Beat Saber just released an upgraded version of its Imagine Dragons DLC Music Pack, featuring two new songs and redesigned maps for the existing tracks.
The Imagine Dragons DLC tracks for Beat Saber first released in 2019, featuring 10 songs available for purchase individually or as a bundle. Since then, the team at Beat Games released a bunch of other DLC tracks and made some significant updates to the game, including new note types and an upgraded lighting system.
Given those changes since the initial release, Beat Games released a ‘new and improved’ Imagine Dragons DLC pack earlier today. The maps for the existing 10 tracks have been redesigned, now featuring arc and chain note types, alongside upgraded environments that use the game’s new lighting system and color scheme. Meta says that players “will immediately notice that the 10 legacy tracks have improved mapping and flow.”
The upgraded pack also includes two new songs – Bones and Enemy, the latter of which is the theme song to Netflix’s show Arcane, set in the League of Legends universe.
The upgraded pack now features 12 tracks total and is available for the same $14.99 price as the original, with individual tracks available for $1.99.
Meta says that existing owners of the former 10-track DLC bundle will be able to purchase an ‘upgrade’ that includes the two new tracks for $2.50. It’s unclear whether existing individually-owned tracks or those who do not purchase the $2.50 ‘upgrade’ will automatically receive the updated versions of the tracks for free. UploadVR has reached out to Meta for clarification and will provide an update if we receive a response.
Popular block-slashing rhythm game Beat Saber just got an unexpected drop of 12 new tracks in its Electronic Mixtape paid DLC, which includes content spanning nearly two decades of electronic music.
Beat Games, the Meta-owned developers behind Beat Saber, initially teased the Electronic Mixtape at Meta’s Quest Gaming Showcase late last month. Now the studio has surprise-launched the paid DLC across all supported VR headsets starting today.
Beat Saber’s Electronic Mixtape comes with 10 songs for $13, or $2 per song when purchased individually. Check out the full track list below:
Marshmello – “Alone”
MartinGarrix – “Animals”
BomfunkMC’s – “Freestyler”
Deadmau5 – “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff” (feat. Rob Swire)
Madeon – “Icarus”
Darude – “Sandstorm”
Zedd – “Stay The Night” (feat. Hayley Williams)
Fatboy Slim – “The Rockafeller Skank”
Rudimental – “Waiting All Night” (feat. Ella Eyre)
Pendulum – “Witchcraft”
Ok, so Beat Saber is already pretty electronic-heavy. Whatever you may think of the music on offer though, the constant influx of paid and free DLC has kept Beat Saber squarely seated in the top 10 on respective lists for most popular VR game on both the Quest and PSVR platforms—not bad for a game from 2018.
The launch of today’s Electronic Mixtape pack follows what seems like a non-stop push for evermore DLC. Thanks to Meta’s deep pockets, Beat Saber has been able to include content from high-profile artists such as Skrillex, BTS, Green Day, Timbaland, Linkin Park, and Imagine Dragons, not to mention the Interscope Music Pack featuring tracks from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, OneRepublic, Limp Bizkit, and Maroon 5.
Beat Saber is getting a good slice of new mechanics soon that aim to change up the game’s feel by introducing some long-awaited block styles that may just make you a more stylish player.
A short video popped up yesterday that shows off some new block types that are said to come to the game soon.
Outside of the game’s addition of 360 gameplay mode in 2019, and ‘angled window’ blocks released in the game’s Timbaland Music Pack back in 2020, the new blocks represent one of the biggest changes to come to the game since launch.
Official Lead Level Creator for BeatSaber ‘Freeek’ hosted a Q&A session where they defined each of the new blocks/mechanics and their functions. Here’s the breakdown of what you’re seeing above:
Sliders
Sliders are highlighted lines that lead from a starter block to the next, or no note at all. They primarily act as a guide, but also get the user to engage with the music by moving to the beat.
Image courtesy Beat Games, Meta
Sliders are dynamic elements—similar to a string tied to the end of your saber—which lead the player into cooler, or more efficient slicing patterns. Following the slider isn’t scored, however there is a haptic feedback when you’ve hit them so you know when you’re on track.
Burst Sliders
Burst Sliders are slinky-style blocks that, similar to the slider mentioned above, guide the player into a requisite slicing pattern. The difference here is the player must slice completely through the burst sliders to achieve the maximum points.
Image courtesy Beat Games, Meta
The team calls the individual slinky bits ‘elements’. Elements aren’t limited in number, so it seems to create room for some increasingly longer and windier slicing gameplay.
Each element has a haptic feedback, and is scored at 20 points per block, with the principal starter block scored much higher. Elements aren’t slice-angle dependent, and only require the player hit them somehow, unlike traditional blocks which measure entry/exit angle as a part of scoring methodology.
Diagonal Dots
Diagonal dots are pretty straightforward. It’s more of a minor request that cosmetically changes the dot block’s orientation.
Image courtesy Beat Games, Meta
For reference, the dot block is a scored block that lets the user choose which direction to slice in. No, it’s not for stabbing!
It’s uncertain when Beat Saber will get the new new blocks, however lead developer Jan ‘Split’ Ilavsky mentions that it’s coming in the “next update” along with more stuff—just what that stuff is, we can’t say.
During Meta’s (formerly Facebook) annual Connect conference, Beat Games debuted a small teaser that showed a new type of cosmetic saber.
The stinger video, embedded below, came midway through the keynote presentation, just after it was announced that Beat Saber has now passed the $100 million mark for revenue on the Quest platform alone.
It’s not exactly clear what this new content is, but it looks like it could be a fairly substantial addition to the game. Most content updates for Beat Saber have been purely new music drops or paid DLC music pack releases. However, this looks to be something different.
The most striking thing in the short teaser is the saber, which looks markedly different from the standard sabers available in the game. Custom sabers have long been an element of the Beat Saber custom modding scene on several platforms, but it looks like Quest might get access to some form of official cosmetic sabers in the near future.
The ‘Level Up’ graphic also might be hinting at some kind of progression system. If we had to guess, it might be something like a Fornite/Population: One Battle Pass system with competitive seasons. That could mean opening the door to cosmetic rewards, like the fancy saber in the stinger video.
Just before they ran the teaser footage, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Oculus Studios Producer Deborah Guzman discussed the importance of live-service games that “launch updates and new downloadable content regularly” to the constantly-evolving metaverse. Beat Saber was given as an example of such a title, so it’s not far-fetched to think that some kind of progression system or unlockable cosmetic items might be on the way soon.
What do you think Beat Saber is teasing? Let us know in the comments.
[Update 3/18] OST 4 is now available in Beat Saber for free on all platforms. The update includes four new songs:
It Takes Me (ft. Waylon Reavis) by Boom Kitty
Spin Eternally by Camellia
Into the Dream (ft. Jakub Tirco) by Jaroslav Beck
LUDICROUS+ by Jaroslav Beck
[Original 3/15] Beat Games revealed today that the fourth Original Soundtrack DLC for Beat Saber (OST 4) is slated to release this week on March 18th. The update will be free.
Former Beat Games CEO and current Head of Music revealed late last year during a video livestream (more details here) that the “theme” for OST 4 will be “guitars and synthetic guitars” with “metal-ish” music. According to Beck there is a lot of electronic music and he has always wanted to do a metal song.
On a personal level, this is great news. The Linkin Park DLC is my favorite paid music pack across all of Beat Saber so I whole-heartedly welcome more guitar-focused music for the game. As someone that played Guitar Hero and Rock Band religiously in late high school years and college, I am extremely excited to tap back into that mindset again.
In the video above you can hear a quick preview of one of the tracks. There isn’t much more to go off of, but the previous official release, OST 3, was a free download so fingers crossed this new pack will be free as well. According to some follow-up tweets from the official Beat Saber account it sounds like this pack may also include a new environment. Perhaps that’s what is teased when the ‘4’ shows up on-screen in the video teaser within the tweet embedded at the top of this article.
Let us know what you think of the news down in the comments below! We won’t have to wait but a few days before diving into the new music tracks for ourselves.
One of Oculus Quest 2’s biggest titles, Beat Saber, just released support for the headset’s more immersive 90Hz refresh rate.
At launch in mid-October, Oculus Quest 2 featured an opt-in experimental 90Hz mode which only applied to the headset’s menus.
A month later, Facebook brought the more immersive 90Hz refresh rate to Quest 2’s system software, and started to allow developers to update their apps to run at 90Hz—provided they could hit a consistent 90 fps. When not run in 90Hz mode, Quest 2 also displays in 72Hz and 80Hz, which depends on individual developers to support or optimize.
With the launch of 90Hz support on Beat Saber for Quest 2, Facebook’s Beat Games also added Oculus ‘Group Launch’ to the game on Quest, so users can directly launch into multiplayer from an Oculus Party. The studio also added a toggle to enable ‘Joinable Oculus Rich Presence‘ whilst in multiplayer, which Beat Games says lets Oculus users launch the game directly onto your private server.
Beat Games previously launched multiplayer mode back in October on PC VR headsets and Oculus Quest. The studio says it’s currently finalizing multiplayer on PSVR, and it “should be ready for testing next week.”
The multiplayer update for Beat Saber is finally available for PC VR and Oculus Quest players! Sadly, PSVR players will have to wait a bit longer, as the update has been delayed on that platform.
It’s been years in the making, but now up to five Beat Saber players will be able to compete in tracks together thanks to multiplayer support. Multiplayer functionality was promised by Beat Games many years ago, but we had heard nothing new until last month.
As part of Facebook Connect, Beat Games announced that multiplayer support would release on October 13, to coincide with the launch of Facebook’s new standalone headset, Oculus Quest 2.
Unfortunately, the PS4 version will be delayed, but we’re working hard on it! Please bear with us as we will be sharing more updates from the development regularly. Thank you for your understanding guys!
Multiplayer functionality was not the only Beat Saber announcement at Facebook Connect — a BTS music pack was also announced, which will release later this year. The South Korean boy band is the latest in a bunch of Beat Saber DLC releases, including Linkin Park, Green Day and Imagine Dragons packs. There’s been so many lately that we’ve even ranked the best ones!
The Beat Saber Multiplayer update is available now for PC VR and Oculus Quest, to coincide with the launch of the Oculus Quest 2. You can read our review of the new headset here.
So you’ve got your greasy mitts on a Meta Quest 2, and you’re wondering what to buy after you’ve exhausted all of the best free games and experiences available on the standalone headset. Whether you’re into active games, puzzles, or just want to slice or shoot the ever-living crap out of something, we’re here to help you settle into your new headset with a few games that should keep you playing for hundreds of hours yet to come.
Note: This list includes only native Quest games. Don’t forget that you can also play PC games with either Oculus Link or Air Link and a VR-ready PC. Find out if your PC is ready for Link.
This list below is a great starting point if you’re looking to burn pretty close to a single Benjamin, although you should definitely check out our list of the best and most rated Meta Quest games now available, which also includes prices to help you whittle away your hard-earned cash.
Each genre section breaks down pretty close to $100 bucks, which includes games to get your heart pumping, shooter fans, puzzle nerds, fantasy swordplay geeks, and much more.
Multiplayer Shooting Madness
After the Fall – $40
After the Fall is basically Valve’s Left 4 Dead in VR. This four-player co-op shooter pits you against hordes of zombies across a handful of linear levels, all of which are characteristically dotted with safehouses. Zombies aren’t very intimidating as individuals, but when the masses start streaming in from every corner, you’ll be glad you have a good team to back you up and the gun you grinded for with the points you picked up from—you guessed it—shooting zombies.
Population One is VR’s very own battle royale, letting you team up in 24-player matches so you can climb, glide, run, and scrounge your way to victory. You’ll be battling against teams of hardcore players in this heavily populated, cross-platform shooter, so make sure to pick your squad wisely.
The Quest version of Onward was widely maligned for bringing down the PC VR experience when it went cross-platform, but it’s still one of the best mil-sims on Quest. This online mil-sim shooter is filled with hardcore users thanks to its realism, which means you’ll need to use all of the sort of military tactics to win against the other team. Communicate clearly, make sure you’re not running ahead of the pack Leroy Jenkins-style, and get good at shooting.
Developer Beat Games last week revealed a new ‘360 mode’ for their VR hit Beat Saber. Notes can now come from all around the player instead of just straight ahead. While it feels like a fun new way to play, it makes beat mapping considerably more complex. It’ll take innovative and creative mapping to really make 360 mode great, and for that, Beat Games should turn to its community.
Beat Saber’s primary mode throws a series of blocks at you from directly ahead. It’s simple and straightforward, but can be very challenging at high levels, which is part of the reason why Beat Saber has such broad appeal. A new ‘360 mode’ planned for Oculus Quest allows beat maps to send lines of blocks at you from arbitrary directions as the song plays out.
At E3 2019 I got to play an early version of the 360 mode. As a relatively high-level Beat Saber player, I found it very intriguing and I see a lot of potential, but it’ll take more time to discovery what kind of note patterns really make this mode shine feel unique and awesome.
You can think of the 360 mode much like the normal mode, except that the direction where the blocks are coming from can rotate around you on the fly. No matter which direction they’re coming from, they’re still traveling in straight lines, but notes can come along multiple tracks at once with different angles to you. Lines on the ground are used to show where you can expect the next string of blocks and to give you an idea of which direction you should be facing.
I got to play two songs, both of which were only mapped up to Hard difficulty. At first the songs started with notes coming head-on, but pretty quickly I saw the lines on the ground shift to indicate that notes would be coming from the side. The lines worked well to tell me ahead of time what to expect, and even slicing notes that moved between tracks felt pretty natural as they shifted gradually around me. However, sometimes the lines and note paths intersected in front of me and it was little more difficult to sort out the order of the notes because of the way they intertwined as they got closer to me.
In the end, playing in 360 mode was fun and different, and definitely felt like a new way to play Beat Saber compared to the standard mode, but it’s clear that it’ll take more time to learn how to make beat maps in the 360 mode which are really innovative and interesting. Ideally 360 mode should allow note maps which create totally unique movements for players compared to the standard mode. Because the design space of 360 mode is larger in scope though, it’s going to be more difficult to discover what really makes a great beat map.
In order to accelerate this need to learn what kind of 360 mode beat mapping could really be awesome, I think that Beat Games ought to put these tools out to their passionate communicate to see what kind of interesting 360 beat maps they come up with.
While the 360 mode could be a cool addition to Beat Saber, it could also represent ‘feature-creep’, which is dangerous for an indie team like Beat Games and for a game which thrives because of its simplicity.
Beat Saber already features the standard mode and ‘one saber’ mode, both of which have unique maps across four difficulties. That means that to make one song level for Beat Saber, the developers need to hand-craft eight unique maps if they want to serve every difficulty of both modes. Introducing 360 mode means not just more complex mapping, but four additional beat maps for each song (if they choose to cover all songs and difficulties with the 360 mode), meaning each song needs 12 hand-crafted beat maps.
Beat Games says that 360 mode will debut first on Quest because of its untethered 360 tracking, but it expects that a similar mode would come to other headsets later in a way that confines the rotating notes to some area in front of the player (so that they don’t get wrapped up in their cable), perhaps a ‘180 mode’. Without incredibly careful mapping and testing, it seems unlikely that 360 maps could easily be automatically converted into 180 maps though, so again, a 180 mode might mean yet more complexity and work when it comes to beat mapping.
Image courtesy Beat Games
Speaking with the developers though, it sounds like 360 mode is still very early and both the mechanics of how it works and the extent to which it will or won’t cover all of the game’s music is unclear. So we’ll still have to wait and see if it ends up being a boon for the game or extra baggage.
Beat Saber (2018) players on PC have a certain luxury of choice that their PSVR and Quest-owning counterparts simply don’t: easy access to user-created mods that indefinitely expand the game’s number of playable tracks, and now, an official level editor so you can easily make your own maps with your own music. Now, Beat Games says their new custom beatmap builder will also support Quest moving forward.
The studio released word yesterday via a tweet, stating that the ability to add custom levels would come in “one of the future updates.” There’s still no launch date, although Beat Games says they’re just now working on it.
Additionally, the studio says Quest users will make custom levels using a PC-based level editor, presumably the very same the studio just added to their PC VR client, a 2D software that allows you to build maps outside of the headset using your own music.
Late last week we reported on a modder that managed to port in custom beatmaps to the Quest version, which at the time seemed like the genesis of a singular home-grown solution. Now it appears Beat Games is taking a proactive approach by owning that process themselves on Quest.
This largely makes sense from a platform perspective, as Oculus hasn’t been as cagey as Sony when it comes to allowing players to bring their own music, something that has prevented Beat Games from pursuing a similar level editor on PSVR.
We’re hoping to learn more about both unofficial mods and the official level editor coming to Beat Saber on Quest in the near future. As always, we’ll keep you updated, so check back soon.
