Onward

They took what was once an okay looking game and Questified it into absolute dog****. Vote with your wallet and don't support this garbage trend of dumbing down games and abandoning PCVR in favor of stupid AIO headsets. I wish there was a Steam policy that let us refund games when Devs ****ing ruin them.

If you are PC VR player the devs have handicapped the game to make it run on meta quest vr headsets that are not powerful enough to run a full pc game. The devs would rather cripple their game than support a separate PC only version.

The pandering to the Quest user base and its consequences have been a disaster for the VR gaming market.

This changing and bait and switch of games that you paid for should be against the law. There has always been downgrading of games, for a variety of reasons, either to make it somewhat compatible with older generations of consoles, or examples where what was shown off at E3 was what they were aiming for, but they realized that the budget didn't allow for that level of ambition and so the final product that gets in your hands is not as good as what was shown off, (Watch Dogs being a famous example). The difference? The changes were made before you bought the game. This unique scenario that keeps happening to VR games specifically in the pursuit to be made quest compatible is unprecedented in gaming and because VR is niche, it's not coming to the attention of lawyers the way that EA Battlefront 2's gambling controversy made it's way into the public and legal eyes. This is the equivalent of a scenario where you buy the PS3 version of Call of Duty: World at War, and you play it for years, and then, one day, the game gets changed to the PS2 version in every way, graphics, sound, etc so that there's crossplay between PS2 online and PS3 online. That is not the game you paid for. If it happened with something as big as Call of Duty, there would be lawsuits filed, you can be assured of that. Yet it happens in PCVR games time and time again for the sake of the Quest. Typically, if someone ports something to a weaker console, they leave the more powerful console version alone as it's own thing. If, in the year 2009, someone doesn't want to buy a PS3, and they want to stick to the PS2 version of World at War, then that's just fine, their game doesn't impact the PS3 owners and the PS3 owners don't impact the PS2 owners. Here they're changing games that you paid money for, and it's happened to Zero Caliber, Pavlov (not graphically but in player count, modding, and other key ways that made that game great for a time) and many others. Again, if it were done before money exchanged hands, or there were two seperate versions of games, there wouldn't be an issue. This Quest-ification of PCVR games is unique to VR and is putting that philosophy experiment of "The Ship of Theseus" into practice and not offering refunds. When is Onward no longer Onward? The developers answer: Who cares, we got your money already, plus the Meta money as well. Just so you know where I'm coming from, I hardly played the 1.7 and earlier versions of this game, though I owned it from pretty close to the beginning. By the time I came to this game and played it on a fairly regular basis, it had been so long since I had booted the game up that I didn't notice the downgrades. I came to this game, though I had owned it forever, after Pavlov drove me away with everything they did to cater to PSVR crossplay abandoning the PCVR players. With Onward, I really enjoyed it though I understand it was already a downgrade from 1.7. But with 2.0, it's even more of a downgrade. Audio, visuals, everything and I'm making this review not just for this game in particular, but pointing out that doing this to games you pay for would not fly in any way if VR wasn't niche. They're abusing the fact that VR doesn't have the player base of something like Battlefront 2 (2018) that would attract the attention of lawyers, and I think that should change. Now the counter-argument will be "the terms of service say anything can change and you agreed to it", to which I say, every game that has been hit with a successful lawsuit also had terms of services justifying itself. Terms of service aren't get out of jail free cards. If in courts, it can be proven that higher laws were violated such as false advertising or other laws that are there to protect paying customers, terms of service have a limit to their protective power.

Paid full price fro this game when it was fairly new, but seemingly every update both makes the game look and perform worse all in the name of making it compatible with the quest headset. I'm all for cross platform gaming, but severely downgrading a game after i've purchased and played it and making no effort at all to make it right by pc players is downright disgusting.

This was the game that got me into VR and buy a Valve Index back in 2020. When I got the game (July 2020) I was blown away by the level of detail in the graphics and the sound fx. The community was anything but toxic. 3 weeks later version 1.8 came out and the graphics were reduced to something from the late 90's N64 game and the performance was broken at best. All because they allowed cross-platform gaming with the Oculus Quest. The lobbies were filled with children screaming racial slurs and drawing swastikas and ♥♥♥♥♥ all the time. Most just sit at spawn trying to learn the controls because they couldn't be bothered to do the tutorial, or teamkill you as soon as the round starts. This community has become so toxic you have to mute everyone in the lobby. If you join a comp lobby (If you can even find one) you'll be met with the same thing. The movement is often exploited by children even at the league level. This game has been dying since 2021 and the trend will continue until either there is a new mil-sim out (Geronimo will be the Onward replacement in 2024), The devs finally make Onward 2 as promised (they have promised a lot and never deliver). Or people just get tired of all the BS and just straight up quit playing. Don't bother with this game, I've wasted too much time with this game hoping that Meta would fix it and make things right but I know they never will.

I still miss version 1.7, before they downgraded the game for quest users, I still play the game now, but holy crap do I hear a lot of whining from the inferior quest users about the fact I snipe them across downfall with a hand gun, not may fault the downgraded graphics made it so I can see you across the map and you can't see me, blame the devs, also doesn't help I've also played the game longer than them and have better map sense, but this game gets a down vote for the amount of kids that now ruin this game, because they think this is going to be like CoD, or Fortnite...

The game is dead. Plain and simple. The devs need to stop trying by hammering out meaningless updates. The game was on a good trajectory, but then they really had to make a move for the quest market and ditch the once so decent graphics, VoIP and overall user experience. The steam ratings tanked over night. It's cute how they keep trying to bounce back, but no small studio comes back from such a move. It's well deserved! It would have looked differently if they decided to run two versions of the game, one for high-end graphics and gameplay on PCVR and a "lite" edition that allows PC, Quest and other VR platforms to play together, giving users a choice after being made aware of the drawbacks. I completely fail to understand how this studio abandoned all the work that went into the original PCVR version of the game. Countless hours, simply p!ss3d away.

i would recommend if you have other friends that have headsets. otherwise you either end up babysitting a 7 year old who has unrestricted access to the internet, or jeremy the tier 1 operator that will complain that the game isnt real enough for him as he dies to 3 enemies because he walked down the center of a road.