To fit alongside the company’ Daydream mobile VR platform, Google is partnering with Lenovo, LG, and YI Technology to create a new class of 180 cameras. Called VR180, the point-and-shoot video cameras create stereoscopic 180 video that can be uploaded or livestreamed to YouTube, and viewed on VR headsets.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki took the stage at Vidcon 2017 to announce that the Google-owned company would immediately support 180 video, or what YouTube calls VR180, and is bringing an eponymous class of VR cameras to market. In a YouTube blogpost, the company says VR180 video can be viewed on Cardboard, Daydream, and PSVR headsets.
image captured by Road to VR
While individual VR180 cameras are still under wraps, the company says the point-and-shoot cameras are due out sometime this winter. As for price, Wojcicki says these cameras will be comparatively cheaper to 360 cameras, revealing that VR180 cameras “are just a couple hundred [dollars].”
Google is also opening up a certification program so other manufacturers can create VR180 cameras—starting with Z CAM.
image courtesy Google
YouTube has released a playlist on its official Virtual Reality Channel showing a number of its content partners using what we would presume is some version of the supported 180 camera. Unlike 360 video, which first saw support on the video sharing platform back in 2015, VR180 video is missing the ability to change your point of view (POV) when viewed on traditional monitors. Since these videos are also displayed as 16:9 videos on traditional monitors, a YouTuber could hypothetically shoot video exclusively in VR180 to garner a greater crossover of VR and non-VR viewership on a single video.
It’s uncertain if the videos below were captured with official VR180 hardware, or a test rig that provided similar performance. Notice the videos are delivered at up to 4K resolution at 30 FPS on both traditional monitors and in the VR-accessible YouTube app. Find out how to watch a VR video on your smartphone here by using the stock YouTube app.
180 degree stereoscopic video has been around in VR for a while now, with companies like NextVR broadcasting their sports coverage almost exclusively in 3D 180. This is because it allows you to deliver video with better resolution than a 3D 360 video, but at lesser or equal file size—something that’s important when you’re streaming to headsets. When the action is mostly forward-facing, the back register of a 360 video tends not to be used anyway, making 3D 180 a smarter choice for specific purposes.
IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence platform designed to understand natural language, today launched support for Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017) across PSVR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Before the service launched today, lone players could control the ship’s other posts—Engineering, Tactical, Helm—by clicking a few boxes to issue orders. Now a sole captain (also with a mixed crew of humans and non-humans) can complete whole missions by issuing commands directly to the non-human-controller characters using natural language.
image courtesy IBM
Voice commands are enabled by IBM’s VR Speech Sandbox program, which is available on GitHub for developers to integrate speech controls into their own VR applications. The Sandbox, released in May, combines IBM’s Watson Unity SDK with two services, Watson Speech to Text and Watson Conversation.
at the Captain’s chair, image captured by Road to VR
We had a chance to go hands-on at E3 2017 with Star Trek: Bridge Crew embedded with the Watson-powered voice recognition,a feature that’s initiated during gameplay with a single button press.While talking directly to your digital crew does provide some of those iconic moments (“Engage!” and “Fire phasers!), and most orders went through without a hitch, Watson still has trouble parsing some pretty basic things. For example, Watson doesn’t understand when you use the name of ships, so “scan the Polaris” just doesn’t register. Watson also didn’t pick up on a few things that would seem pretty easy at face value. Commands like “fire on the target”, “fire on the enemy,” and “come on, let’s warp already!” fell on deaf digital ears.
IBM says their VR speech controls aren’t “keyword driven exchanges,” but are built around recognition of natural language and the intent behind what’s being said. Watson also has the capacity to improve its understanding over time, so those “Lets get the hell out of here, you stupid robots!” may actually register one day.
This however doesn’t stop a pretty weird logical disconnect that occurs when talking to a bot-controlled NPC, and it stems from the fact that I was at first imbuing the NPCs with actual intelligence. When talking directly to them, I was instinctively relying on them naturally to help me do my job, to have eyes and ears and not only understand the intent of my speech, but also the intent of the mission. A human tactical officer would have seen that we were getting fired on, and I wouldn’t have had to issue the order to keep the Bird of Prey within phaser range. I wouldn’t have to even select the target because Tactical would do it for me. IBM isn’t claiming to be able to do any of that with its cognitive computing platform, but the frustration of figuring out what Watson can and can’t do is a stark reality, especially when getting your tail-end blasted out of the final frontier.
In the end, Watson-supported voice commands may not be perfect—because when the Red Shirts are dropping like flies and consoles are exploding all over the place, the last thing you want to do is take the time to repeat an important order—but the fact that you can talk to an NPC in VR and get a pretty reliable response is amazing to say the least.
Valve has lifted the veil somewhat on its Knuckles controllers, first revealed as a prototype last October at the company’s annual Steam Dev Days conference. In a blog post today, Valve showed off some specs of the Knuckles dev kit alongside a button-map of the device, revealing the controllers will have multiple capacitive sensors to allow for some basic 5-finger tracking.
Like HTC Vive’s motion controller, Knuckles is positioned in 3D space by Steams’s Lighthouse tracking system, but Valve has designed its prototype motion controller to offer a greater sense of presence than its ‘closed hand’ predecessor. By creating a device that clamps onto the back of your hand, Valve hopes to let users ‘let go’ of the controller while in use, allowing virtual objects to be grabbed and thrown naturally.
As an ‘open hand’ controller, Knuckles will also hone in on virtual hand presence by including a number of capacitive sensors, detailed today in a developer blog post. Located in different areas on the controller, these sensors, much like the ones in Ouclus Touch, will help detect the state of the user’s hands by sensing when your finger in on a button, or particular part of a controller.
Capacitive sensors are under each physical button including the trigger surface, outer face button surface, inner face button surface, and system button surface. There are also separate arrays of capacitive sensors in the controller’s grip, which is designed to enable grasp and un-grasp actions and determine which finger is resting where.
While this isn’t what you’d call ‘full’ finger tracking, which would ideally involve a way to calculate exactly where your fingers are at all times, the Knuckles controller is promising to provide a more basic tracking solution that can tell if your fingers are on or off discrete parts of the controller, like sitting on a button or curling around the grip. In fact, because capacitive sensors only allow for an on and off state, Valve recommends devs perform some smoothing when designing virtual hands for the controller to keep the finger motions from looking “too mechanical.”
It’s not ideal, but besides aiming to provide better hand presence, it also hopes to make social VR a little more human by allowing users to show natural hand positions.
image courtesy Valve
It also has a handy strap-tightening system that lets you fit the controller snug, and release with a single hand.
Some is sure to change before commercial release of the Knuckles controllers. Developers currently need to calibrate finger tracking, as dev units provide “very poor” tracking when operated in an uncalibrated state. Valve says however the need for an explicit calibration procedure “should be considered a temporary measure that will only be required for these dev-units.” Dev kits currently have a 3 hour battery life that draw current from a rechargeable 500mA battery, charging via a USB micro-B connector.
Stepping into The Mage’s Tale, a first-person dungeon crawler RPG that puts you in the enchanted boots of an apprentice mage, is a bit like jumping into your own personal ’80s sword and sorcery flick. With elemental magic at the ready, you get to experience classic dungeon crawler stuff like exploration, spell crafting, puzzles, and battle against a number of monster types—and all of it in the immersive realm of VR. While at times a little rough around the edges, The Mage’s Tale is a charming throwback that vaults you head-first into a dank and mysterious universe of inXile’s other series, The Bard’s Tale.
Developer: inXile Entertainment Available On: Oculus Rift (Touch required) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift Release Date: June 20, 2017
Gameplay
The evil wizard Gaufroi has kidnapped your master, Mage Alguin. As his apprentice, it’s your job to get him back by finding his powerful fellow mages, a quest that takes you through ten dungeons where you’re confronted with various puzzles, traps, and monsters—where there’s always a chest that needs looting at the end.
Walking into a puzzle room usually elicits a hint from your Alguin’s familiar, a magical goblin whose name I can’t remember. For the purposes of this review, he shall henceforth be known as ‘smarmy turd’ (ST for short).
image captured by Road to VR
ST is a constant thorn in your side, and tends to tutorialize puzzles and generally point out the obvious. He does however make the dank dungeons placed before you a little less lonely, so I guess he’s got that going for him. When not tutorialized by ST, puzzles are explained by a changing cast of ever-present talking wall monsters, who offer riddles to help you along the way. Puzzles tend to be fairly simple, but because The Mage’s Tale offers so many varied types, you’ll always be on your toes figuring out the next one (if ST hasn’t spoiled it already, that is). You’ll find yourself fetching missing parts to puzzles, looking through magical orbs to locate important runes, cranking machines, freezing water in pipes so you can light a torch that’s being dowsed; the variations are so rich, that even the smarmiest of turds can’t ruin it for you.
When you’re not cranking weird machines and blowing out walls to reach hidden chests though, you’re probably blasting away at the world’s many monsters. Enemy types tend to be mostly ranged, like archers and mages, so they usually keep their distance allowing you to block with your arcane shield or plink away with your magical abilities. There are however a number of melee fighters to watch out for later in the game including shielded goblins and hammer-wielding giants. Enemies don’t have health bars, so you usually end up blasting away with whatever appears to work best on each enemy type.
image courtesy inXile Entertainment
To my utter dismay, dual-wielding is not a thing in The Mage’s Tale. Oh well.
A big personal attraction for me to the game is spell crafting. I would have loved to find ancient books filled with spells, but unfortunately crafting is done entirely through trial and error, as your cauldron will unhappily vomit out bad combinations, forcing you to start over again until you find something that works. Because there are more than 2 dozen ingredients and over a 100 combinations, you’ll spend plenty of time mixing and matching until you get that perfect lighting spell that has both impressive range, rips health from your enemies when they die and tosses out confetti on the monster’s dead body.
image courtesy inXile Entertainment
Chests usually offer some sort of magical ingredient you can use in crafting, be it base elemental spells like lighting/fire/wind/ice, or a modifier like poison, extra recharge, or triple shot. My absolute favorite part of opening chests isn’t receiving points for upgrades, or new magical reagents, but tossing them into the awaiting mouth of my teleporting frog-buddy, whose name was mentioned once and forgotten forever.
Without revealing too much, the story line isn’t anything you wouldn’t find ripped from a Dungeon Master’s Guide, so don’t expect any great innovations in story telling here. But then again, that’s exactly you’re in for with The Mage’s Tale, a faithful classic that lets you fire lighting at wise-cracking goblins.
For those of you mashing ctrl+f and searching the article for ‘gameplay length’, you’ll see I finished in a little over 7.5 hours, a slight tick under the advertised 10+. I’m far from a completionist, so I don’t mind leaving the game’s many collectibles behind in the dark dungeons where they belong, so you may well spend 10+ hours collecting everything, not to mention trying your hand at mixing together ingredients to get better spells.
Combat can feel a little repetitive at times. This is dampened somewhat once you get a good number of reagents to add to your base spells and start to naturally rotate through different attacks instead of just picking the strongest one. Just like classic games of yore, combat can be a process of trial and error, so expect to get smashed a few times by a giant before you know his weak spot. To get a good idea of what combat looks like in The Mage’s Tale, check out the video below. And no, you can’t get a sword or any other melee weapon.
Immersion & Comfort
Relying on classic dungeon level design and an appropriate mix of irreverent campiness (a goblin told me to “kiss his ass”), it’s easy to like The Mage’s Tale, especially as it follows some well-established practices in RPGs that date back to the pencil and paper era of Dungeons and Dragons. Bringing those places to life, and in a grand way, is ultimately one of the coolest things about The Mage’s Tale. It’s truly a breathtaking adventure into the known unknown.
Despite this, one thing that I can’t quite get around is the game’s character animations. An otherwise good-looking game with a varied palette, awesome magical effects, and impressive architecture, The Mage’s Tale is blighted by its clunky and wooden characters, that when confronted in VR look just terrible. A competent swath of Scottish and English voice actors do their best to bring the characters to life, but I can’t shake the feeling that every NPC is actually chewing on a magically invisible potato.
Another gripe is the game’s ‘force grab’. Striving to make your life easier by giving you a telekinetic powers and saving you from constantly bending over and letting you get to items just out of reach, actually activating the force grab it is somewhat of a pain. Instead of using the omnipresent gaze-based cursor to highlight objects, you actually select the item by pointing your finger at it, which is extremely fiddly. It doesn’t sound difficult to grasp at first, but I can’t count the number of times I waved my hands to no effect at a nearby bottle or mushroom. Also, force grab seems to take precedent over natural object interaction, and trying to lift open a chest or grab one of the many collectible monster cages without critically highlighting it first, usually means your hand will pass right through it without the slightest bit of recognition of intent. Because force grab is usually used during downtime from battles, its more of a constant annoyance than a game-breaking feature.
wall monster riddles, image captured by Road to VR
During battle however, the game’s UI is remarkably intuitive, giving you access to either a spell menu with 4 selectable elemental spells, or an arcane shield that lets you reflect incoming arrows and enemy magic. You can access these on the fly, and mix and match your attacks/defense to the best effect. Popping the menu open and quickly shooting out a flurry of different spells is just so gratifying.
To the dismay of some players, locomotion is teleportation only, and is done by one of two ways; you can select the teleport spot and potentially move farther (and quicker) using your right thumbstick, or use your left thumbstick for a shorter blink teleportation. Even in close, quick combat, I felt ultimately very comfortable using either method. A snap-turn (aka ‘VR comfort mode’) exists so people using a two-sensor setup can adjust themselves for optimal hand controller tracking. As someone who owns a two-sensor stock Rift/Touch setup, I would highly recommend getting a third for better coverage, because it seems I was constantly facing the wrong direction at crucial moments.
Comfort-wise, I was very happy with The Mage’s Tale, but once battles really popped off and multiple enemies force you to go mobile, you really start to buck up against the limits of the locomotion style. Snap-turning and teleporting at high-speed can start to feel like a bit of a slide show, and while it’s ultimately comfortable, it certainly dampens the immersion. I hate to think how much I missed in the dark corners of the game by spamming the far-teleport button.
inXile developer Brian Fargo says in a recent tweet that The Mage’s Tale will be available on other VR platforms in 12 months.
Ubisoft’s upcoming VR shooter Space Junkies, announced at last year’s E3, is promising some fast-paced, first-person action fueled by jet packs and an impressive assortment of guns. Getting into a multiplayer demo, I got a chance to fly high, whip around corners at some pretty impressive speeds, and get my hands on a unique array of futuristic weapons that completely stole the show.
Update (03/28/18): We had a chance to dive back into ‘Space Junkies’ at GDC 2018. While not substantially different from our past two times with the multiplayer zero-g shooter – the first at E3 and the second at Oculus Connect in October 2017 – there are some quality-of-life updates worth mentioning from our third time with ‘Space Junkies’.
Improvements include a verifiable tutorial level that takes you through the basics of locomotion and gun firing. This was the first time we’ve seen the tutorial, which before was conducted informally by Ubisoft staff.
Ubisoft’s big improvement this time around was a unique hand gesture system, letting you intuitively make a thumbs up sign, an ‘ok’ sign, a ‘hang ten’ sign, a ‘shush’ sign, and a heart sign when you depress both hold buttons and touch your index fingers together.
image courtesy Ubisoft
There’s also more characters to choose from, including several armored humanoids and reptilian/insectoid aliens. The latter wasn’t so great at replicating the hand gestures since they only have three fingers, although the results are pretty comical. The game’s inverse kinematics system still works very much like Echo Arena’s, letting your body trail behind you as you float in space.
image courtesy Ubisoft
In the demo I played, oxygen wasn’t present, although it’s unclear if this was merely for the purpose of the demo or if they dropped the mechanic entirely. Only armor and health pick-ups were available in GDC demo.
The game has undergone closed alpha access, and is soon heading into closed beta, so these quality-of-life improvements are certainly both a welcome sight, and showing a clear path to its 2018 release for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. In all, the game is approaching a level of polish that very much puts it in the ‘nearly done’ category.
Our original impressions from E3 are below, which give you a better idea of the game’s locomotion, shooting style and general gameplay.
Original Article (06/16/17): Adding a layer of dimensionality to the VR shooter genre, the addition of jet packs lets you quickly zip around the space-based arenas with ease. Using Oculus Touch, it wasn’t very long until I got a handle on the two-stick movement scheme and I was riding around corners and making a quick dash for cover.
Critical to note for Space Junkies: calling it ‘zero-G’ is a bit of a misstep. The game doesn’t allow you complete freedom of movement in the 3D space, as there’s still a fixed up and down to the world, making it feel more like a traditional shooter in level design than a freewheeling spacewalk. In fact, the developers are couching it as a microgravity environment and not zero-G.
image courtesy Ubisoft
The developers over at Ubisoft Montpellier told us they’ve been working on the game for over 3 years (prior to commercial motion controllers like Touch and Vive), and have integrated a number of tricks to make the frenetic action feel more comfortable. The standard 45-degree snap turn, aka ‘VR comfort mode’, is the default locomotion style, but there’s also a smooth-turning option that let you whip around quicker for those with iron stomachs. Like in Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight (2016), Space Junkies makes use of a FOV limiter that automatically engages during fast movement and collisions. All of it seemed to work fairly well, and I walked away with only a slightly heady feeling afterwards.
image courtesy Ubisoft
Balance is key to Space Junkies; you can boost anytime you have the juice, which can be collected around the map, but engaging boost makes you instantly visible to the enemy as a ghostly outline projecting through the level’s walls, making hide-and-seek nigh impossible when it’s on.
You also have to contend with your oxygen level, which acts as a health meter that dwindles down to nothing when you take damage. Like boosts, you can of course pick up fresh weapons and oxygen tanks scattered around the map, but you’ll have to risk getting caught in vulnerable, open spots to do it.
image courtesy Ubisoft
Weapons are also considered a consumable item, becoming useless after the last round is spent. Since there’s no reloading mechanic, you’ll have to make a frenzied dash for the next gun, and hope its something powerful. Guns range from two-handed machine guns and explosive slingshots to single-handed pistols and shotguns which you can dual-wield, all of which had a satisfying explosion or charge-up effect that left me with the impression of holding a substantial piece of kit. We’ll have more on the weapons of Space Junkies in a video due out later today.
Everything considered, Space Junkies is shaping up to the level of polish and comfort that Ubisoft has become known for with its previous VR titles. I’m not sure if the game’s 1v1 and 2v2 multiplayer combat will satiate my need for digital space carnage, but stay tuned for the full review when Space Junkies launches in early 2018 on HTC Vive and Oculus Touch for all the details on Ubisoft’s first VR shooter.
Stepping into the Bandai Namco booth at E3 in Los Angeles, I got a hands-on with Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown’s PSVR mode. Far from being just a single mission, the VR mode is apparently going to offer “several hours of VR gameplay” according to David Bonacci, Brand Manager at Bandai Namco Entertainment America.
Announced back in 2015 as a PSVR exclusive, Ace Combat 7 has seen several delays, the latest of which has pushed the release of the iconic dogfighter back to sometime in 2018. Delays notwithstanding, Bonacci maintains that Ace Combat 7’s PSVR mode will have “100 percent the same mobility” as the non-VR campaign, meaning every bit of speed and topsy-turvy fun of the flat screen game will be available on PSVR.
Going hands-on with the demo using a dualshock 4 controller, I launched off the aircraft carrier at high-speed, raising the nose of the fighter at the steepest pitch it would allow me. Prompted by an authoritative voice over the radio telling me to watch out for the game’s vaguely slavic-sounding enemy, I start a 10-minute bout of acrobatic stunts that would have likely emptied my brain of its precious bodily fluids and left me blacked-out and on the floor had it been real life. If you’ve ever played the arcade dogfighter, you know what I mean.
image courtesy Bandai Namco
The vista was graphically impressive, with the sun glinting off the ocean and lighting everything with a warm hue. Clouds obscured the green islands below at points―the sort of weather for a pleasure cruise. Condensation formed on my glass canopy as I sped through the middle of a grey-ish rain cloud―all at mach ‘whatever’.
Despite tons of high-flying twists, the experience was exceedingly comfortable. As a fast-paced flight filled with some serious potential for Top Gun (1986) moments, the demo threw a couple of types of baddies at me, ranging from normal fighters to smaller, more agile drones. Winding like a corkscrew, I never once felt the dreaded flop sweat and nausea of simulator-induced sickness.
Spoiling some of the fun, enemies seemed like an eternal jumble of tiny pixels in front of me, fuzzing into a blueish background. This issue can be blamed on two main factors: PSVR’s limited resolution, and the unavoidable problem of being literal miles away from enemy fighters. You can’t really knock Ace Combat for being Ace Combat in that department, as you almost always rely on the plane’s targeting system to keep an eye on distant baddies, VR headset or traditional monitor. While lower perceived resolution doesn’t effect the gameplay at all, highlighting a singular, low-resolution object that you’re constantly straining to see is a bit of turn-off visually.
Bandai Namco is playing it pretty close to the vest on exactly what “several hours of VR gameplay” really means too, so we can’t say for sure yet. Rest assured, we’ll at very least know by the time we publish the review (in 2018) to find out if PSVR owners should drop the big bucks on a game that may or may not offer value specifically to the VR-conscious buyers out there.
Bethesda recently announced that Fallout 4 (2015) is coming to HTC Vive this October, and Skyrim (2011) is soon to follow sometime in late 2017 on PlayStation VR. Amidst talk of platform exclusivity, the company took to twitter to quell some fears in the community, tweeting out yesterday that they “plan on supporting as many platforms as [they] can.”
While Bethesda’s Doom VFR is coming to PSVR and HTC Vive straight away, the company hasn’t spoken in specific terms exactly when either Skyrim VR or Fallout 4 VR will make it across the aisle to other VR platforms (read: timed exclusivity). On top of that, the company has made no official mention of Oculus Rift support for any of their upcoming VR titles. Consider the following tweet though:
It’s been fun bringing our style of games to VR. We plan on supporting as many platforms as we can. #E32017pic.twitter.com/xA5kNgV9hR
— BethesdaGameStudios (@BethesdaStudios) June 13, 2017
Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax was engaged in a legal battle with Oculus/Facebook earlier this year, and to say there’s bad blood between the two companies is a bit of an understatement when ZeniMax was awarded $500M in damages after bringing a lawsuit for $4B surrounding exactly who owned the intellectual property that was vital in creating the Oculus Rift.
Despite these legal troubles, Bethesda’s plan to support “as many platforms as [they] can” sounds like good news for Rift owners, considering it would take very little to enable Rift/Touch support after ensuring the initial pull for HTC Vive via Steam. After all, SteamVR supports HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and OSVR natively.
It’s entirely possible that Bethesda decides to enable a hardware lock specific to the HTC Vive, necessitating a “Rift hack” like the one used to skate around the headset check inn Google Earth VRbefore official Rift support was available. They are however a pragmatic company, one that likely won’t throw away the opportunity to earn the full price of $59.99 for either VR versions of Skyrim or Fallout 4.
The question remains: is Bethesda going to openly snub Facebook (and Rift owners by proxy) by locking them out of their VR games? The answer may be less dramatic than you think. Bethesda may not openly list Rift support, but unofficially allow it access without announcing it to the world. A win-win (sort of) for Rift owners and Bethesda.
Only time will tell, but the chances of stalking The Wasteland or battling a 9-foot, club-totting giant on your choice of VR hardware are good, because whatever happens, there’s always likelihood of a day-1 hack should ZeniMax take the grudge to its logical extreme.
Supermassive Games, the makers of VR titles Until Dawn: Rush of Blood (2016) and Tumble VR (2016), are coming out with a new psychological horror game for PSVR called The Inpatient that seems to offer a level of realism thanks to some very well-tuned facial motion capture.We went hands on at the Sony booth at this year’s E3 to find out just what Supermassive had in store.
Set in the Blackwood Sanatorium, the very same seen in Until Dawn (2015), I awake to find myself strapped to a chair in a dark room. Facing Jefferson Bragg, the owner of the Sanatorium, I’m told I have amnesia and that I desperately need to remember what happened ‘that night’. Bragg comes close, nearly touching my nose and motions to a shadowy figure in the corner, “The Doctor.”
image courtesy Supermassive Games
Telling from Bragg’s Father Knows Best (1954) vibe and the weirdly antique devices and decor, I’m guessing we’re in the ’50s, some 60 years before Until Dawn took place.
From what I gather during the demo, the game makes heavy use of dialogue trees. Supermassive says these will eventually react via audio input, meaning you’ll be able to answer NPCs in real-time with your voice. For the purposes of the demo I answered the binary questions (“Yes, I remember.” – “No, I don’t remember”) with a simple button press of the dualshock 4 controller as the audio input option wasn’t available.
In effort to remember that fateful night, I jump into a memory sequence and find myself standing in a supply closet looking through wooden slats. A man is searching for me and shouting. Peering through the slats, I see that where his face should be is a blurry, unrecognizable mess. The faceless man is brandishing a strange flashlight in his hand, shouting frantically. I can’t move. He flings the door open and blinds me with the light, and suddenly I’m back in the strange chair with the fatherly Bragg.
Talking some more with the remarkably human-looking Bragg, I jump back and forth between the same memory sequence in search of more relevant details before he sedates me with a syringe and I’m carted off to my room by an orderly. I think I was wearing a doctor’s coat in the memory.
image courtesy Supermassive Games
Now I’m in my room, seemingly ripped straight from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). I chat with the orderly a bit, a man with a kind face and an easygoing attitude. He suggests I take a nap and I oblige. And that’s when things get weird – well, weirder. I appear in a rotting corridor, not unlike the Sanatorium. A ghostly version of the orderly beckons me down the corridor, disappearing and reappearing within inches of my face (read: jump scare). Concluding the demo, I was faced with a fork in the nightmarish hall: follow the orderly from hell, or a strange deer-human chimera. Flipping a mental coin, I chase the deer-person and am immediately captured in a cage. Demo over. Fade to black.
image courtesy Supermassive Games
Visually the game’s characters are extremely lifelike, showing a close attention to detail that was no doubt the result of belabored facial motion capture. Looking into each of their faces, I was left waiting for the uncanny valley to rear its ugly head, for the condescending smiles and eyebrow raises to lag or somehow tell my brain I was seeing clever, albeit imperfect digital puppets. The expectation never quite manifested during my brief time with The Inpatient demo.
Despite the intensely human-like character animations and excellent voice acting, I felt there were some slight issues with scale during the demo. I’m not a giant person, but looking down at myself and at the characters in front of me, I felt a twinge of regret that the game was fumbling somewhat on the immersion factor by making everyone a little bigger than real life would have them, something I found apparent when Bragg got up good and close to me.
Since it was only a 10-15 minute demo, I can’t say for sure how robust the dialogue system really is and how much affect you have on the world. Supermassive maintains that the full game will allow you to navigate different branches of the narrative and even experience different endings, something I’ll be looking forward to in the full review hopefully sometime soon.
No release date has been established for The Inpatient, but we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled in the meantime.
Now that E3 is in full swing, we had a chance to get our hands on the newly announced third-person action-adventure game Moss, a title for PSVR from Polyarc Games that follows the adorable but fierce little sword-wielding mouse Quill.
Seated in a great library with vaulted ceilings, a closed book is placed before me on ancient-looking writing bench, the sort you’d see propping up Harry Potter’s spellbooks. Inscribed with the word ‘Moss’, I physically reached for the book’s cover with my dualshock 4 controller, using it to manipulate the cover of the antique book. I thumb through the pages, which are covered in pictures introducing the universe called ‘Moss’ and enter the game.
image courtesy Polyarc
I’m suddenly bathed in white light and transported into a dense forest dotted with mushrooms, ferns, and the occasional lazy insect. There’s a rustle in the bush. It’s Quill, the 3-inch tall mouse, carefully checking to see if the coast is clear.
image courtesy Polyarc
Now I’m not the type of person who gushes when confronted with a cartoon mouse (no matter how cute), but the connection I made with the little creature, who was strapped with a tiny sword reminiscent of Bilbo/Frodo’s little dagger-sized elven sword Sting, was nearly immediate. She walks up to me apprehensively, and motions for me to look down at the puddle of water below. Looking into the reflection, my face is revealed, a mask glowing an ethereal blue. My gamepad also glows in the virtual world, emitting a blue orb to tell me where it is. Quill waves at me to come along with her on the great adventure ahead.
image courtesy Polyarc
The demo I played lasted about 15 minutes, covering around 5 puzzle-laden areas which led through the forest and to some sort of ancient fortress or temple. Each area had an interactive item that you had to physically move with your dualshock gamepad in order to progress, like a door, a box or rotating stairway.
image courtesy Polyarc
These interactive items weren’t at first obvious, as they only shimmer with a blue light when you’re close to them. Iterations range from physically pulling out a glowing blue block so little Quill can jump up to the next level, to plucking enemies from the ground below and placing them on pressure pads to make some stairway-machine open up and turn.
Along the way I was confronted with mechanical beetles, which were about the size of Quill. Striking with the sword and destroying the beetles was accomplished through a single button press, which made combat feel like it was taking a back seat, although the developers are couching Moss as an action-adventure game and not an action-puzzle game, the difference being the amount of and level of difficulty combat expected. Either way, I didn’t have the heart to let little Quill die during my time with Moss, but I can bet I would have felt pretty bad about it.
image courtesy Polyarc
The demo ended just as I entered the dark lair of a giant snake, who I presumably would have to battle in the full game. Going by the game’s high level of visual adeptness, the quick emotional relationship I created with Quill, and a cool interactive adventure, I’m definitely looking forward to playing more of Moss.
Polyarc is shooting for a holiday 2017 release, stating roughly 3 hours of gameplay. As a potentially expandable world, the developers told us that there may be more games from the Moss universe to come.
Archangel is an upcoming single-player shooter from Skydance Interactive that puts you in the cockpit of a 6-story mech, enlisting you into the resistance forces to battle an evil corporation now rampant in post-apocalyptic USA. Check out the new trailer here.
Selected by the United States Free Forces to pilot a one-of-a-kind mech, you lead your squadron into battle against HUMNX, a private conglomerate that’s taken the reigns of power in absence of the now disbanded US government. Using motion controls, Archangel lets you shoot an array of high-powered weapons, or even use your physicality to punch a plane from the sky while shooting away with the other.
Archangel launches in July for an exclusive two-week window on PlayStation VR before releasing on HTC Vive and Oculus Rift via Steam and Viveport.
Demoing the game at GDC 2017 in March, we can say that Archangel’s is technically an ‘on-rails’ shooter, meaning you don’t get to freely control the mech’s locomotion. Visuals were immersive, and the task of shooting wave after wave of buzzing drones and massive tanks that scramble around as you make your way through the story was certainly a tall order to fill.
Skydance Interactive, launched in 2016, is a division of Skydance Media. The company creates and publish original and IP-based virtual reality experiences and video games. In 2017, Skydance Interactive will debut Archangel, representing its first original title.
