VR Design Unpacked: The secret to Beat Saber's fun
84 comments
·May 2, 2025Animats
Wowfunhappy
I desperately want more games like Unseen Diplomacy, where you walk through an infinite hallway. In real life, you're just walking in circles, but it doesn't feel that way in VR!
I'm immune to VR motion sickness, but games without fake movement just feel so much more immersive!
this_and_that
The game "Tea for God" (https://www.google.com/search?q=tea+for+god&oq=tea+for+god) also has this strange behavior where the world curves around in a non-Euclidean / M.C. Escher-style fashion so that you feel like you're in a labyrinth, but you're actually in a ~8ft square in your living room.
"Tea for God" and "Unseen Diplomacy" are the only games I'm aware of that operate in this fashion, with "realistic" walking movement that doubles back on itself.
flavelius
"Eye of the temple" is another one https://www.roadtovr.com/eye-of-the-temple-design-room-scale...
Wowfunhappy
There's at least one more, Shattered Lights: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1057720/Shattered_Lights/
But I've played all three of these to death!
HPsquared
Another type of game with this characteristic is Table tennis simulators. Although the reduced field of view is a limitation, it just feels like wearing a strange helmet. Inner ear still matches the visual picture.
piyh
I've seen plenty of people try to lean on the table and fall over
HPsquared
I play with an actual dinner table in front of me around the same place as the virtual table. Hazardous for some games but helpful on this case!
thatguy0900
When I got my headset forever ago my brothers girlfriend broke a controller by putting it down on the virtual table lol
socalgal2
That's not sufficient to explain Beat Saber's secert as pretty much every VR rythym game follows the same pattern but was not as successful
CarVac
That what makes it not bad, not what makes it good.
fennecbutt
I would expand on that.
I'd say because the gameplay is so elegantly simple, most people can do kinda sorta well right from the get go. It feels extremely natural with almost no set up apart from height, just incredibly intuitive and frictionless.
echelon
I wonder if a game where you ride inside of a mecha with free roaming capabilities would feel more natural.
ZeWaka
That's the basis for a very common VR game(s) you see in VR arcades and such (or conventions). https://store.steampowered.com/app/334540/Vox_Machinae/ or https://store.steampowered.com/app/1192900/IRON_REBELLION/
Having played them, they were slightly disorienting at first but nowhere near as actual movement-based VR games.
jayd16
No. The visual movement of the mech will not align with the inertia you feel irl and you'll get dizzy.
Sohcahtoa82
Not really.
Any game where your game-world movements don't match your real-world movements is what causes motion sickness.
It's as simple as that. If you're sitting in a mech, once the mech moves, you're likely to get sick, because you're moving in the game world, but not the real world.
There are ways to kind of fool your brain to make it work, but it's not 100%. For example, in Gorn, one of the movement options is to move an arm forward, then pull it back while holding the trigger, kind of like you're pulling the world. But if you alternate arms as you do it, your arms kind of simulate the swinging motion of walking, and that can be enough to drastically reduce or even eliminate the sickness.
bisby
And the worst part is that it goes both ways.
Brain expects movement (from visual stimuli) and doesn't feel any movement? Nausea. (VR sickness)
Brain expects stability (from visual stimuli) and feels movement? Nausea. (Sea sickness).
This is why when you're sea sick they tell you to watch the horizon, because if you watch the horizon, you can tell that the horizon is going up and down and your brain can correlate that to the motion.
LorenDB
There are also efforts to create patches that provide neural stimuli to fool your brain into thinking you've moved. Reportedly Valve has looked into those in the past.
9dev
Why wouldn’t the same thing apply when driving a car in RL, however?
doctorpangloss
Do you regularly play Beat Saber?
mintplant
> So if Beat Saber scoring isn’t about timing, then how does it work? The scoring system is actually based on motion. In fact, it’s actually designed to make you move in specific ways if you want the highest score.
> The key scoring factors are how broad your swing is and how even your cut is through the center of the block. So Beat Saber throws these cubes at you and challenges you to swing broadly and precisely.
Oh. Coming from a rhythm game background, I couldn't figure out why I kept failing charts when I tried Beat Saber on my friend's VIVE. Now I finally understand what was happening. The experience was frustrating and disheartening. Maybe it wouldn't have been if I'd gone through the tutorial instead of picking up from my friend's game save?
AuryGlenz
You won't fail out due to not hitting the blocks "right," other than direction. You fail from missing them (or hitting them the wrong way) or being in those box-hurt-zones, hitting the mines...and I think that's about it.
That said I always kind of wished it was based more on the the timing, if only because it feels good to hit the boxes in time with the beat. People tend to move around though and that'd throw that off.
jerf
"Maybe it wouldn't have been if I'd gone through the tutorial instead of picking up from my friend's game save?"
As far as I know this is not explained anywhere in the game itself. Coming from DDR I finally twigged that something was up when I did a full combo and realized I was still light years from the #1 score, and realized there must be more to it than that. Obvious in hindsight, but easy to miss. And I would not have guessed how much it wants your swing to be rather large; scoring [1] is 70 points for a 100 degree approach, 30 points for a 60 degree follow through, and 15 points based on accuracy in hitting the center. Nice in the sense that it creates a lot of headroom for high scores, but most people should not obsess over score too much. The swing sizes it "wants" get absurd pretty quickly as the boxes start coming faster.
xdfgh1112
It is literally explained in the first five minutes of the turorial
Or you can intuit from the score displayed after you cut each block
Cieric
To be fair the tutorial wasn't always there. And when it was added I had no reason to go through it. Not the parent though.
jerf
This is the tutorial I got: https://youtu.be/EJIMULOXbYI
Maybe you have a different one on a different platform but there is no score discussion there.
Intuiting things at 3 blocks a second is a challenge.
corytheboyd
It’s been so long I don’t remember if they explain the scoring system fully in a tutorial… but it becomes very intuitive if you _flow_ the direction the blocks want you to go in, with liberal follow through. Also, this makes way more sense at higher difficulties, because the lower ones are so slow that flow and follow through just isn’t intuitive.
I’m not at all interested in high score min/max, but I do confidently play most “dancey” expert+ (as in, not the ridiculous Camellia stuff), and this is how I think about the game.
SequoiaHope
Hah I also skipped the tutorial and was lost for a while the first time I played.
koolala
Its like playing Wii Tennis without swinging your arms.
pinoy420
[dead]
bangonkeyboard
Beat Saber's reveal trailer is still one of the best I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIzRbI1JUe4
A tight 30 seconds of wordless, uncut gameplay that intuitively unveils the game mechanics while the simple track, just when it seems overly easy, crescendoes into the beat drop and trickier motions. The finishing touch is the missed note right before the hard cut to title.
chrisldgk
This is as good a time as any to throw in a shameless plug and say that my sister, Sarah Kolb actually voiced the German tutorial for Beatsaber [1]. If you need a voice actress for German and English content, she’s your gal! [2]
[1] https://youtu.be/QNZh2lvd5gs [2] https://www.imsarahkolb.com
caseyross
So, building on this, we can view Beat Saber not as a music game, but as a *dance* game that figured out a reliable, precise way to track player movements.
It's interesting to note that similar movement-quantizing systems are at the core of numerous other hit games, most notably in Dance Dance Revolution but also to some extent Rock Band and Taiko no Tatsujin.
scotty79
I completely agree that's a dance game. Similar way that Guitar Hero is a music playing game. It's not exactly a dance but delivers something close to dance feeling.
My brain can't dance, can't even perceive dance. When I see dancing champions perform, their movements make no sense to me and seem completely unrelated to the music they are dancing to. However when I played Beat Saber occasionally I feel glimpses of the feeling of dancing. That's pretty much as close to dancing as I can get.
socalgal2
Alternative POV. I never "got" Beat Saber. It didn't "make me dance". I could stand in one spot and twist my wrists, barely moving my arms, at least as far as I played. Since it didn't hook me, I never got that far. Maybe higher levels are better.
My personal favorite VR rythym game is Audica. As for why it did poorly I can only guess that it's not that interesting on easy. On expert mode though, it requires (required) you to move your entire body as things come at you from all sides. It's got 2 basic movies, shoot and smash. When a target appears you shoot it to the beat. When a ball appears you smash it to the beat. It's also got sticky targets (you need to hold the trigger) during which it projects a beam. The beam's sound changes based on how tilt the controller which is nice touch.
When it first came out it required you to hold your hands out at arms length to get a good score. They removed that requirement and I get why but, like Beat Saber, the game is less fun the less required you are to move)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftH825-SeQ
Another one I liked was SynthRiders but it's far less polished. In particular, Audica, each track has been edited for game play, ending on a cresendo. In SynthWave, the songs are just the songs as released on the artist's CD. Many of them are too long and end really boringly compared to the edits in Audica.
Another issue with SynthRiders is they don't adjust the timing based on where you're standing so that it's pretty obvious the sounds are off the beat. The only way to fix that AFAICT is to walk forward or back and try to find the spot where the timing aligns. That's arguably just lazy design IMO because it ruins the experience when you feel like you're doing the right thing but the game's audio makes it sound like you're way behind/ahead
Still, I had a lot of run with it and it does do a good job of making you movie. Unfortuantely it didn't have many tracks I found appealing but those I did I played too many times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XaUdBgAHbM
I have friends who got into Pistol Whip. Didn't do it for me though.
Oh, and from the article, I agree that Until You Fall is an amazing game.
Twisol
Audica is sick! I definitely enjoyed it a lot more than Beat Saber, for the reasons you give -- it feels way more technical, and (therefore?) much more satisfying to learn.
IAmNotACellist
A large part of the "secret" (?) to its fun is that you can pirate all the music you actually want to listen to. If they had tried harder to stop that the game would've been forgotten in weeks.
vunderba
As someone who very much enjoys the hell out of rhythm based games (pump, vib ribbon, Cytus, etc) - Beat Saber is a great game, but apples-to-apples I actually prefer Sound Boxing which is basically DDR meets Tae Bo. It never got nearly the mainstream success as Beat Saber, but I found the motion to be a little more natural for your body - you also feel a little less like an air traffic controller on meth.
jonplackett
I just wouldn’t have cared that much about getting a VR headset without beatsaber.
And when I got bored of beatsaber, I was bored of VR.
SkyeCA
I got bored of Beat Saber and stopped using VR for a while...then I tried VRchat and developed what some would call an addition.
bitwize
You should try Rez Infinite. Along with Beat Saber I'd say it's a "killer app" for VR gear.
socalgal2
I love Rez and have owned many versions (PS2, PS4, VR) including Rez Infinite. I loved it and the sound track is on my phone. That said, I found the game super easy. I cleared all 5 levels in a few hours. I got Rez Infinite and found it about the same. Cleared it in 1 play though. So while I still love it. It wasn't a game I went back to over and over.
TechPlasma
The Path will reveal itself to you as you play. There is usually only one and it is correct.
Memorizing levels in Beatsaber isn't required to do VERY well. I very rarely ever play a level more than once in a session. And actually tend to struggle with highly repetitive "memory intense" sections of songs where it DOES become a rhythm game.
But if you follow the blocks they will lead you to where the next block will be.
divan
Never cared about scoring in Beat Saber. To me the game stood out for two reasons:
1) multisensory experience - when you chop the block it's a music+visual+kinestetic experience (beat/flash/haptic). That alone was wildly satisfying and worth playing game for 2h hours.
2) simplicity of rules
The first thing later was replicated in may apps/games (one I enjoyed a lot is FitXR). But Beat Saber nailed it so good and early, that it's still unbeatable :)
socalgal2
Those aren't enough to explains Beat Saber's success. 9 of 10 VR rhythm games have the same 2 points.
corytheboyd
Huh yeah I guess I never thought of it as not a rhythm game. At higher difficulty it’s really more of a DANCING game, if you think about what you’re doing with your body. I think the observation about the scoring system backs this up too, because it’s based on direction and speed of motion, not timing. Of course you need to have some timing mastery to hit the blocks, but the scoring is not based on it.
The secret to Beat Saber is that the player's physical and virtual world are locked together at all times. You're standing on a small platform and can't go anywhere. Thus, it doesn't cause nausea. Or disorientation. Or falls. Even when the player is in very active motion.[1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV1sw4lfwFw