Sony veröffentlichte im Zuge seines Livestream-Events State of Play nicht nur einen neuen Meilenstein für die PlayStation VR (PSVR), sondern auch zahlreiche kommende VR-Titel für Konsolenspieler. Auch der lange erwartete Nachfolger von The London Heist, Blood & Truth, erhält nun ein offizielles Veröffentlichungsdatum. Die Vorbestellungen wurden eröffnet und ein neuer Trailer gibt zudem weitere Einblicke in die Geschichte und das Gameplay des Action-Agenten-Shooters.
Blood & Truth – PSVR-Exklusivtitel erscheint offiziell am 28. Mai 2019
Entwicklerstudio SIE Worldwide Studios veröffentlicht mit Blood & Truth eine eigenständige Version der VR-Kurzerfahrung The London Heist aus der VR-Demosammlung PlayStation VR Worlds. Der VR-Titel wurde erstmals 2017 vorgestellt, nach langer Entwicklungszeit wurde nun die finale Version vorgeführt, die in knapp zwei Monaten erhältlich sein wird.
Innerhalb des Action-Shooters schlüpfen die Spieler in die Rolle des Special-Forces-Soldaten Ryan Marks, der sich auf einer gefährlichen Mission durch die Londoner Unterwelt durchschlägt, um seine Familie vor einem kaltblütigen Verbrechersyndikat zu beschützen. Mit einer großen Waffenauswahl bekämpft ihr zahlreiche Ganoven und Gangmitglieder, die euch während eurer halsbrecherischen Mission ans Leder wollen.
Dabei werdet ihr kurzerhand zum Actionhelden und dürft euch mit reichlich Feuerkraft durch zahlreiche virtuelle Schauplätze zu Land und in der Luft kämpfen. So durchlebt ihr in James-Bond-Manier verschiedenen Actionszenen, wie Fallschirmsprünge aus einem Flugzeug oder Autoverfolgungsjagden. Zudem gibt es diverse Interaktionsmöglichkeiten beim Lösen von Rätseln. Dazu zählt das Knacken von Schlössern oder Entschärfen von Sprengstoff.
Insgesamt fünf bis sechs Stunden Spielzeit soll die angehenden Agenten im VR-Titel erwarten.
As a part of Sony’s inaugural ‘State of Play’ webseries, the company today announced that the upcoming action shooter for PSVR Blood & Truth finally has a release date.
The game is headed exclusively to PSVR May 28th, 2019.
Pre-orders are available today through the PlayStation Store. The webpage still isn’t updated yet, although once it is we’ll update this article to reflect whatever new information is bound to arrive.
“gives players much more agency than ‘The London Heist’. Players now have a means of node-based movement, which is more immersive than being stuck in the same spot but still managed to be comfortable. In addition to a strong shooting component, Blood & Truth mixes things up with a variety of interactive moments like picking locks, arming explosives, and climbing ladders.
Blood & Truth has grown out of ‘The London Heist’—one of the best received mini experiences included in PlayStation VR Worlds outside Astro Bot Rescue Mission (2018). It aims to build upon the many lessons learned and flesh things out into a fully developed game which Sony is saying will bring players five to six hours of immersive gameplay.
Blood & Truth was developed by Sony’s Worldwide Studios.
(Update: 5:55 PM ET): In a previous version of this article it was reported that Blood & Truth would be available this week (March 28th), when in reality it will be due on May 28th. Chalking that up to a heavy week at GDC and resultant jet lag.
When was the last time you played an action game where you had to put any real thought into reloading?
It’s an abstracted activity, most of the time, bound to a single button or key. Usually, you get into the habit of reloading after any exchange of fire. (Which means your character is leaving a bunch of partially-full magazines lying around everywhere, like that person you knew in college who was completely incapable of ever finishing an entire can of soda.) Reloading’s mostly just there in these games to provide a break in the action, some vague nod to realism, or some degree of additional tactical complexity, but you usually don’t have to think about it beyond that. Aside from the occasional mechanic like Gears of War’s “tactical reloads,” you just hit the button and forget about it.
The above demo and video interview are from a preview event held in October 2017
Blood and Truth, at least in its current state, is a game about that reloading. At its simplest level, it’s just a very British shooter (similar to its predecessor, London Heist) that’s more than a little reminiscent of old arcade games like Time Crisis. You move from cover to cover, shooting and being shot at. So far, so comfortably familiar.
You’ve got a realistic ammunition limit in your guns, and have to reload manually. Your character, a British special forces operative named Ryan Marks, carries spare magazines in a pouch on his chest. You use one controller to grab it with your character’s empty hand, then manually bring it to the port on your gun to reload. It doesn’t take long, but that’s a couple of seconds during which you aren’t returning fire, and that’s long enough to get you into trouble.
Not only is it weirdly immersive, but it really forces you to keep count of your shots in a way that a lot of other games simply don’t. I played a short demo version of Blood and Truth on the floor at PAX West, which was stripped down to its most basic elements. Marks’s family is in the clutches of an unnamed criminal element; Marks is entering a run-down part of the London Underground as part of his endeavors to find and rescue them. That run-down part of London, as it turns out, is the part where somebody’s been arming the chavs, and I ended up in a shootout with what appeared to be the most well-equipped group of football hooligans in the history of fiction.
Playing Blood & Truth made me think a lot about how much tactical-response stuff I’ve inadvertently picked up from years of increasingly realistic shooters, as well as how many terrible habits I’ve gotten into at the same time. For example, dual-wielding in this game is a really stupid idea, because you’ll run both guns dry in seconds, and then you have to laboriously holster at least one gun so you can reload the other.
The guns feature a realistic amount of sway to them, but you can reduce that and stabilize your aim by holding your controllers close together, as if your empty hand is being used to steady your grip on the weapon. It may look cool if you hold your pistol sideways, or fire a sub-machine gun one-handed, but it’s hardly efficient, and when there are five guys bearing down on you, efficiency suddenly matters quite a lot. I started off simply spraying lead in enemies’ general direction, but after a while, I got the hang of things and began dropping fools with precise head and body shots.
There were even a couple of moments where I ran dry in my main gun at a bad time, which forced me to pull out my pistol – holstered on my character’s belt, naturally, forcing me to do a cross-arm draw – and drop a guy like John Wick. The only thing that was missing was the ability to do a New York reload. Hell, if somebody were to add a bunch of doves flying everywhere to this, it could be a John Woo movie.
It sounds simple, but the addition of relatively simple mechanics that mirror actual gun-fighting tactics really adds a lot to Blood and Truth, which would otherwise be a fairly straightforward light gun shooter that happens to be in VR. It also has a “focus mode,” one of those short-lived moments where everything goes into slow motion except you, but the tutorial made a special point of showing it to me and I proceeded to forget all about it. Fortunately, for the sake of the demo, my character’s health was cranked way up, or I’d have been mowed down in my first or second real fight.
There’s definitely something here, although the demo was too brief to say much more than that. My time at PAX West with it was buggy and your character’s disembodied VR hands had a habit of deciding to float around near the middle of the screen, but it was also surprisingly (and a little disturbingly) easy to pick up and roll with. I played a lot of VR shooters at this year’s PAX, but this was the most memorable entirely because it was the most down-to-Earth.
One of PSVR’s most promising upcoming games may not get support for the headset’s excellent Aim controller, but hope is not lost.
VentureBeat recently spoke to Sony London’s Director of VR Product Development, Stuart Whyte, about the studio’s newest game, Blood And Truth. The PSVR exclusive is a first-person shooter (FPS) set in London’s gritty streets in which you take on gangsters. Currently we’ve only seen the game running with two PlayStation Move motion controllers, but could we also see the rifle-shaped Aim controller supported?
“It’s a great question,” Whyte said when asked. “We’ve optimized our experience around two Move controllers currently, as it allows you to intuitively use both hands in play. We don’t have anything else to share on Aim at this moment.”
It takes a bit of reading between the lines but, to us at least, Whyte’s answer certainly suggests Aim support could happen at some point down the line. Given that Blood And Truth is one of the biggest PSVR games on the horizon right now, it seems strange to us that Sony wouldn’t use the game to promote the Aim controller, which already makes FPS games like Farpoint and the upcoming Firewall: Zero Hour so compelling.
Still, as Whyte said, Blood And Truth has clearly been optimized for the dual-wielding Move controllers from what we’ve seen before. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t see an Arizona Sunshine-style reworking, though, that switches our pistols for rifles depending on what controller you’re using. We’ll keep our fingers crossed as we await the game’s launch date.
The lead game designer for the studio behind Blood & Truth, Sony London, has been speaking at the Develop: Brighton conference. Michael Hampden addressed attendees on the topic of virtual reality (VR) and what the next few years will bring.
During a talk for the first day of the conference, Hampden said that he expected the future to be bright for VR, with new genres of games emerging from VR, and new development tools being created.
As reported by MCV UK, Hampden said he expected VR to birth entirely new types of videogame, stating: “In the next five years, I think we’ll see some VR killer apps emerge and we’re going to have established a design language. I think we’re going to see some growth in mobile VR as well and medical applications. And one new genre of game will be born, one that will only be possible in VR.”
Looking further ahead, Hampden said he expected that accessories that provided more realism, such as haptic feedback, would make an impact on the VR space: “I think one of the missing key for everyone is haptic feedback. It should makes a giant leap forward and will be a game changer. Feeling an object, the texture, will change the game, it will make things much more immersive and it will allow new genres of VR games to emerge.”
The rise of location-based VR centres was something Hampden also pinpointed as an ongoing trend: “We’ve seen developers switching from doing room scale environment to do location-based experiences. These are things like the Star Wars Secrets of the Empire and stuff like that and it’s pretty interesting to see the ability that this technology brings to users. You can have the ground shaking as the user is walking through the space or you can have wind or temperature changes. These are very powerful and profound experiences that people love and are willing to spend money for, to try something like that. We have a limited number of these experiences out there so far but I think this trend is here to stay and we’ll see more and more location based VR coming in the future.”
For future coverage of developments in the VR industry, keep checking back with VRFocus.
One of the videogames that caught PlayStation VR owner’s attention during Paris Games Week (PGW) 2017 was the announcement by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) regarding a new project from The London Heist developers London Studios called Blood & Truth. As that was over six months ago – and sometime since VRFocus last played it – it was time to check out a new build of the action spy caper to see how development was progressing.
London Studios took an updated version of Blood & Truth to the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, giving PlayStation VR fans a chance to see if this point-to-point first-person shooter (FPS) could improve upon more disappointing titles like Bravo Team. While there were plenty of minor updates that aren’t instantly noticeable, the major one being pointed out by the team was the ability to dual wield guns for the first time.
While it may seem obvious that if you’ve got two PlayStation Move’s in your hands that a gun would be nice in both, it’s not always feasible depending on the type of gameplay and what the developer wants to achieve. In the case of Blood & Truth however that addition is more than welcomed.
As VRFocus has mentioned in previous previews, Blood & Truth employs a fairly linear teleportation system similar to that of Arktika.1 where you have pre-set locations to move to. Unlike Arktika.1 where there were only minimal points to choose from – keeping you barely in cover – Blood & Truth is far more realistic, with each point keeping you hunkered down and protected as best as possible.
It’s these situations when you’re hiding behind a wall or car, bullets hailing down on you from several locations that dual wield certainly has it uses. It affords that additional strategy element allowing you to shoot through a window the other hand can’t comfortably reach or in the middle of a gunfight grant you a few extra bullets without reloading. On that subject, it’s not instantly instinctual to reload a gun with another still in your hand but that is possible in Blood & Truth. All that means is the ammo just doesn’t last as long.
Those that enjoyed The London Heist will rightly be looking forward to Blood & Truth. The linear nature of the experience maybe a negative to some yet that’s the nature of a highly story driven adventure where you can play a spy. The new demo also showcased a new area – previous demos have featured a casino shoot out and chase/interrogation scene – a dilapidated multi-storey building.
Again, while the main path is set you are given some freedom in how you approach some of the set pieces – what cover you choose for example. Having to work your way up the building in an effort to free your mum, London Studios want to get you involved in more than just shooting bad guys so there are climbing elements thrown in for good measure.
From what VRFocus has seen so far Blood & Truth looks to be a promising experience for PlayStation VR. There’s always that question of repetition, shooting enemies and keeping in cover which can only be answered with a proper hands-on review. As development continues VRFocus will keep you updated.
Following the wave of pre-show announcements and conferences, here’s a final roundup of all our E3 2018 coverage. Vive Wireless Adapter news, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot platforms clarified, Ready at Dawn interview, and we go hands-on with Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Trover Saves the Universe, Blood & Truth, Megalith, Beat Saber, and Firewall: Zero Hour.
Hands-on With Astro Bot Rescue Mission
Image courtesy Sony Japan Studio
Featuring the cute bots first seen in The Playroom (2013), Sony Japan Studio’s upcoming platformer Astro Bot Rescue Mission uses similar controls and gameplay mechanics as any other 3D platformer, but it has been created from the ground up with VR in mind. Our hands-on time at E3 2018 left us impressed and wanting more; the title launches exclusively on PSVR in the Fall. The game is one of many PSVR titles shown at Sony’s E3 booth.
HTC’s official Wireless Adapter for the Vive was first announced earlier this year, and made an appearance at the DisplayLink booth at E3 2018. An HTC spokesperson confirmed that the device was on track for a late summer launch. They also said that up to three Wireless Adapters could used in the same space without interference, with an ideal range of up to six meters from the transmitter.
Announced at Sony’s main E3 2018 showcase, Trover Saves the Universe is an action platformer presented with the unique comedic style of Justin Roiland, creator of Rick and Morty. Our hands-on time revealed a game with more ‘serious’ platforming than you might imagine, and plenty of fourth-wall breaking gags along the way.
Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot Confirmed for PSVR and Vive
Image courtesy Bethesda
This standalone VR experience initially revealed at the early Bethesda E3 2018 showcase has now been confirmed to launch on PSVR and HTC Vive sometime in 2019. The game takes place two decades after the events of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (2017); you can check out the new trailer here.
Sony’s VR Announcements Were on the Sidelines at E3
Photo by Road to VR
Following Microsoft’s more traditional (and VR-free) E3 presentation, Sony’s event got off to an unusual start, switching venues and generally avoiding the ‘on stage’ style of delivery. But perhaps more surprising was the distinct lack of PSVR information within the main showcase. Aside from Trover Saves the Universe and a brief montage, the focus was entirely on non-VR, blockbuster titles. In this article we consider the significance of this decision.
Hands-on With the Latest Preview of PSVR Exclusive Blood & Truth
Image courtesy Sony
VR action shooter Blood & Truth left a great first impression when we tried the game in October, so we were keen to take an updated look at E3 this year. Fleshed out from the ‘London Heist’ experience in PlayStation VR Worlds (2016), Sony’s London Studio has been given more time to fully realise their vision. The new demo also impressed, and introduced a new ‘bullet time’ mechanic.
Launching as a timed exclusive on PSVR later this year, Megalith is a first-person arena brawler employing many familiar mechanics of popular MOBAs like Dota 2 (2013) and League of Legends (2009), with different heroes to choose from, each with unique abilities. Our hands-on left us keen to see the final game, as it has potential to deliver fun co-op brawling. The demo featured free locomotion plus ‘snap turn’, with other options being investigated.
We’ve enjoyed many hours of Beat Saber on PC VR systems via the game’s Early Access program on the Steam and Oculus stores, but this was our first try with the PlayStation VR version, which is set to launch later this year. This fast-paced VR rhythm game naturally benefits from motion control tracking accuracy, and we were pleased to find that the Move controllers were largely up to the task, but players will want to make sure their tracking setup is set up perfectly to avoid frustration.
This four-vs-four, objective-based shooter from First Contact Entertainment is shaping up well, delivering team-based multiplayer action similar to series such as Counter-Strike and Rainbow Six, but in an immersive style (particularly when played with the Aim controller) that PSVR users have been waiting for. The game is due to arrive some time in 2018.
Ready at Dawn CEO Talks Echo Combat, Commitment to VR
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
We caught up with Ready at Dawn CEO Ru Weerasuriya on the E3 show floor to talk about the upcoming Echo Combat open beta, and the studio’s commitment to the medium. By the time the game launches, Weerasuriya says they intend to add “more functionality, potentially more modes, but more ways to play.” He said that the studio was “currently exploring a lot of ideas” to move the VR medium forward in the long term.
Blood & Truth, a promising VR action shooter from Sony’s first-party London Studio, got a brand new demo for E3 2018 which brings improved gunplay and a new bullet time mechanic while showing off a new level.
Blood & Truth has grown from the seed of ‘The London Heist’—one of the best recieved mini experiences included in PlayStation VR Worlds—aiming to build upon the many lessons learned and flesh things out into a fully developed game which Sony is saying will bring players five to six hours of immersive gameplay. In my first hands-on with the game back in October, I felt like the game was off to a great start. How are things now seven months later? Still as promising as ever, but the game needs to tread carefully to steer clear of becoming a wave shooter.
From the outset, Blood & Truth gives players much more agency than ‘The London Heist’. Players now have a means of node-based movement, which is more immersive than being stuck in the same spot but still managed to be comfortable. In addition to a strong shooting component, Blood & Truth mixes things up with a variety of interactive moments like picking locks, arming explosives, and climbing ladders. If you haven’t seen the trailer before, it’s worth watching to get a sense of how the game plays:
In the latest demo shown off at E3 2018, the game showed refined shooting and weapon handling mechanics. Players now have two holsters near their hips, a chest pack (where magazines are held), and a heavy weapon slot over their back. Much care has gone into making sure these elements are placed in way that they don’t interfere with each other—even in the game’s recommended seated position, it was easy and reliable to holster and unholster my pistol, reload it by pulling a magazine from my chest pack, and holster/unholster the submachine gun on my back. You can now easily hand your gun back and forth between your hands, which makes it easy to switch between hands and get the gun to the desired holster.
One bothersome point—while guns use a toggle-hold system (where they ‘stick’ to your hands once you grasp them, even if you let the trigger go), other items in the world use a ‘continuous-hold’ system, where they only stay in your hand as long as you’re holding the trigger. That meant I wound up dropping many of the game’s items, like lock picks and screw drivers, because I was used to the guns using toggle-hold. At one point I dropped an active grenade at my feet for this very reason. It would be nice if grabbing was consistent between all items in the game, whether it be toggle-hold or continuous-hold.
Blood & Truth is also now more aware of how you choose to hold your guns. For instance, when I cupped my right hand under my left hand in real life (to stabilize the virtual pistol), my virtual hands animated into a pose to match the act, which felt pretty cool. The SMG slung over my back could also be gripped as a two-handed weapon, though in this case I didn’t like it so much because the two-handed handling was weird, causing the forward hand to have a disproportionate amount of control over the gun’s rotation. I expect this might have been done to prevent the player’s front hand from occluding the rear hand from the PS Camera, or maybe it just needs more refinement to feel good.
As before, shooting guns in Blood & Truth feels visceral and satisfying. You can easily spam shots from the hip or blind-fire over cover, or take your time aiming down the sights for some well-placed headshots (especially fun when using the silenced pistol to clear a room without alerting the rest of the compound). On that note, I felt that the scale of the world was a little too small, causing the pistol to look small in my hands, and the holo-scope mounted on top to be a little smaller than I would have hoped.
Image courtesy Sony
This build of Blood & Truth also introduced a ‘bullet time’ mechanic called Focus. Activated by pressing both Move buttons at the same time, Focus gives you a few seconds of slow motion, providing a good opportunity to dispatch key enemies when you’re in a tough spot. It also looks and sounds super cool—incoming bullets slow down too, giving you time to dodge them with your head, all the while particles and effects can be seen with greater detail. In the prior demo, there was a moment of automatically triggered slow motion, but you couldn’t just activate it on a whim.
While your Focus seems to be limited to a certain amount of time (which slowly recharges), I think it might be more interesting to make Focus always available, but make it a risk-reward thing, where incoming bullets do extra damage unless they’re dodged (giving you brief moments of SUPERHOT-like gameplay).
Movement is slow and steady to avoid any motion sickness, and while this mechanic feels more immersive than teleportation, it does begin to feel a bit ‘on-rails’. You’ll find moments where you want to go somewhere that seems like you should be able to reach, but you can’t because there’s no node; or times where you’ll want to retreat after pushing too far into dangerous territory, but you can’t because there’s effectively no backtracking between nodes. Being restricted to nodes also kills any sense of exploration (a shame, because the environments look great) and introduces the risk of feeling like a shooting gallery.
Image courtesy Sony
To its credit, Blood & Truth is attempting to head off that shooting gallery feeling before it sets in, by smartly breaking up combat with interactive moments. In the demo I picked the lock on a door (by inserting two tools and carefully twisting them to pop the pins on the lock), disabled a security system (by unscrewing a few screws, flipping a switch, and swapping a fuse), and even used my hands to climb along the outside of a building (by grabbing big bolts in the wall and construction scaffolding to pull myself along).
These were all nice distractions from the shooting, but I think these intermission moments need to become more than distractions—they should mean something. It’s nice to use the 1:1 control of VR to flip some switches and press some buttons, but it should ideally be important somehow, not just a thing you have to do to move forward—and as interesting as the lock picking is at first, I hope I’m not asked to pick 50 locks over the course of the game; there ought to be more variety than that if I’m not even getting to choose which locks to pick (because I’m on rails).
One way to fix that may be to sometimes put the player in danger during these intermission moments (like if you don’t get the door open in a certain amount of time, you would get caught and fail the mission). Another could be to give players some sort of choice—perhaps I could choose to pick the lock to a door for a stealthy entry, or choose instead to blow it open with C4 to rush in with guns a’blazing (with the best option being revealed if I have the time to first peek through the window at the type of enemies inside). A combination of these two (danger + choice) could be doubly compelling.
Image courtesy Sony
I also hope that, beyond the brief intermission moments, chapters of the game will have players doing things altogether different than just shooting—like driving, flying, or even sword fighting! The variety of different vignettes carried along by a meaningful narrative is a big part of what made ‘The London Heist’ great, and Blood & Truth is likely to succeed if it can capture that magic while managing to scale it out into a complete game. The challenge is doing so without becoming a boring shooting gallery, as happened with Bravo Team. We’ll have to wait and see where Sony London Studios takes things next.
– – — – –
While we expect that Blood & Truth will launch in 2018, Sony still isn’t confirming a release date or price for the game, though I was told that players can expect around five or six hours of gameplay, split up into chapters meant to run around 20 or 30 minutes each. At E3 2018 I also learned that the game is designed for seated play and there’s presently no plans for a ‘standing’ mode.
The PlayStation VR has been a showcase piece for Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Los Angeles, for two years running. Last year’s media briefing featured a segment which demonstrated dozens of titles in quick succession, including big hits such as Moss and new downloadable content (DLC) for Farpoint. This year, the heat is on to raise more interest in the PlayStation VR beyond that of the early adopters.
The PlayStation VR is arguably the most successful of all the head-mounted displays (HMDs) currently available. While it may not have outsold the Samsung Gear VR, it most certainly has a much bigger active install base. But what’s next? Those who were keen to get the device early-on have already jumped in, and so SIE need to bring a big new wave of titles to convince the naysayers that now is the time to jump into virtual reality (VR).
New VR Games
We should expect a number of new titles at E3 this year as part of SIE’s media briefing, both first- and third-party. Indeed, the recent announcement of a PlayStation VR version of Archiact’s Evasion has started the ball rolling, and there’s likely to be many more on the way. Something new from Polyarc – currently assumed to be a second chapter for Moss – is expected, plus more information on the release of Blood & Truth and numerous other PlayStation VR titles that are considered missing in action.
Megalith
Originally expected in Q1 2018, Megalith hasn’t delivered any new information for some time. A new playable build at E3 2018 should be expected, plus hopefully some solid details on a release later this year. It wouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to see Megalith held back for a holiday season launch.
Blood & Truth
And the same applies for Blood & Truth, also. After the hugely positive reaction to the spiritual predecessor – The London Heist featured in PlayStation VR launch title, PlayStation VR Worlds – Blood & Truth is looking set to be an influencer amongst new adopters of the PlayStation VR. SIE will undoubtedly want to time such a launch wisely, and will surely use E3 to build hype for the title prior to its launch later this year.
Golem
‘Golem will launch on 13th March 2018!’
Really? Then where is it? Nowhere, except maybe in SIE’s E3 plans. Highwire Games’ PlayStation VR adventure has been high on many early adopters ‘most wanted’ lists for quite some time, and so the rapid updating of information late last year built up the hope that it might actually see a release soon. Nearly six months later and we’ll still no closer to seeing an official launch. All we can do is hope that E3 will bring the news we want.
Zumindest nach Ankündigungen haben PC-Brillen der Sony-Initiative wenig entgegenzusetzen. Rund 150 Spiele für die virtuelle Realität sind für PlayStation VR bisher erhältlich, bis Ende diesen Jahres soll der Katalog auf 280 anschwillen und sich damit fast verdoppeln. Bereits jetzt sind etliche Exklusivtitel erhältlich oder angekündigt, einige Highlights sollten in den nächsten Wochen für Spielfreude sorgn.
Sony: PSVR-Katalog bis zum Jahresende mit 280 Titeln
Von den großen Systemen war 2017 die PSVR ganz klar der Gewinner: Über 2 Millionen Einheiten seiner VR-Brille konnte Sony absetzen und mit einem exklusiven Katalog für viele gute Erfahrungen sorgen. Zu den Highlights im letzten Jahr gehörten sicherlich Resident Evil 7, Farpoint und The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR. Wie die japanische Wirschaftspublikation Nikkei mitteilt, ist der Verkaufserfolg der PSVR entscheidend dafür, dass der VR-Katalog um 80 Prozent in diesem Jahr zulegen wird. Noch wichtiger als die reinen Hardware-Verkäufe ist nämlich die Kauffreudigkeit der Kunden bei Software-Titeln. Laut Sony hat man bis Dezember 2017 12,2 Millionen Titel absetzen können. Das entspricht mehr als sechs VR-Titel pro Brillen-Besitzer und legt die wirtschaftliche Grundlage für weitere Entwicklungen.
Zu den in diesem Jahr kommenden Highlights gehören beispielsweise das putzige und liebevoll gestaltete Mausspiel Moss, das für Ende Februar geplant ist und sich bereits jetzt vorbestellen lässt. Ein Leckerbissen für Racing-Freunde steht mit dem kostenlosen VR-Update der WipEout Omega Collection in diesem Frühjahr ins Haus. Die Sammlung kostet derzeit 35 Euro und vereint mehrere Titel des futuristischen Racing-Klassikers. Zudem steht die Eigenproduktion Blood & Truth in diesem Jahr an, die filmreife Action bieten soll und das Konzept von The London Heist weiterentwickelt. Ein genaueres Datum steht hier allerdings noch nicht fest. Ebenfalls dieses Jahr soll Ace Combat 7 Skies Unknown erscheinen. Zwar nicht exklusiv, aber eine schöne Erweiterung der Bibliothek dürfte Bigscreen werden, das nach PC-Brillen auf weiteren Plattformen erscheinen soll. Bigscreen erlaubt es beispielsweise, in Gemeinschaft Filme zu schauen und dabei sozial zu interagieren. Weitere Ankündigungen für die PSVR findet ihr in diesem Beitrag.
