Batman: Arkham Shadow without VR or motion sickness

Batman: Arkham Shadow on Meta Quest 3 and 3S can regrettably get you VR or motion sick if you’re susceptible to it. An easy indication whether you’ll be affected, but not a safe bet, is how easily you tend to get sick when you read while being a passenger in a car or bus, those effects are correlated.
We explain the reasons for VR/motion sickness in another article, but here’s the hack you’re looking for: Just close your eyes while moving your character over bigger distances or at the time an automatic animation is being triggered. It sounds stupid, it feels stupid at first, but it works like a charm. 🎉
While I’m regrettably quite prone to VR sickness, I didn’t have any trouble with the fights at all, maybe that’s because your subconscious is busy processing everything and doesn’t have time to trigger getting sick for the short amounts of automatic movement within the fights. I hope it stays that way as I really enjoy it!

The basics of avoiding VR or motion sickness

Regrettably, some of the design choices in Batman: Arkham Shadow will inevitably lead to motion sickness if you’re sensitive to it. While some accessiblity options are available, they will not help people who are sensitive to motion sickness. Of course, if you’re affected, you should set the game to maximum comfort, which Arkham Shadow will force you to do before starting up the game – that’s great!
Even after that, regrettably some design choices will very likely lead to motion sickness for affected people:

you can only move with the controller like in a PC game, instead of beaming, the obvious alternative
whenever you jump across a hurdle, an automatic animation is triggered that brings you up
using the grapnel gun to get up to higher places triggers an automatic animation dragging you through the air.
if you want to get across depths, you can only jump while running (with or without jumping, running may get you sick)
if you need to glide somewhere, it may get you sick.

Regrettably, most of these accessibility issues could have been easily avoided:

for locomotion (moving around) beaming could have been easily implemented.
for automatic movement, an option to turn the screen dark during movement would have helped without imaginable problem
for gliding and jumping, beaming could have been used as an alternative

Another Batman VR game, another hit?

The first Batman VR game, Batman: Arkham VR, was the reason our company was founded. When the founding team tried it out on various VR platforms back in late 2016, Batman: Arkham VR was the title that convinced us that VR was finally ready for the mainstream. I’ll never forget how cool it was to put on the Batsuit for the first time in the game’s elevator down to the Batcave. It was the title we showed to everybody, and everybody liked it. It was just an amazing way of showing people how immersive VR could be.

Is Batman: Arkham Shadow a system seller?

It’s now almost exactly 8 years later, and the new Batman title was released as an exclusive title for Meta Quest 3 and 3S, supposedly to serve as a system seller. It’s close, but I personally don’t think it will be able to take that role. Batman: Arkham Shadow definitely has the power to increase the sales of the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S, but I wouldn’t call it a system seller. It is a great game as far as I’ve played it, bringing the gameplay of the Arkham games to VR in pretty good way. I’m not entirely happy with the accessiblity options though, but they’re good enough in my opinion if you know the hack from above. Still, if you don’t, you have a decent chance of getting sick, and this is bad for the game, bad for Meta, bad for the VR industry. 😢

If you’re reading this and need help making VR software accessible for everybody, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.