Australia-based Studio Alta, the developer behind A Township Tale, today announced it has raised a $12.4 million seed investment to expand its studio and accelerate development of the game.
Studio Alta had been quietly developing its brilliant co-op focused VR game A Township Tale for years on PC as a small indie team. Though it was loved by many who played it, the title remained something of a sleeper, likely due in part to the fact that the studio has only ever distributed it independently rather than through storefronts like SteamVR or Oculus PC.
Through an impressive effort the studio managed to port A Township Tale to Quest where it seems the game has found the right conditions to thrive. The studio says the game spent “seven weeks at #1 on the Oculus charts” and “produced historical engagement metrics for the platform […]” at its debut.
And it would seem investors took notice. The studio today announced it has raised a $12.4 million seed round… and not just from any old investors either; the round was co-led by Makers Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, the latter being a well known name in the venture capital space—with nearly $20 billion in assets under management—and an early investor in Oculus. The round also saw participation by Pioneer Fund, Boost VC, muru-D, and Thomas Rice.
Image courtesy Alta
Alta says it plans to use the funds to “further develop proprietary content and IP, expand the team, and position the game for new platforms.”
“Alta started out with a single quest: to create worlds that bring people together,” said Tima Anoshechkin, CEO and co-founder of Alta. “This funding helps us expand that vision beyond just growing our flagship game, and allows us to expand the team, create new opportunities and partnerships to collaborate with, and continue to develop world-class technology whether with VR or other platforms. Whenever and wherever you are playing, our experience will always be engaging, seamless and fun.”
Road to VR further spoke with Anoshechkin in to learn more about the studio’s priorities and aim for the future, including a hint that the game could come to PSVR or PSVR 2.
Q: What’s the biggest focus for A Township Tale development in 2022?
A: We have accumulated a lot of technical debt. The goal is to clean everything up, so we can release features faster to the community and bring A Township Tale to as many platforms as possible. Also we are really focusing on onboarding experience and explaining the game to the new players in a very friendly way.
Q: What’s the long-term vision for A Township Tale?
A: Our long term vision to create a unique experience where there is always reason for players to stay. I don’t like to use metaverse as much, but if we can deliver a unique world experience to each user that they have agency over, can share with their friends and visit their friend’s world seamlessly that would be a worthwhile goal to build towards.
Q: What’s the long term plan for the studio (plan to work on multiple projects or focus solely on A Township Tale)?
A: For now focus is solely on A Township Tale.
Q: What can you tell me about the game’s reception on Quest?
A: We can’t share many metrics as we in preparation for our next round, but studio is cash flow positive and definitely there is enough users in VR space to support mid size studios.
Q: How large is the studio?
A: More than two-dozen and growing. We can’t provide exact number, as a lot of people have joined, but still in on-boarding phase or just waiting for their notice periods to end. But studio tripled in size since the game launch.
Q: Do you expect A Township Tale to come to PSVR / PSVR 2?
A: We would love to.
Q: What are you long-term plans for in-app purchases (IAP) in A Township Tale?
A: We are pretty much open to everything as long as the game is not P2W and our community is on board with IAP strategy.
Q: What’s the most surprising/interesting thing you’ve seen players do in A Township Tale?
A: I am still surprised by number of people in VR ecosystem that only have mobile and Quest devices. As a result it really forces you to re-examine how games are build and how to onboard players. For a lot of this people Quest is their first high end gaming device, which is mind boggling to me.
Alongside the announcement Alta says it is actively hiring. While it will take time for the studio to ramp up, we’d expect updates to A Township Tale to expand in scope going forward. The Quest version is missing some major parts of the game compared to the PC version, so there’s some catching up to do before genuine progress is made to move both versions forward. The studio has also said previously that it hopes to add cross-play support with PC players eventually.
Every weekend VRFocus gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) industry, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hub to check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Every weekend VRFocus gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) industry, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hub to check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
When it comes to the sheer amount of content available, being able to sink hours and hours into a videogame, Alta’s recent release of A Township Tale for Oculus Quest is hard to beat. It’s all about building and exploring your own world with friends and this weekend VRFocus is giving you a chance to win a copy for yourself.
A Township Tale gives you your own virtual server where you and up to seven others can team up, master professions and then go on adventures together. You can choose to become a blacksmith, woodcutter, miner, archer or warrior, each vital to the ecosystem as you recover crafting materials to make new equipment and improve your gear.
You can try by yourself but there’s so much to do and explore that bringing a few friends along for the ride makes it a whole lot easier. From chopping wood, mining the caves or cooking up new recipes, there’s plenty to learn, all of which require vital resources, some of which are in dangerous locations. And it’s all highly interactive, whether you’re lighting a fire or making a backpack, there’s no automation here.
In VRFocus’first impression of this massive videogame: “It’s an impressive achievement getting this massive open-world to work on Oculus Quest considering its hardware limitations. There are no loading sequences that I could find, run into a fort or go explore some dark and dingy caves and it’s all smooth and effortless, making A Township Tale truly feel immersive.”
So onto the competition. VRFocus has several Oculus Quest codes for A Township Tale to giveaway. There are multiple ways to enter the giveaway with the standard prize draw entry rules applying: Follow us (or already be following us) on Twitter (@VRFocus) or alternatively, visit our Facebook page or YouTube channel to get an entry for each. The competition will be open until 11.59 pm BST on Monday, 2nd August 2021. The draw will be made shortly thereafter. Best of luck.
Having already spent a week with Alta’s A Township Tale for Oculus Quest it became clear that this was nowhere near enough time to actually review this open-world adventure. Originally brought to PC in 2019, if I’d played this version of A Township Tale then I would’ve had a better understanding. Instead, I stepped into A Township Tale fresh and naive that I’d be able to see most of what it had to offer prior to launch and give a definitive answer. What I can say most assuredly, if you’re looking for a huge, brand new Oculus Quest videogame to play with friends then this is most certainly it.
If you’re already acquainted with the PC edition of A Township Tale or have been closely following its development, all the core functionality and gameplay has been brought over to Oculus Quest. Every player can start their own virtual server (private or open), get invited to another or simply join an already open server. These are their own individual worlds, so any progress made stays with them, hence why it’s a good idea to start your own with a few friends to nurture. Because you’ll need them, there’s a lot of ground to cover and jobs to do – unless you’re a glutton for multitasking.
And I’m not lying when I say you’ve got plenty to keep yourself busy. A Township Tale is built around collaboration as each server can support up to eight players so you can build a merry town. All the marketing blurb focuses on each player choosing a profession which they then have to stick to, every one providing vital services to progress the groups’ goal. In reality, this is only partially correct. You can if you so choose become a Blacksmith or a Woodcutter, or decide that you want to be a warrior fighting through monster-filled woods. It is quite easy to be a bit of everything, learning the various crafts so you know how to forge a weapon or cook a tasty meal.
That’s certainly the case if you don’t have a full contingent, becoming even more daunting if you decide to start a game all by yourself. And this is exactly what I did, thinking “how hard can this be?” as I wandered around the derelict town for the first time. Hard wasn’t really the correct description either, it was more “what the f**k do I do and where do I go?” A Township Tale gives you almost complete freedom to do that, with almost no handholding whatsoever. There’s a tutorial which in itself isn’t exactly straight forward and once you’re through that, satchel in hand, you’re off to build a brave new world.
Like any videogame of this ilk, you’re going to stumble around for a bit as you find your bearings. There are basic challenges to help give you direction and books which do kind of detail some of the mechanics but there’s certainly plenty of trial and error. This is why it’s best to bring at least one buddy along so you can all figure some of this stuff out. Brazenly, after felling a couple of chicken/dodo type creatures wandering around the town we thought it would be a good idea to explore farther afield, get the lay of the land so to speak. We so weren’t ready.
Whilst there’s plenty to do in and around the town, collecting useful resources such as food or various rocks and ores, there’s a big world to explore and it’s dangerous. Danger is good, danger is exciting unless of course you dive into your first fight with nothing more than a piece of flint strapped to a stick. In which case, death is almost certain, and with the hunger level low, the option to run away suddenly wasn’t there. Then, in a very Dark Souls kinda way, I returned to the town minus one backpack full of useful items I’d collected, so you know exactly what happened next.
Thus it would be nice to get back and suddenly find one of your mates has been finessing their blacksmithing skills and created a new weapon or maybe someone else has cooked up a hearty broth to soothe those bones, all possible in A Township Tale.
It’s an impressive achievement getting this massive open-world to work on Oculus Quest considering its hardware limitations. There are no loading sequences that I could find, run into a fort or go explore some dark and dingy caves and it’s all smooth and effortless, making A Township Tale truly feel immersive. However, sacrifices have had to be made to ensure this velvety effortlessness. As VRFocus previously reported when Alta released a comparison video between the PC VR and Oculus Quest versions, massive amounts of detail have been scrapped, especially at a distance. If you’re expecting a beautiful landscape when you get to the top of a hill, don’t, the videogame is best appreciated at closer range. Even then, buildings, trees, animals will all popinto view. That’s the price you pay for wireless, standalone freedom.
Even with these visual issues – and a few other annoying quirks – the time that I’ve spent with A Township Tale has been a blast, just mucking around working shit out. And not once have I been bored, even strolling around the town at night lighting all the torches was a simple joy, seeing the flames flicker away. As mentioned, I do need to spend more time digging into A Township Tale and its various mechanics to provide a proper review. Priced at $9.99 USD, from what I’ve seen so far A Township Tale is an absolute bargain on Oculus Quest.
MMO-like A Township Tale has been available on PC VR for a few years now, but today’s launch on Quest opens the game up to a whole new audience. With support for up to eight simultaneous players and immersive interactions at its core, there’s nothing else quite like A Township Tale out there.
A Township Tale Details:
Available On: Oculus Quest & PC VR
Price: $10 (Quest), Free (PC) Cross-play: No (planned for future)
Developer: Alta Release Date: July 15th, 2021 Reviewed On: Quest 2
A Township Tale is free-to-play on PC but costs $10 on Quest. However, the Quest version includes 1,000 Talems (the in-game currency for premium cosmetics) and the ability to run your own server (which on PC costs $10 per month).
Gameplay
On its face, Township Tale is a game about finding an abandoned town and working together with friends to fix it up and create a functional community. Along the way there’s tons to explore and discover. Not just the world around the town, but the game’s breadth of mechanics and professions like cooking, mining, blacksmithing, carpentry, and more.
Image courtesy Alta
Township Tale is very open-ended; there is no explicit story or quest structure. The game starts you off with a tutorial of the absolute basics. It’s up to you—and your compatriots—to figure out the rest. At its best, discovering how the world works is a blast. Every time you find a new item, area, or learn how to make something new, it feels like the world is expanding before your eyes.
While some parts of the game—thanks to fairly intuitive immersive designs—offer that thrill, other parts can feel obtuse and frustrating. Players who are not patient and persistent will likely tire of Township Tale quickly for this reason. And while you could certainly opt to look everything up in the official Wiki, discovering it together is really the heart of the game.
Whether or not you have friends to share in the highs and lows of discovery and adventure will likely play a significant role in your enjoyment of the game. While any number of players can ‘belong’ to a server, up to eight can be connected at once on Quest. Cross-play with PC isn’t supported, but developer Alta says it expects to add this in the future.
Township Tale’s avatar system has great customization thanks to a wide range of options, including the ability to pick the color (and often secondary color) of pretty much anything you can customize on your character. Figuring out how to save your avatar and apply it before joining a server can be pretty confusing on the first run, but it works pretty well once you understand it, and supports 10 different avatar outfits which you can swap between.
While Township Tale might be missing the ‘massive’ part of ‘massively multiplayer online’ (MMO), it definitely has that MMO-like feel of adventuring around a persistent world that everyone is contributing to. I can’t imagine playing the game solo (nor would I recommend it); there’s a ton to do and a lot to learn; you’re going to want some friends to share the load, otherwise much of the game could feel like a tiresome grind.
While there’s also lands to explore and enemies to slay, Township Tale’s crafting professions really steal the spotlight. Gathering resources to build things is usually the motivating force behind what you decide to do in the game.
If you want to make a sword, for instance, you’ll need to mine ore. To mine ore you’ll need to make a pickaxe. To make a pickaxe you’ll need to learn carpentry to make a handle. To make a handle you’ll need wood. To get wood you need to chop down trees. Etc.
While the lack of tutorialization can be frustrating at times, it encourages communal knowledge transmission that often plays out much like a master & apprentice. This is supported by the game’s rich player-to-player interactions (covered in more detail in the Immersion section).
As you get more experienced with the game’s various professions, you’ll be able to become even more specialized in that profession by learning new skills at special shrines hidden throughout the world. I don’t want to get too deep into all the skills—after all, discovery is one of the most fun parts of Township Tale—but learning these skills feels like a direct sense of progression in the game, and a reflection of the role you’ve chosen to take.
While out looking for resources, you’re likely to come across enemies. Unfortunately combat in Township Tale is perhaps the game’s weakest component. It feels very ‘first-gen’ in terms of VR combat; which is to say it’s largely an awkward affair due to enemies hardly responding to your hits and there being little room for strategy beyond ‘hit them until they die’.
This is a bummer considering the range of player-made weapons available in the game. There’s bows, swords, axes, spears, daggers, maces, throwing knives, dynamite, and even a slingshot.
And, thanks to the flexible crafting system, you can build interesting variations on those weapons. For instance you could easily whip up a halberd (a spear & axe combo) by combining a side-facing axe head and a top-facing spear tip onto a long handle. Or you could make a double-ended polearm, a battle axe, or an axe-hammer. Hell, you could even make a flaming torch-axe.
Like the professions, the ‘town’ of Township Tale has a surprising amount of depth to it. At the start most buildings will be in some state of disrepair and you’ll need to gather resources to build them up to their full potential. Eventually you’ll find your own personal lockbox and bank where you can store valuable items and coins that only you can access. There’s even vending machines in town which you can use to sell items to other players when you aren’t around. You put in your inventory, pick the price, and then collect the earnings when you get back.
Image courtesy Alta
Any time you sign onto Township Tale it feels like there’s 20 things you could be doing. Because it’s so open-ended, your enjoyment of the game will be very reliant on having friends to play with regularly, and your ability to focus on one objective (ie: gather ore to make a weapon or upgrade a building) and work diligently toward it without getting sidetracked. The game can feel like ‘work’ at times, given how long it can take to accomplish larger goals, so pick your objectives carefully.
Township Tale doesn’t have an explicit ending, so there’s no amount of time that constitutes the ‘end’ of the game. Your progression will be heavily dependent on whether you choose to look up information and whether or not you’re learning from seasoned players or learning everything as you go.
I’ve played the game for more than 10 hours and haven’t looked up anything or played with experienced players; even at this point it feels like there’s tons more for me to discover and craft. But I’ve gotten a strong feeling for the foundation of the game and where the core fun lies. There is some end-game-ish content, but it isn’t in the Quest version of the game at launch.
Immersion
Immersive player-to-player interactions in Township Tale make for a certain kind of social VR magic that’s hard to come by elsewhere. Nearly every interactive object in the game is physics-driven and networked between players. This means you can hand items to others, work together while crafting, fighting, managing inventory, etc.
There’s something special about holding out a torch toward your friend while they spark it alight by clacking two flint together before getting out their own torch to light it from yours.
This kind of cooperation is really where Township Tale shines, and opportunities for it are abound, especially in crafting. Blacksmithing, for instance, is a multi-step process that involves different tools and resources. Tossing a bag of coal to your friend and asking them to load it into the furnace while you load the ore into the hopper feels entirely natural thanks to the immersive crafting design.
You’ll likely find yourself asking your friend to hand you a tool or hold something for you while your hands are full doing something else. The game’s interactive and cooperative nature opens opportunities for benevolent helpfulness (or trolling, depending upon which kind of friends you have) and resource sharing which aren’t possible in some other games due to limitations in cross-player item interactivity.
This is all underpinned by an inventory system which, while frustrating at times, is smartly designed for immersion and usability.
On your back you’ve got a backpack with a handful of item slots and four additional item slots around your belt. If you have spare room in your backpack, you can put items over your shoulder and they’ll drop into an open slot. Or you can pull your pack off of your back to see everything inside and move things between your belt and backpack.
The developers have also came up with a smart system for handling ‘stacks’ of items. By default if you pull and item out of a stack of items, you’ll just grab a single item. But if you hold the grab button over the stack for a moment it will turn into a ‘pouch’ which holds all of the items in the stack. This makes it easy to move large stacks of items around your inventory, to other players, or into storage.
You can easily pull individual items out of pouches, or long-hold to split the pouch in half, with one half in each hand; using the thumbstick you can transfer items between pouches to change the stack sizes. It’s a smart, flexible system which makes working with large stacks of items easy and intuitive.
And, as with the rest of the game, your inventory and backpack are interactive between everyone. It isn’t yourcharacter’s backpack; it’s just a backpack you happen to be wearing. If you took it off and left it sitting in the woods, another player could come along and pick it up, loot your entire inventory, or take the entire backpack with them. Luckily people can’t steal items if you’re wearing the pack, but if you hold it out to them they can even place items into it for you (great when your hands a full!).
While there’s a lot of immersion that comes from this level of player-to-player interactivity, there’s an undercurrent of jankiness that tempers the overall level of immersion in Township Tale.
Object physics can sometimes be spotty, with items jumping about under the influence of invisible forces when dropped. Grabbing some items can be annoying due to a limited amount of grabbing points, and it can be difficult to get a tool into the right position to feel like you’re holding it at the proper angle (for instance, holding a chisel and a hammer). If you want to make a small adjustment to the grip of your tool, you usually need to set down whatever is in your other hand and then use both hands to make the adjustment (trying to toss it up and re-catch it with one hand usually leads to frustratingly dropping your tool to the ground).
Weapons also don’t feel great to swing given how enemies hardly react to the damage they’re taking. It isn’t clear how much you really need to swing for a successful hit, nor is it clear how much damage you’re dealing or how much is being dealt to you.
While the game’s immersive menus (like the server selection menu) are more interesting than their laser-pointer counterparts, they aren’t always intuitive and are often designed with the expectation that the player has a lot of space to physically walk around. They would definitely benefit from a redesign which reduces their footprint and aims for a bit more clarity.
Unfortunately Township Tale on Quest has a near-persistent performance-related stuttering issue which is especially apparent in your hands and when using tools. It’s hard to imagine this is the expected behavior, so hopefully something can be done about it post-launch.
The stuttering seems to impact the game’s physics which sometimes cause you to miss strikes (ie: when hitting something with a hammer) or can cause your tool to clip through an object and get stuck inside of it.
Comfort
Image courtesy Alta
Township Tale includes both smooth locomotion and teleportation. And although teleport is the default on Quest, it feels like the game has been built primarily around smooth locomotion, especially considering the way that combat plays out and that the teleport implementation doesn’t seem well-tuned for traveling long distances as one often does in the game.
There are plenty of VR games that I can play comfortably with smooth locomotion, however Township Tale isn’t one of them. It may be related to the fact that there’s a long acceleration curve when movement starts and stops. Luckily I could play comfortably with teleport even for sessions of an hour or more.
While the game generally doesn’t have any intentional lurching moments (ie: taking control of the player’s head), this can happen accidentally if you lean over a slightly raised surface. For instance if you lean your head over a small step, the game will consider that you are now on the step and raise your viewpoint accordingly. If you are merely leaning to reach for something, this sudden change in height can be uncomfortable, especially when it happens repeatedly (I found several instances of this while blacksmithing).
The aforementioned performance-related stuttering issue definitely adds a level of discomfort when you are looking at your hands or interacting with objects. It also makes smooth turning feel choppy and potentially uncomfortable even for those who would normally prefer it.
A Township Tale Comfort Settings – July 15th, 2021
Indie developer Alta is set to launch its open-world role-playing game (RPG) A Township Tale for Oculus Quest next week. Originally a PC title, today the studio has released a new comparison video showcasing what some of the fundamental changes between the two versions will be.
Obviously, most of this is centred around the graphics and the decisions Alta had to make to ensure a smooth experience for Oculus Quest players. As you can clearly see in the screenshot above, there’s a massive hit when it comes to detail and the number of objects displayed, especially at a distance. In the comparison video, A Township Tale’s Game Director Boramy Unn pays specific attention to lighting, explaining that it’s all real-time in both versions for a dynamic day/night cycle. However, the Quest isn’t able to handle all the shadows being cast, so they’ve been removed.
Avatars, on the other hand, don’t look too dissimilar to their PC versions, they just lack that extra level of detail. As Alta has previously confirmed, if you are coming from the PC to Oculus Quest then all your in-game items will still be available by signing into your account. Cross-platform play, however, won’t be supported.
There is good news though. One of the benefits of bringing A Township Tale to Oculus Quest is its fixed specifications. On PC Alta makes continual improvements to the performance which is never simple considering the sheer amount of PC variations available. Talking about the Quest’s performance Unn says: “We’re better able to ensure that players get a near-perfect framerate throughout their play session.”
A Township Tale is a co-op adventure allowing up to eight friends to team up on one virtual server and go on quests. They’ll all have to choose a profession to aid each other as they explore the dangerous world around them. They can become a blacksmith, woodcutter, miner, archer or warrior, each vital in their own way. As the team ventures deeper into the landscape, they’ll be able to recover crafting materials to make new equipment and improve their gear.
The Oculus Quest version of A Township Tale will launch next Thursday, 15th July for $9.99. Users will get their own personal server and 1,000 Talems of in-game currency to start spending and customising. VRFocus will continue its coverage of A Township Tale, reporting back with further updates.
A Township Tale is soon to launch on Quest and developer Alta has now offered up a graphical comparison to show how things differ between the Quest and PC versions of the game.
A Township Tale’s stylized art direction might make it look like it wouldn’t be too demanding to run on Quest, but the game’s large open world exists as a nearly seamless space, with sightlines that sometimes allow players to see across vast distances—not to mention tons of physics-based objects, interactions, all happening with up to eight simultaneous players.
Even though the game was built for PC well before the original Quest was even announced, developer Alta has managed to get A Township Tale’s open world running on the low-powered device. It’s definitely a downgrade from PC, but the studio clearly took care to bring the essence of the game to Quest without simply crushing the resolution.
A common technique used to get games to run on lower-end hardware is to employ a dense fog wall around the player in an effort to drastically cut down how much of the game world must be drawn at any given time.
As A Township Tale game director Boramy Unn explains, this wasn’t an option for the game, because the studio wanted to preserve distant landmarks in the world which help players navigate. While the distant landscape is significantly cut down in its level of detail, the core function of guiding players remains intact. Fortunately nearby buildings and objects render in solid quality, as we saw in our recent preview of the Quest version of A Township Tale.
Boramy also notes that shadows and transparency had to be removed from the Quest version because they were too expensive to run on the headset’s low-powered processor while still reaching the goal of achieving a “perfect framerate” on the headset. For the game’s crucial torches, the studio says they’ve “done some wizardy to give the impression of lights on a shader-wider level.”
Going forward, the studio says it plans to focus on improving the game’s graphical presentation.
– – — – –
Priced at $10, A Township Tale launches on Quest July 15th, or on July 13th for those that pre-ordered the game. On PC the game is already available and free-to-play.
When it came to Oculus Quest announcements during E3 week one of the most exciting was news of A Township Tale, the open-world role-playing game (RPG) from Alta. Confirming a 15th July launch date, today the studio has opened up pre-orders for the videogame which unlock some useful bonuses including being able to play A Township Tale early.
Pre-ordering A Township Taletoday for $9.99 USD will mean that you can dive into its colourful world two days early on 13th July. You’ll also get an exclusive outfit, toolbelt and an additional 1,000 Talems (in-game currency) – on top of the base 1,000 Talems all players receive – to customise your character.
A Township Tale won’t offer cross-platform gameplay between the original PC VR version and Oculus Quest but all the in-game items are cross compatible. So if you already play the PC version you can bring your items across by signing into your A Township Tale account on Quest. Alta is planning to make both versions compatible in a future update.
The videogame is a co-op adventure where up to eight friends can team up on one virtual server, choose a profession and then help each other explore the dangerous world around them. You can choose to become a blacksmith, woodcutter, miner, archer or warrior, each vital to the ecosystem as you recover crafting materials to make new equipment and improve your gear.
“Launching on Quest gives a new way for fans around the world to band together and face the challenges of the magical, medieval VR world of A Township Tale,” said Boramy Unn, game director, Alta in a statement. “Since revealing A Township Tale for Quest and Quest 2 earlier this month, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We created this pre-order program to provide even more reason for new and current playersto jump right in and connect with friends in the immersive way that is only possible on VR.”
For those not interested in pre-ordering, A Township Tale will launch for Oculus Quest on 15th July priced at $9.99. Users will get their own personal server and those Talems previously mentioned. For further updates on the open-world RPG, keep reading VRFocus.
A Township Tale, the MMO-like VR game available on PC VR headsets since 2018, is making its way to Oculus Quest next month. In anticipation of its July 15th launch, developer Alta has opened pre-orders today, which includes a few goodies like getting a chance to play before launch.
If you pre-order the game on Oculus Store for Quest starting today (priced at $10), you’ll be able to hop into the game on July 13th. In addition to the standard dedicated server, you’ll get an exclusive outfit, toolbelt, and an additional 1,000 Talems (for a total of 2,000 Talems) of its in-game currency.
We call A Township Tale “MMO-like” because it offers a wide range of activities, crafting, and opportunities for leveling—all of it playable with up to eight players in a persistent world. You can take on tasks like building up your town through blacksmithing, mining, and woodcutting, but you’ll also have to fight all sorts of monsters too. Check out the trailer below to see it in action:
“Exploration is really the name of the game in A Township Tale, both of the world and mechanically,” Lang says. “Very little is handed to you outright, and players will need to work together to discover how it all works as they go. As you explore, you’ll learn how to improve your crafting, learn new abilities, and even upgrade the town for everyone.”
A Township Tale is free-to-play on PC, where Talems are sold in bundles for real-world cash—the lowest denomination costs $10 for 1,000 Talems. The same is true for the Quest version of the game, although that $10 initial purchase price comes with 1,000 Talems already.
Cross-play between Quest and PC isn’t supported at launch. The studio says it has plans to support “one-way cross-play” at some point, which would allow PC players to connect to Quest servers.
A Township Tale is free-to-play on PC but costs $10 on Quest. However, the Quest version includes 1,000 Talems (the in-game currency for premium cosmetics) and the ability to run your own server (which on PC costs $10 per month).
