Meta’s Sanzaru Games released a new look at Asgard’s Wrath 2 in a developer diary video that, in addition to showing off more of the upcoming action RPG, teases an opportunity to put your combat skills to the test against other players.
The studio says that in addition to its main narrative-driven quest, Asgard’s Wrath 2 is going to feature an “asynchronously social dungeon-crawling mode” where you as the Cosmic Guardian will “take part in an ongoing battle that evolves over time,” the studio says in a blogpost.
We’re due to learn more about the newly teased dungeon mode in the game’s next deep dive video, where the studio says it will further explore the so-called ‘Uncharted Rifts’.
Announced during the Quest Gaming Showcase in June, the Asgard’s Wrath sequel is headed exclusively to the Quest platform, which includes Quest 2, Quest Pro, and the upcoming Quest 3 headset.
In it, you travel across the realms in pursuit of the trickster god Loki, taking on the role of four mortal heroes with various weapons and playstyles. Like the first, which was a Rift exclusive, the new Quest-only title is said to be packed with creatures, quests, puzzles, and the ability to convert loyal animals into fierce warrior companions. The studio says we can expect “60 hours of exploration [and] viscous combat” when the game launches in Winter 2023.
You can also now pre-order the game, priced at $60. Pre-orders include exclusive in-game weapon and armor set, a free download of Asgard’s Wrath 1 on PC, a Meta Quest home environment, and an exclusive Asgard’s Wrath 2 character bundle for battle royale shooter POPULATION: ONE.
During Meta’s Connect 2023 developer conference today the company revealed the hotly awaited sequel to Asgard’s Wrath, the single-player adventure which launched on Rift in 2019, is coming to Quest 2 and the fully unveiled Quest 3 on December 15th.
Update (September 27th, 2023): Now we know precisely when to set our calendars for the release of Asgard’s Wrath 2: December 15th, 2023.
Additionally, Meta announced that users who buy Quest 3, either the 128GB variant for $500 or the 512GB for $650, is getting Asgard’s Wrath 2 for free, which will be otherwise priced at $60. The original article announcing Asgard’s Wrath 2 follows below:
Original Article (June 1st, 2023): Called Asgard’s Wrath 2, the game is slated to launch on Quest 2 and Quest Pro in Winter 2023. Picking up where it last left off, the sequel suddenly thrusts you into a battle with a creature from an Ancient Egypt-inspired realm. There, you encounter the ‘Weavers of Fate’ who set you on a mission to find and stop a certain trickster god.
Meta-owned studio Sanzaru Games says the sequel includes a host of new realms to explore, including Asgardian realms in addition to vast desert expanses of ancient Egypt. You’ll be able to battle and puzzle your way through temples, caves, and dungeons, where you’re encounter monsters, main quests, sidequests, crafting resources, mini-games and more.
Like the first, you’ll have access to a cast of warrior-followers to help you solve puzzles and help you take on enemies. God-scale perspective
Asgard’s Wrath 2 includes an updated combat system that departs from the last, which previously required you to block and parry hits, destroy shields and armor, then kill the enemy itself. Now you’ll be able to hack away at defenses naturally in addition to parrying for opportune melee windows. It also includes elemental types and a wider variety of enemies in addition to physics-based melee. Upgradeable abilities and weapons extend beyond the player, as companions also have their own skill trees.
Enemies are said to scale to user level and ability, giving them access to better moves and defensive measures. In addition to the main game, there’s also set to be an infinite dungeon crawling mode to help you bone up on tactics.
Meta is putting on its Quest Gaming Showcase in June, and while we’re not certain what standalone goodies the company has in store, a promo video seems to suggest we’ll be getting something from the universe of hit Rift exclusive Asgard’s Wrath (2019).
We say ‘universe’ and not ‘direct port’ because we simply can’t tell for now based on the few seconds of footage, which seems to show Loki’s helmet with what appears to be a shadowy god-like figure in the background.
What suggests the promo may not be a flat-out Rift to Quest port is the desert environment. If you’ve played Asgard’s Wrath on Rift, you may remember some post-credits sequel bait, where you find an Egyptian ankh that suggests a follow-up will take place in an Egyptian-inspired environment.
Meta largely abandoned PC VR gaming almost immediately after releasing Rift S and Asgard’s Wrath in 2019 however, afterwards devoting its clutch of VR gaming studios to produce content for Quest and putting the kibosh on a direct-to-Rift sequel in the process. Maybe the next in the series will live on as a Quest native from the get-go?
It would certainly make more sense than Meta’s Sanzaru Games going back and completely overhauling the original Asgard’s Wrath for Quest, although we haven’t heard anything from the studio since it was acquired by Meta in early 2020. It’s not inconceivable that the original and a sequel could be in the works for Quest.
Meanwhile, we’ll be waiting to hear about the other rash of long-promised Quest content yet to come, including Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Assassin’s Creed Nexus, and Vertigo Games’ upcoming work with Deep Silver’s IP, which could be anything from Metro to Dead Island.
Following along with us on June at at 10 AM PT to find out, as Meta is slated to share over 40 minutes of content, including new game announcements, gameplay first-looks, updates to existing games, and more.
A set of assets released to demonstrate new changes in Quest 2’s v41 update featured Rift-exclusive Asgard’s Wrath in a Quest store mock-up.
Sadly, a mock-up was all it was.
Quest’s v41 update includes some important new features, such as the introduction of Horizon Home. But it also updates some of the headset’s parental supervision tools. One such feature allows users to invite parents to approve and deny use of certain apps. The graphic for this shows one user clearly trying to buy Asgard’s Wrath on a mock-up of the Quest 2 store interface.
Another shows how this system works with a parent’s smartphone which, again, shows Asgard’s Wrath on the Oculus Mobile app (though, in fairness, it’s already there under the Rift section). The assets also showed a 4.5 star rating for the game which would be hard to achieve considering it hasn’t actually been released, and lists ‘Add-On Content’, which Asgard’s Wrath doesn’t actually feature.
We reached out to Meta to ask if this graphic confirms that Asgard’s Wrath is in fact coming to Quest 2. Unforuntely it’s not to be; the company clarified this was purely a mock-up and Asgard’s Wrath was just a placeholder. The game isn’t coming to Quest 2 (at least as far as we know).
It’s a strange mistake to feature a non-Quest 2 game in an asset like this. Asgard’s Wrath originally released in late 2019 as a Rift exclusive title and answered the call for a deep, lengthy VR adventure. Since its release Meta acquired Sanzaru itself, but there’s been no word on a possible sequel or spin-off. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for a proper follow-up at some point in the future, though.
A firmware finding and an experimental setting apparently made available to a redditor suggest Meta is working on cloud VR streaming.
Last month firmware sleuth Samulia found a string ‘AVALANCE_CLOUD_GAMING_INFRA_ENABLED’ in version 24 of the Quest firmware, according to YouTuber Brad Lynch (SadlyItsBradley). Version 24 would have shipped around 18 months ago, suggesting Avalanche has been in development for quite some time.
Two days ago redditor /u/technicalthrowaway posted a screenshot appearing to show an ‘Enable Avalanche (Alpha)’ option appearing in the Experimental features tab of their Quest 2’s settings, writing the following:
I pressed it, it said “finding server” for 20 seconds or so, and then loaded oculus home. For about 15 seconds, it was really decent framerate, but with a little bit of lag, then a spinning ring came up and stayed like that.
Anyone else got this working?
Meta has been known to roll out features to a small portion of users separately from the main firmware versioning, but we haven’t heard of anyone else seeing this Avalanche option.
Brad Lynch wrote on Twitter that the redditor directly contacted him about their experience, saying “they were able to get into a totally remote game of Asgards Wrath via a UK Wifi5 session”. Asgard’s Wrath is a 25+ hour action-adventure RPG released for the PC-based Oculus Rift platform in late 2019. We gave it 5 stars and described at the time as VR’s best and most ambitious game yet. Between 2016 and 2021 Facebook invested hundreds of millions of dollars to ship a number of such PC exclusive titles – cloud streaming could bring them to the majority of Quest owners who don’t own a gaming PC.
But the experience of cloud streaming heavily depends on the quality of the user’s internet connection. There is a potential for high latency, and for judder caused by packet loss. In late 2020 Oculus ‘Consulting CTO’ John Carmack had this to say, comparing it to local network streaming: “obviously it’s even worse, obviously more people are going to find that unacceptable and it will be a terrible experience for more people, but still I am quite confident that for some people in some situations it’s still going to be quite valuable”.
In 2020 Facebook Gaming VP Jason Rubin described cloud VR gaming as more than five years out, and Carmack said the company has “interminable arguments” about the minimum quality bar required to ship VR streaming. But streaming VR games remotely is already possible on Quest with third party software. Air Link alternative Virtual Desktop supports streaming from a PC outside on your local network, while Shadow and PlutoSphere even let you rent a VR capable PC in the cloud. But a Meta store and App Lab policy relegate these services to third party store SideQuest.
Could seeing these services launch have accelerated Meta’s plans, or was Rubin’s comment simply too pessimistic? We’ve reached out to Meta for comment on this apparent Avalanche leak and will update the article if we get a response.
Lots of behind-the-scenes tidbits and details were revealed today in a massive oral history report published by Facebook that chronicles the history of Oculus to celebrate the five-year anniversary of the original Rift launch. One of the most interesting details to me is the surprising shift in tone and genre that Asgard’s Wrath went through between its conception and its release.
Asgard’s Wrath
For those unaware, Asgard’s Wrath is a massive VR action-adventure RPG that’s exclusive to the Oculus Rift PC VR store developed by Sanzaru (now owned by Facebook) in which you take control of a Norse God that has the ability to possess mortals and control them directly. The game plays out similar to a Zelda or God of War game in which you explore various realms of Norse mythology, solve puzzles, and fight hundreds of monsters. You can also transform animals into humanoid familiars that fight with you and all have unique abilities to help you on your journey.
It’s a huge, sprawling game that captures the essence of a large-scale AAA quality RPG and puts it into VR with great results. It was the first 5/5 score we ever game here on UploadVR back in 2019 and it’s still my personal favorite VR game to date.
In the oral history report that published today, developers from Sanzaru and Oculus Studios discuss a surprising revelation: the game wasn’t even planned to be an action game at all originally. Not even close.
“Asgard’s Wrath actually started as a Touch-centric demo like VR Sports Challenge,” said Grace Morales Lingad, Creative Director at developer Sanzaru. “It was meant as a Toybox-like demo early on and grew from there… It was more focused on being the god and helping this puny mortal.”
Toybox was a multiplayer Oculus Touch tech demo in which you and another person would stand at a table and play with toys. The toys were intended to encourage interaction so there were building blocks, remote controlled airplanes, and more. That feeling of being a giant looking down at little toys on a table stuck with the developers.
Then along the way it became a tower defense game where you were picking up little
Toybox-size objects and putting them down as your defensive armaments,” said Mike Doran, Director of Production at Oculus Studios. “There’s a couple places where you still see the tower defense game, a couple of boss encounters where you’re firing these giant cannons down on massive armies in the distance. Also, not a lot of people realize that our entire inventory is a series of shelves with tiny little units or objects, and those shelves were originally the UI for selecting towers.”
Once the idea for flipping between God-mode and mortal-mode were introduced, it spiraled from there. They added more features and more concepts on top of everything else, letting you explore more of the world and take control of more types of mortals. Before long, it wasn’t a tower-defense game at all.
“With Asgard’s Wrath, we wanted to make a real-deal, big game,” said Mat Kraemer, Head of Design at Sanzaru. “I’m tired of playing the ten-minute demos and I’m tired of limited movement. I wanted to play a God of War style game. I wanted to play a Zelda style game in VR. I want to make the game that makes you buy an Oculus headset, so when people look at Oculus hardware, they say, ‘I want to play Sanzaru’s next big thing.’ That is what I want to make, and I think as a developer being given the opportunity to do that has been awesome.”
For games similar to what Sanzaru originally envisioned, check out Defense Grid 2 and Brass Tactics. And for more on Asgard’s Wrath, you can read or watch my full Asgard’s Wrath review, beginner tips, and my one-year retrospective from last October that looked back at why the game remains so great for me.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we want to know which game genre you think is missing most in the VR market?
Did you miss the latest episode of our VR Download podcast show? We ranked every single PSVR exclusive. Check it out in the video above or on your preferred podcast platform.
Over the last 5+ years VR has slowly grown into its own format for computing. More and more we’re seeing big made-for-VR games or seeing big publishers fund VR ports of existing games that deliver deep, immersive experiences for players. Now more than ever it’s a good time to be a fan of VR if you’re also into gaming.
But it also seems like most developers cater to very specific types of gamers with their VR experiences. Horror games release in droves, zombie-related content is well-represented, and if you like shooting things with guns then you’re absolutely covered. The action-based FPS, competitive online shooter, and wave shooter are all three of the most popular genres in VR.
Don’t get me wrong, it totally makes sense, but there are lots of underrepresented genres in VR I’d love to see more of. For starters, more strategy games would be great. Brass Tactics is really one of the only solid VR strategy games and there haven’t been many sense. I’d also love more action-adventure fantasy-themed games like Asgard’s Wrath, but I fully accept those take years of development to make properly.
Missing VR Genres?
What kind of VR games do you want to see more of? Which genres do you think are missing most or are most underrepresented in the VR space?
Until January 31st, 2021 anyone that purchases an Oculus Quest 2 and then connects it to a PC via Oculus Link will receive a copy of PC VR-exclusive action-adventure Asgard’s Wrath for free. Asgard’s Wrath currently sells for $40 on the Oculus Store for PC.
Facebook is running the promotion as a way to celebrate the first anniversary of the Oculus Link technology that allows you to connect a Quest to your PC and play PC VR games directly on the headset as if it were a Rift. Link recently exited beta and is now “officially” supported. This promotion is one of the first signs that Oculus is fully and publicly marketing and promoting the Quest 2 as a legitimate PC VR headset rather than as a standalone device. Of course, it’s always been capable of doing both.
This post was originally published on November 20th but updated on November 23rd (and the publish date changed) to reflect a change to Oculus policy which would give the game to anyone who purchased Quest 2 from September 16th onward. Facebook originally limited the promotion to purchases made after the November 20th announcement.
Thank you to everyone who shared concerns about the Quest 2 Asgard’s Wrath promotion timing. Your candid feedback, support, and enthusiasm are what make this platform a success. The promotion is now available to those who purchased a Quest 2 between Sept 16 and Nov 20, 2020.
Asgard’s Wrath is still, personally, my favorite VR game. I’m a massive fan of games like Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, and generally any type of fantasy setting so getting to play through a massive 30+ hour RPG full of custom-crafted levels, dungeons, puzzles, enemy encounters, and more, all tied together by a sweeping narrative that spans the entirety of Norse mythology, was pretty incredible. It won our Game of the Year award for 2019.
You can also play Asgard’s Wrath wirelessly on Quest if you use Virtual Desktop to stream the game to your standalone headset, although depending on the quality of your router and home network there may be noticeable latency this way which makes the twitchy reaction-based parrying combat quite difficult.
Oculus announced late last week that, starting on November 20th, new Quest 2 owners would be able to download the award-winning PC VR title Asgard’s Wrath (2019) for free until January 31st, 2021. Following public outcry from early customers who were inexplicably locked out of the promotion, Oculus has now extended the offer to Quest 2 users who purchased their headset from September 16th onwards.
Update (November 24th, 2020): Following public controversy, Oculus has decided to extend its free offer of PC VR title Asgard’s Wrath to effectively all prior owners of Quest 2, the company’s latest standalone headset.
The company says in a statement that users who purchased Quest 2 between September 16th and November 20th should contact Oculus Support with a PDF containing proof of purchase.
September 16th was the starting pre-order date for Quest 2, so ostensibly everyone who bought a Quest 2 should be able to claim Asgard’s Wrath, provided they activate the headset before January 31st, 2021 and use it with Link via a VR-ready PC. The original article follows below:
Original Article (November 20th, 2020): It’s been one year since Oculus released beta support for Link, the company’s compatibility software that lets Quest users play Rift exclusives on PC. In celebration, the company is giving Quest 2 owners Asgard’s Wrath, the Norse mythology-inspired RPG.
To qualify, you need to activate a Quest 2 for the first time and use it with a Link cable between today (see update) and January 31st, 2021. Make sure to download the Oculus PC app first, and connect your Quest 2 with a USB 3.0 cable or the original Link cable sold by Oculus.
Developed by Sanzaru Games exclusively for the Rift platform, Asgard’s Wrath boasts 30+ hours of first-person combat, dungeoning, and plenty of RPG goodness. Although the game is all about melee, you’ll also find yourself morphing to the size of a god to solve environmental puzzles using any one of your animal companions. Find out why we gave it [8.8/10] in our full review from last year.
It’s already been an entire year since Asgard’s Wrath first released exclusively on the Oculus Rift and won our Best VR Game of the Year award for 2019. We dove back into Sanzaru Games’ action RPG epic and were delighted to find that it remains just as impressive as we remember.
Asgard’s Wrath: Still Impressive One Year Later
A lot has happened since Asgard’s Wrath first released, including the announcement and impending release of the Quest 2 as well as revelation that Facebook will start selling its first Oculus Studios first-party game on Steam soon. VR is a very different landscape now. Back when Asgard’s Wrath came out, it was the big title to prove VR could be more than tech demos and two-hour walk-around-and-read stuff adventures. Now, games like Boneworks, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and Half-Life: Alyx have continued to carry that torch.
I still really, really like Asgard’s Wrath. For more specifics on why you can obviously read my full, lengthy review or watch the video version above, but to put it simply it’s the kind of VR game I’d always wanted. Growing up I was raised on The Legend of Zelda, Lord of the Rings movies, and a fascination with mythology and medieval swordsmanship. In many ways, Asgard’s Wrath is the culmination of all those things into a single, neatly crafted package.
That being said, it would be easy to nitpick and criticize individual elements from Asgard’s Wrath, but it’s much more than just the sum of its parts. Yes, combat relies on pre-made enemy animations heavily rather than the physics-driven combat sandbox of Blade & Sorcery. No, it’s not a true open world that lets you go anywhere or do anything. But within the confines of what it tries to be — essentially, a VR Zelda game complete with epic boss fights, a litany of items and gear, and head-scratching puzzles to mix things up — it knocks it out of the park.
If we take a look at all of the VR RPGs on the market, both those that released before and after Asgard’s Wrath, you’ll see there is still nothing that really compares.
Watch my interview with the Creative Director on the game, Mat Kraemer, right here:
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is perhaps the closest comparison, but you’d need to mod the hell out of it to get something that feels like a made-for-VR game and even then it’s still nine-years old. I love The Elder Scrolls as much as anyone and it’s a remarkable open-world RPG, but it doesn’t deliver the same narrative impact with a well-paced adventure through a series of dungeons. Asgard’s Wrath borrows its design more liberally from Zelda than anywhere else, as mentioned before.
Journey of the Gods isn’t bad, but the simplistic art style and much smaller scope (mostly linear levels without real dungeons totaling around 10 hours vs. 30+ hours) puts it in a different ballpark. The Wizards is a fun mage adventure, Vanishing Realms does a good job with what it’s got going for it, but is over pretty soon as well.
To put things into perspective: I don’t think there are many other VR games on the market, even a year later, that offer the amount and variety of content that Asgard’s Wrath does that isn’t procedurally generated. These are hand-crafted assets with full voice acting and wonderful world-building.
Visually, I don’t think Asgard’s Wrath has been topped in my opinion. Half-Life: Alyx nails the decrepit sci-fi dystopia without issue, but Asgard’s Wrath has it beat in terms of scale and variety. Gazing out at the snow-capped mountains of Helheim before facing off against Hela herself, pausing on the edge of a cliff to admire the ocean, or seeing intricate, ornate structures as tall as the eye can see in Asgard is all magnificent.
I’m still holding out hope for a full-on sequel of some kind after the cliffhanger ending we got at the conclusion of the story, or at least some kind of DLC to keep things going, so hopefully an announcement of some kind isn’t too far off. Now that Facebook owns Sanzaru Games you can guarantee they’re hard at work on whatever is next in VR.
Asgard’s Wrath clocks in at around 130GB on PC, so a Quest port seems unlikely, but maybe a spin-off of some kind could work. That being said, I’ve played it on the Oculus Quest 2 using Virtual Desktop and with Oculus Link and it plays great on both. The Quest 2’s sharp screen and 90Hz refresh rate in Virtual Desktop looks excellent if you’ve got a beefy enough PC and strong WiFi network.
However, you really need to have ultra-precise reaction times here and any latency, such as over wireless Virtual Desktop streaming, can make combat difficult at times. I’ll also say that this is not the best game to put down for a full year and then suddenly pick up again. It’s very complex with a wide range of companion characters, weapons, and features that I honestly spent a solid 20 minutes just trying to jog up the muscle memory. It’s a doozy — but it’s so worth it. And if you’re playing for the first time then no worries.
Here’s to hoping I can eventually play something else that will make me feel excited to binge a ~30 hour RPG fully in VR. Until then, I can always return to Asgard’s Wrath.
