After playing some more, I realize my initial disappointment was due to the game being far from what I expected. Judging the game on its own merits may be more fair.
Today I tried to find some value in what the devs created. I did find some interesting locations - and I'm prepared to lift my rating from below 5/10 to 5.5 or 6 out of 10 - making this a just barely positive experience.
I've been playing VR games for 7 years, and while Stride: Fates is far from amazing, I did enjoy just being on the rooftops, the jumping and the occasional shootings of very dumb enemies. Do avoid the very boring A1 sewer level, and consider starting with the A2 rooftops level after the tutorial.
Here are some screenshots I took on the A2 rooftops:
Even if this is close to a 1:1 Quest port, I'm pushing a res of 45 million pixels per frame here - see how clear distant objects are? And it really looks the same in the hmd - this is the image projected on the left Index panel
You can go (jump) to the white tower - if you want 🙂 View distance is quite high
More view distance - and extreme super-sampling reduce jaggies, there are no in-game graphics options at all
Weapons look nice too - nothing out of the ordinary, but not bad either
You can manually reload or use the same reloading as in the original Stride
Pros: The city can be beautiful, Index controls work great, and the climbing and shooting can be fun. Using extreme res this Quest port does look significantly better than the Quest version. Performance is great, I'm getting 120 - 144 fps with an insane Index res 500% using RTX 3090 and i9 10900K.
More pros shown in screenshots:
There are dynamic shadows - more like "in-your-face" by the devs to show the game has shadows in case anyone says there are no shadows, lol. The game really has no dynamic shadows - in the real game opponents rarely have detailed dynamic shadows
If you zoom out and do not get too close, the Quest graphics can look ok-ish
Some textures do look fine - but those are few. The PCVR version is 10GB compared to the 4GB Quest version - thus some textures seem improved in res
Cons: There's not much of a game here, opponents are dumber than dirt, its a Quest port, there are no graphics settings, and you need extreme amounts of res to reduce aliasing.
Turning to the negatives shown in screenshots:
Ground textures are very low-res
Maybe some of you think the ground textures look fine - but before the original Stride game was Questified, this is how the original Stride PCVR ground textures looked in September 2020:
The original Stride ground textures - all are now Questified, meaning severely reduced to fit very weak mobile processors
Wood textures in Stride: Fates look like a PC game from year 2000
Worst baked shadows like ... ever? 🤔
You know a dodecagon, or 12-gon, cup when you see it. These are normal for Quest games, but not for true PCVR
Typical low-poly low-res-textured Quest lamp
Opponents are low-poly and blocky, textures quite low-res too
I guess devs put much effort into your tour guide 🙂 But she's still very low-poly and blocky - and the hair looks like a very dated PCVR game
Remember Lone Echo 2? - In case some have forgotten what real PCVR looks like 🙂
In-game npc quality in Lone Echo 2
No doubt that Stride: Fates on Steam is close to a 1:1 Quest port, but you can get higher fps and use extreme super-sampling for optimal image quality with PCVR - and still the opponents are really dumb and the story is extremely weak. If you will like the game or not may depending on your perspective 😎
For now I'll probably just be enjoying the view from the rooftops, lol. If you're looking for a great game, look elsewhere - and do not pay the full price and wait for patches.
To make this a greater game, devs need to redo most textures, redo opponents making them more realistic, greatly improve AI, add proper dynamic shadows, and add graphics settings especially for antialiasing.
