Floor Plan Remastered for VR brings a silent innovation to the Quest series: graphical options

Like it or not, a huge part of what brings tech like the Quest 3 to the top of the best VR headsets charts is games. I’m excited to see what MR can be beyond entertainment, sure, but right now: games are selling products.

And with games like Resident Evil 4 VR, aptly a part of our best games for Quest 3 list, I can’t really blame people, honestly.

But here’s the deal: games have been around for decades at this point. And one of the less-appreciated innovations of the industry is graphical options. You know, that menu you can go in in order to pick how you want your game to look like.

And that’s a no brainer, right? It broadens your audience, allows both sturdy and outdated hardware to run your creation and plain just gives options, which is always appreciated. So how come we haven’t gotten to this level yet on VR, like in games for the Quest?

Well, Floor Plan Remastered may have actually just started that revolution.



Hold on, before we proceed, let’s explain what this game from 2021 is all about. As the trailer, which you can watch above, aptly puts it: it’s your new favorite elevator simulator. And honestly, that’s about all the marketing I’d need. But it also features doors and buttons too!

And apparently, it’s not just me, because the game was enough of a hit to get a remaster. FYI, that’s what it’s called when a game is given a visual facelift, without necessarily changing up the core gameplay or sequence of events (that would be a remake).

But let’s get back on point! Obviously, this new game leverages the amped-up hardware of the Quest 3 in order to become way prettier. But it does another, really important thing: it allows users to pick one of two possible graphical profiles.

Which, as far as I can remember, is the first time we’ve actually seen this for a VR game?

The settings that you can pick from are:

• Quality: 90FPS on the Quest 3, 72FPS on the Quest 2 and with real time shadows enabled
• Clarity: 120FPS on the Quest 3, 90FPS on the Quest 2 and with higher resolution all around.

Now, in a perfect world, we’d be allowed to mix and match these as we please, but you know what? It’s a start.

And it’s also a pretty clever workaround to a problem that game devs are facing with the Quest platform, because it doesn’t allow you to upload separate game files for different headset models. So anything that you change, changes everything for everyone and you can’t always afford that, as not all headsets are the same.

This isn’t just about VR games becoming more visually impressive: it’s also about developers being able to offer their products on multiple platforms. We can’t say that this is the comeback of the graphical options on VR, but I sure hope it’s the start of the resurgence.