Beat Saber is a VR rhythm game released in 2019, and has been a great success, with 96% of more than 60k reviews for the game on Steam being positive. It’s a game that I’m certain many have seen before or at least heard of.
Regardless of the player’s level of experience with rhythm games, the gameplay is intuitive enough for any new player to grasp quickly, especially since the controls are simply an extension of one’s own arms.
While I have not personally played Beat Saber due to a lack of the required hardware, I have been an avid player of rhythm games for more than a decade, and I feel that I am well equipped to give the game a reasonably well-substantiated writeup from the viewpoint of someone with such experience.
Revolutionising rhythm games
Before the introduction of Beat Saber, rhythm games have been primarily played on mobile devices, PCs, and arcades. Rhythm games tend to stick to a very standard formula: notes fly at you and you click on them at the right timing. They mostly vary in how the standard formula is implemented: namely how the notes fly at you, and how you click them.
Some of the more innovative implementations include Cytus for phones, osu! for PCs, and many various titles for arcades. However as time progressed, it becomes harder to create innovative variations of the standard rhythm game formula, especially for phones and PCs, due to the limited types of inputs that could be used. Arcade rhythm games on the other hand are able to continue innovating, as they are not restricted by the hardware.
With the advent of VR technology, Beat Saber is able to utilise the new input methods available to PCs and bring something similar to the arcade experience to the home.
With access to input in the third dimension, Beat Saber uses a very natural twist on the classic vertically scrolling system widely seen in many rhythm games. Instead of having the notes scroll vertically down the y-axis, they come towards the player in the z-axis.
While this is very intuitive, it comes at the cost of players not having a clear visual cue about when the notes should be hit. Most rhythm games do have some sort of judgement line which users can use as an accurate reference of when the note should be hit.
Having the notes come towards the player also comes at the cost of each note potentially occluding the note directly behind it, which might end up either restricting chart design or making memory an important part of playing some charts. This is especially impactful since the player needs to actually be able to see the arrow on the note to hit the note properly.
Straying from the classic formula
On the topic of players not having a clear visual cue about the accurate timing of each note, it is worth noting that unlike a classic rhythm game where the player gets a higher score for hitting the note at the right time, Beat Saber scores players based on the angle and position of the cut.
The rhythm aspect still exists. There is a sweet spot that is around 44ms long where your swing will net you more points by virtue of slicing the note at the right timing. However, this sweet spot is rather lenient when compared to other rhythm games, which typically have a timing window around 33ms.
This is a great change to make the game more focused on mindlessly slashing the notes to the beat, improving the immersion the player would experience, as well as making the game more forgiving for new players. Since the player has to move more to hit the note as well, the larger timing window also accounts for the further distance the player’s hands have to travel to hit the note.
Focusing on the cut also ensures that the player would move as much as the game intended, making the slicing aspect of the game feel more satisfying. This however does come at the cost of requiring players to move more, making them more exhausted than they already are.
Making use of the whole body
Besides just having notes to slice, Beat Saber also has bombs and walls that the player is supposed to dodge with their body. This makes use of the player’s whole body in a way that very few other rhythm games in the market have done at that time, fully immersing the player to move to the song and working out their whole body instead of just their arms.
Before the advent of VR, such body tracking was hard to achieve at home. Some dancing-based rhythm games like Dance Evolution for the arcade or the Just Dance series have done this before, but it is hard to consider these games as pure rhythm games due to the lack of distinct notes to be hit at a certain time.
Beat Saber does a great job of mixing the full-motion of the dancing games with the core rhythm game mechanic of hitting notes at the right time, bringing the best of both worlds into one single game.
A vibrant community to fill a gap
The core game itself does not actually contain that many songs, with approximately 100 songs as of writing this. For reference, Project Sekai, another popular rhythm game that was released more than a year later, has more than double of that.
Furthermore, the songs in Beat Saber are mostly Western songs, which might alienate the most dedicated fanbase for rhythm games: East Asians. A lot of rhythm games primarily use electronic music composed by some well-established Japanese and Korean composers that specialise in rhythm game music.
It is puzzling why the developers went in this direction, since most hardcore rhythm game players are very familiar with and love the typical style of eastern electronic music. Perhaps they wished to appeal to the larger western market which might not have as much experience in rhythm games.
The Beat Saber community clearly recognises this as a big problem, as there is a large community with more than 250k members on their discord channel completely focused around modding the game to add their own songs to the game. However this is also a big draw of the game: being able to make your own charts and play your favourite songs. The PC rhythm game osu! also does this, and it is also a big draw of the game.
The future of VR rhythm games
Rhythm games in classic platforms like the phone come in many forms: classic vertically scrolling games like Deemo, having the judgement line move like in Cytus, playing in a circle like Lanota, or having notes come in multiple directions like Dynamix.
It would be nice for Beat Saber or other VR rhythm game titles to not only experiment with ways that the notes are hit, but also how the notes approach the user. This is the key aspect in keeping the gameplay of rhythm games distinct from each other, and I fully anticipate to see a whole array of innovations in this aspect as VR technology matures.
Conclusion
Beat Saber is a great adaptation of the classic rhythm game formula to fit the VR context. The controls are intuitive, and with a satisfying way to hit each note and a scoring system that rewards the cleanest slices, Beat Saber sits solidly among the top few rhythm games in terms of the fun factor.
It makes good use of the unique characteristics of VR, immersing users in the experience of grooving to the music while slicing to the beat the approaches you in the third dimension.
It’s a great game that many enjoy playing, and one that I would love to try out someday too.
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