Popular indie game Smalland: Survive the Wilds (2024) launched out of Steam Early Access back in February, bringing its big 1.0 update on PC along with a fresh version for Xbox and PlayStation. Now the studio launched a VR-native spin-off for Quest too.
Smalland: Survive the Wilds VR promises “dozens of hours” of survival, crafting, and exploring, although you’d be forgiven thinking it’s a straightforward 1:1 port of the original judging just by its name alone.
Described as a “new, unique single-player adventure set within the world of Smalland: Survive the Wilds,” the Quest exclusive omits co-op support, but includes many of the flatscreen game’s features however despite offering up a new story.
This includes the ability to craft tools and shelters, tame and customize the world’s many giant creatures, and immersive yourself in the world of the Smallfolk as you explore the ‘land of the giants’.
Here’s how developer Merge Games describes the game:
“Before the time of the giants, we lived freely under the Sun and Moon. Centuries have passed, but those stories of the surface world have been passed down through the generations. Now the giants are gone, and you, Vanguard, must venture out into the wilds once more. Be brave, and do not falter…”
You can find Smalland: Survive the Wilds VR over on Quest, priced at $30 and supporting Quest 2/3/Pro.
Looking to see how that new 77-inch TV will fit in your rumpus room? Best Buy’s new Vision Pro app has you covered.
Released in April, the new Best Buy Envision app for Vision Pro offers up 3D preview models from a number of product categories, including TV & home theater, large kitchen appliances like fridges and freezers, computers & tablets, health & fitness stuff, and even furniture.
For now, you can’t actually buy stuff directly on the app; instead you’re given a hyperlink to the web-based store that you can then navigate and purchase on the full online store via Safari.
Image courtesy Best Buy
Even if you’re not looking to plonk down cash for a new toy or appliance right now, it’s a pretty cool way to preview a selection of accurately scaled stuff in-headset, albeit whittled down to a few manufacturers, such as LG, Bosch, Asus, Lenovo, Dell—and of course a ton of products from the company’s vertically integrated house brand, Insignia.
Granted, it’s not as extensive a selection as you can find on the company’s Best Buy mobile app, which features a lot more AR product previews using your smartphone’s camera, but it’s a pretty prescient look at what it could be like in the pretty near future.
And besides giving you a more accurate way of placing digital products in your room, it’s also pretty interesting to see the retailer invest in creating a Vision Pro-native app where others deemed it too niche—we’re looking at you YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify.
While we’re still waiting on that XR-driven shopping revolution companies have been touting for years now, take at a look at Best Buy Envision is action to see just how close we’re getting, courtesy YouTuber ‘Kel.Vision’:
Hugo Barra, Meta’s former Head of VR, offered some unique insight into the XR industry recently with an extensive blogpost that centers around Apple Vision Pro. Barra warns that, like the company’s first standalone headset Oculus Go, the novelty around casual content consumption will probably fade fairly quickly.
Looking back at his time at Meta (then Facebook), Barra notes that Oculus Go was “the biggest product failure” he’d ever been attached to, stating that although casual content consumption was the headset’s raison d’être, the hype wore off pretty quickly.
Here’s Barra’s appraisal of the situation:
Watching TV/movies in virtual reality seemed like such an incredibly compelling idea that we (the Oculus team at Meta/Facebook) built an entire product around that idea — Oculus Go.
Launched in 2018, Oculus Go was the biggest product failure I’ve ever been associated with for the simple reason that it had extremely low retention despite strong partnerships with Netflix and YouTube.
Most users who bought Oculus Go completely abandoned the headset after a few weeks. The full story is much more nuanced (including the fact that the Oculus Go failure got us on the path to Oculus Quest very quickly), but it taught us an important lesson.
Oculus Go | Photo by Road to VR
Barra notes that poor retention for Oculus Go had to do with a few common factors, including user comfort, friction in starting a session when not already wearing the headset, and the social isolation of watching content alone—all of which is true for Vision Pro as well.
Barra concludes that, at least as far as Oculus Go went, traditional media consumption was “not a core ‘daily driver’ pillar but more an ancillary use case that adds some value to other core pillars (such as productivity or gaming).”
Granted Barra says Vision Pro brings more to the table thanks to its better displays than previous VR headsets, which can create “magical movie experiences on occasion,” but those same challenges that Oculus Go contended with basically remain.
Barra initially moved to Meta (then Facebook) in 2017 from his role as Global VP at the China-based tech giant Xiaomi, becoming head of Oculus and VP of Reality Labs partnerships. Leveraging his experience at Xiaomi, Meta even tapped the Chinese tech giant to manufacture Oculus Go for both the international market and the Chinese domestic market, also branding it under the name ‘Mi VR Standalone’, belying just how big the company expected Go to resonate.
Only a short year after the release of Oculus Go though, the company shifted gears to launch its first room-scale-capable standalone Oculus Quest, nearly abandoning Oculus Go entirely, which in addition to largely relying on Samsung Gear VR apps, omitted motion controllers due to only being tracked in three degrees of freedom.
Then again, that’s where the comparions stop, as Vision Pro has great hand-tracking, millions of apps, and compelling mixed reality passthrough—all of the things Barra says Apple is hoping to use to make Vision Pro “the future of work.”
Despite not receiving updates in years, Google Earth VR (2016) on Steam is still one of the most useful and immersive ways to interact with the company’s 3D version of planet Earth, Street View and all. There are already a few apps on Quest that tap into Google’s free-to-use Maps APIs, but none that are doing it at the scale of EarthQuest.
Released on Quest in September 2023, EarthQuest promises “almost every identifiable city on earth is in realistic 3D,” going toe-to-toe with Google’s own Earth VR app on Steam by bringing 3D areas available on earth.google.com to the Quest-native app.
One of the most obvious comparisons on Quest right now is Wooorld (2022), which similarly incorporates all of the 2D and 3D data you’d find on Google Earth VR, albeit with a much more limited rendering area. Wooorld is similarly centered around a social component which lets you tour around with friends and strangers (also available on EarthQuest), but includes co-op GeoGuessr-style games which use Street View.
Something you certainly won’t find on Google Earth VR or Wooorld is EarthQuest’s integration of ChatGPT, letting you interact with an AI companion on your virtual global trek while helping you navigate the user interface, ask questions about your surroundings, teleport you anywhere you want go, and speak to you in practically any language ChatGPT can digest and speak.
Meta announced last week it’s set to release Horizon OS (ex-Quest OS) to select third-party OEMs, marking a monumental shift in how the company hopes to compete with Apple now that it’s released Vision Pro. While Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a range of “specialized” third-party headsets running its OS, and consequently having access to its store of XR apps, former Oculus CTO and legendary programmer John Carmack says we shouldn’t expect cheaper VR headsets than Quest as a result.
“Meta already sells the Quest systems basically at production cost, and just ignores the development costs, so don’t expect this to result in cheaper VR headsets from other companies with Quest equivalent capabilities. Even if the other companies have greater efficiency, they can’t compete with that,” Carmack wrote in a recent X post.
As Meta hopes to engage select OEMs to create specialized headsets—which for now include ASUS, Lenovo and Xbox—Carmack maintains the move to release Horizon OS is more about enabling “a variety of high end ’boutique’ headsets, as you get with Varjo / Pimax / Bigscreen on SteamVR,” which could promise spec bumps in resolution, field of view, and comfort.
Image courtesy Meta
“You could drive the Apple displays from Quest silicon. You could make a headset for people with extremely wide or narrow IPD or unusual head / face shapes. You could add crazy cooling systems and overclock everything. All with full app compatibility, but at higher price points,” Carmack says.
This, [releasing Horizon OS] brings with it a tension, because Meta as a company, as well as the individual engineers, want the shine of making industry leading high-end gear. If Meta cedes those “simple scaling” axes to other headset developers, they will be left leaning in with novel new hardware systems from the research pipeline for their high end systems, which is going to lead to poor decisions.
VR is held back more by software than hardware. This initiative will be a drag on software development at Meta. Unquestionably. Preparing the entire system for sharing, then maintaining good communication and trying not to break your partners will steal the focus of key developers that would be better spent improving the system. It is tempting to think this is just a matter of increasing the budget, but that is not the way it works in practice – sharing the system with partners is not a cost that can be cleanly factored out.
Just allowing partner access to the full OS build for standard Quest hardware could be done very cheaply, and would open up a lot of specialty applications and location based entertainment systems, but that would be a much lower key announcement.
There may be some hope for at least one cheaper headset out of the gate. Besides providing Horizon OS to ASUS Republic of Gamers for what could be a higher-end gaming-focused headset, and Lenovo for a work-focused device, Meta tapped Xbox to create its own branded Quest.
Microsoft’s Xbox has hasn’t revealed anything yet, however in Zuckerberg’s Horizon OS announcement video he mentioned he envisions a VR headset that is “maybe just a version that comes out of the box with Xbox controller and Game Pass, and you can immediately start playing on a big screen anywhere you go.” When purchased separately, Touch controllers cost $100, while a single Xbox One wireless controller can cost nearly half that price.
And then there’s the question of what cheap really means to Meta. Right now, a Quest 2 costs $200, although it’s very likely being phased out as a few developers have already pledged Quest 3 exclusivity for games releasing in late 2024 including Alien: Rogue Incursion and Batman: Arkham Shadow. Notably, Quest 3 is priced at $500 for its 128GB and $650 for the 512GB variant.
Reports maintain Meta is ostensibly hoping to supplant Quest 2 with the release of a prospective ‘Quest 3 Lite’ however, which is rumored to arrive sometime later this year, so there’s no telling what that ‘cheap’ floor price may be.
We’ve been waiting a long time for a fully fledged Batman VR game, and now Meta announced we’re getting one later this year, exclusive to Quest 3.
Developed by Meta’s Camouflaj and Oculus Studios, and created in partnership with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and DC, Batman: Arkham Shadow is little more than a teaser trailer for now, appended with a “late 2024” release date.
That said, it’s likely we’re in for a Batman vs. Ratcatcher saga, as hordes of rats stream in from the streets of Gotham. The Ratcatcher, aka Otis Flannegan, was an Easter egg character in console and PC title Batman: Arkham City (2011), but has made no appreciable appearance in a Batman video game since release of the console title Batman: Dark Tomorrow (2003).
A nametag is also seen in the trailer, reading Dr. Harleen Quinzel, aka Harley Quinn.
Image courtesy Meta, Warner Bros., DC
Acquired by Meta in 2022, Camouflaj is most recently known for having developed Marvel’s Iron Man VR (2020). The PSVR timed exclusive eventually made it to the Quest platform nearly two years after its initial release, spurred by the studio’s acquisition and incorporation into Oculus Studios.
When it launched on PSVR in July 2020, Road to VR gave Iron Man VR a rating of ‘Great’ in our full review, calling it VR’s “first great superhero game,” later awarding it our PSVR Game of the Year in 2020. To say we’re expecting big things from Camouflaj is a bit of an understatement.
Batman: Arkham Shadow promises to be the first full Batman VR game, which follows the PSVR action-puzzle game Batman: Arkham VR (2016), which includes about an hour of gameplay. We’ll be tuning into Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest on June 7 at 2:00 PM PT (local time here) to learn more, as Meta promises more details will be revealed there.
Batman: Arkham Shadow isn’t the first big budget VR game targeting Quest 3 exclusivity later this year. Earlier this week VR veteran studio Survios revealed its single-player horror game Alien: Rogue Incursion is also skipping Quest 2 and Quest Pro support when it launches “holiday 2024,” something that may signal the beginning of the end for Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
Meta is set to release its v65 update to Quest, promising a number of improvements ostensibly spurred by its ongoing competition with Apple Vision Pro.
The company says in a recent blogpost that v65 will include updates to the spatial video playback feature introduced in v62, a new way to view panoramic stills in-headset, and improvements to how passthrough works on Quest 3.
In early April, Meta rolled its v64 update for Meta Quest 3, which included marked boost in passthrough quality, improving color, exposure, contrast, and dynamic range for a more realistic view in mixed reality. Now the company says it’s tweaking passthrough again, bringing more of its UI into mixed reality.
When it starts rolling out gradually, users will notice that Quest 3’s lockscreen, power-off menu, and other panels will no longer appear in the previous gray void-like VR environment, but now allow you to continue seeing your environment until you take off the headset—basically like how it’s done on Vision Pro.
Other v65 updates include the ability to upload upload panoramic photos or spatial video to Quest headset using the Meta Quest mobile app, now available for users of iPhone on iOS 17 and later. Being able to view iPhone-captured spatial video was one of the big features touted by Apple Vision Pro, which Meta was quick to undercut with its v62 release in February, bringing native support for the MV-HVEC video codec.
Helldivers 2 (2024) doesn’t have VR support yet, official or otherwise, although this new fan-made trailer shows just how immersive it could be.
Created by YouTuber ‘DemoAkuroVR‘, the unofficial cinematic trailer reimagines the squad-based shooter action in a modded version of Blade & Sorcery, the viral VR combat sandbox that is all about taking on waves of baddies and, as you’ve probably seen, decapitating them in style using melee and magic.
Check out DemoAkuroVR’s take on Devil May Cry (built in Blade & Sorcery) to see what we mean:
As you might have guessed, Blade & Sorcery is extremely moddable, letting you import anything from custom Star Wars maps and weapons, to the entirety of San Andreas from GTA, which basically lets you go ham on whatever, however, and wherever—making for a pretty interesting test bed for your own ‘what if this was actually in VR’ dreams.
And DemoAkuroVR is all about modding Blade & Sorcery to make a host of similarly cool ‘what-if’ VR trailers, including non-VR games like God of War and Metal Gear Rising, but also games that already happen to have VR mods too—the difference being they’re all captured in Blade & Sorcery.
While there are a lot of VR mods out there, thanks to groups like Flat2VR, Team Beef, and Praydog’s UEVR mod, which allows you to inject VR support to games built in Unreal Engine 4 and 5, it may be some time before we actually get any sort of unofficial VR mod for Helldivers 2 since the game is built in the obscure and rarely used Autodesk Stingray game engine.
Even so, such a mod likely couldn’t include the intense physics-based interactions you see in DemoAkuroVR’s trailer, although we can always dream. Who knows, maybe developers Arrowhead Game Studios will take notice, and implement their own VR support?
VR veteran studio Survios finally revealed Alien: Rogue Incursion, the upcoming single-player horror game that’s sure to pit you against some nasty Xenomorphs. The officially branded tie-in game is coming to Quest 3 later this year, but not any other Quest headset, which could signal waning developer interest in supporting Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
In addition to launching on PSVR 2 and SteamVR, a Survios spokesperson told Road to VR that Alien: Rogue Incursion is indeed “native to Meta Quest 3 only,” i.e. not Quest 2 or Quest Pro. Given what we know about where standalone headsets are headed, there’s a fair bit we can tease from that statement.
And it case you misses it, here’s the Alien: Rogue Incursion announcement trailer:
Alien: Rogue Incursion is slated to launch Holiday 2024, putting release somewhere around eight months out from the recent Quest 2 fire sale, which slashed the company’s last-gen VR headset to just $200, and discounted a ton of official Quest 2 accessories.
Now almost four years old, Quest 2 has been supported by practically all games available on the platform since the VR headset’s release in October 2020. The same goes for Quest Pro, the company’s first true mixed reality headset which launched in October 2022 for an eye-watering $1,500—later lowered to $1,000.
Both were timed around Meta’s respective Connect developer conferences for those years. However now rumors maintain Meta is currently working on some sort of ‘Quest 3 Lite’ follow-up that would imply a cheaper version of the company’s flagship, which would conceptually displace Quest 2 in its lineup. Maybe in… October 2024? We simply don’t know.
Quest 2 (left) & Quest Pro (right) | Photo by Road to VR
If this article were published a month ago, it would have been pretty straight forward story: Meta is ostensibly getting ready to sunset Quest 2 and Quest Pro to make way for Quest 3 Lite…or whatever it will be called, and has tipped off Survios to let them know to not waste time or effort on making sure their fairly big budget official Alien game runs on older hardware.
Survios hasn’t said as much, but that “native to Meta Quest 3 only” caveat probably only applies to the Meta’s specific Quest first-party product line since it’s obviously supporting SteamVR headsets and PSVR 2, meaning we may see a wider distribution across headsets built by ASUS and Lenovo, and the Xbox-branded Quest hardware—whenever those arrive.
A few things are certain though: as one of the most veteran VR studios out there, Survios has created a dizzying number of games over the years, including Creed: Rise to Glory, Puzzle Bobble 3D: Vacation Odyssey, The Walking Dead: Onslaught, Electronauts, Sprint Vector, Raw Data, and Battlewake. And if such a prolific studio thinks its time to shelve Quest 2 and Quest Pro to get the best possible reach out of its official Alien IP game, it’s likely other developers will follow suit.
The long-awaited VR mod for World of Warcraft (2004) is here, bringing full PC VR support to players grinding the vast lands of Azeroth.
Created by Flat2VR community members ‘Streetrat’ and ‘Marulu’, the long-time modders have finally brought full 6DOF VR support to World of Warcraft in the aptly named WoVR mod.
According to the Github, where you can download WoVR for free, it also includes directional audio, synced eye rendering, the ability to switch between third and first person, motion controls and a floating UI.
While couched as an “experimental release,” WoVR aims to add PC VR support to 3.3.5a, the last patch of the second expansion of the game.
Take a look at it in action below:
“This mod is a experimental release intended to be played seated with VR motion controllers. Currently we do not have plans for active continued development, if there is enough support and interested from the community we could look into first person mount visibility and player character IK,” the creators say.
It’s been a long road to get there too. WoVR has been in on and off development for over the past ten years, as it was originally conceived on the original Oculus Rift DK1 back in 2013.
“In January 2024 after a 4 year long hiatus we decided to restart development from scratch with everything we learned from creating XIVR,” the creators say. “This mod not only converts the game to be playable with motion controllers but also aims to add quality of life improvements from FF14.”
The modders are also known for having brought a similar VR mod to MMO Final Fantasy XIV (2010), which was initially released in 2022.
If you want to grab the WoVR mod, you can either do so by following the Github link above, or by visiting the Flat2VR Discord (invite link) where you can find precompiled versions for easier installation.
