Polished new VR shooter, After The Fall, is coming to PSVR.
The news was confirmed during Sony’s State of Play livestream today. The game will be arriving on the headset in 2020. So far we’d only seen the game confirmed for Oculus Rift, so it’s good to see it confirmed for other platforms. That said, it’s not confirmed if it will come to PC and PSVR on the same day.
After The Fall is set in an alternate history in which a second ice age has overcome the Earth. A race of zombie-like enemies has emerged and, as one of humanity’s few survivors, you have to fight your way through overwhelming hordes. It features up to four play co-op.
We initially announced the game during our E3 VR Showcase back in June. It features incredible visuals, though we’re yet to see what truly makes it shine. At the very least it will offer a persistent hub of VR shooter action, with a full campaign and the promise of end game content too.
“Just how far this promise goes remains to be seen, but it’s big enough that Vertigo is taking sign-ups for a beta,” we said in our preview. “If the studio successfully establishes the game as a long-term hub for persistent VR action, I can see After The Fall being a big deal for a community that’s constantly pining for long-form content.”
This isn’t Vertigo’s only news of the day. Earlier on, the studio confirmed that its next DLC for zombie shooter Arizona Sunshine, The Damned, will be launching on PC VR and PSVR next week. Plus we’re still waiting for that game to hit Oculus Quest.
For the first time in several years, Oculus returned to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 with a massive stand filled with Oculus Quests and Oculus Rift S’s. On hand were some of the biggest titles due for the headsets including Lone Echo II and Asgard’s Wrath. Vertigo Games was there to showcase an early look at its newly revealed title After the Fall and VRFocus took some time to learn more about the project from one of the designers, Nick Witsel.
Vertigo Games is best known for its virtual reality (VR) zombie shooter Arizona Sunshine (among others), so the studio has taken what it knows and upped the ante with better visuals, bosses, and a wintery Los Angeles for After the Fall. In this post-apocalyptic adventure, humanity has ravaged the environment to the point where the planet is a snow-covered disaster, and to cope everyone decided to do loads of designer drugs. And just like any good horror story, this in turn hideously mutated almost everyone into undead monsters.
So After the Fall is an action-packed first-person shooter (FPS) which is all about surviving by killing anything in your way with a selection of melee and ranged weaponry. These can then be upgraded by picking up all the loot dropped by enemies. The core story campaign can be played solo, but the final experience will have options for a full four-player co-op experience.
VRFocuspreviewed After the Fall at E3 2019 and found that while this early demo was slick and had plenty of arcade action it didn’t always play to VR’s strengths, possibly falling into a generic shooter class if not too careful. It’s still early days for the project and one that’s certainly in good hands.
Naturally, VRFocus wanted to learn more with After the Fall Level Designer Nick Witsel on hand to answer a few questions. Check out the video interview below to see what he said about development and Vertigo Games’ plans for the videogame. As always, keep reading VRFocus for all the latest VR news, and for more E3 2019 previews like this one for Penn & Teller VR.
For those after a zombie-themed first-person shooter (FPS) in virtual reality (VR) one of the most popular has to be Vertigo Games’ Arizona Sunshine which has found its way to numerous headsets over the past couple of years. Now the studio is looking to replicate that success with another FPS involving the undead, After the Fall which was revealed during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 last week.
Mankind has once again completely screwed things over, so in After the Fall society has collapsed due to the love of designer drugs, and of course, the environment has also suffered. So rather than a hot arid Arizona desert, you’re now in the remains of Los Angeles, completely covered in snow.
Vertigo Games really aren’t playing with the formula too much when it comes to gameplay, with After the Fall treading familiar ground as an all-out zombie shooter. It’s all about popping heads and collecting supplies, with the E3 demo offering a taste of the co-op by adding in a second player – the final version will allow up to four.
Unlike some VR FPS titles like Blood & Truth which seek to immerse players further through the use of interactive elements such as manual reloading of weapons, or backpacks with inventory slots, After the Fall has none of these. It feels very much like an arcade-style experience where you don’t need to worry about these real-world mechanics and purely enjoy the carnage.
This is fine if you want a no-brain shooter, or are in fact in a VR Arcade and want 30 minutes of intense battles. Home users, on the other hand, may find it a little shallow, and possibly not as immersive as other titles. Now, this may be counteracted by things such as the upgrade system (which wasn’t shown) as killing vast amounts of zombies means a great deal of loot to pick up. Touching on the VR interaction again, all of this loot can simply be grabbed magnetically from a distance which does tend to go against the grain of roomscale VR, where you can pick up everything with your hands.
When it came to weapons After the Fall had a mixture on show from pistols and SMG’s to a rather nifty little rocket launcher. Upgrades could be added on the fly to tweak them mid-game but on average they were the usual affair. The wrist-mounted rocket launcher provided the only novel gameplay change, able to lock-on to five zombies at a time when the hordes get a little too much.
After the Fall’s most striking feature at this was most certainly its visuals. These offer a much richer (and prettier) environment to explore, with the decrepit snow filled buildings evoking a proper nuclear winter feel – similar to the outdoor scenes in the Metro series.
Having only been revealed a week ago Vertigo Games has some way to go until After the Fall is finished. In its current form After the Fall is a nice generic shooter that would be home on VR as well as non-VR systems. The gameplay is slick, fast and in your face, which tends to mean a certain nuance is missing. Snow zombies are all well and good but there needs to be more, Vertigo Games has the talent, hopefully, it can deliver.
After the Fall is an upcoming co-op VR zombie shooter that promises to let groups of up to four players battle for survival within a zombie infested landscape. Revealed last week at E3 2019, the game’s first demo offered visual polish underscored by bland gameplay that isn’t playing to VR’s strengths.
Let’s say this up front: After the Fall was only just revealed last week, and the game isn’t due out until sometime in 2020, so it’s likely changes between now and then. It’s also worth noting that in the demo I played at the Oculus booth last week I was only playing with one other player, and the demo didn’t show any of the “seamless multiplayer” that developer Vertigo Games says will be a cornerstone of the game. That said, based on my experience with the demo, I’m hoping to see some significant changes to the core game design that better player to VR’s strengths.
Great VR experiences are all about immersion—a sense of being in the world, not just seeing it and hearing it. But that doesn’t happen just because a player is wearing a headset—it’s the means of interacting with the virtual world that creates the kind of immersion that only VR is capable of. In this regard, After the Fall is doing a lot wrong right out of the gate for immersion; it seems distracted with delivering high-level non-VR gameplay tropes of loot shooters like Borderlands and The Division.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
For one, guns ‘stick’ to your hands as soon a you grab one. As far as I could tell, the demo offered me no way to drop or holster a gun; once I grabbed a pistol, it simply became an extra appendage. When I wanted to reach out to grab items in the environment, my gun was still attached to my hand even though I wanted to pick something up with that hand—even so, the game allowed me to grab the thing I was reaching for by simply making the gun appear in the opposite hand when I hit the ‘grab’ button; when I released the object, the gun re-appeared back in my other hand. This is not only not intuitive, it’s also immersion-breaking.
But that’s fine anyway, because 90% of the generic loot I picked up from the environment (which will be used later as crafting currency for upgrades, etc) just magically flies toward your body after you press the grab button, and when it reaches you it vanishes into an invisible and apparently infinite inventory void. So now we’ve got two different systems for ‘grabbing’ items, some are hands-on (if oddly designed), while the rest is more of a magnetic net where certain objects just disappear into you.
Now, don’t get me wrong, ‘force-grab’ (pulling objects to you from afar) can often be a smart design choice for a VR game so that players don’t need to reach down to pick up objects that fall to the ground. But in After the Fall, force-grab is used not just as a convenience, but as an essential element to not pulling your hair out from the heaps and heaps of loot you’re expected to hoover up into your invisible inventory space. Over the course of just the demo alone, I must have picked up at least 100 individual pieces of loot, and it seems that the game will expect players to pick up thousands more as they grind for gear and unlocks.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
After the Fall treats items like icons or points instead of physical objects that manifest in a virtual world, and it lacks embodiment because of it. It would likely be much more immersive to make loot more valuable and less frequent; instead of picking up hundreds of loot items throughout a level, maybe instead you’d open a few chests or boxes (hopefully with satisfying, hands-on interactions, not point and click) which would contain big caches of the loot at once.
Weapons are similarly symbolic in After the Fall instead of feeling physical and interactive in the way that VR does so well. While many VR games offer an intuitive reloading mechanism where (at a minimum) the player puts a new magazine into the weapon, After the Fall’s weapons reload automatically after the bullets run out… by magic, I guess. This means that while you’re spamming your pistol at groups of incoming zombies, at some point you’ll wait a few seconds while your gun decides to automatically reload itself as your character shouts “reloading!” and then you can start shooting again—all the while your arm is outstretched in a shooting pose just waiting to resume the action.
This ‘automatic magic reload when the bullets run out’ is jarring and doesn’t encourage the player to manage the state of their weapon, which contributes to the blandness of the shooting gameplay (which I’ll talk more about shortly). It’s possible to manually reload with a button press, but again, just pressing a button and watching the gun do its thing by magic feels very anti-immersion, especially considering this is not explained away by context (ie: these are contemporary weapons with bullets & magazines, not sci-fi or anything like that where automatic reloading would make sense).
On the ‘painfully missed opportunity’ front, I was traversing through a decrepit building of the post-apocalyptic variety and came across a series of cables dangling from the ceiling right near my head. As I naturally went to see if I could push one of the cables out of my way with the barrel of my pistol, I watched as it clipped perfectly through the gun. A tiny little bit of physics here would have made a simple but delightfully embodying moment, but instead the reality of this world was revealed to be paper thin in an instant. The better choice—if not some physics for the cable—would be to simply not put things that look like they can be touched, pushed, or grabbed, within reach of the player.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
So, interactions aside, this is a zombie shooter. The game’s basic zombies are of the medium speed variety and most go down with one shot to the head. The game throws reasonably large groups of zombies at you, maybe 20 or so at a time. But without even the baseline of VR weapon interactions (like manual reloading), it’s really just a point and click affair. By the time I killed my 20th zombie, I may as well have killed them all—with copious ammo and a gun in each hand, there’s just zero sense of threat or joy in taking down one zombie after another after another by putting one bullet in each head. Even after finding this odd miniature-hand-mounted-zombie-seeking-missile-launcher weapon—which could lock on to five or so zombies at once before launching a salvo of mini-explosives—I wasn’t having any more fun killing these bland enemies.
Beyond the basic zombies I was introduced to, there was one other zombie type in the demo which was the ‘vomit’ variety that could spray you from a distance. Again though, fighting these guys was uninteresting at best—just shuffle around a bit to dodge the vomit while you keep holding your arms in their direction and pulling your triggers until they go bye-bye. Again—and I’m just riffing here—how interesting might it be if instead they spat some sticky goop that would lock you in place and prevent you from moving such that you had to physically dodge their vomit with your real body until you can dispatch them? This would make them a much more interesting threat and present an opportunity for some gameplay that feels truly native to VR.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
The boss at the end of the demo was a big snowy zombie monster which formed the basis of an encounter that seemed poorly directed. Lots of the basic zombies were shuffling in from all directions while the faster boss zombie could close distance quickly by leaping in my direction. When it got in close it did a ground-pound attack and got its hand stuck in the ground opening up an opportunity to shoot a weak spot for a few seconds, otherwise it was a bullet-sponge affair. Battling this boss was really just a matter of moving around with a stick while holding my arms out and constantly pulling the trigger, allowing my guns to reload automatically, and continuing to shoot. Keeping the basic zombies at bay throughout might have made this more interesting if the mini missile launcher didn’t make them so easy to dispatch.
After the Fall has a long way to go if the developers want to deliver gameplay that feels native to VR, and I hope they do. The only thing the game really seems to have going for it is some pretty darn good visuals (a big upgrade from the studio’s previous title, Arizona Sunshine). Right now it almost feels like Vertigo Games is designing After the Fall to work on flat screens too—maybe they have ambitions to release a non-VR version of the game? Being overtly distracted with high-level non-VR game design goals that evoke the non-VR loot shooters is a sure-fire way to end up with a VR game that feels like a port, and Borderlands 2 VR already has that covered.
Arizona Sunshine wouldn’t have been my personal pick for our 2016 Game of the Year award, but I can see why we landed on that decision. Though time has proven Superhot VR to be the more significant of the two, Arizona delivered on the virtual zombie apocalypse dream with a meaty, straight-laced campaign and popular wave-based survival mode. It resembled a ‘full’ game at a time VR was sorely lacking them.
Time’s moved on, though, and VR has grown. Without a flagship shooter release since 2016, has Vertigo grown with it?
Logistically, After The Fall suggests it has. Vertigo’s latest ‘basically zombie’ shooter expands in all the right ways on paper; there’s a full campaign that can be enjoyed either by yourself or with up to three friends. It is, essentially, VR’s equivalent of Left4Dead, swapping out Turtle Rock’s dark, dank take on a Pennsylvania outbreak for a slightly zanier alternate history. A second ice age ripped through Los Angeles in the 1980’s. By 2005, many a poor soul mutated into brainless ‘Snowbreed’ and survivors band together for the best chance of, well, remaining survivors.
Vertigo’s pitch is a shooter specced out to the standards of modern console games, squeezed into VR headsets. The usual trends like loot and crafting systems find a home here, as does an arsenal of customizable guns and melee weapons. Take out the last of a pack of Snowbreed and the world will momentarily slow to a crawl to let you marvel at the bloodshed. If you’d have told me this was, say, Ubisoft or Activision’s vision of the shooter formula applied to VR, I’d have believed you, impressive production values and all.
There’s familiar fun to be had, then. I shoot my way through a crumbling building with another player. We make short work of the hordes of enemies, but they pour in in overwhelming numbers. There’s no denying After The Fall is an impressive technical showcase for VR; I often couldn’t fire fast enough to keep up with the incoming swarms. Bravado often informs tactics; it probably doesn’t make sense to swap a pistol for a spiked baseball bat close in on enemies, but it definitely delights to bat their heads away as if you’re some bizarre mix of Rick Grimes and Novak Djokovic.
Scarier than the Snowbreed, though, is the creeping suspicion that this might all a bit too by the numbers. In 2019, my VR zombie kill count is probably starting to rival my same tally for traditional games (not that I’m counting or anything). After The Fall is certainly answering the call (rhyming pun not intended) for the robust VR shooter, but I’m more interested in seeing what Vertigo does to offset zombie fatigue at the game’s launch in 2020.
My demo does provide a few hints. After The Fall has special weapons, the first of which shows wonderful invention. Riffing on the game’s setting, in which technological advances came swiftly to a halt, I discover a wrist-mounted cassette player that launches a fleet of homing missiles in the direction of huge groups of Snowbreed. It’s conveniently placed just before the numbers really start swelling, but provides a welcome bit of tactical tension as you decide when to unleash a payload. Make your move too early and you’ll have to fend for yourself as you wait for it to recharge. Vertigo says another weapon lets you manipulate Snowbreed yourself, and there are glimpses of some super-charged melee weaponry. This might be where After The Fall finds a closer connection to VR, with weapons designed specifically around the medium.
There’s also the promise of tougher types of Snowbreed. My demo culminates in a boss battle with an enormous brute that trades his attention between myself and my companion. It suggests that the tougher After The Fall gets, the better it will be (I don’t think I took more than a few scratches in the entire demo up until that point). I can see a more vicious version of this demo being an absolute thrill ride, for example.
A bigger curiosity, though, is the game’s online element, which I suspect could be the standout component. Vertigo describes the game as a ‘shared-world’ with endgame content. The game’s website says once the campaign is done you’ll still have “a living world full of events, missions and blood-pumping encounters” to explore.
Just how far this promise goes remains to be seen, but it’s big enough that Vertigo is taking sign-ups for a beta. If the studio successfully establishes the game as a long-term hub for persistent VR action, I can see After The Fall being a big deal for a community that’s constantly pining for long-form content. Competitive multiplayer aside, there’s a lack of ‘go to’ VR games out there right now. Vertigo may just ensure this is one that stays installed on your hard drive for some time to come.
For now, though, this is enough. I’m waiting to see a brighter spark from After The Fall, but the prospect of getting three friends together and shooting our way through the campaign is a welcome one.
It’s time for the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) once again, and Vertigo Games, the studio behind popular titles such as Arizona Sunshineand Skyworld, has announced its latest virtual reality (VR) project. Currently in production is After the Fall, a multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.
Taking what the team has learnt with Arizona Sunshine and turning it up a notch, After the Fall allows for single and co-operative play for up to four players.
“Set in the ice-covered ruins of LA nearly 20 years after the apocalypse. A generation has passed since a mysterious outbreak caused by the excessive use of designer drugs birthed the terrible Snowbreed, infesting our cities and collapsing civilization. You, one of the survivors seemingly immune to the side-effects of the substances, are humanity’s last hope of resurgence,” explains the story synopsis.
Players will be able to explore an LA trapped in an alternate 1980s, scavenging whatever remains to craft a range of deadly ranged and melee weapons to fight against the different hordes of Snowbreed’s. Specials will test those skills while awe-inspiring bosses will provide a monstrous challenge. And it’s not just weapons you can build, armour and other gear can be upgraded and modded to ensure survival in the snow-covered landscape.
Built to make the most of VR, After the Fall is a living, breathing virtual world to be shared with players from all over the world. Featuring a story-driven campaign, once completed players will be able to return and venture back out into a city full of events, missions, and more blood-pumping encounters.
Vertigo Games hasn’t confirmed which headsets will be supported at the moment, although just like its previous titles and because of the co-op gameplay, expect most high-end devices to be compatible. Additionally, the studio has yet to confirm a release date for the videogame. Don’t forget that Arizona Sunshine will be getting new DLC called The Damned this summer
VRFocus will be at E3 2019 all week to bring you the latest updates and announcements from the prestigious gaming event. And as further details regard After the Fall are released, we’ll let you know.
After The Fall is the next big VR title from Vertigo Games, the developer of Arizona Sunshine.
The game was just revealed on our E3 VR Showcase, where members of Vertigo joined us to give more details. Like Arizona before it, After The Fall is a first-person shooter with cooperative multiplayer support. Unlike its original zombie killer, though, Vertigo’s latest has you fighting back monsters named the Snowbreed in the frozen wastes of an alternate history Los Angeles.
Check out the first trailer right here. No gameplay for now, but fans of Arizona Sunshine should feel right at home with this tease. We have a few screenshots below too.
A new ice age has taken Earth by blizzard, with much of the population mutating into twisted Snowbreed. Players can either team up with friends or go out on missions by themselves, tackling hordes of enemies with upgradable guns, melee weapons and special powers. Over the course of levels, you’ll gather loot, spend resources at workbenches and tackle massive bosses. Think of it a little like VR’s answer to Left4Dead. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
When off-mission you’ll busy yourself in a hub world with other players. You can meet up with friends there or make new ones. Crucially, Vertigo is promising an expansive endgame component to the game, with evolving missions that give you reasons to keep coming back.
Interested in giving it at try? Head to the game’s official website, where you can sign up for a beta.
After The Fall will be coming to major VR headsets sometime next year. Sadly we don’t have more specifics beyond that right now. As for our E3 VR Showcase? We’ve got plenty more announcements to check out!
