Skyfront VR, the upcoming multiplayer arena first-person shooter from Levity Play, is coming to Steam Early Access on November 10th, including support for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Setting it apart from more ‘traditional’ VR shooters, Skyfront VR boasts a unique locomotion style that supposedly offers a fast-pace, nausea-free experience.
Set in 2700 CE, when humanity has mastered the laws of physics, players battle in zero-gravity arenas made from the cities of old in a remembrance of a past civilization-ending war that took place 400 years earlier. In the case of the trailer, it looks like one of the first maps has you shooting it out among architecture lifted from a typical Greek island like Santorini or Mykonos.
From what we’ve seen, Skyfront VR’s locomotion scheme appears to have much more in common with arcade flight sims like EVE: Valkyrie (2016) than more ‘traditional style’ VR shooters like Onward (2016). The Superman-style flight mechanic is done by moving your hands, “translating to 1:1 movement in this virtual, zero-gravity space.” This, according to Levity Play, forces players to consciously guide their in-game movements with their physical body, which helps eliminate the sensory conflict that often occurs when movement is dictated by a joystick.
At Early Access launch, two arenas will be available including Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch gametypes, five different weapons, five special abilities, and a ‘Bot Shootout’ practice mode.
Full Game Features:
5 game modes including Single Deathmatch
3v3Elimination and Capture The Flag
5-6 visually stunning maps in different geographical settings
20+ destructive weapons and special abilities to choose from
An engaging progression system
Customizable character & weapon assets
Play against advanced AI opponents
No pricing information is available currently. You can keep an eye on Skyfront VR by signing up for updates via the Steam Early Access page.
Job Simulator (2016), Owlchemy Labs’ madcap workplace sim from the future, is pushing a free content update called ‘Infinite Overtime mode’ that lets you play endless, randomized tasks. Owlchemy is also permanently dropping the price of Job Simulator to $20.
Now including TempBot, “JobBot’s far less motivated nighttime replacement,” you can now go through endless, randomized tasks to your hearts content—which should sound hopelessly depressing if it were real work, but considering the nature of the incredibly silly tasks, it actually sounds like a neat way of squeezing out more playtime in the tongue-in-cheek simulator game.
According to a blogpost announcing Infinite Overtime, each of the game’s jobs have been updated “to allow for a countless stream of customers as you punch the clock late into the evening.”
The new mode comes for free in the latest update, but is only accessible once you’ve completed all tasks in a job, then letting you flip the Infinite Overtime switch attached to the kiosk in the museum.
“We’re super excited about [Infinite Job Overtime]! We’ve been working in secret on this update for quite a while, creating randomized bot interactions, adding in new mini-meta games, and updating our vehicular drift vectors. Each of the jobs in Job Simulator has been fitted with an Infinite Overtime mode, which includes new tasks, promotions and, of course, easter eggs! Keep at the nightly grind to earn promotions and desk flair to declare your dedication to endless jobbing. Even a human like you could one day be promoted to ‘Managing Director of Interns’! Also, we added fidget spinners, because why not?”
image courtesy Owlchemy Labs
Originally created as a HTC Vive launch title, Job Simulator went on to support both Oculus Touch and PSVR at their respective launches, becoming one of the most successful VR games financially. Earlier this year, the studio revealed they had posted $3 million in sales for the game.
Lytro, the once consumer-facing light field camera company which has recently pivoted to create high-end production tools, has announced a light field rendering software for VR that essentially aims to free developers from the current limitations of real-time rendering. The company calls it ‘Volume Tracer’.
Light field cameras are typically hailed as the next necessary technology in bridging the gap between real-time rendered experiences and 360 video—two VR content types that for now act as bookends on the spectrum of immersive to less-than-immersive virtual media. Professional-level light field cameras, like Lytro’s Immerge prototype, still aren’t yet in common use though, but light fields aren’t only capable of being generated with expensive/large physical cameras.
The company’s newest software-only solution, Volume Tracer, places multiple virtual cameras within a view volume of an existing 3D scene that might otherwise be expected to be rendered in real-time. Because developers who create real-time rendered VR experiences constantly fight to hit the necessary 90 fps required for comfortable play, and have to do so in a pretty tight envelope—both Oculus and HTC agree on a recommended GPU spec of NVIDIA GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 480—the appeal of graphics power-saving light fields is pretty apparent.
Lytro breaks it down on their website, saying “each individual pixel in these 2D renders provide sample information for tracing the light rays in the scene, enabling a complete Light Field volume for high fidelity, immersive playback.”
According to Lytro, content created with Volume Tracer provides view-dependent illumination including specular highlights, reflections, refractions, etc; and is scalable to any volume of space, from seated to room-scale sizes. It also presents a compelling case for developers looking to eke out as much visual detail as possible by hooking into industry standard 3D modeling and rendering tools like Maya, 3DS Max, Nuke, Houdini, V-Ray, Arnold, Maxwell, and Renderman.
Real-time playback with positional tracking is also possible on Oculus rift and HTC Vive at up to 90 fps refresh rate.
One Morning, an animated short directed by former Pixar animator Rodrigo Blaas that tells the story of a brief encounter with a robot bird, was built on the Nimble Collective, rendered in Maxwell, and then brought to life in VR with Lytro Volume Tracer.
“What Lytro is doing with its tech is bringing something you haven’t seen before; it hasn’t been possible. Once you put the headset on and experience it, you don’t want to go back. It’s a new reality,” said Blaas.
Volume Tracker doesn’t seem to be currently available for download, but keep an eye on Lytro’s site and sign up for their newsletter for more info.
Earlier this year, Valve confirmed that LG was developing a VR headset utilizing SteamVR Tracking, making it one of the first headsets to do so outside of HTC Vive and the upcoming Pimax “8K” VR headset. While still unnamed when we first demoed the headset at GDC in March, a recent trademark filing with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) now suggests the headset will be dubbed ‘UltraGear’.
First reported by Dutch publication LetsGoDigital, LG filed the trademark application with EUIPO on October 17th, stating that the UltraGear name categorizes a product relating to “Head-mounted holographic displays; Virtual Reality headsets.”
image courtesy LetsGoDigital
LetsGoDigital maintains the UltraGear name specifically applies to LG’s SteamVR headset, although there’s nothing beyond the trademark filing that would suggest a definite answer to the affirmative. While it’s possible LG has created an entirely new headset intended for the UltraGear naming scheme, for example working in the Windows ‘Mixed Reality’ hardware ecosystem, LG has only shown its SteamVR-compatible headset, making it more plausible that it’s moving out of full production and heading into its marketing phase.
The South Korean multinational has made minor headway in the VR market thus far, starting with its ill-received ‘LG 360 VR’ headset which specifically connects to the LG G5 smartphone via a dedicated cable, an unusual departure from the standard convention of using the phone’s display to drive the VR experience. LG’s V30 smartphone shows more promise as one of the few ‘Daydream ready’ flagship smartphones, although a ‘tethered’ PC VR headset would put it squarely in the thick of what appears to be the first major steps by popular OEMs to seriously enter the VR headset market.
If specs remain largely unchanged from what we saw at GDC, LG’s SteamVR headset stands to have a higher resolution and improved ergonomics over HTC Vive. LG’s prototype showed off a flip-up design and PSVR-style halo head strap. Its entrance into the SteamVR tracking ecosystem will also make the Vive’s main selling point, famously robust room-scale tracking, less unique.
It looks like Fujitsu is adding its name to the list of OEMs producing Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets, which currently include the likes of Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung.
Fujitsu’s unnamed headset follows the same reference design as the others in the Windows headset ecosystem, which provide inside-out positional tracking and wireless, optically-tracked motion controllers—allowing the user to set up the VR system without the need of external trackers, basestations, or sensors.
Engadget Japanreports the headset includes the standard dual 2.89 inch 1440×1440 LCD panels with 90 hz refresh rate, flip-up visor and 95 degrees plus field of view. Including controllers, Fujitsu’s headset is set tentatively at a price tag of 50,000 yen, or about $440 / €370 / £330; putting it in the middle of the pack, with Acer and Lenovo’s headset + controller bundle fetching $400 at the lowest price tier, and Samsung HMD Odyssey + controller bundle with the highest price at $500.
According to Fujitsu’s press release (Japanese), the headset is expected to launch sometime in late November 2017 in Japan. It’s uncertain at this time if the headset will make it to Western markets though, as the company has only released word via Japanese outlets. Fujitsu also doesn’t officially sell its full line of consumer tech in the US or Europe, so the move to release a headset there would come as somewhat of a surprise.
If you want to know more about Windows VR headsets, Road to VR Executive Editor Ben Lang wrote a deep dive review of Acer’s headset, a mile marker of what to expect at the very least from any Windows VR headset.
SteamVR’s latest update to its beta branch is bringing along with it a Media Player that allows users to browse, preview and view a number of local media files directly in VR, including traditional video/photo formats as well as 180/360 degree content.
Navigable both on monitors and from within VR, SteamVR’s new Media Player gives you an easy-to-use file explorer and re-sizable viewing window that supports both keyboard/mouse or tracked motion controllers. In a news post announcing the update, Valve says the Media Player supports auto-detection of media layout and format, and it also observes common file naming conventions.
At the time of this writing, the beta supports six layouts: mono, stereo left/right, stereo right/left, stereo top/bottom, stereo bottom/top, and anaglyph and four distinct formats: virtual screen, 180 degree, 360 degree, and fisheye. It also supports all Windows 10 systems and most Windows 7 systems.
A slight pain point in an otherwise ‘no fuss’ package is the Media Player’s current inability to recognize .mkv files, making it a little less convenient than using a desktop media player like VLC and watching straight from SteamVR’s desktop viewer or from a separate program like Bigscreen. Since it’s still in beta, and hasn’t been integrated into the core functionality of SteamVR, we expect this to change before it hits prime time as it fulfills its promise to become a low-friction entry into media viewing.
To run SteamVR Media Player, you’ll need to opt into SteamVR Beta, open the SteamVR Status menu and select Run Media Player.
image courtesy Valve
If you haven’t already opted into SteamVR Beta, just navigate to SteamVR under Tools in your Steam Library. Right click to bring up Properties, then select ‘beta’ from the dropdown in the Betas tab. You can also revert back to the main update branch at any time by opting out.
Valve already provides a Steam 360 Video Player, but the new Media Player’s inclusion of 360 formats make its usecase less appealing, as the Steam 360 Video Player can only view 360 videos available in your Steam Library.
Echo Arena (2017), the futuristic multiplayer sports game from Ready at Dawn and Oculus Studios, is getting into the holiday spirit with an upcoming seasonal Halloween Bash that looks to be a devily fun time—a great incentive to get more people to download the game for free before the free download window expires on All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1st).
Starting today, you’ll be able to float around in a newly designed haunted lobby area, play with the gruesome collection of new toys, and unlock 20 new cosmetic styles that you can take with you before they vanish on November 1st.
New cosmetic items can be earned after you complete at least one public match, where you’ll automatically be granted “5 ghoulish patterns, 5 creepy tints, 7 unnerving decals, and 3 eerie emotes.”
Ready at Dawn previously stated that the free 3-month download window, which allows anyone to download and keep the game permanently for free, would end on October 20th, but the studio says in a blogpost announcing the Halloween Bash that its November 1st conclusion “also coincides with the end of the 3-month period where you can add Echo Arena to your Oculus library for free.”
The Halloween Bash begins on October 20th at 12:00pm PST (your local time here). The spooky lobby and the ability to claim the Halloween-themed items will disappear in the afternoon of November 1st, but users can continue to flaunt the spooky items (and smugly answer the question: “where did you get the skull helmet?”) long afterwards.
If you haven’t played Echo Arena yet, definitely take the chance to download this zero-g, adrenaline pumping game now for free before it becomes a paid app in November—unless you’re planning on buying the single-player adventure Lone Echo, which gets you the multiplayer Echo Arena for free at any time.
The Tron-like sports game boasts a healthy player base, and while substantial updates may be a little sluggish, the Halloween Bash represents one of the first big changes (albeit temporary) to the game since its last public beta. We’re hoping once the game heads into paid app territory that it’ll bring with it more substantive changes including more maps to keep people coming back for more.
Left-Hand Path is a Dark Souls-inspired single-player VR adventure developed by Strange Company. The studio recently announced that the spell-casting RPG, which promises 15+ hours of content, is heading out of Early Access November 10th.
Launching out of a year-long stint on Steam Early Access next month for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, players must learn a host of arcane gestures to cast powerful demon-killing spells, perform ancient rituals, and learn the terrible truths behind the ‘Well of All Rewards’.
Turning up the difficulty in classic Dark Souls fashion, Left-Hand Path provides few save points, no regenerating health, respawning enemies when you die, and all in the dark and dank world filled with monsters that look torn straight out of a D&D monster manual.
“Dark Souls changed everything in game design, and I felt strongly that VR needed an experience that captured the ‘Souls-like’ essence. Fans will recognize the atmospheric environment, subtle storytelling, and the ever punishing gameplay of the genre in Left-Hand Path,” said Hugh Hancock, indie developer behind the game.
Because Left-Hand Path makes uses of Vive and Rift’s room-scale capabilities, you’ll have to actually duck, dodge, outmaneuver as you cast powerful spells like acid missiles, lightning, meteors, flaming boulders, and even conjure an army of screaming skulls.
We haven’t had a chance to dive into Left-Hand Path, but the Steam reviews look promising, currently sitting at an 86% positive score and retaining a ‘Very Positive’ rating.
The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone (2017) comes a year and a half after Call of the Starseed (2016), episode one in the narrative-based adventure puzzle game series. As a successor to one of the first room-scale games in existence, the second episode takes you deeper into the ’80s fiction-inspired universe and flushes out what proves to be a story as rich as the cinematic direction teased in the first. Far from being a one hit wonder, the second episode improves on the experience of the first in almost every way.
The Gallery – Episode 2: Heart of the Emberstone Details:
Leaving off from the end of Call of the Starseed, you find yourself on the other side of the universe, searching for your adventuresome sister Elsie as you follow her footsteps onto a strange alien world. At the behest of a hunchbacked overlord, you’re told you must “fetch your grasp,” a powerful addition to your telekenetically-powered gauntlet in order to see your sister again. With the ability to move heavy objects imbibed with a magical power ore, you journey ever further into the deserted world as you become both actor and observer of a story long passed.
image courtesy Cloudhead Games
Without saying too much about the story itself, much of the action takes place in the form of holographic memories projected in front of you, and through found tapes and diary entries. The world you’ve landed on is essentially dead, except for weird little weevil-things that seem to thrive on the sandy planet. Just how it got that way is something for you to find out yourself. I will say though that the story offers salient commentary on the opposing forces of nature and man, and leaves a lot to digest as you delve deeper into the crazy power differential that results from a monarchy that’s both in charge of an entire world’s resources and is ultimately gifted with superhuman powers to maintain that order.
image courtesy Cloudhead Games
Spanning across three main areas, you’ll do some back-and-forth to get missing parts, so while the world itself isn’t giant, it also means there isn’t any wasted space. At first I wished there was more latitude for open exploration, but what I was left with was a situation where a new puzzle and a fresh storyline breadcrumb always in reach to kept me interested. This also kept it from feeling too linear, departing from what I like to call ‘IKEA adventures’.
Besides a single puzzle that’s basically a more complicated version of Simon (repeat a sequence of color-coded tones), the puzzles in Heart of the Emberstone left me feeling like I’d never experienced something similar.
Most doors and certain quest items are accessed by guiding your gauntlet’s stone through a translucent tube with moving barriers, that when you fail to guide it correctly and touch the barrier or edges of the tube, it resets everything. These range from extremely simple—a straight tube with no barriers for commonly-accessed spaces like elevators—to increasingly difficult puzzles as you move along.
You also have your gauntlet, a more powerful ‘grasp’, and an energy slingshot that helps you shoot down room-unlocking ore boxes. These boxes can be slotted into place and used as movable parts in larger room-sized puzzles.
One of my favorites was the gear puzzles, where you have to slot in the right gears within a certain amount of time in order to use a door-opening lever. The little gears have differently-shaped axle inserts, so you have to plan ahead so you can get them all in correctly before the timer runs out, or you have to start over again.
image courtesy Cloudhead Games
While neither of these puzzle types are particularly difficult, the feeling you get when you solve them is synergistic. The developers could have easily made you press a simple button to open a door, or scattered keys throughout the level and make you go on an endless hunt, but the door puzzles not only leave you feeling like you’ve accomplished something, but you’ve done it with style.
I know you’re scanning for it, so here it is. Heart of the Emberstone took me 3.5 hours to complete. There, I even put it in bold. I achieved this playtime reading every book I found, every scrap of paper, and listened to every one of Elsie’s cassette tapes. While I’m not sure how the creators can claim as far as 6 hours of playtime, to its ultimate credit Episode 2 isn’t littered with useless collectibles that would otherwise pad out the game’s length. Most everything you find broadens the story’s lore, leaving you with multiple ways to understand what’s going on.
image courtesy Cloudhead Games
Frankly, after the end credits rolled, I was ready to play again. There’s so much to unpack in Heart of the Emberstone, so much more to absorb than a single pass would allow. Although I knew what was going on and never felt confused by the events that unfolded before me as an observer, I’d place the level of storytelling on the same rung as some of the top TV dramas like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones—the sort of shows you go back to rewatch even if you know what’s going to happen (albeit in a reduced form).
It’s pretty rare that excellent voice acting, competent art direction, and a fully-realized world with a truly interesting story come together at once, so excuse me if I let out a well-deserved “wow.”
Immersion
Comparing the sequel to the first in the series, Heart of the Emberstone feels much more like a complete experience than its predecessor. You can probably chalk this up to the fact that it’s over three-times the length of the first episode, all with about the same density of puzzles and indispensable narrative elements.
Where Call of the Starseed seemed somewhat gimmicky at times and jabbed you in the face every so often with reminders that you were actually in a game and not in a real adventure, Heart of the Emberstone tosses you in a wholly new alien environment where expectations are less primed by real-world interactions, but where your actions have greater overall effect. Once you figure out how to use your gauntlet, puzzles and abilities are thrown on at formative intervals that never leave you scratching your head as what to do next. This doesn’t mean you’re led by the hand though, as the game only tells you how to do something once without nagging you to death with the usual (and frankly way overused) ‘helpful robot’ trope.
Bad storytelling is bad for immersion. Bad stories and crappy voice acting make you feel like you’re in a fake world with fake people, and this is why I tend to discuss it in both the gameplay and immersion sections of reviews. Besides being an obvious visual treat, the world feels alive even though it’s ostensibly dry as a dead dingo’s donger. Grounding you in the world further, the story shows an emotional range that doesn’t reek of the low-rent melodrama of more mediocre titles. Heart-wrenching scenes of betrayal punctuate the bubbly levity that Elsie always seems to bring to every situation.
image courtesy Cloudhead Games
There are of course moments when the devs give you a little ‘wink wink, nudge nudge’, as if to say “we’ve put this story element here conveniently to move things along, but we know you know that.” This is done maybe once or twice throughout the game though, and isn’t really a focal point.
Nuts and bolts-wise, object interaction is vastly improved, showing just how much Cloudhead has worked to create objects that give a solid haptic feedback and work equally well in both left and right hands. Picking up and reading the holographic logs scattered throughout the game was a much more plausible experience than the notepads or books in Starseed which only gave you a few ‘snap-to’ hand poses. Menus, maps, and logs take the place of your hand, leaving hand poses out of the equation entirely.
I found the hand models to be a bit of a minor visual blemish, which felt overly spindly. The position of the hands relative to the controller also felt a bit off, extending farther than my hands naturally would. Like its predecessor, hand models don’t make full use of Oculus Touch’s capacitive buttons, robbing you of some of the more true-to-life flexibility the particular controller can afford. This clearly isn’t an issue on Vive, which is why is only bears brief mention.
Loading screens are fairly quick and unobtrusive, but are numerous as you traverse back and forth on the world map—a clear, but decidedly unavoidable pain point.
Comfort
There are a number of elements that made their way from Call of the Starseed to Heart of the Emberstone, including blink teleportation. One thing that’s changed however is the inclusion of smooth locomotion (put in bold for skimmers) that should have die-hard opponents of teleportation squealing with glee. This however doesn’t include smooth yaw stick turning, meaning you’ll have to weather the game with snap-turn only—aka ‘comfort mode’.
Smooth locomotion options also include controller-oriented stick-move, head-oriented stick move, strafing options and variable movement speeds. Since these are non-default options that must be toggled by the user, the stock blink teleportation makes for an exceedingly comfortable experience for anyone, from novice to expert VR user.
One of the few misgivings I have with Heart of the Emberstone is the lack of seated option, which would be welcome when playing the game from start to finish.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Felix & Paul Studios, the Emmy award-winning VR film producers, and the Just For Laughs comedy festival have launched the first episode of a new VR video project called The Confessional, a seven-episode comedy series available on Daydream and YouTube.
The 3D, 360-degree VR comedy series places you in a confessional booth with one or two comedians, who then confess “their most awkward, humorous and embarrassing stories to the viewer.”
The first episode featuring YouTuber Lilly Singh is already out, delving into Singh’s life-long virginity and obsession with Cinnabons. YouTubers Grace Helbig and Mamrie Hart join a cast of veteran stand-up comedians including Trevor Noah, Judd Apatow, Howie Mandel, Jim Norton, Moshe Kasher, and Natasha Leggero.
The Confessional was conceived and produced by both Felix & Paul Studios and Just For Laughs in collaboration with Google, and was filmed over the course of 2017’s Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. Headspace Studio, the leader in 3D positional audio processing, provided audio capture and end-to-end sound processing for the series.
“When we approached Just For Laughs about creating VR’s first premium short comedy show, it was amazing how quickly we realized we had a shared creative vision – to create a new form of comedic experience by fusing VR’s capacity to create a strong sense of proximity and intimacy between viewer and talent, with the extraordinary quality of presence and performance of the best comedians. Think of ‘Comedians in Cars’ or ‘Between Two Ferns’, but in the highly immersive, intimate and personal medium of virtual reality where the viewer essentially becomes the host,” said Paul Raphaël, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Felix & Paul Studios. “We are thrilled to launch our first VR experiences on the Daydream platform and look forward to future collaborations with both Google and Just For Laughs.”
The Confessional will be available for streaming on YouTube, and YouTube VR on Daydream through the Felix & Paul Studio channel.
