Onward Dev Takes a Tall Stance Over VR Height Problems

Onward is a VR tactical shooter, which is currently available from Steam via Early Access. If you’ve been looking forward to a shooter specifically made for VR, you may want to check your height first. If you’re in the slightly vertically challenged range, you may have to wait.

Redditor JTswift who first picked up on the issue 3 months ago, said “I’m tall. My son isn’t 5’6″ yet. Whenever he’s in the game, he can’t sprint because he’s always crouching. If I play, I need to adjust the height every time. Gotta be a better way to do height than manually changing it?”

The developer, Downpour Interactive, are aware of the issue and released a ‘to do list’, bear in mind that the game is still in early access and this is where problems and bugs are fixed prior to full release. Right now there is no word on a possible fix date, and it seems they are having other problems lately with a recent patch causing a few problems for their playerbase.

There has been suggestions that adding an option to adjust the head height in the settings may be a solution, Mike Schneider, a software engineer, claiming on twitter that it would be easy, pointing out that other games had managed to solve this problem before release into early access. There are, however, implications with this sort of option in a shooter. Would making your height lower or higher reduce or increase the size of your hit box? Would it make the game think you were constantly crouching, thus slowing you down? This article by VRinflux discusses possible problems that VR developers need to solve.

VR is an exciting technology, but it certainly isn’t coming along without its fair share of flaws and problems. That being said, once they have been solved initially, it should help devs further down the line.

Would you meet the minimum height requirement? What ingenious solutions can you think of to give yourself a temporary height boost?