Such are the harsh realities of virtual reality (VR) videogame development that quite often a title appears, heads into early access then simply fades away. This can be from lack of community support but usually its the developer either going under or refocusing efforts. Military shooter Zero Killed seemed to fall into this area until its creator Ignibit made its first announcement in a year, revealing an official release date for September.
The team released a statement via its relatively dormant Discord channel this week, apologising for the silence when it came to updates for the videogame. It sounds like the studio has been hard at work polishing the first-person shooter (FPS) as it wasn’t the smoothest experience when it arrived on Steam Early Access in 2018.
“We are on the last straight for making the final version of the game,” notes the developer, before going on to say: “We still have many things to do, but there is hopefully nothing left that could ruin the fun. We finished all fixing, debugging, optimizations, and so on.”
Ignibit has now set itself a deadline, with an official launch taking place on 4th September 2020. Ahead of this the team will be unveiling a Trello board with a roadmap of its plans whilst giving those players which have stuck with Zero Killed a chance to provide feedback. Those plans include a shooting range to practice on first, another map, hero and a gameplay mode.
The studio will have some work to do, however. Current Steam and Oculus Store responses from players aren’t good, mainly due to the fact that it only offered online PvP, there were few players and no bots to make up numbers. When VRFocus originally previewed Zero Killed it wasn’t an appalling experience but it did need work, and continual support, which it didn’t really get.
Zero Killed pits two teams of four against one another across four gameplay modes and three locations. Players can choose between 10 characters, each with their own particular loadouts of weapons, gadgets and perks.
Titles like Onward, Contractors and Zero Caliber already offer solid military FPS VR gaming so Zero Killed needs to do something special to turn its fortunes around. As further updates are released, VRFocus will let you know.