It may seem like the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 was all about videogames and for the most part, you’d be right, but occasionally some hardware does sneak in. VRFocus isn’t talking about Microsoft’s Project Scarlett, that receives masses or coverage thanks to the press conference – VRFocus won’t go into the fact no VR was mentioned – it’s the small stuff on the show floor. One company showcasing its wares was Insta360, a manufacturer of 360-degree cameras. So with (normal) camera in hand VRFocus learnt some more about Insta360’s 2019 lineup.
Insta360 has quite the catalogue of 360-degree cameras in its portfolio, from entry-level consumer products all the way up to high-end pro devices. Originally founded in China in 2014, it’s first pro-level camera was the Insta360 4K in 2016, while for the general public the Insta360 Nano clipped onto iPhones.
Since then Insta360 has come a long way, showcasing at E3 2019 cameras like the Insta360 EVO, Insta360 Pro 2 and the Insta360 Titan. The EVO is a higher end consumer device which is ideal for those who’ve tried a cheap 360-camera and want something more. It’s part of a new breed of dual-purpose cameras which can either shoot in 360 or in stereoscopic 180. It’s also able to send footage directly to Oculus Go.
The Insta360 Pro 2 and Titan are very different beasts in comparison to the EVO. The Pro 2 is the first step into crystal clear 360 video recording, offering six F2.8 fisheye lenses which can record at 8K resolution. Yours for the low price of £4,999 GBP. Or for those with deep enough pockets and a desire to record in eye-watering 11K resolution then the Insta360 Titan is your next choice. Featuring eight 200° F3.2 fisheye lenses using Micro Four Thirds sensors, the camera has all sorts of technical wizardry inside its shell. And it should to for £14,999.
Those aren’t all the devices Insta360 has on offer which Insta360’s Caroline Zhang goes into great detail, including a rather unusual dog camera? Check out the full interview for further details on Insta360 cameras.
There were a number of interesting virtual reality (VR) titles at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) such as Gearbox Software’s Penn & Teller VRand Survios’ Battlewake. Tripwire Interactive (Killing Floor: Incursion) was also there to promote a title it’s publishing, Espire 1: VR Operative, by Australian studio Digital Lode. A couple of the team came over to the show, and VRFocus decided to find out more (that’s what we’re here for).
Espire 1: VR Operative is a first-person shooter (FPS) with plenty of stealth elements to allow players to conduct missions however they please. The sensible option might be to stay hidden, using gantries, zip lines and other environmental objects to stay out of sight, only engaging enemies if you really need to. This way you can truly explore the Espire 1: VR Operative world without bullets whizzing past your head.
Or there’s always the second option, throwing caution to the wind, grabbing some guns and practising the delicate art of turning enemies into swiss cheese. Both options are equally open to all players, but the first requires patience and skill, the other a deadly aim. Plus there’s the little issue of altering all the guards should you get spotted or somewhat trigger happy.
Digital Lode is keen on ensuring Espire 1: VR Operative can be played by anyone (something not all VR FPS titles are good at), so the team created the ‘Control Theatre’ movement mechanic. This is actually intertwined with the story as you play an Espire Agent, operating a fully remote-controlled Espire model 1 robot. The theatre is the area the player character is in – a holodeck of sorts – so when movement takes place part of this location comes in rather like a vignette. This can be turned off if players so wish.
In the interview, VRFocus had a chat with Michael Wentworth-Bell, Espire 1: VR Operative Game Director at Digital Lode about the videogames’ production, inspiration as well as all the cool stuff you can do when remotely controlling a robot body that’s strong and more agile than a human.
Espire 1: VR Operative is scheduled to arrive in August 2019, supporting Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift S, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index and Windows Mixed Reality headsets. A PlayStation VR has yet to be dated. Check out the interview below and for further updates on Espire 1: VR Operative, keep reading VRFocus.
While the reality of being a pirate wasn’t anywhere near as adventurous and fun as we’d like to think – scurvy anyone? – that hasn’t stopped all sorts of fanciful tales and stories emerging, creating a litany of books, films and other entertainment media. Pirate themed experiences have begun to find their way to virtual reality (VR) headsets, with Survios showcasing its latest effort Battlewake during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019.
Battlewake is very much an arcade style experience that doesn’t pretend to be anything else other fighting action involving boats, sea monsters and other pirates. It will have co-op and multiplayer modes, but for the demo during E3 this was a chance to see several single-player missions from the campaign in action.
VRFocus calls Battlewake an arcade-style experience mainly due to the control scheme and fast/frantic nature of the gameplay. Loot can be collected so that you can upgrade parts of your ship, improving the cannons or the ships ramming capabilities, yet from what was shown so far there’s not a lot more depth at present. This isn’t a role-playing game (RPG) so don’t expect to start naming your character and become a scourge of the Caribbean.
You are a sea lord, just one of four fixed characters, each with their own special abilities. Two were available so VRFocus tried Diego whose main ability was the creation of a giant water spout which could suck in enemies and cause major damage. Like all massive character abilities, this took time to charge, activated when a medallion appears on your glowing arm tattoo.
As this is VR Survios has ensured Battlewake’s control scheme for the boats is very hands-on and semi-realistic. As the captain, you’re at the wheel of your ship, which can be grabbed by either putting your hand near the wheel or pressing the grip button near it. The latter certainly seemed more intuitive, although there were points using either method where the virtual hand came unstuck from the wheel – slightly annoying when bringing the boat around.
Additionally, there was a boost button and the far more handy ‘hard turn’, activated by dropping the anchor (club hauling is the closest nautical term). Either side of the character are two handles depending on if you want to quickly turn left or right. These certainly proved invaluable for tricky manoeuvres such as encroaching rocks when your attention was elsewhere. The technique was handy in battle, yet due to the way the weapon systems work in Battlewake, it wasn’t always needed.
Your armaments on Battlewake are suitably over-the-top and full 360. Unlike traditional boats at the time which had to turn to aim the cannons, in Battlewake it’s as easy as pointing and shooting, no matter where the enemy was. Naturally, the best weapons were the side cannons having the longest range and most damage. A nice big aiming arc points out the side of the boat making hits easy – maybe too easy. Great for enemy boats, these are ideal for taking down land-based fortifications which started the demo.
Should an enemy pirate be directly in front then there were two options, use that boost mentioned to ram them, or if the distance was too great some small yet highly useful front cannons where available. Or, if a ship is at the rear then the mortar cannon with its massive range then came into play. What’s nice about the system was the fluidity. There are no menus or buttons to press to activate each particular weapons system, merely turning your body in the right direction initiates the correct weapon.
The missions were all about blowing stuff up as you might expect. Apart from the fortification to start things off, all the rest were boats. From general pirate ships and slightly tougher mid-bosses to cargo ships filled with gold, it was a non-stop barrage of fights so that there’s never a dull moment. The demo then finished with a boss which wasn’t a sea monster, unfortunately, but a reasonably tough yet rather generic looking pirate vessel.
At the moment the demo did everything right, providing a thrilling experience for roughly 15 minutes. Battlewake featured all the gloss you’d expect from a Survios title, with easy to use controls and exciting gameplay. With a 20-chapter story campaign hopefully the videogame isn’t too repetitive, and there’s still the multiplayer to look forward to.
There are some exciting titles coming to Oculus Rift in 2019 through to 2020, the likes of Stormland and Defector are coming this year, while newly revealed videogames during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 such as After the Fallare due to arrive next year. One of the biggest exclusives the platform is awaiting is Ready at Dawn’s sci-fi sequel Lone Echo II, and VRFocus caught up with the team during E3 to find out more.
The first Lone Echo launched back in 2017 for Oculus Rift, setting a new standard in visual quality and gameplay for virtual reality (VR). Zero-g environmental design always posed a challenge for VR developers as it could lead to nausea in some players. Ready at Dawn managed to crack it, producing an experience which VRFocus gave a full five-star rating to, saying: “Ready at Dawn has created an experience that every Oculus Touch owner needs in their library.”
During Oculus Connect 5 (OC5) in 2018, the studio officially announced Lone Echo II – one of the major reveals of the event behind Oculus Quest – continuing the epic storyline of your robot character Jack and Captain Olivia Rhodes who he’s there to protect against the dangers of space exploration.
For E3 2019 Ready at Dawn showcased a new build of Lone Echo II, featuring new gameplay mechanics, menus, UI and puzzles.
At the Oculus booth, VRFocus had a chat with Nathan Phail-Liff, the Game Director for Lone Echo II and Studio Art Director. Phail-Liff discusses some of the mechanics the studio has added to diversify the gameplay as well as adding more interaction with Liv.
One thing Lone Echo fans might not be pleased to hear is that the title has been delayed. Originally, Ready at Dawn had expected to launch the sequel later this year. Alas, that has now been pushed back to Q1 2020. Hopefully, it won’t slip any further.
Check out the full interview with Phail-Liff below, or take a look at VRFocus’ other interviews from E3 2019 with Oculus’ Jason Rubin or Vertigo Games. VRFocus will continue its coverage of Lone Echo II, reporting back with all the latest announcements.
For the first time in several years, Oculus returned to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 with a massive stand filled with Oculus Quests and Oculus Rift S’s. On hand were some of the biggest titles due for the headsets including Lone Echo II and Asgard’s Wrath. Vertigo Games was there to showcase an early look at its newly revealed title After the Fall and VRFocus took some time to learn more about the project from one of the designers, Nick Witsel.
Vertigo Games is best known for its virtual reality (VR) zombie shooter Arizona Sunshine (among others), so the studio has taken what it knows and upped the ante with better visuals, bosses, and a wintery Los Angeles for After the Fall. In this post-apocalyptic adventure, humanity has ravaged the environment to the point where the planet is a snow-covered disaster, and to cope everyone decided to do loads of designer drugs. And just like any good horror story, this in turn hideously mutated almost everyone into undead monsters.
So After the Fall is an action-packed first-person shooter (FPS) which is all about surviving by killing anything in your way with a selection of melee and ranged weaponry. These can then be upgraded by picking up all the loot dropped by enemies. The core story campaign can be played solo, but the final experience will have options for a full four-player co-op experience.
VRFocuspreviewed After the Fall at E3 2019 and found that while this early demo was slick and had plenty of arcade action it didn’t always play to VR’s strengths, possibly falling into a generic shooter class if not too careful. It’s still early days for the project and one that’s certainly in good hands.
Naturally, VRFocus wanted to learn more with After the Fall Level Designer Nick Witsel on hand to answer a few questions. Check out the video interview below to see what he said about development and Vertigo Games’ plans for the videogame. As always, keep reading VRFocus for all the latest VR news, and for more E3 2019 previews like this one for Penn & Teller VR.
As expected for anyone familiar with the iconic magician duo, nothing about my appointment to see the upcoming Penn & Teller VR game was normal. For starters, the demo took place at a literal dance studio across some railroad tracks a few blocks away from the Los Angeles Convention Center during E3 2019. Offsite demos are entirely common, but they don’t usually take place in rented-out dance studios in the middle of a weekday while teenage ballet girls are busy stretching, gossiping, and loitering in the hallways, whispering about why a sweaty neckbeard with a Pokemon necklace is standing nearby. I was the sweaty neckbeard waiting for my appointment time.
After the prior journalist was done I could finally enter and stop pretending to be busy on my phone to avoid eye contact with concerned children in spandex that were probably considering texting their parents.
The full title of the game is Penn & Teller VR: Frankly Unfair, Unkind, Unnecessary, and Underhanded, which naturally abbreviates to Penn & Teller VR: F U, U, U, and U because that rolls off the tongue much more easily. In the press release Gearbox is describing Penn & Teller VR as a “comedic social VR experience” which sounds about right.
Instead of acting out simulations of the duo’s iconic tricks as if you were learning how to do them, Penn & Teller VR is instead actually all about pranking your friends. Some experiences have you make your friend jump just at the right moment while others have you trick your friend into thinking they can move things with their mind.
Then in another experience I got to re-enact escaping from a cell that’s rapidly filling with water, a la Houdini, while my wrists were literally tied together with an Oculus Touch controller strap, pictured above.
It’s hard to describe Penn & Teller VR without totally spoilingthe fun, so you should just stop reading right now and skip to the final paragraph if you don’t want anything ruined at all.
During one experience the VR user puts on the headset and holds out a single Touch controller to get ready for a round of rock, paper, scissors. A non-VR players holds the other controller. By holding down different buttons you can throw out either rock, paper, or scissors. Eventually, the non-VR player is encouraged to trigger the AI to take over, which emulates their prior movements, freeing you up to scare your friend, move their chair, steal their wallet, or whatever you want to do.
Another example is the team’s famous bullet catch trick. As it goes, Penn shoots a gun and Teller catches the bullet with his teeth. Simple, right? For the VR experience your POV is inside Teller’s mouth and you move his jaws by pulling the controller’s trigger button to catch slow-motion bullets.
Then at the end, Penn blasts you in the face with a shotgun as a friend in real life is instructed to push you as a jump scare. It definitely worked on me.
Without a doubt, Penn & Teller VR is shaping up to be one of the most bizarre and downright hilarious VR experiences out there. It combines the zaniness of the iconic duo with the sort of asynchronous out-of-body experience that only VR can afford. This will likely join Cards Against Humanity and the Jackbox Party Pack as a staple at parties and get togethers.
Penn & Teller VR is due out very soon this summer. It releases for Oculus Rift, Quest, and Vive on June 27 and then hits PSVR the following month on July 9. The game will cost $19.99 on all platforms.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
E3 has had a ton of spectacular moments in its 25 year history. But it has also had its fair share of spectacularly awful moments, too. Ahead of E3 2019, we compiled eight of the biggest flops, fails, and blunders in E3 history
For those after a zombie-themed first-person shooter (FPS) in virtual reality (VR) one of the most popular has to be Vertigo Games’ Arizona Sunshine which has found its way to numerous headsets over the past couple of years. Now the studio is looking to replicate that success with another FPS involving the undead, After the Fall which was revealed during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2019 last week.
Mankind has once again completely screwed things over, so in After the Fall society has collapsed due to the love of designer drugs, and of course, the environment has also suffered. So rather than a hot arid Arizona desert, you’re now in the remains of Los Angeles, completely covered in snow.
Vertigo Games really aren’t playing with the formula too much when it comes to gameplay, with After the Fall treading familiar ground as an all-out zombie shooter. It’s all about popping heads and collecting supplies, with the E3 demo offering a taste of the co-op by adding in a second player – the final version will allow up to four.
Unlike some VR FPS titles like Blood & Truth which seek to immerse players further through the use of interactive elements such as manual reloading of weapons, or backpacks with inventory slots, After the Fall has none of these. It feels very much like an arcade-style experience where you don’t need to worry about these real-world mechanics and purely enjoy the carnage.
This is fine if you want a no-brain shooter, or are in fact in a VR Arcade and want 30 minutes of intense battles. Home users, on the other hand, may find it a little shallow, and possibly not as immersive as other titles. Now, this may be counteracted by things such as the upgrade system (which wasn’t shown) as killing vast amounts of zombies means a great deal of loot to pick up. Touching on the VR interaction again, all of this loot can simply be grabbed magnetically from a distance which does tend to go against the grain of roomscale VR, where you can pick up everything with your hands.
When it came to weapons After the Fall had a mixture on show from pistols and SMG’s to a rather nifty little rocket launcher. Upgrades could be added on the fly to tweak them mid-game but on average they were the usual affair. The wrist-mounted rocket launcher provided the only novel gameplay change, able to lock-on to five zombies at a time when the hordes get a little too much.
After the Fall’s most striking feature at this was most certainly its visuals. These offer a much richer (and prettier) environment to explore, with the decrepit snow filled buildings evoking a proper nuclear winter feel – similar to the outdoor scenes in the Metro series.
Having only been revealed a week ago Vertigo Games has some way to go until After the Fall is finished. In its current form After the Fall is a nice generic shooter that would be home on VR as well as non-VR systems. The gameplay is slick, fast and in your face, which tends to mean a certain nuance is missing. Snow zombies are all well and good but there needs to be more, Vertigo Games has the talent, hopefully, it can deliver.
After the Fall is an upcoming co-op VR zombie shooter that promises to let groups of up to four players battle for survival within a zombie infested landscape. Revealed last week at E3 2019, the game’s first demo offered visual polish underscored by bland gameplay that isn’t playing to VR’s strengths.
Let’s say this up front: After the Fall was only just revealed last week, and the game isn’t due out until sometime in 2020, so it’s likely changes between now and then. It’s also worth noting that in the demo I played at the Oculus booth last week I was only playing with one other player, and the demo didn’t show any of the “seamless multiplayer” that developer Vertigo Games says will be a cornerstone of the game. That said, based on my experience with the demo, I’m hoping to see some significant changes to the core game design that better player to VR’s strengths.
Great VR experiences are all about immersion—a sense of being in the world, not just seeing it and hearing it. But that doesn’t happen just because a player is wearing a headset—it’s the means of interacting with the virtual world that creates the kind of immersion that only VR is capable of. In this regard, After the Fall is doing a lot wrong right out of the gate for immersion; it seems distracted with delivering high-level non-VR gameplay tropes of loot shooters like Borderlands and The Division.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
For one, guns ‘stick’ to your hands as soon a you grab one. As far as I could tell, the demo offered me no way to drop or holster a gun; once I grabbed a pistol, it simply became an extra appendage. When I wanted to reach out to grab items in the environment, my gun was still attached to my hand even though I wanted to pick something up with that hand—even so, the game allowed me to grab the thing I was reaching for by simply making the gun appear in the opposite hand when I hit the ‘grab’ button; when I released the object, the gun re-appeared back in my other hand. This is not only not intuitive, it’s also immersion-breaking.
But that’s fine anyway, because 90% of the generic loot I picked up from the environment (which will be used later as crafting currency for upgrades, etc) just magically flies toward your body after you press the grab button, and when it reaches you it vanishes into an invisible and apparently infinite inventory void. So now we’ve got two different systems for ‘grabbing’ items, some are hands-on (if oddly designed), while the rest is more of a magnetic net where certain objects just disappear into you.
Now, don’t get me wrong, ‘force-grab’ (pulling objects to you from afar) can often be a smart design choice for a VR game so that players don’t need to reach down to pick up objects that fall to the ground. But in After the Fall, force-grab is used not just as a convenience, but as an essential element to not pulling your hair out from the heaps and heaps of loot you’re expected to hoover up into your invisible inventory space. Over the course of just the demo alone, I must have picked up at least 100 individual pieces of loot, and it seems that the game will expect players to pick up thousands more as they grind for gear and unlocks.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
After the Fall treats items like icons or points instead of physical objects that manifest in a virtual world, and it lacks embodiment because of it. It would likely be much more immersive to make loot more valuable and less frequent; instead of picking up hundreds of loot items throughout a level, maybe instead you’d open a few chests or boxes (hopefully with satisfying, hands-on interactions, not point and click) which would contain big caches of the loot at once.
Weapons are similarly symbolic in After the Fall instead of feeling physical and interactive in the way that VR does so well. While many VR games offer an intuitive reloading mechanism where (at a minimum) the player puts a new magazine into the weapon, After the Fall’s weapons reload automatically after the bullets run out… by magic, I guess. This means that while you’re spamming your pistol at groups of incoming zombies, at some point you’ll wait a few seconds while your gun decides to automatically reload itself as your character shouts “reloading!” and then you can start shooting again—all the while your arm is outstretched in a shooting pose just waiting to resume the action.
This ‘automatic magic reload when the bullets run out’ is jarring and doesn’t encourage the player to manage the state of their weapon, which contributes to the blandness of the shooting gameplay (which I’ll talk more about shortly). It’s possible to manually reload with a button press, but again, just pressing a button and watching the gun do its thing by magic feels very anti-immersion, especially considering this is not explained away by context (ie: these are contemporary weapons with bullets & magazines, not sci-fi or anything like that where automatic reloading would make sense).
On the ‘painfully missed opportunity’ front, I was traversing through a decrepit building of the post-apocalyptic variety and came across a series of cables dangling from the ceiling right near my head. As I naturally went to see if I could push one of the cables out of my way with the barrel of my pistol, I watched as it clipped perfectly through the gun. A tiny little bit of physics here would have made a simple but delightfully embodying moment, but instead the reality of this world was revealed to be paper thin in an instant. The better choice—if not some physics for the cable—would be to simply not put things that look like they can be touched, pushed, or grabbed, within reach of the player.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
So, interactions aside, this is a zombie shooter. The game’s basic zombies are of the medium speed variety and most go down with one shot to the head. The game throws reasonably large groups of zombies at you, maybe 20 or so at a time. But without even the baseline of VR weapon interactions (like manual reloading), it’s really just a point and click affair. By the time I killed my 20th zombie, I may as well have killed them all—with copious ammo and a gun in each hand, there’s just zero sense of threat or joy in taking down one zombie after another after another by putting one bullet in each head. Even after finding this odd miniature-hand-mounted-zombie-seeking-missile-launcher weapon—which could lock on to five or so zombies at once before launching a salvo of mini-explosives—I wasn’t having any more fun killing these bland enemies.
Beyond the basic zombies I was introduced to, there was one other zombie type in the demo which was the ‘vomit’ variety that could spray you from a distance. Again though, fighting these guys was uninteresting at best—just shuffle around a bit to dodge the vomit while you keep holding your arms in their direction and pulling your triggers until they go bye-bye. Again—and I’m just riffing here—how interesting might it be if instead they spat some sticky goop that would lock you in place and prevent you from moving such that you had to physically dodge their vomit with your real body until you can dispatch them? This would make them a much more interesting threat and present an opportunity for some gameplay that feels truly native to VR.
Image courtesy Vertigo Games
The boss at the end of the demo was a big snowy zombie monster which formed the basis of an encounter that seemed poorly directed. Lots of the basic zombies were shuffling in from all directions while the faster boss zombie could close distance quickly by leaping in my direction. When it got in close it did a ground-pound attack and got its hand stuck in the ground opening up an opportunity to shoot a weak spot for a few seconds, otherwise it was a bullet-sponge affair. Battling this boss was really just a matter of moving around with a stick while holding my arms out and constantly pulling the trigger, allowing my guns to reload automatically, and continuing to shoot. Keeping the basic zombies at bay throughout might have made this more interesting if the mini missile launcher didn’t make them so easy to dispatch.
After the Fall has a long way to go if the developers want to deliver gameplay that feels native to VR, and I hope they do. The only thing the game really seems to have going for it is some pretty darn good visuals (a big upgrade from the studio’s previous title, Arizona Sunshine). Right now it almost feels like Vertigo Games is designing After the Fall to work on flat screens too—maybe they have ambitions to release a non-VR version of the game? Being overtly distracted with high-level non-VR game design goals that evoke the non-VR loot shooters is a sure-fire way to end up with a VR game that feels like a port, and Borderlands 2 VR already has that covered.
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate.
While E3 2019 is technically over as a physical event that happened in Los Angeles, CA, the actual act of covering everything that we did, played, and saw over last week has just begun. I have close to a dozen things left to write about from my time at gaming’s biggest show so I’ll be very busy for the next week or two still.
Did you get a chance to watch our first-ever E3 VR Showcase last week? It was jam-packed with new game announcements, gameplay debuts, reveals, and more. We had something in there for every type of gamer on every type of VR platform so you should check it out if you haven’t yet. Our YouTube channel is also packed full of interviews, impressions, gameplay videos, and more.
So for everyone that reads us that wasn’t able to make it out to the show (or maybe you were and have your own thoughts) we ask you this: Which games have you most excited? Which games are you most eager to play once they’re released?
When we ran our E3 2019 awards last week, People’s Choice Award poll Asgard’s Wrath was selected as the winner and out of all the things we played last week we picked Espire.1 as our Best of Show VR Game. But maybe you’re most excited about something completely different or are more focused on the games that weren’t talked about like Respawn’s VR game or The Climb on Quest.
