offered by VR loses a bit of sense. The application can be also very nausea-inducing.
Regarding content, I’m sure that if you can play it, you can find some worlds that you can enjoy and have fun in. I think that it’s cool to have 15M worlds to choose from, it gives VR users infinite content to play with. It’s not common to find nowadays an application with such a big catalog of content to play, so Roblox is special in this sense. This is very important to increase the retention of VR headsets, something Meta is still struggling with. The problem with this content, though, is that many of the Roblox worlds are not valorized by VR. They are made for mobile, so they are rough, they are small, they do not feature great graphics, and are not thought for physical body interactions. This means that when you enter them in VR, you don’t feel great value for using virtual reality, because usually, the best VR content is the one that makes you feel great immersion (e.g. Half-Life: Alyx), exploits physicality (e.g. fitness games like HitMotion), or that gives you strong emotions (e.g. storytelling content a la Dear Angelica). In the content I’ve tried, I’ve found nothing of this, so I think that if Roblox truly believes in this platform, it should build more content that is specifically made for VR to make VR users happy.
I think that as soon as the application will be polished, many kids will find it very enjoyable to enter their creations in virtual reality and meet there their friends in a more engaging way. Roblox has a huge user base, and even if only a minority of it gets interested in the idea of virtual reality, this can still be a big deal for our whole ecosystem. I’m very curious to see what will happen this holiday season and which will be the percentage of Roblox users who will access it from virtual reality. (And I also advocate that we will provide these kids with a safe social VR environment where they can have fun)
I can’t wait to try the application as soon as it has been finalized and I wish good work to the Roblox team for the improvements it has to develop. And if you play the game, too, let me know your impressions in the comments below (or on my social media channels), because I’m very curious to hear from you.
(Header image by Roblox)