VRFocus spoke to Jessica Dowding, Senior Producer of Archiact at the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC) in San Francisco, USA about their latest online multiplayer first-person videogame Evasion, which was announced today.
Evasion is an intense co-op multiplayer videogame for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Archiact dipped their toes into virtual reality (VR) with VR arcades, but wanted to do a videogame that dealt with locomotion and was a co-op multiplayer title. So, they built Evasion from the ground up to deal with locomotion using Unreal Engine 4 and are working together with Intel create a fully destructible environment. You can play with up to four people and HTC Vive and Oculus Rift owners can play together.
In the demo that was showcased at VRDC, there were three different types of movement control schemes to choose from in Evasion. The first option, ‘smooth movement’, used traditional joystick motions, commonly found in VR. The second option, ‘quick dash’ is for players who experience motion sickness by doing quick spurts of dashes around the map and the last option is a ‘jog’ option, which requires you to physically jog on the spot – this will translate to your avatar running in Evasion. There will be even further options to customise this in the settings, so you can tweak it to your personal preferences. Dowding explains that Archiact wanted to create awesome animation with the various styles of locomotion whilst creating the authentic first-person VR title that everybody’s been craving for. VRFocus tried the demo and a preview of the experience can be found here.
There are four classes to choose from: The Striker, Surgeon, Engineer and Warden. Each have their own unique strengths, weapons and abilities. Made in IKinema‘s state-of-the-art player avatar, you are able to recognise your friends perhaps by their avatars movements, gestures or motions. This doesn’t mean you all have to choose different classes when playing, “you can mix and match” says Dowding.
There will be various maps, randomised objectives in every game as well as Swarm AI, smart AI that changes the way it attacks you depending on how you play. You can play with friends or play online and join matches. Archiact has also made sure that enemies would become more difficult if another joins your match with the drop in, drop out method of online matchmaking. Dowding explains that it’s all about teamwork, and that you have to work together as a team – so if a player joins who isn’t that good, everybody else has to work a little harder.
Evasion will be released Spring 2018 for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.