L.A. Noire (2011), the hit neo-noire adventure game for PC and console, is coming to VR in a series of cases taken from the original game that Rockstar says are being “rebuilt specifically for virtual reality.”
Called L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files, the game will deliver seven of the original, self-contained cases from L.A. Noire. Rockstar maintains its new VR game is “rebuilt specifically for a virtual reality experience on the HTC VIVE™ system.” Thanks to the Revive compatibility layer, Oculus Rift will likely see support as well, albeit it an unofficial capacity if it doesn’t eventually show up on the Oculus Store.
The VR game comes alongside new versions of L.A. Noire which are scheduled to release on November 14, 2017 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
image courtesy Rockstar Games
“We’re excited to bring L.A. Noire’sunique mix of real detective work, classic Hollywood atmosphere and thrilling action to these new platforms,” said Sam Houser, Founder of Rockstar Games. “Now with a choice of spectacular virtual reality, stunning 4K, or the freedom of portable play, these enhanced versions are a perfect opportunity for players to experience this richly detailed world in a whole new way.”
The game’s lifelike characters were created using a type of facial capture technology called MotionScan, a technology that records real actors with 32 surrounding cameras to capture facial expressions from every angle. We can’t wait to see what they look like up close and personal, in a way only a VR headset can provide.
The free open betaof From Other Suns, the multiplayer shooter from Gunfire Games, has arrived. You’ve got the entire weekend to test this interesting co-op space-faring action-adventure game.
Update (9/29/17): The From Other Suns open beta weekend is here. Have at it!
Oculus quietly announced the news, releasing word of the open beta with no other general release dates. Thegame’s open beta weekend will start September 29th and go until October 1st, coming exclusively to Rift.
We got a chance to play a demo of From Other Suns when it first debuted at this year’s GDC, with Road to VR’s Executive Editor Ben Lang drawing some clear similarities to the much beloved rogue-like FTL: Faster Than Light.
“From Other Suns aims to recreate the same sort of challenges and gameplay found in FTL—multiple crew members, permadeath, procedurally generated events and environments, ship management, and more—in a VR adventure FPS that’s built from the ground up for three-player co-op.”
Lang calls the pacing “a little slower and more deliberate than some VR FPS games out there, but that’s intentional,” saying that it plays “much like a dungeon crawler.”
Here’s what Gunfire had to say about From Other Suns:
Your own ship. A crew. Steady work. Things were going well until the Collapse. Now you and half of humanity are trapped on the far side of the wormhole with ruthless pirates, scheming corporations, and worse—new threats from outside known space. There’s danger at every jump on this side of the wormhole. You and up to two of your friends will tour the sector, upgrading your ship, stockpiling weapons, and fighting for your lives. And when you all die, you’ll discover new challenges in your next playthrough.Fight and try to save humanity, or just joyride through the galaxy until its extinction. Your call.
Brass Tactics, the RTS from Defense Grid 2 (2016) studio Hidden Path Entertainment, was first teased at GDC earlier this year where they showed off their miniature tabletop world of war. As an Oculus platform exclusive, Brass Tactics is now available for pre-order on the Oculus Store with an October 19th launch date.
Inspired by the iconic visual style made popular by the Game of Thrones opening sequence, which features buildings growing out of the ground in a recognizable clockwork fashion, Brass Tactics promises to deliver familiar RTS gameplay with a ‘VR twist’ that aims to immerse you in the tiny diorama world of filled with all manner of steampunk-ish units including legged tanks, clockwork wasps, archers, and tiny toy soldiers.
Created by the lead designer of Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, the game puts a twist on classic RTS gameplay by letting you grab structures and place them on the battlefield, and direct your units with your own two hands. In our hands-on at GDC, we had fun firing boulders with the game’s giant catapult that you can launch manually with the Touch controllers.
Brass Tactics is the studio’s third VR title, following Witchblood (2017)and Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition (2016). In an Oculus blogpost, Hidden Path CEO Jeff Probst says RTSs have “never been this social. Seeing the avatar of your opponent or partner in the world—watching your opponent slump when they know they’ve been beaten or rescuing a friend in co-op when they called for help—these are things that just haven’t been experienced in RTS before, ever.”
Brass Tactics offers both co-op and PvP mode, and is currently on pre-order for a 15% discounted price of $25.
Facebook’s VP of Marketing, Rebecca Van Dyck, has been chosen to take over the role of CMO at Oculus.
TechCrunchconfirmed the story late last week, which initially broke via an unnamed Facebook spokesperson. It’s only now that Oculus has officially released word, with CEO Hugo Barra announcing the news on twitter. Barra joined the company from his position as Xiaomi’s Global VP earlier this year.
Psyched to welcome Facebook veteran Becca Van Dyck to Oculus as our new Chief Marketing Officer 😎 pic.twitter.com/dCwNtu2kyA
Van Dyck has worked as Facebook’s VP of Marketing for over 5 years, and previously held leading marketing roles at Apple, Nike, and Levi’s.
The official announcement of Van Dyck’s new role comes one day after the end of ‘Summer of Rift Sale’, which saw the Rift + Touch controller bundle slashed from $600 to a temporary price of $400. While timing could be either purposeful or coincidental, hiring a new CMO could mean a forthcoming ramp-up in marketing activities, making way for holiday season deals, or even getting a strategy in place for the release of new products and content.
Oculus’ previous CMO, Elizabeth Hamren, left the company in April for a spot as VP of the ‘Mixed Reality’ division at Microsoft.
We suspect more reveals will come out during Oculus Connect 4, the company’s annual developer conference taking place October 10-12. We’ll have feet on the ground, so check back then for more VR news.
Samsung Electronics has recently signed a partnership with Korean VR studio FNI and Gangnam Severance Hospital, one of South Korea’s largest hospitals, to develop VR-based mental health diagnosis programs for Samsung Gear VR.
The goal, a report by ZDNetmaintains, is to eventually commercialize the VR apps in 2018 for use in hospitals, dementia centers, and schools, before they head to general consumers at some later date.
The apps, developed by FNI, will use medical data obtained from Gangnam Severance Hospital and target Samsung’s Gear VR headset. The ZDNet report maintains that the app will focus on cognitive behavior therapies for suicide prevention, and include psychological assessment tools using the Samsung’s Bixby AI assistant.
the New 2017 Gear VR with Controller
Besides Gear VR and Bixby, the diagnostic tool will also incorporate data retrieved from the Gear S3 smartwatch and the S Health app.
With these partnership, Samsung is looking to capitalize on the Gear VR headset’s ease of mobility, which only requires a flagship Samsung smartphone to run—ranging from the Galaxy S6 line all the up way to the new Note 8.
The company recently collaborated with Sydney, Australia-based VR studio Start VR to develop a Gear VR app to help alleviate stress for diagnosed cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy treatment at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, a hospital dedicated to fighting cancer in all aspects, both physically and mentally.
SyncThink, a Boston-based startup, created a portable concussion diagnostic tool that uses a tablet and either a Gear VR or Oculus Rift DK2 fitted with an SMI eye tracker. The system, called Eye Sync, is already in use at the athletic divisions of University of Texas and Iowa State University.
It’s not only mobile headsets though that are useful for diagnosing health issues, just take a look at all of the VR health apps making news.
The big Oculus Rift Summer Sale may be officially over, which saw the Rift + Touch bundle temporarily slashed from $600 to $400 for a limited time, but for some reason the US Amazon site hasn’t reverted yet to the new $500 price tag, making now the very last time you’ll be able to get the deal.
Amazon is likely to correct this sometime today, as every world-wide Amazon site has done so including other official distributors. Follow the link here for the unbeatable Amazon deal.
Image courtesy Oculus
Oculus already extended their Summer Sale by “a few weeks,” but only announced a few days ago that the sale would come to an end right before midnight of the 4th, leaving many high and dry waiting without the extra funds to finally pull the trigger on the incredibly priced deal.
CrossVR’s Revive, the software that allows HTC Vive users to play games from the Oculus platform, today announced it’s joining one of the leading initiatives in creating an open standard for VR and AR apps and devices, otherwise known as OpenXR.
Lead by the Khronos Group, OpenXR aims to eliminate industry fragmentation by creating a standard, royalty-free API that enables applications to target a wide variety of AR and VR headsets. Those already involved in the initiative include the likes of Oculus, HTC, Samsung, Valve, Epic Games, Unity, AMD and NVIDIA to name a few. Khronos has already helped create several open standards including WebGL, Vulcan, and OpenGL.
image courtesy Khronos Group
Jules Blok, the creator and driving force behind Revive, announced on his Patreon early this morning that CrossVR would be officially joining as an Associate Member, something he says will “represent your interests to help ensure that the next generation of VR headsets will have a truly open standard.”
Blok initially stated that, upon reaching the $2,000 per month donation mark, he would invest the $3,500 it took to join as an Associate Member, a non-voting position in the group that allows for full participation in OpenXR’s development.
Having recently reached his goal, in large part due to the help of a $2,000 monthly recurring donation by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, Blok contacted the the Khronos Group to confirm he had the $3,500 membership fee and was ready to join. To his surprise, Khronos waved the fee, giving him free entrance into the working group.
Blok says the money originally earmarked for the membership fee will be spent on the Revive project instead. Learn more about Revive (and how to install it) on CrossVR’s GitHub.
Eternity Warriors, the mobile game series, is making its way to VR soon with the aptly named Eternity Warriors VR, a first-person co-op hack-and-slash coming to Steam Early Access later this month.
The game was initially released on Viveport as a single-player demo that let you play as either the blade-wielding Warrior or the Hunter, a class outfitted with bow and arrow. Featuring mission-based gameplay, the demon-filled brawler now lets you slash through enemies as one of three different classes; the Warrior, the Hunter, or the Gunner, a class that uses both a pistol and shotgun to take out enemies.
Thanks to SteamVR support, Eternity Warriors VR will be compatible with HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Eternity Warriors VR is also one of the first VR games to have native support for Windows VR headsets, among 67 others.
1 of 5
image courtesy Vanimals Technology
image courtesy Vanimals Technology
image courtesy Vanimals Technology
image courtesy Vanimals Technology
image courtesy Vanimals Technology
Inspired by the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta series, the built-for-VR game was created by Vanimals Technology, a Beijing-based game studio working with Eternity Warriors franchise owners Glu Mobile. In Q3 2016, Vanimals received an initial round investment of approximately $1 million from Youget Capital and Green Pine Capital.
Microsoft’s Windows VR headsets (branded as ‘Mixed Reality’) are nearly ready to ship, coming alongside the launch of Windows Fall Creators Update in mid-October. Announced today at Microsoft’s Windows Mixed Reality event, the company says a “preview” of SteamVR compatibility is sure to arrive sometime during the holiday season, giving its line of VR headsets access to the Steam’s vast library of room-scale games.
Update (10/03/17): Microsoft today announced that SteamVR support is surely headed to Windows VR headsets before the end of the year. Starting today, developers will be able to access a preview version of Windows Mixed Reality SteamVR support, but consumers will gain access sometime before the end of the year. The original article continues below.
Original article (09/04/17): Microsoft recently co-announced with Valve that the headsets will support SteamVR content, but didn’t say exactly when it would transpire.
As reported by the German tech publication Computer Base, Microsoft’s Greg Sullivan announced at the Berlin-based tech trade show IFA 2017 that SteamVR support wouldn’t be ready for the October 17th release of the Windows Fall Creators Update. According to ComputerBase, work on hooking the company’s swath of VR headsets into SteamVR has only just begun, and exactly when customers will be able to pop into Steam to buy and play supported titles, Sullivan couldn’t say.
image courtesy Microsoft
Windows VR headsets already have a number of confirmed titles, including Superhot VR (2016), Arizona Sunshine (2016), and Rec Room (2017) that can be available through the Microsoft Store. Check out the full list here.
Massive multiplayer online (MMO) games with persistent worlds and real economies like Second Life haven’t reached critical mass in VR yet, although many in the community are counting the moments until they can live out their days immersed in all-encompassing virtual worlds.Enter MetaWorld, one such MMO launching on Steam Early Access September 29th that hopes to bring about an age of virtual land ownership.
On the surface, buying a scarce resource (albeit immaterial) seems like a sound investment for virtual pioneers, the same instinct that continues to drive the cryptocurrency boom, but the waters invariably get murkier the farther you descend.
The Pitch
Considering MMOs require a healthy player base to function, MetaWorld is hoping to invigorate its procedurally generated 10,000 square mile digital wilderness with a wide swath of the VR headset-owning market, including cross-play support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR, and Gear VR. For reference, MetaWorld is planning to cover an area about as large as the island of Malta.
Developed by HelloVR, a studio founded by ex-Altspace VR director of user experience Dedric Reid, MetaWorld first suffered a rocky IndieGogo campaign that saw less than 10 percent of its $50,000 funding goal. Undeterred by the lack of community support, Reid continued development on the free-to-play world, which he’s hoping to monetize by selling plots of land that come with ready-made structures, ranging from a 1/2 acre plot with rustic log cabin to a 2-acre plot with ultra-modern space intended for vendors.
Built with SpatialOS, a platform that lets game developers stitch together multiple servers and game engines to power large-scale persistent worlds, MetaWorld also purports to offer detailed environmental simulations, complete with wind-swept trees and different animals like fish, foxes and deer that roam the map.
image courtesy MetaWorld
Prospective vendors will own a larger piece of the world, and have access to world-building tools that let them create a unique space as well as the still undefined ‘vendor tool kit’, presumably a way of creating unique world items so you can earn in-game credits. The company also promises its class of vendors a more ‘true to life’ avatar created by the team based on a picture of the person.
image courtesy MetaWorld
The economy, while presented in vague terms, promises to allow users to buy and sell anything, and also let vendors monetize their space. The company hasn’t mentioned its in-game currency outside of the IndieGogo campaign, so there’s still no telling if it will essentially be based on microtransactions, or function like Second Life’s Linden dollars, a currency that you can actually buy (and earn) and use for digital purchases and then convert back to regular currencies like the US dollar or Euro.
Co-founder Abandons Ship
HelloVR co-founder Carleton DiLeo left the company before the ill-fated IndieGogo campaign was devised. According to a post on DiLeo’s blog where he distances himself from MetaWorld, he isn’t sure how Reid can deliver everything he’s promised.
Last year, I began the journey to create MetaWorld. Being one of the first developers to use SpatialOS and being the first using it for VR was a huge challenge. Documentation was sparse and Improbable [the studio behind SpatialOS] was tied up growing their company. After a 3-4 months we had something to show to the world. The response was good, people who tried MetaWorld really connected with the world
Unfortunately, after the press showing, I ran into a number of issues with SpatialOS due to required version upgrades and bugs with SpatialOS itself. Improbable was busy with other things so they were unable to help. I slowly worked through some of the problems but progress was slow. I started to feel that making a massive VR experience wasn’t going to be possible. At our current trajectory it would just take too long.
I still wanted to create something that allowed people to be able to visit a living world together from around the globe. To get there we would need more support from Improbable and a much bigger team. Funding efforts weren’t going well because investors wanted to see more before investing. The time required for one developer/game designer and a designer to create what we need would just take too long, we needed more help which costs money. This became a contention point between me and my business partner. Eventually I just didn’t see a future in continuing the way we were. I decided to stop working on MetaWorld and focus on a new title called Community Garden. Community Garden would start small to prove the viability of building persistent VR worlds in SpatialOS.
I was surprised when I found out my partner had started an IndieGoGo fund. To avoid confusion, I wanted to make it clear that I’m not currently working on MetaWorld and I don’t know how my partner plans to deliver on the promise of the fund. If you plan on donating to the IndieGoGo fund, please note that none of the work I produced for the MetaWorld you see in videos like the one above is what will be delivered.
Buyer Beware
MetaWorld is headed into Early Access, which partly excuses it from being an incomplete product, but the inconsistency in messaging around the game’s core mechanics and features ought to leave you worried about the stability of the still unreleased MMO. The game purports to feature a variety of activities including hunting, fishing, camping, snorkeling, sailing, sports, training, RC, drones, and go karts—all well and good—but according to the company, the core gameplay is based around survival. “You’ll have to defend your land against other players as well as opportunistic animals,” the company says.
You won’t find this information conveniently listed on the MetaWorld website though, but rather strewn across various Reddit pages where the creator sporadically posts, oftentimes in cryptic, single-word answers. At the time of this writing, the game’s website only consists of press blurbs gathered from before the IndieGogo campaign was launched and a small marketplace selling the game’s three plot sizes. The custom avatar mentioned above is only detailed in a 2 month-old post on the company’s Reddit page.
image courtesy MetaWorld
It still isn’t clear how much is truly at stake for landowners or the landless free-to-players at the moment either. Questions like: can animals or other players kill you? If you die, do you lose your items? Can you trade in-game credits back to real cash? Can you craft items, or do you have to buy everything from vendors? The list of unaddressed questions goes on in the game’s largely abandoned discussion board on Steam.
To quell fears around the general lack of communication about the core game mechanics, the studio took to three major VR Reddit pages on Saturday (r/Vive, r/Oculus, r/PSVR), saying that the game won’t only be a wilderness area with cookie-cutter buildings as featured in the promo, but rather a growing framework “we can use […] to create many other worlds. Fantasy, Sci Fi etc.”
“We are building the world as a community, a few square miles at a time,” the company says. “Early pioneers will gather in world and decide on what types of diverse biomes to build. People in the world are discover-able through the UI. We figured out a way to make a huge world that feels alive, rich with things to do. One of our primary goals is to introduce an experience with lots of divergent game play, that you’ll never get bored of.”
For potential customers, HelloVR also had this to say about refunds on the PSVR Reddit page:
“MetaWorld was founded out of passion. Our team doesn’t expect to generate much revenue from the project. Our early access goal is to build a core community that has ownership in the world. Anyone can ask for a refund at anytime by emailing metabot@metaworldvr.com“
Anyone can ask, but it remains to be seen if anyone can actually have a refund—something to keep in mind for digital prospectors looking to settle a virtual frontier that might just as likely turn out to be a barren wasteland.
