If the avalanche of recent reports can indicate anything at all, it seems Apple is entering the VR/AR headset market fairly soon, bringing along with it the most inflated expectations the industry has ever seen. It’s probably going to be expensive, but whether it flops or becomes a big hit, the mere existence of Apple in the space is set to change a lot about how things are done.
The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone. That award goes to an obscure PDA device called the IBM Simon, released in limited numbers in 1994. The Apple Watch wasn’t the first smartwatch either. That was debatably the Seiko Raputer, which was released in 1998 in Japan. Its monochrome LCD wasn’t capable of touch, instead offering up a tiny eight-direction joystick and six function buttons to browse files, play games, and set calendar appointments. Similarly, iPad wasn’t the first tablet. Mac wasn’t the first home computer. iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player. But all of these products have become nothing short of iconic. There’s very little benefit to being first, at least as far as Apple is concerned.
And while it seems the company’s first mixed reality headset could finally debut at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, like all of its other products, it won’t be the first MR headset. Just the same, like everything else the fruit company makes, it’s going to be the one everyone is talking about—for better or worse.
In case you haven’t noticed, Apple is a big deal. It has an ecosystem of products which connect to each other, design-forward hardware that has helped it maintain brand name cache, and a philosophy that puts user-friendliness at the core of its software experience. Oh, and it’s the most valuable company in the world.
And while the irrational exuberance for successive device generations has mostly petered out since its heydays in the early 2000s, reducing its famed long-line launch extravaganzas to more chill online pre-order releases, becoming an Apple apostate is still unthinkable to many. Once you’re in, you’re in. You buy the phone, the laptop, the headphones, and now, maybe you’ll get the newfangled headset too. Maybe. Let’s put aside the rumors for now. Forget about the spec breakdowns, hardware design leaks, software capabilities, etc. There are plenty of them out there, and you can read about those here. The only thing we know for sure is Apple is… well… Apple. Here’s what you, and probably everyone else is expecting.
Apple’s BKC Store in Mumbai, India | Image courtesy Apple
For Better: What Should Happen
Unless the company is making a drastic departure here, its first mixed reality headset should be built with this same level of user friendliness as all of its other devices, which means it should connect to the Apple ecosystem easily, and have a simple and intuitive UI. Log in with Apple ID. No muss, no fuss (whatever ‘muss’ is). Privacy should be a giant focus for the headset from the outset, since it will almost certainly pack eye-tracking in addition to a host of cameras to get a glimpse of the inside of your immediate surroundings, messiness and all. Apple has its fair share of data collection scandals, yet it seems to inspire enough confidence for privacy to be a big historical selling point for all of its devices.
If you want to avoid drawing the ire of tech reviewers everywhere though, wearing it should be fairly simple and very comfortable, and the experiences within should be of high enough value to overcome that inherent friction of charging it, putting it on, setting up a tracking volume, and wearing it for extended periods of time—everything we expect from any mixed reality headset at this point. It should fit most people, and offer up a clear picture to people with heads and eyes of all shapes and sizes.
Meta Quest Pro | Image courtesy Meta
An obvious analogue here is Meta Quest Pro, which is relatively low friction, but things like a halo strap that forces too much weight on your brow, or a passthrough that’s just a little too grainy, or a display that doesn’t have a high enough pixel per degree (ppd) for staring at text—all of these things make it less appealing to users in the day-to-day, introducing what you might call accumulative friction. You use it a bunch at first until you figure out all of the niggles, at which point you may revert to traditional computing standards like using a laptop or smartphone. The thing isn’t really the all-purpose device you hoped it would be, and the company thinks twice about when to send the better, more improved version down the pipeline.
One would hope that Apple’s headset, on the other hand, should have a mature design language and have obviously useful features from day one. While there’s bound to be some stutters, like with the first Apple Watch, which was critiqued for its slow software, short battery life, and lack of customization, it should all be there, and not require a ton of feature updates to enhance after the big launch day.
It should sell well out of the gate—at least by the standards of the existing XR industry—even if everything isn’t perfect. And it should be so cool that it’s copied. Like a lot. And it should drag top-level studios into the XR scene to start making innovative and useful apps that aren’t just straight ports of ARkit or ARcore apps made for mobile, but things people need and want to use in-headset. A big win from Apple should not only spur its new mixed reality product category, but kick off a buzz among developers, which would include those who currently work in the XR industry and Apple’s existing cohort of dedicated iOS developers.
But more than merely being the latest shiny new headset within the existing XR industry, Apple’s entrance into the field has a real chance of radically expanding the industry itself, by showing that the world’s most iconic tech company now thinks the medium is worth pursuing. That’s the way it happened when Apple jumped into MP3 players, smartphones, tablets, wireless earbuds, and more.
As the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. The inverse is also true though….
For Worse: What Could Happen
Apple’s headset is reportedly (okay, maybe just one rumor) priced somewhere near $3,000, so it probably won’t be the sort of accessory that initially attracts people to the ecosystem; that would be the job of a peripheral like Apple Watch. It will likely rely on the pool of built-in Apple users. Despite the price, the first iteration very likely won’t offer the sort of power you’d expect from a workhorse like Apple MacBook Pro either.
At the outset, any sustained draw from prosumers will invariably hinge on how well it can manage general computing tasks, like you might have with an iPad or MacBook, and everything else current mixed reality headset should do too, namely VR and AR stuff. That includes a large swath of things like fitness apps, both AR and VR games and experiences, productivity apps, standard work apps, everything. Basically, it has to be the Quest Pro that Meta wanted to release but didn’t.
AR turn-by-turn directions on an iPhone | Image courtesy Apple
And if not, it leaves Apple in a pretty precarious situation. If their headset can’t find a proper foothold within its ecosystem and attract enough users, it could lead to low adoption rates and a lack of interest in the technology as a whole. Mixed reality is largely seen as valuable steppingstone to what many consider the true moneymaker: all-day AR glasses. And despite some very glassses-shaped AR headsets out there, we’re still not there yet. Even if Apple is willing to take a hit with a bulky device in service of pushing use cases for its AR glasses yet to come, the short term may not look very bright.
And perhaps most importantly for the industry as a whole are the (metaphorical) optics.
After all, if the iconic Apple can’t manage to make MR something that everybody wants, the rest of the world watching from the sidelines may think the concept just can’t be conquered. In turn, it may mean capital investment in the space will dry up until ‘real’ AR headsets are a thing—the all-day glasses that will let you play Pokémon Go in the park, do turn-by-turn directions, and remind you the name of that person you met last week. The steppingstone of mixed reality may get waterlogged. Those are a lot of ifs, coulds, shoulds, and won’ts though. The only thing truly certain is we’re in for a very interesting few months, which you can of course follow at Road to VR.
Apple’s entrance into XR has the potential to expand the industry by demonstrating its viability, just as Apple has done with previous technologies. It stands a good chance at carving out a sizeable claim in the space, but it’s a gamble that could equally backfire if both sales and public perception aren’t on their side.
Is Apple’s XR headset going to be the “one more thing?” we’ve all been waiting for at WWDC this year? Will it live up to the Apple name, or be an expensive dev kit? Let us know in the comments below!
The lack of backwards compatibility between PSVR 2 and the original PSVR is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, we’re getting a ton of games for Sony’s next-gen VR headset that have been specifically built or overhauled to make use of the new hardware, but it also means a lot of games in your PSVR library will forever be stuck in the past.
Thankfully, there are a handful of developers who have pledged free PSVR 2 support for their games, many of which you can already grab on the store before the headset launches on February 22nd, 2023.
Note: There are a ton of games coming to PSVR 2 you might recognize, although not all studios have mentioned free PSVR 2 support for those games. We’ll be updating this list, so check back for more. Also, in addition to previously released titles getting new PSVR 2 support, we’ve also included brand new titles launching with both PSVR and PSVR 2 support. You’ll find those at the bottom, labeled [NEW].
We’ve also included a [Awaiting Further Confirmation] section at the bottom, which we are in the process of vetting.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
Based on the series’ graphic novels, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners tosses you into the flooded ruins of New Orleans, where you face gut-wrenching choices: Kill the zombies? Sure. Join a gang? Okay. Execute someone who may be innocent to maintain an alliance..? That one’s on you. While not a launch title, Skydance is bringing the free PSVR 2 upgrade on March 21st, arriving alongside the sequel as it finally leaves Quest exclusivity.
Puzzling Places is a jigsaw puzzle for the virtual age, bringing to life a vast selection of real-world places that were captured with a technique called photogrammetry. Sit back and relax with a lower number of pieces and enjoy the intricate bits of each puzzling scene, or go for the most difficult mode where you’ll find yourself matching carpet patterns and wooden desk venires in one of the most surprisingly fun purist puzzle games out there. Yup, previously purchased DLC is coming over too.
Looking for a survival game that lets you craft everything you need to fend off the wild primeval beasties of the nigth? Song in the Smoke has your number, and the ‘rekindled’ edition for PSVR 2 is said to be fully remastered with supercharged graphics, new haptics for Sense Controllers, and a new free jump and clamber mode.
Kluge Interactive announced a remastered version of its hit rhythm game Synth Riders. This includes remastered visuals, more nuanced controller haptics, headset feedback for in-game obstacles, next-gen performance and SSD optimization to dramatically reduce load times. And yes, it includes all music DLC previously purchased on the original PSVR so you can pick up where you last left off.
NFL PRO ERA is the first fully licensed NFL VR sim that puts you in the shoes of QB of your favorite NFL team. Lead your team to a Super Bowl, improve your QB skills by participating in drills, or play catch virtually with your friends in your favorite NFL stadium.
During Sony’s CES 2023 conference, the company announced that Gran Turismo 7 will support PSVR 2 at the headset’s launch via a free upgrade for existing owners. Not much was shared about exactly how the game’s VR compatibility will work, including whether it would support the headset’s new motion controllers or rely on the standard PS5 gamepad. Still, it’s a pretty exciting prospect since GT7 is a big upgrade over GT Sport.
A free PSVR 2 upgrade is expected at the headset’s launch in February, which includes the entirety of its main story in VR. We went hands-on with Village back in September, and it proved to not only one of the best-looking games on PS5 to date, but probably one of the best in VR, offering up a level of visual detail that approaches Half-Life: Alyx territory.
Team zombie shooter After the Fall is cross-compatible with PC and Quest, but it’s soon to be available on PSVR 2 too, as Vertigo Games is tossing out support for Sony’s latest and greatest at some point in early 2023. It’s basically Left 4 Dead in VR, and it’s most definitely worth getting a team together since this horde shooter is cross-compatible with PSVR, Quest, and PC VR headsets.
This space simulator used to be considered gaming’s biggest flop, but thanks to Hello Games’ continuous updates it’s become the industry’s biggest redemption story. With the promise of free PSVR 2 support, you’ll be able to strap into No Man’s Sky on launch day with your shiny new headset.
Pistol Whip is a rhythm-shooter from Cloudhead Games, which has thrown out tons of updates and free DLC to keep you blasting away like John Wick to some pretty infectious beats. On PSVR 2, the game is said to offer fine-tuned haptics, adaptive triggers, higher resolution, 3D audio, and SSD optimization to bolster how the game loads and runs.
Zenith: The Last City is one of VR’s most successful MMOs to date, offering up hundreds of hours of quests, jobs, classes, you name it. Developers Ramen VR say it’s getting a free PSVR 2 upgrade. If you already own the PS4 version, the PSVR 2-supported PS5 version is already free to download, so nab it early so you can play with all of your friends on Quest, PC VR headsets, and the original PSVR.
This is a new title coming to both PSVR and PSVR 2, developed by Funktronic Labs, the studio behind Fujii and Cosmic Trip. The Light Brigade tosses you on a procedurally-generated journey to free the souls of the fallen trapped within, making for a tactical roguelike shooting experience you can play on launch-day.
Hello Neighbor: Search and Rescue is another new title getting both PSVR and PSVR 2 support, letting you delve into the same universe of the popular Hello Neighbor stealth horror series. Sneak into your creepy neighbor’s house to save your friend, and don’t get caught.
Cave Digger 2: Dig Harder is a 1-4 player VR adventure game set in an alternative western frontier, where discoveries, dangers and digging await the Prospector. The player is a Prospector who begins their adventure in a seemingly abandoned camp with a goal to extract valuables from the caves, to trade them for new tools, upgrades, and locations in order to advance their frontier exploration.
As the original gangster of VR launch titles, Job Simulator is making the jump to PSVR 2 for free. Yes, you’ll be able to job with the best of them upon PSVR 2’s February 22nd launch in this parody game that is all about stepping into the world of work from a future robot’s point of view.
The sequel to Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator imagines what vacations must have been like in during the age of humanity. This parody game is bigger and arguably funnier than the first, taking you to more locales and giving you more mad cap fun along the way.
Abducted by accident and enrolled into the Startenders Bartending Academy, you will have to shake, slice and serve to survive until you can find a way to escape! Use your skills to create delicious concoctions to serve to your alien patrons, use wacky machines and even wackier ingredients to earn your way home.
In The Tale of Onogoro, Haru has summoned you to the magical Onogoro Island, a floating island in a parallel world. Together, you must solve sprawling puzzles and defeat giant beasts called ‘Kami’ that are blocking your path.
There are a number of games that many expect, or have heard will get either cross-buy or some form of free PSVR 2 upgrade at some point. We’re in the process of verifying these titles; they still have poor documentation (some guy in Discord said it!), or studios haven’t fully committed to free support (“We want to, but we still have to figure it out..)
We’ll move these up to the section above as studios release word, or we find verifiable confirmation. Remember, this list is growing rapidly, so feel free to comment and let us know so we can make this the most complete and accurate article on the subject.
Beat Saber – Beat Games (Meta)
ALVO – Mordonpool
Suicide Guy VR – Chubby Pixel
Swordsman VR – SinnStudio
Windlands 2 – Psytec Games
Rc Airplane Challenge – Strange Games Studios
– – — – –
Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments below, as we’ll be updating this article all the way up to PSVR 2’s launch in February.
We’re looking forward to a ton of new games this year, as newcomers and trusted names in VR development alike are prepping to release bigger and better VR experiences.
Here we look at our most anticipated titles that are scheduled to release in 2022. We’ve ordered games according to their confirmed release dates, then the rash of titles sporting the ever-nebulous ‘coming in 2022’ release window, and then games that we have our eyes on (TBA). We update this article regularly, so make sure to check back for updated info.
Cities VR
Platform: Quest 2
Developer: Fast Travel Games
Release date: April 28th, 2022
Studiodescription: Be the mayor in Cities: VR, the ultimate VR city-building and management simulator. Design neighborhoods, construct buildings, direct the flow of traffic – all while you handle economics, emergency services, and more. Step inside this VR adaptation of the leading city-builder, Cities: Skylines.
Little Cities
Platform: Quest & Quest 2
Developer: Purple Yonder
Release date: May 12th, 2022
Studiodescription: Get ready to escape to the charming world of Little Cities, the cozy VR city creation game. Start with a simple road, carefully place your residential, commercial, or industrial zones and then watch the citizens move in! But keeping them happy is the only way to help your cities grow.
The Last Clockwinder
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: Pontoco
Release date: Summer 2022
Studiodescription: A VR game about building contraptions out of your own clones in a cozy sci-fi world.
Ruinsmagus
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: CharacterBank
Release date: Summer 2022
Studiodescription: Beneath the quaint streets and alleyways of Grand Amnis lies a vast labyrinth of ruins, long-forgotten by those above. In RUINSMAGUS, journey deep into this hidden subterranean realm in search of precious and powerful artifacts. Unravel the secrets of a lost age and grow from a novice wizard into a powerful, spell-wielding Magus in this narrative-driven action JRPG that includes 26 fully-voiced quests—featuring the vocal talents of Naomi Ohzora, Ai Maeda, Eiji Takemoto, and more.
MOTHERGUNSHIP: FORGE
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: Terrible Posture Games
Release date: June 2022
Studiodescription: Craft. Shoot. Die. Repeat. Forge absurdly powerful guns and fight through the belly of a metal alien monstrosity in this VR FPS roguelite follow up to MOTHERGUNSHIP. Wanna build a rocket-firing-shotgun or a toxic spike-ball-launcher? Unleash your inner mad scientist, then take on the MOTHERGUNSHIP.
NFL PRO ERA
Platform: Quest 2, PSVR
Developer: StatusPro
Release date: Fall 2022
Studiodescription: NFL PRO ERA uses NFL game data to create the most authentic on-the-field NFL VR experience to-date. Lead your team to a Super Bowl, improve your QB skills by participating in drills, or play catch virtually with your friends in your favorite NFL stadium. Read the defense, run the offense and make the plays just like the pros do on Sundays—and see whether you have what it takes to compete at the highest level.
Espire 2
Platform: Quest 2
Developer: Digital Lode
Release date: November 2022
Studiodescription: Your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to ultimately locate and stop the launch of an untraceable, supersonic missile, a true doomsday device. Wield an array of high-tech gadgets as you go behind enemy lines and try to save the world for a second time.
Tea for God
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: void room
Release date: Late 2022
Studiodescription: VR adventure that allows infinite movement within your own place. Customise your experience. Make it an intense shooter, a roguelite explorer, a relaxing trek.
The Exorcist Legion: SIN
Platform: Quest, PSVR
Developer: Fun Train
Release date: Late 2022
Studiodescription: As the sequel to The Exorcist: Legion VR, the game advances the chilling storyline and mythology with both single player and co-operative gameplay as well as some other mechanics and play styles never seen before in a horror co-op game.
Ziggy’s Cosmic Adventures
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: Stardust Collective
Release date: Late 2022
Studiodescription: ZIGGY’S COSMIC ADVENTURES is a fully immersive cockpit VR game set in a stunning universe. Fight your way through the solar system amidst intense arcade combat, navigate through treacherous space environments, and feel the rush of scrambling to manage your ship’s systems.
Among Us
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: Schell Games
Release date: holiday 2022
Studiodescription: Among Us VR will keep what made the original party game so awesome. Players attempt to get their spaceship in working order, priming the shields or diverting power to various subsystems. Easy enough—except one or more members of the Crew are secretly Impostors, tasked with sabotaging and killing off the crew. Among Us at its best involves everyone accusing everyone, with the Crew trying to ejectImpostors from the airlock and Impostors trying to get Crewmates to turn on each other. Nobody is above suspicion.
Propagation: Paradise Hotel
Platform: PC VR
Developer: WanadevStudio
Release date: End of 2022
Studiodescription: Live an intense VR survival horror adventure with gripping storytelling, in which you will explore dark environments, make terrifying encounters and get your adrenaline pumping. Will you find your way out of the Paradise Hotel alive?
“Coming in 2022”
BONELAB
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: Stress Level Zero
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: Sentenced to death, you embody an outcast escaping fate. Discovering a pathway to a hidden underground research facility. A series of challenging experiments and discoveries await. A road to the truth calls from the void.
Ghostbusters VR
Platform: Quest 2
Developer: nDreams, Sony Pictures
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: Head to San Francisco and start your very own Ghostbusters HQ. With a trusty proton pack on your back and a P.K.E. meter in-hand, you have everything you need to track, blast, and trap ghosts—and begin to unravel a mysterious conspiracy that threatens the entire city. You can go it alone, or grab up to three friends for a true Ghostbusters crew experience.
Red Matter 2
Platform: Quest 2
Developer: Vertical Robot
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: Red Matter 2 picks up right where the previous game left off. You might’ve escaped the titular red matter last time, but you certainly haven’t stopped it. Doing so will take you across the solar system, from a base on our own moon to a space station orbiting above Saturn’s rings, and beyond. Uncover dark secrets and do your best to halt the red matter’s spread and save humanity.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution
Platform: Quest 2
Developer: Skydance Interactive
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: Continue your journey through a changed New Orleans, one that’s even more dangerous than before. Expect fewer resources, more walkers, and a new and bloodthirsty threat that will hunt you across the city. Scrounge up whatever you can to survive—and be careful. Your choices matter now more than ever.
Studiodescription: COMPOUND (Pre-Alpha) is a randomized rogue-lite, free-roaming shooter for VR veterans. Duck and dodge around enemy fire in a tough-as-nails retro FPS with multiple locomotion options.
Super Kit: To The Top
Platform: PSVR, PC VR(?)
Developer: Electric Hat Games
Release date: 2022
Description: Electric Hat hasn’t said much about the game outside of the official trailer, but looking at the video it’s apparent Super Kit is focusing again on high-flying parkour with the addition of some combat elements and some very slick-looking environments that recall games like Jet Set Radio, Mirror’s Edge, and The Climb 2.
Paradox of Hope VR
Platform: PC VR
Developer: Monkey-With-a-Bomb
Release date: Coming to Early Access “soon”
Studiodescription: Paradox of Hope is an immersive single-player VR shooter with survival and horror elements. Explore mysterious metro mazes of post-apocalyptic Moscow, use stealth or combat approach to achieve your goal, upgrade your equipment and arsenal, and enjoy the atmospheric moments of stalker’s life.
Peaky Blinders: The King’s Ransom VR
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2
Developer: Maze Theory
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: Step into the gritty streets of 1920s Birmingham and London and explore iconic locations from the show, including The Garrison pub, Charlie’s Yard and Shelby’s Betting Shop, as you take down rivals and move up in the world.
Vertigo 2
Platform: PC VR
Developer: Zulubo Productions
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: Vertigo 2 is a single-player VR adventure. Explore the depths of the vast Quantum Reactor as you descend to finish your journey home.
Ultimechs
Platform: “major VR platforms”
Developer: Resolution Games
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: Ultimechs is the multiplayer VR gaming experience from Resolution Games that will be coming to major VR platforms next year. As the thrill of professional athletics meets the precision of purpose-built machines, Ultimechs welcomes players into the sport of the future to compete for victory. If you don’t have the speed, precision and rocketry that it takes to defeat your opponents, you’re done for.
The Last Worker
Platform: PC VR, Quest
Developer: Oiffy, Wolf & Wood Interactive
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: The Last Worker is a first person narrative adventure centered around our struggle in an increasingly automated world.
Nerf Ultimate Championship
Platform: Quest 2
Developer: Secret Location
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: NERF Ultimate Championship is a competitive multiplayer game that brings NERF battles into an electrifying competition only possible in virtual reality. Gear up with a wide range of new and classic blasters as you leap around fantastic arenas in intense 4v4 team matches. Soak in the sound of roaring fans and master your skills as you begin your journey to become the Ultimate NERF Champion.
Samurai Slaughter House
Platform: PC VR, Quest 2, PSVR
Developer: Tab Games
Release date: 2022
Studiodescription: VR-only physics-based combat game. Use stealth and creativity or brute force to take on your foes in a vast physics based sandbox. Battle both humans and demons while exploring a large metroidvania-style open world. Collect items and power up your character. Explore towns and interact with NPCs.
Update (April 21st, 2022): We’ve cycled out a number of previously released games, and plugged in a few more promising titles set to come out this year. If you have any suggestions or tips, let us know in the comments below.
What VR game are you looking forward to? Let us know in the comments below!
Whether you’re off dodging lasers and defusing bombs, shooting back hordes of zombies with your friends, or just sitting down for a quiet night alone with a photogrammetric jigsaw puzzle, there’s plenty of options out there on how you to teleport yourself to another universe through the magic of virtual reality.
And as we look back at this year in VR gaming, we’re hoping to highlight those truly great games that captured our senses and fooled those squishy bits between our ears into believing we’d done something delightfully improbable.
Approaching our fifth annual Game of the Year Awards wasn’t an easy task either. It seems every year is more difficult than the last when it comes to stacking up the competition. Even in the face of worldwide disaster, the medium has continued to flourish.
This year has been all about getting back to business though, so in that spirit we present our 2021 Game of the Year Awards without further delay:
Originally slated to launch in 2020, After the Fall fell victim to the global shutdown that disrupted nearly every industry. Things looked uncertain for the four-player co-op shooter, as delays pushed launch more than two years after its E3 2019 reveal. Vertigo Games is one of the most veteran VR studios out there though, and has thankfully managed to make After the Fall totally worth the wait.
Taking plenty of cues from Valve’s Left 4 Dead (2008),After the Fall offers up intense zombie-shooting action across a good handful of bespoke levels, each of them providing ample opportunities for exploration and surprise attacks. As a four-player co-op, social play is a big part of After the Fall too. Unless you’re playing with bots—which is actually a pretty great experience on its own—you need to keep communication clear so you can heal fellow players, report where baddies are, and learn the ins and outs of each map. All of this maximizes your ability to collect points and make permanent upgrades to weapons, a big reason for coming back for more.
The studio has done well to focus on Quest 2 and PSVR, offering seamless cross-play across all supported platforms, which in turn means plenty of online user activity. Many developers targeting Quest however don’t always take the same level of care when it comes to launching on PC VR headsets, often opting to pair down the PC version as a result of shifting focus to the admittedly more profitable Quest platform. But the PC version of After the Fall feels like it’s had an uncommon level of love and devotion poured into it, making it the best gameplay experience by a long shot. That’s taking everything into account: from enemy design/animation/physics to the spatters of blood and gore that litter the impressively detailed world. It’s a visual treat.
Although we were hoping to see more enemy and map variations, nearly everything you’d want for a multi-day binge is there and then some. Still, Vertigo Games has an excellent track record of releasing DLC, with its early hit Arizona Sunshine (2016) receiving updates well into 2021, so we’re looking forward to plenty more reasons to play more in 2022 and beyond.
Translating the sort of survival games we know and love to VR is difficult. The immensity of those iconic worlds is a big bonus, but then the crafting aspect usually falls flat on its face due to the overreliance on abstracted menus. Standard 2D menus are simply unintuitive when you have two hands and you expect to use them… well… like hands. Song in the Smoke is a ground-up effort from 17-BIT that makes both the crafting experience—and the danger that lurks in the shadows—feel real.
You’ll scrape around for twine to physically wrap around a branch and stone to make an ax, or shape an arrowhead out of a small rock and affix it to an arrow shaft, replete with fletching you made earlier. You’ll keep the demons away at night by building a big fire—all of them a constant challenge you need to balance as you simultaneously tackle hunger, sleep, and health. This inward pressure of maintaining your daily tasks combined with outward conflict of fighting off prehistoric beasts makes it difficult to rest on your laurels as you push yet deeper into the game’s large-scale levels.
All of the game’s well-studied crafting depth is underpinned by an expressive art style that offers excellent visual contrast between the massive number of items and enemies you’ll encounter, something that’s extremely important when played on PSVR’s aging 960 × 1,080 per-eye display. Headset resolution woes fade into the background though, as Song in the Smoke deftly serves up a stylized visual panache and immersive two-handed crafting system via PS Move that feels reliable and impressively real.
In few words, Song in the Smoke is breathtaking, and definitely worth the tens of hours it will coax out of you.
I Expect You to Die (2016) didn’t win our Game of the Year when it released in late 2016 for one reason: we started the whole GOTY thing in 2017. If we had though, the first in the series would have been the game to beat thanks to its inventive escape room puzzles that have given it rare staying power that few VR games of the era can boast.
The good news: I Expect You to Die 2: The Spy and the Liar has more of everything, and its patented brand of spy-themed gameplay is still going strong. The sequel offers up a great depth in puzzles, impressive visual flair, and a resounding continuation of the game’s Bond-style spy intrigue.
Oftentimes it feels like there’s more ways to solve each deadly dalliance, which requires you to really fire up your critical thinking skills in short order to avoid lasers, defuse bombs, and generally foil the evil plans of Zoraxis—arguably more so than the first. And just like the first, what I Expect You to Die 2 lacks in immersive object interaction it makes up for with its varied levels packed with truly intriguing puzzles and plenty of windy plot twists that will have you questioning just who you’re working for.
With I Expect You to Die 2, Schell Games has again delivered a surprising amount of detail and depth onto more humble chipsets like Quest and PSVR, and doing it to such a level that it puts even some PC VR-only titles to shame.
Like its predecessor, Lone Echo II delivered an impressively immersive experience, and one that had an even bigger scope than the original. But how did developer Ready at Dawn manage to capture that lighting not once, but twice?
Immersion is baked into the core of Lone Echo II in two foundational ways. First is the novel zero-G locomotion where players can grab-onto and push off-of any surface in the game to propel themselves through space. After just a few minutes this becomes surprisingly natural and it’s also highly dynamic; you can give yourself just a little push to gently float from one place to another, or a hard lunge if you’re in a hurry. You can even grab onto fast moving objects in the game—like the little powered drones—to hitch a ride long distances. And if you fling yourself far out into space with nothing to grab onto, you really feel helpless out there… save for the little hand boosters which you can use to slowly get back to safety.
The other foundation is the game’s consistently high-quality hands-on interactions. Much of the game’s underlying gameplay is about grabbing things, pressing buttons, pulling levers, and plugging things into other things. All of this happens by directly manipulating things with your hands which keeps much of the game’s moment-to-moment gameplay in your ‘near-field’. This consistently engages your sense of proprioception, which in a way almost forces you to feel present in the virtual world.
Backing up these highly immersive mechanics, Lone Echo II also drops players inside and outside of a seemingly massive space station that’s there to seamlessly explore all the way from one end to another with no loading screens.
Taken all together, Lone Echo II delivers one of the most highly immersive VR experiences to date.
It’s been almost five years since the first consumer VR headsets hit the scene, but innovation into something as ostensibly simple as ‘moving around’ is still going strong. Really basic stuff like stick movement, room-scale movement, and teleporting has been more or less codified as standard methods, but developers still have the latitude to create something different if they think outside the box.
Eye of the Temple puts forth a massive temple complex filled with room-scale puzzles, which sounds a bit like par for the course when it comes to VR games. The entire locomotion scheme is based on moving platforms though that require you to physically hop aboard to move through the world—or rather let the world move around you.
The game’s platforming is baked into everything, taking you around multi-level rooms which include normal linear platforms, but also ingenuous log-rolling devices that are used tactically throughout the game to surreptitiously move you back to the center of your physical playspace. Due to the tight integration with its locomotion style, the amount of intention that went into designing the entire game is actually pretty mindboggling—especially because Rune Skovbo Johansen isn’t just a cool name for a VR studio; it’s the name of the dude who made it.
And it would all be for naught if Eye of the Temple weren’t absolutely chocked full of interesting puzzles and traps, the results of which make you feel like Indiana Jones, including bull whip, fedora, and trusty torch.
You can’t just throw VR support into a game and expect it to be a hit. Thankfully, studios seem to be waking up to this, and are starting to revive some of our favorite games from years past with a more studied eye for the whole shebang: visual appeal, attention to object interaction, and smart choices when it comes to packaging the game into a comfortable experience for VR players.
And thanks to bringing all of the above to fruition, Armature Studios has made Resident Evil 4 arguably even cooler when played from inside a VR headset than on flatscreen. You get to go hands-on with the game’s iconic weapons in a natural way as you engage in battle with probably the biggest bosses we’ve ever seen in VR. Granted, cutscenes are all presented in 2D windows, but there’s not much you can expect since the game was so heavily reliant on cinematics to drive the story.
In addition to being reworked from the ground-up to make sure textures don’t look blocky and terrible, it also includes the new first-person POV that the original game lacked when unmodded in addition to multiple locomotion styles and holstering options. All of this makes for what we’d consider an essential way to relive the glory days of Resident Evil 4.
A Rogue Escape expertly fuses the concept of an escape room with a videogame by putting you into a giant mech with convoluted controls and no manual.
The only way to figure out how everything works is by experimenting with the dizzying array of buttons, knobs, levers, and gauges around you to try to figure out what’s going on. And here’s the kicker… this mech doesn’t even have a window so you can see where you’re headed or what challenges stand in your way. You’re effectively blind inside this hulking machine and have only one objective: figure out how to use it to escape.
In time you come to learn some of the mech’s basic functionality—like how to take your first few steps forward, how to turn, how to refuel and, critically, how to understand what’s happening in the world outside of this hulking metal shell.
This is A Rogue Escape’s most genius conceit… the entire mech—all of its buttons, levers, and confusing displays—is the interface to the world outside, both how to interact with it and how you perceive it. Once you understand how everything in the cockpit works, your imagination renders the world outside of the mech… so the developer doesn’t have to!
It was a risky idea to make a room full of buttons, levers, and gauges essentially a giant, immersive interface to the broader game, but in pulling it off, A Rogue Escape delivered one of the most unique games we’ve played in VR yet.
Developer Realities.io has been working for years to bring its expert photogrammetry to VR audiences. In 2016, the studio released a series of beautiful photogrammetry scenes that wowed plenty of early VR users. But despite their beauty, simple photogrammetry tours didn’t exactly catch on.
The studio bided its time and patiently continued to explore the intersection of photogrammetry and VR. Eventually it struck upon an interesting idea. What if, instead of simply walking around photogrammetry scenes virtually, the scenes were shrunk down and sliced up like 3D puzzles?
Puzzling Places just fits brilliantly in VR and works as the perfect showcase for the great photogrammetry talent of Realities.io. Not only does the app give users puzzles that are uniquely fun to piece together in VR—each puzzle is a detailed photogrammetry scene that has been shrunk down into an adorable diorama.
And it isn’t just the unique 3D puzzling that makes Puzzling Places especially well suited to VR. The studio went above and beyond by crafting lovely ambient audio that accompanies each puzzle. As you’re building a puzzle of, say, a snowy church, occasionally you’ll hear the faint sounds of church bells ringing or snow gently falling on the ground. The serene backdrop and delicate sound design work together to transport you into a world designed for that perfect puzzling mood of zen and focus.
Note: Games eligible for Road to VR‘s Game of the Year Award must be available to the public on or before December 13th, 2021 to allow for ample deliberation. Games must also natively support the target platform as to ensure full operability.
Three years after the original Vive Pro, HTC’s Vive Pro 2 is here. With a class-leading price, the “Pro” branded headset is clearly positioned to one-up its contemporaries. Unfortunately the headset’s performance doesn’t quite justify the Pro price.
Before we dive into the full review, here’s a recap of the headset’s specs:
Vive Pro 2 Specs
Resolution
2,448 x 2,448 (6.0MP) per-eye, LCD (2x)
Refresh Rate
90Hz, 120Hz
Lenses
Dual-element Fresnel
Field-of-view
120° horizontal
Optical Adjustments
IPD, eye-relief
IPD Adjustment Range
57–72mm
Connectors
USB 3.0, DisplayPort 1.2, power
Cable Length
5m (breakout box)
Tracking
SteamVR Tracking 1.0 or 2.0 (external beacons)
On-board cameras
2x RGB
Input
Vive wand controllers, rechargable battery
Audio
On-ear headphones, USB-C audio output
Microphone
Dual microphone
Pass-through view
Yes
HTC Vive Pro 2 Summary
Photo by Road to VR
As is tradition, our full review goes into significant depth, so we’ll start with a summary.
HTC’s Vive Pro 2 brings some serious specs that, on paper, make it look like the headset will deliver an unbeatable experience compared to its competitors. And that ought to be the goal to justify the steep asking price of $800 for the headset by itself or $1,400 full kit price. Here’s a quick look at how this stacks up to the headset’s two nearest competitors:
Vive Pro 2
Valve Index
Reverb G2
Headset Only
$800
$500
–
Full Kit
$1,400
$1,000
$600
With regards to fitting in with the competition and justifying its price, the key goal for Vive Pro 2 would be to offer customers the wide field of view of Valve Index with the clarity of Reverb G2—or at least one or the other. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite get there, and also has a few other oversights that belie the “Pro” branding.
While the resolution and field-of-view are good on paper, ultimately the headset doesn’t achieve either of those goals—it doesn’t have a field-of-view that’s as large or larger than Index, nor does it have as great or greater clarity than Reverb G2.
Photo by Road to VR
Part of the issue seems to be that the lenses can’t escape the historically tight sweet spot we find on HTC headsets. Even though the field-of-view is wider than the original Vive Pro, much of that added field-of-view gets blurry quickly. Rotate your eyes just a bit and text becomes difficult to read. Combined with the usual god-rays plus additional outer glare from the new dual-element lenses, and the headset’s tight sweet spot makes the view feel oddly cramped at times. This is furthered by a surprisingly small vertical field-of-view which makes feel like the top and bottom of the view has been cropped down.
Personal Measurements
Vive Pro 2
Vive Pro
Valve Index
Reverb G2
Horizontal FOV
102°
94°
106°
82°
Vertical FOV
78°
102°
106°
78°
The displays otherwise are fairly good, even if the lenses seem to limit their sharpness somewhat. The headset has no visible screen-door effect, and other artifacts like mura, chromatic aberration, and ghosting are very minimal.
Even if Vive Pro 2 doesn’t beat out Index and Reverb G2 in key areas like field-of-view and clarity, it could still be a great headset worthy of the “Pro” name (and price). Unfortunately it falls short of that in other areas too.
For one, the pass-through cameras on Vive Pro 2 are very low quality, as is the microphone. While the headphones themselves are quite good in audio quality, the off-ear approach is increasingly the more convenient and preferred way to do audio on a VR headset. While you could opt to remove the headset’s on-ear speakers in favor of your own audio solution, the bulky strap would make it hard to work with anything but earbuds.
Photo by Road to VR
With SteamVR Tracking built in, you can expect the same gold standard tracking accuracy, latency, and coverage that you’d find with other headsets with SteamVR Tracking, though you’ll have to put up with external beacons mounted somewhere in your room. Thankfully SteamVR Tracking also opens the door to some options, such as choosing if you want to use the old school Vive wand controllers or opting for something else like the Valve Index controllers. You can also use the headset with tracking pucks which are used to track other accessories or for adding more tracking points to yourself for full body tracking.
Vive Pro (left), Vive Pro 2 (right) | Photo by Road to VR
From an ergonomic standpoint, Vive Pro 2 is exactly the same as the original Vive Pro, which means it’s a fairly comfortable headset with a pretty good set of ergonomic adjustments. Notably, the headset has a physical IPD adjustment which ranges from 57–72mm and an eye-relief adjustment, both of which allow the headset to adapt to a wider range of users. Two things I also would have preferred but aren’t included: springs in the headstrap which make it easier to put on and take off without adjusting the tightness each time, and a wider range of rotation for the display housing.
HTC Vive Pro 2 In-depth Review
Photo by Road to VR
Let’s first talk about the bread and butter of any VR headset: the visuals. With a whopping 2,448 x 2,448 per-eye resolution and a purported 120° horizontal field-of-view, Vive Pro 2 would seem to be perfectly positioned to bring the best of Valve Index and Reverb G2 into one headset. Unfortunately the reality is a little more blurry.
Clarity
Although the paper specs would suggest that Vive Pro 2 and Reverb G2 could have quite similar resolving power, a quick side-by-side with the headsets reveals Reverb G2 to have an obviously sharper image, even before running any objective tests. To some extent, this would be expected given that Reverb G2 packs its pixels a bit more densely into its smaller field-of-view; even so, while Vive Pro 2 is clearly sharper than Index or the original Vive Pro, it still seems less sharp than it ought to next to Reverb G2.
This is very likely a result of the optics, which is one of the biggest changes on Vive Pro 2 compared to the original Vive Pro. While both headsets use Fresnel lenses, Vive Pro 2 adopts the Valve Index approach of moving to a dual-element lens, apparently in an effort to expand the field-of-view. Users of Valve Index will know that the dual-element approach risks introducing additional glare around the outer edges of the lenses (on top of the usual Fresnel god-rays), and we see the same thing happening on Vive Pro 2, more or less to the same extent as Index.
This additional glare, combined with the classically weak edge-to-edge clarity of HTC lenses, creates a sweet spot that at times feels oppressively small. Rotate your eyes just a little bit and the world is blurry until you move your head to recenter your eyes.
This small sweet spot unfortunately detracts from Vive Pro 2’s improved field-of-view. While it is indeed wider than the original Vive Pro by a good margin, the edges become blurry which can give a sense of tunnel vision even when in your periphery.
Field-of-View
Speaking of field-of-view, Vive Pro 2’s theoretical 120° horizontal seems to be just that: theoretical. At least for my personal measurements, I found the Vive Pro 2 to have a notably smaller field of view than Valve Index:
Personal Measurements
Vive Pro 2
Vive Pro
Valve Index
Reverb G2
Horizontal FOV
102°
94°
106°
82°
Vertical FOV
78°
102°
106°
78°
Vive Pro 2 might indeed have a 120° horizontal field-of-view, but only if you could get your eyes close enough to the lenses. Although the headset has an eye-relief adjustment, it doesn’t seem to have the range of motion necessary to maximize the field-of-view, at least for my head. The eye-relief adjustment on Valve Index, on the other hand, makes it easier to squeeze the most out of the headset’s displays.
Photo by Road to VR
You’ll notice a surprisingly small vertical field-of-view on Vive Pro 2. From the shape of the lenses alone you might expect this to be the case; rather than being circular, the top and bottom of the lens are flat. When looking through the headset, it looks like your vertical view has been cropped down, which furthers that feeling of tunnel-vision that ultimately works against the headset’s field-of-view.
Displays
The Vive Pro 2 displays themselves seem quite good, even if their resolution is hampered by the optics. The headset uses an LCD display per-eye, which run up to 120Hz. Unfortunately the switch to LCD on Vive Pro 2 means losing out on the rich colors and deep contrast from the Vive Pro’s OLED display, but in return you’re getting much higher resolution, better pixel fill, and less ghosting.
Like Reverb G2, Vive Pro 2 essentially has no screen-door effect (the visibility of unlit spaces between pixels). The display density is simply too great to make out individual pixels.
In general use, the displays have almost no visible artifacts. I had to search carefully to find some minor ghosting against certain colors. Mura (the consistency of brightness and color from one pixel to the next) is similarly hard to spot and will probably go entirely unnoticed during normal use. Looking carefully against flat colors I could spot some faint splotchy mura, but it’s impact on the overall clarity is very minimal.
When it comes to visual performance, Vive Pro 2 is good, but it doesn’t feel “Pro”, given that it’s bested by Index in field-of-view and sweet spot, and by Reverb G2 in clarity, both of which are less expensive headsets.
We spoke with several VR game designers and developers about the important (and difficulty) of creating believable and immersive hands in VR.
The Importance of Believable VR Hands
VR hands are a strange thing to ‘get to grips with’ so to speak. Not only do they allow you to interact with the virtual world in front of you but they allow you to become part of it. As you shape yourself to fit into that world, it does the same to fit around you. In real life, you have limited strength and ability but VR gives you that rare opportunity to be better than real life; it lets you become an action hero.
“It was pretty clear right off the bat that it was important,” Kerry Davis, a Valve programmer that worked on Half-Life: Alyx, said in an interview “Even if you didn’t have a full-body avatar yet, to at least have hands so that you could sort of connect with the world and actually participate. We all have an innate desire to control the world we inhabit. As a VR user, you don’t simply want to sit back and let the story happen—you want this organic control over the world. “People really wanted to have hands.”
Half-Life: Alyx’s design encapsulates this. There’s this visceral sense of control you have covering your mouth when you come across Jeff or even that satisfying click you get from loading up ammo. Tristan Reidford, a Valve artist who also worked on Alyx, learned this previously when working on the Aperture Robot Repair Demo that shipped as part of The Lab.
“We didn’t have hands in that… we simulated the controller… that satisfied people’s desires to have representation,” Reidford said.
The most fascinating thing about VR hands is the spectacle itself, the representation of you. When using a controller, you can disconnect and understand that certain buttons equal certain actions. The uncanny valley nature of movement in VR makes it just close enough to true immersion to become distracting when it’s not.
The uncanny valley in this case represents that physical and mental border between what your eyes see in the headset lens and what you feel around you. As VR gets closer to real life, it also gets further away. There’s something distinctly recognizable, yet alien-feeling about this imitation of real life. VR is at its best when it’s immersive and compelling but not trying to lie to you. It offers you a fantasy and, in the case of Half-Life: Alyx, that alien feeling comes from somewhere else: Xen
“Now you don’t need as much of an abstraction so you can almost get an exact representation of reality,” Davis said. “It turns out it’s almost harder to do in VR.”
The complicated nature of emulating some sense of real-life movement means you often have to trivialize or exaggerate that movement. “In VR, your interactions are so close that your brain wants to fall back to actions you’ve known since you were a toddler,” Davis said.“We still have to put this interface layer in there and say we’re defining what the constraints of this virtual world are.”
You are constrained in two senses when in VR. There are the constraints of your movement—such as how far you can move in your actual room and how much you can lunge forward before colliding head-first into your dresser—and the constraints of the tech itself. There is this wonderful creativity that springs from necessity when creating games atop necessary limitations.
Oftentimes, a world has to be made less organic and genuine to feel real, as paradoxical as that sounds. The swinging of a sword feels natural but you don’t have to undergo a year of training before you can use it in VR. It throws a little bit of ‘real life’ out the window to provide a more fun and, ironically, more immersive experience.
Limitless Limitations
Over at Streamline Media, a small group working on their first real VR title. “Due to resolution issues they (the team) often went back to using just larger gestures and bigger levers,” Stefan Baier, COO at Streamline Media, said. “Smaller hand gestures didn’t reliably scale and made it not work well with the dev work we were doing for PS4 where you don’t have that input.”
When working with it, PSVR often has to be at the bottom of the barrel, technologically speaking. This means that whilst hand gestures are held back in some sense, the choice to fit certain actions in are made purely for the player experience. When you can’t show off the tech or provide hyper-realistic details, you only provide what’s necessary. A streamlined control system allows for more natural movement, even if it’s constrained.
“We are always limited by the hardware…Especially with these fairly new technologies…tracking will massively improve”, Christof Lutteroth, a senior lecturer in the department of computer science at Bath University, said. “There’s nothing fundamental that will prevent us from simply tracking our hands. It’s just a computational problem that’s harder to solve.”
Ultimately, we are always held back by the tech but this doesn’t mean we should stop and accept it as it is.
“From what I’ve seen…It’s definitely a big step forward. However, it’s still very rudimentary,” Lutteroth said when talking about the Oculus Quest’s finger tracking. “When you come to hand tracking, there’s quite a lot of error involved with machine learning… That’s very often data-driven.”Due to the varied nature of human fingers (that’s before mentioning those with disabilities) hand tracking technology is dominated by research into what an average hand is. Unfortunately, with the way that research works, it often gets caught up in implicit biases.
One very highly publicized case of these forms of bias is Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Tay. It was designed to pick up on speech and emulate it to make Tay’s speech sound authentic. Within a day, it was virulently bigoted. This is an interesting microcosm of how these biases set in. If the people you test are racist, your chat bot will be. If the people you test have all ten fingers, your hand designs will be.
This is why Davis and Reidford were so outspoken in our interview about the power of playtesting. Reidford spoke of finger tracking and the unique hurdles in making your movement feel both organic, yet slick.
“There’s this sliding scale where, on one side, it’s fully finger tacking and then, on the other side, 100% animation,” Reidford said. ”We had to find the balance there… as soon you put the player under any kind of duress…They just want to slam a new magazine in.”
Surpassing Limitations
There’s creativity to just existing in VR. Davis mentioned that testers told him “‘Yeah, I’m playing this. I don’t feel powerful… I feel like my normal everyday self… that’s not why I go into games,’” Davis said. “‘I go into games to feel powerful and skilled.’” Even though it emulates your actions, VR is so captivating due to its ability to emulate the wonderful and powerful. That uncanny valley is less prevalent when the situation itself is one that you choose to put yourself into. When you’re aware of your world and place yourself in there, you can forget all about the gear you’re wearing.
A fantastic example of this is Half-Life: Alyx’s gravity gloves. “In Half-Life: Alyx it was about having the hands feel so natural you don’t really think about them anymore,” Reidford said.
You hold your hands up, grab an item and pull it towards you, and hope it lands. As long as you’re close to where you should be, it will always land. The same design philosophy is at work with the doors in Alyx. They don’t function like a normal door. You put your hand up to the doorknob and your character just turns it automatically.
“The player can still turn the handle themselves if they want to but they don’t have to, all they have to do is reach out, make a fist, and the door is open,” Reidford said. “Over time, it looks so correct and it’s what they expect to happen that the player actually believes that they’ve done it. They think that they reached out and turned the handle themselves when really they didn’t. The game did it for them”
The genius of Half-Life: Alyx is that this notion of feeling like “the action hero” is deployed so effectively without making you overpowered. You can simultaneously get crushed by creatures, cower away from Jeff, and giggle at the falling physics of a head crab—yet you still get out there, load your weapon, and take down the bad guys. This is a testament to VR as a whole. There’s a spectacle to it that can only be accessed via your hands. From its early days and crude movements to the beginning signs of significant hand tracking, there’s this bustling sense of creativity that keeps pushing the industry forward.
When you stare into the dark lenses of a VR headset and find yourself staring back, you look around your environment, look down at your hands, then squeeze closed your fists and you become something grander than the every day. You become your own version of an action hero.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR (PC review / PSVR review) is one of the most expansive video games out there with nearly endless amounts of content. However, it’s not the most immersive from a VR port perspective. Thankfully, the PC modding community is here to fix that.
Skyrim VR Mods: Before We Get Started
Skyrim VR is the type of game that will continue to evolve for years and years to come. The original version of Skyrim first hit PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 nearly 10 years ago and it’s still getting new mods to this day on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Unfortunately, Skyrim VR only has mods for the PC version—not PSVR.
When looking up mods for Skyrim VR on PC there is one important thing to keep in mind: The VR version of Skyrim is based on the Skyrim Special Edition iteration of the game, otherwise known as SSE, and not the original legacy version of Skyrim on PC. Almost all of the Skyrim Special Edition mods will work on Skyrim VR without any trickery needed — you can usually just use them just like you’re playing outside of VR — which is great.
If you’re interested in further expanding your modding and finding even more mods to try out, I highly recommend subscribing to the Skyrim VR subreddit and checking out the Lightweight Lazy List for even more mods and tweaks. There are countless guides, lists, and more on there to check out and people are always releasing new mods and discussing the latest mods they’ve tried.
For my list below, I’ve collected the mods into a handful of subcategories to organize things. First are the required tools and plugins that you need before you can even use most of the other mods on this list. Then we’ve mods I’ve classified as “essential” if you want to get the most out of Skyrim VR, followed by graphics mods, immersion mods, gameplay mods, and “other” mods such as followers and quests.
Preferences, Mod Manager, and Load Order
When it comes to the graphics mods specifically, keep in mind that everyone has different visual preferences so what I list here may not apply to you. Maybe you really love the Vanilla weather effects (if you’re unaware vanilla = unmodded) or maybe you want three different tree mods. That’s up to you, so treat this modding list as a starting point only.
You should also use a Mod Manager to streamline things more. I recommend either Mod Organizer 2 if you’re extremely new to this or Vortex, which is directly connected to Nexus Mods so it’s pretty straightforward as well.
And in regards to Load Order, generally speaking you want to make sure your mods are arranged in order of most general to most specific because if a mod loads later in the list it will overwrite whatever loaded before it if they cover similar areas. For example, if you have a mod that changes all textures in the game and then a specific mod to make the road signs a particular texture, you’d put the road sign mod after the general texture mod. And sometimes there are patches that make mods compatible with each other when they conflict—in those cases make sure patches are loaded after both of the other mods.
For more information on load order, you can read this guide.
This is a script extender which means it’s a mod that unlocks more modding potential for other mods to use. Many of the best mods require you have this one installed already.
This is technically a UI replacement mod that just makes things a lot better and easer to navigate and the VR version is specifically enhanced for VR. Also, plenty of other mods require this one.
This is the big one. Skyrim VR does not natively have a full-body for your player character while you’re playing. This means you just have two floating hands and if you look down you don’t see anything at all. VRIK fixes that with a full body to look at. In addition, it also includes weapon holstering on your body itself as well as gesture-based spellcasting and equipping gear and spells. All of this is powered by inverse kinematics. Requires SKSEVR and SkyUI.
Combined with VRIK, HIGGS VR truly transforms Skyrim VR into something that almost feels like it was natively made for VR. This mods adds hand collisions, object grabbing so you can just pick up and use items instead of having to navigate to your inventory menu first, and even gravity gloves like in Half-Life: Alyx for picking up things. Requires SKSEVR and SkyUI.
Regardless of how beefy your PC is Skyrim VR is a taxing game and the more mods you install the higher the demand goes for your system. This mods won’t solve every issue, but it does help maintain a high framerate and help avoid reprojections and FPS spikes. Definite must-have for everyone. Requires SKSEVR.
It’s bizarre that you need to mod this in, but here we are. This mod makes sure that sounds actually come from the proper direction in 3D space when you’re in VR. It makes a huge difference for immersion.
This mod is simple: it lets you sit down and use beds in more places. It’s a pretty nice immersion bonus to actually feel like you’re part of the world more.
This isn’t actually a mod, but it’s a plugin that lets you control your character’s movement in VR by moving in real-life. So you can swing your arms or use trackers on your feet to move around instead of the analog stick. Combined with a treadmill or even just jogging in place, it can really feel more immersive that way. It’s the next best thing besides a VR treadmill like the Kat Walk.
This lets you use your voice to actually read out dialogue options over your mic rather than selecting with the controllers. It’s a bit complicated to setup, but worth it.
You know how in Skyrim your character “shouts” dragon words to do special abilities? Well, this lets you actually say them out loud to activate the powers. It’s a huge immersion benefit.
I almost included this one under essentials because of how great and transformative it feels. This is a very lightweight mod that is specifically made for VR to totally revamp the weather and sky to make it all look and feel far, far better.
This mod emulates water reflections and makes all bodies of water look a lot better. It’s directly compatible with the aforementioned mods, Onyx VR Weathers and Realistic Water Two.
More detail and nuance for space, stars, and constellations at night time. Combined with Ethereal Clouds it really transforms the mood at nighttime in Tamriel.
This combination will give Skyrim VR a fresh look that is much more vibrant and sharpens the visuals to get rid of the rampant jagged lines you usually see in Vanilla.
This is a big combat overhaul mod. It changes and adds so much you should just read the Nexus page for more details but I highly recommend it, especially for melee characters.
With this mod, you’ll do different amounts of damage based on which body part you hit on an enemy with your arrows and spells. This sounds minor, but Location Damage VR really improves combat a lot in terms of immersion and realism.
This adds more VR-focused interactions and movements to access and navigate menus. As a mage in Vanilla Skyrim VR you spend a ton of time in menus, so this mod changes that. This is basically essential if you plan on playing a mage or using magic, at all, in any way.
This adds arcane archery to the game that more effectively lets you combine magic and archery into one character with things like elemental arrows and archery skills based on various schools of magic.
Best Other Skyrim VR Mods
This list of other mods is entirely based on my own personal preferences, so there is a high chance that you may not even like these things—and that’s okay. Take these recommendations with a grain of salt, if you will.
I’ve played through the opening in Skyrim so many times I can’t really stand it anymore, to be honest, so I always use the Alternate Start mod now for something different. Immersive Citizens is a great mod as well to add more behavior variation to NPCs. For some great follower companion mods, I absolutely love both Inigoand Sofia, who are fully-voiced, and this mod which fleshes out Seranaeven more from the base game.
To add in new content via Skyrim VR mods like quests and expansions, it’s hard to not recommend Legacy of the Dragonborn, which feels like a proper DLC for the game more than a fan-made mod. I’ve also got a soft spot for Helgen Reborn, which lets you rebuild the city of Helgen after Alduin attacks during the intro, The Forgotten City questline which won a Writer’s Guild award for its script, and of course the excellent Moonpath to Elsweyr, which lets you visit the border of Elsweyr, the home of the Khajiit people.
Ultimately, there is no such thing as a complete list of all recommended Skyrim VR mods because everyone’s needs and wants are different—not to mention more new mods are released all the time. Just look over the list of most popular all-time Skyrim mods for more ideas.
Did we miss any of your favorite Skyrim VR mods? Let us know your other recommendations down in the comments below!
Alvo is a brand new competitive VR first-person shooter on PSVR that can be played with a PS Aim Controller, two PS Move controllers, or the DualShock 4. Check out our full Alvo review for more!
When it comes to multiplayer military shooters on PSVR, there isn’t exactly a wealth of choices. Alvo aims to fill the gap left in the absence of titles like Onward and Pavlov — the latter of which is confirmed to be a PSVR 2 title — by delivering the fast-paced multiplayer shooter that PSVR gamers have been waiting for.
Alvo PSVR Review – The Facts
What is it?: An online competitive shooter for up to 10-players Platforms: PSVR, Quest and PC VR coming next Release Date: Out Now Price: $39.99
Alvo isn’t going to blow your mind with an original theme or unique mechanics. It’s more of an “anything you can do, I can do better” sort of affair — eventually, anyway. There’s no getting around the fact that Alvo isn’t quite finished yet. The build numbers don’t even hide it: it’s version 0.2.027 as of the PlayStation Store release. But what Alvo lacks in content it makes up for in good foundations. This game has excellent bones, even if there isn’t very much to do.
Right now, Alvo gives players the choice between four original maps, with the fifth choice being a night variant of the Monastery map. Each map can be played via three different modes: 10-player Free For All (deathmatch), 5v5 Team Deathmatch, and 5v5 Search and Destroy (team and objective-based). Three additional choices will be available in the near future once development has finished: Zombies, Domination, and private match.
Each map is multi-tiered and offers plenty of places to hide or take cover behind, although only one of them is close to the size you’ll find in similar titles like Contractors or Onward — neither of which are available on PSVR, anyway. The largest map, simply called “IndustrialMap”, is a much more tactical experience compared to the others, which are often quite small and can feel a bit crowded in a full Free For All game. The biggest negatives here are the quantity and variety of maps, not the quality.
On the surface, Alvo — a Portuguese word meaning target — seems to take aim at one of the biggest classics in the PSVR library: Firewall Zero Hour. While similar in theme, Alvo eschews the slower, tactical nature of Firewall and, in its place, delivers a formula that’s more akin to Pavlov or Counter-Strike in pacing. Getting shot is quite unforgiving and you’ll find that you die within fractions of a second if an enemy spots you first. Loading times, likewise, are blazing fast, and the multiplayer matches I joined all took mere seconds to go from sitting in a lobby to shooting enemies.
It’s a refreshing pace when compared to Firewall’s wait times, which can be a buzzkill to the excitement that you might otherwise have for the next round. Like Counter-Strike, players will vote on the next map at the end of each round and scoreboards will show who did the best. Unlike Counter-Strike, however, players will earn Alvo Coins based on how well they played. Skilled players will find themselves unlocking an arsenal of weaponry in no time, while other players will need to put in more practice time before they can get a shiny new gun or add-on.
Sensible Upgrade System
While some games in this genre give players access to everything up-front, Alvo gives everyone the same starting weapon collection and rewards players who put time into the game with additional firepower. Players start off with an AK-47-like gun (called an Annihilator) and a pistol, and can also choose between three grenade types, as well as a pick of 13 character models. Six additional primary weapons and one additional secondary weapon must all be unlocked with the aforementioned in-game currency, Alvo Coins.
In addition to the standard weapons, players can earn two types of attachments — a laser and a bayonet — as well as a rather impressive set of seven different types of scopes, and a slew of different skins for each weapon. Since Alvo Coins are earned and cannot purchased with real cash, only the most dedicated players will be running around shanking you with bayonets or shooting you with shotguns.
It only took me a few rounds before I was able to buy a scope (for reference, there are no scopes at all in Firewall Zero Hour), helping long-range shooting substantially. A few rounds more and I had my second primary weapon, which helped me play more to my personal style. That’s the kind of upgrade path I can get behind, as it persuades players to spend time in the game rather than coercing them to spend more money.
A perks category is also listed as “coming soon”, but no additional information on those items is available just yet. As you upgrade your arsenal, you’ll be able to customize four individual load-outs for quick selection in future matches.
Alvo on PSVR Review — Comfort
Alvo fits squarely into the “intense” category for comfort. This is a game where you’ll be using the joystick to virtually look and move, just as you would on a standard first-person shooter on your TV. Because of the PSVR’s limited range of physical movement tracking, you’ll be using the right stick to turn your character — either by tapping to move in incremental degrees or holding to smooth turn. Jumping and sliding could add additional discomfort for some players as well. There are some vignetting options enabled by default to dim the edges of your view and help with motion sickness, but players who suffer from these effects will likely prefer taking a seat instead of standing while playing. Options for using the DualShock 4, Move controllers, or Aim controller also help provide a range of custom options to aid in suppressing motion sickness.
Fast-Paced Gameplay and Tight Gunplay
As was said before, Alvo relies on speed and intensity to overcome its fairly barebones experience. This will hopefully evolve over time as the developers add more content but, for now, players who love fast-paced shooter experiences and want to play something like Counter-Strike in VR will feel right at home here. You don’t have the slower, more realistic type of physics that you’ll find in something like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners or complex reloading mechanics like in Onward or Contractors.
This is a more arcade-like experience and everything else reflects that. Heck, you can slide like an action hero by pressing crouch while running similar to Solaris — a move that will absolutely make you feel badass if you kill someone while pulling it off. Turning and aiming both feel exactly as you would expect while playing a light-gun game in an arcade, with no additional interpolation or weapon weight. Weapons will get caught on walls or other objects if you get too close, though, so you’ll need to be mindful of things getting in the way of your aim.
Alvo PSVR Review — Aim Controller vs PS Move vs DualShock 4
Alvo’s developers have created excellent control schemes for all three types of PSVR controllers. The DualShock 4 and PlayStation Aim controllers will feel most natural at first. In fact, the DualShock 4 even behaves as if you were holding a gun, requiring players to physically aim the controller, similar to Hitman 3 and Firewall. While the PS Move controllers don’t have a joystick — or any obvious way to move virtually, for that matter — Alvo’s developers cleverly devised a way to move in any direction without much fuss by holding the big button where your thumb rests and orienting your left controller in the direction you want to move.
Even though it took me a couple of rounds to get adjusted to this method, I actually found it to be a rather palatable way to play the game. The Move controllers made aiming easier than when using a DualShock 4 and didn’t suffer from any of the weird drifting I sometimes experience with the PlayStation Aim controller. Using the face buttons to turn left and right brought back memories of Goldeneye on N64, which is extremely limiting in stressful close combat situations, but it worked surprisingly well given the controller’s usually limited nature.
Controls are straightforward for a shooter. Square reloads, Circle toggles ducking, Triangle cycles between primary and secondary guns, L1 jumps, L2 tosses a grenade — this was one of my favorite mechanics as it allows you to quickly throw one in a pinch without really needing to aim — and R1 and R2 are used for melee or shooting your weapons. If you’ve played any modern shooter at all, the controls just make sense, and don’t attempt to reinvent the wheel.
Visually, the game is good enough for a PSVR game built with the PS4’s hardware in mind. It reminded me a lot of the recently released Hitman 3 in terms of model and texture quality, while the sound effects were pretty lackluster. You’re not going to be impressed by any of it, but it gets the job done well enough and gave me nothing to really complain about. While I played this on a PS5, PSVR games cannot be built with PS5 hardware in mind, so it’s still running a PS4 game in backwards compatibility support at the end of the day.
Alvo PSVR Review: Final Impressions
If you’re a fan of multiplayer shooters, there’s no doubt you’re going to have a solid time with Alvo. It’s seriously great fun thanks to lighthearted, arcade-like mechanics and a low learning curve that’s instantly accessible to anyone who’s played a shooter before. Quick matches and fast loading times keep the action going, and built-in voice communication makes it easy to work with teammates without any fuss.
But there’s no denying that the game is quite barebones — something that’s especially worrying for a title that’s been in development over four years and, yet, is only launching with five maps and three game modes with lots of unavailable features in the menu. The $40 price tag seems a bit steep to me for such a small amount of content, even with the promise of plenty more to come.
Still, there’s not exactly a wealth of other options in the PSVR world, With solid bones and what seems to be a welcoming and excited community, it’s likely that you’ll have a fantastic time with Alvo if you enjoy multiplayer shooters. Even in empty rooms, bots will automatically fill up the roster and make sure you have plenty of target practice before the real battles begin. Just don’t go in expecting any sort of single-player missions or a campaign mode, because there isn’t one whatsoever.
This review was conducted using a PlayStation 5 playing Alvo as a backwards compatible PS4 game. For more on how we arrived at this score, read our review guidelines.
Alvo is now available on PSVR for $40 with a 25% discount for PS Plus users until 4/27/21. Both PC VR and Quest releases with cross-play are planned for the future.
Today DOOM 3 VR Edition launches on PSVR for $20. We sat down for a chat with Ken Thain, Executive Producer from Archiact to talk about what it was like working with id Software to bring this iconic FPS into VR officially.
David Jagneaux, Senior Editor at UploadVR: Okay so, just checking here: the official title is DOOM 3 VR Edition, is that right?
Ken Thain, Executive Producer at Archiact: It’s a VR edition because we were very particular. It’s not a port. It’s not we threw stereoscopic view on a DOOM game…When we were working with it, they [id Software] were actually quite passionate about the idea that it’s not just a port, let’s make this an adaptation, let’s make this a remaster for VR because we both recognized that Doom 3 is a fantastic game for VR just based on the fact that out of the DOOM franchise, it’s a bit more of a slower first-person shooter.
We as well recognize the possibility within VR and so we consider it an adaptation or remastering because we redid so much. We redid the weapons, we redid the audio, and we can talk about it later, but the VFX: the audio, uprezzing the graphics, uprezzing the weapons, a new diegetic UI. We did so much to it to make sure that it felt like it was for VR from the ground up and I have to say it came out really, really well.
When we first got [the weapon 3D models] it was like, yeah, there’s whole chunks missing because they never had to show them on-screen so you can reveal the weapons and re-texture them up and stuff and then all the additions of the laser target, the flashlights, redoing the sound, redoing the VFX. It really is a remastering and I think once everybody’s able to jump in and play it, they’ll really feel it.
UploadVR: I remember when the game first came out there were lots of complaints about how the flashlight worked. How does it work exactly here? Were the weapons totally remade?
Thain: Yeah, it’s just depending on the weapons. We modified the weapons for those that either we had to put a flashlight on it, or we just keep it on your shoulder or it’s on your head where your aim and for VR is particularly good because with Doom 3 being so intense, like you literally playing where a door opens, it’s dark inside, you peek your head in, look around, put your gun in with the flashlight, check out all the dark corners, it feels totally different…The fact that your flashlight is still on a battery, it can run out, you can turn it off and on and you can look in one direction and have a flashlight going in another direction. So I think people will be really happy with that addition.
UploadVR: Can you talk a little bit about getting the lighting and all that, adapting it for VR, just right? How important is that sort of creepy atmosphere in a VR game like DOOM 3? As you said, it’s a slower-paced game, more horror-style than the others—I imagine it really helps amplify things tremendously.
Thain: First off, it was an advantage in the sense that games built back in 2004 were a lot less complicated rendering wise than they are now. So we’re able to bring the engine forward to update it, but like our team had a lot of Doom 3 fans, particularly, and there’s a group of us actually that were motors in an era of this.
Luckily enough, we uprezzed the environments, we uprezzed the weapons, we uprezzed all the UI and stuff. These additions feel really good. They feel really modern. You play the game, it’s super solid frame rates, 60 frames across. It feels really smooth. Everything’s really clear. It has this modern feel to it but yet this nostalgia of the style of graphics and the style of creatures and stuff from the original Doom. From there, it feels really good and then there was a few things we had to work on, like the original Doom 3 had a lot of strobing lights and that’s not good for VR because you are right in there.
We had to go through and do some modification, either tone down the strobing of some lights or leave them on full time. There was some atmosphere that we had to work around with that, but overall, based on all the additions that we did to it, the game itself stands out really well. I mean it’s id Software, they invented the first person shooter.
UploadVR: Have you looked into the Quest version of DOOM 3 at all? Is that something you’re aware of?
Thain: We’re aware of the Dr. Beef Quest 2 version. There’s also a lot of VR mods for DOOM 3 on the PC as well and we’re aware of these and it’s good. Overall, it’s good. We’re all contributing to VR. We’re all creating good content for VR players. There was never a moment we’d looked at it as competitive or anything like that. As far as Archiact is concerned, we support those mods and I’m sure Bethesda does as well as far as making sure that as many people get to play DOOM as possible.
UploadVR: I didn’t know if that was one you had played or not.
Thain: Well, definitely looked at it. We looked at actually a lot of shooters in the VR space just to see what was working, what doesn’t. Even our experiences ourselves with Evasion, we knew what worked and what doesn’t and the good thing is with id Software, they were very supportive of when we came up with the features and we prototyped them and we had them try it out. We had some collaboration back and forth of exactly the placement of flashlights or even the art. Like, with the double barrel shotgun we have the flashlight taped on because it feels a bit more visceral. Yet the modern machine gun, which is very sci-fi looking, we built the flashlight into it.
Let us know what you think of DOOM 3 VR Edition down in the comments below!
Zenith: The Last City is an upcoming VR MMORPG from Ramen VR that’s slated to release on PC VR, PSVR, Quest, and non-VR PC platforms sometime this year. Last week, I sat down with Andy Tsen, CEO of Ramen VR, to discuss the game, their ambitious plans, and what players should expect with a game of this scope and scale.
If you’d rather watch the interview instead of read it, which clocks in at just around 45-minutes total, then you can check that out above. We met in the UploadVR virtual studio, the same one that we use to capture and stream our twice-per-week talkshow podcast, VR Download.
Keep in mind this was a 45-minute long conversation-style interview, it wasn’t an email Q&A or anything like that. Enjoy and let us know of any questions or comments down below!
Zenith: The Last City—Made-For VR MMORPG
Andy Tsen, Ramen VR CEO: Zenith is a virtual reality MMO and it has kind of a JRPG East Asian aesthetic. It’s kind of sci-fi fantasy and we want people to be able to come into the world and just explore and have a really positive, fun kind of RPG experience that they would have on any other platform except built for VR. We really think that this is the stuff that people have been wanting for a long time, and that’s why we set out to build it.
David Jagneaux, UploadVR: Yeah, you guys had a Kickstarter campaign, right? I’m drawing a blank on remembering how much you guys ended up raising but it was pretty successful, right?
Tsen: Yeah, we had a $280,000 Kickstarter a while back ago. Mm hmm.
UploadVR: Awesome, that’s exciting! You talk about VR MMOs, it’s something that everyone wants, everyone has been dreaming about since Neuromancer came out, since who knows how long. And certainly, pop culture has fed into that with– You know, for me growing up, there was .hack//Sign and then Sword Art Online and The Matrix and Ready Player One, and there’s just so much pop culture centered around that idea of this magical sci-fi fantasy world where we can all go in and hang out and do stuff together. Obviously, VR headsets are getting us closer to that. In what ways do you think Zenith is doing things that hasn’t been done yet?
Tsen: Well, we’re building a full-scale VR MMO and so… It’s basically a lot of is uncharted territory, right? I’m actually a big fan of Orbus and the guys at ATT -A Township Tale. Everybody has their own take on what of their MMO should be. But what we’re really trying to do is create a top extremely polished core game loop that is really, really fun to play that feels a lot more polished and a lot deeper. That’s our fundamental goal; to create an experience where it feels both familiar to MMORPG players as well as completely unique being in the space of VR itself. As an example, Zenith is going to feel a lot more like an action RPG than something like Final Fantasy XIV or WoW where they are basically spreadsheet simulators where you’re pressing macros and you’re doing the whole hotkey dance, right? In Zenith, you literally have to parry enemy’s attacks, throw fireballs, you can slow time. And of course, all of this is tied together by a gorgeous environment where we’ve spent thousands of hours creating unique props and content and just building a world that feels fully alive and immersive. Along with that, obviously, one of the most important things about VR is a sense of presence and I think that that’s something that other genres outside of VR, MMOs can’t really reach. And so for us, it’s all about that feeling of physical embodiment in the world. That’s why we introduced our recent pop one-style gliding, we have climbing, we have full-body IK, right? These are things that will make the players feel like they’re really in the world living a different life essentially.
UploadVR: This is a key question for me that a lot of MMOs don’t handle this well and I feel like a lot of MMOs- like you alluded to- with spreadsheet simulator style gameplay, they’re all very target based. You target an enemy, you use your abilities and you just flow on from there. But is everything in Zenith real time? Like if I cast a fireball, does it travel in real time through the game world where it’ll then hit an enemy or can he dodge it? Or if I miss with bad aim? Is that an aspect of it? Can I target something then automatically hit it?
Tsen: Yeah, absolutely. That’s where you get to the real time action RPG part of this. Yes, things in Zenith do feel like real time. You’ll have to raise your sword up at the right time to block an attack, you’ll have to do gestures to cast spells. We have a pretty innovative casting system that we’re excited to show people. But yeah, if you aim wrong, for example, or you throw your fireball in the wrong direction, it’s not going to hit the enemy.
UploadVR: Got it, got it. That’s pretty cool. I know nowadays there are a handful of MMOs that do stuff like that, like New World is coming out soon a non-VR MMO that’s going to have real time combat, but it’s pretty rare still. Most all the big MMOs are all target-based, you don’t have to really aim anything. So, I’m excited to have a game like that in VR for sure.
Tsen: Yeah, for sure. I think there’s a couple of MMOs out there that are a little bit more action paced in the non-VR realm. If you look at games like Black Desert Online or Guild Wars 2 to an certain extent, they feel a little bit more Diablo-ey or Path of Exile-ey. Also ESO I guess is another example of something that feels a little bit more real time. But for us, we are literally talking about having hitboxes and being able to dodge enemy attacks and being able to parry. One of the things that’s really cool is in Zenith is you can actually parry enemy projectiles. You can block arrows, knock arrows down as they are coming towards you.
UploadVR: Nice. Okay. That’s pretty cool. I think a lot of MMOs right now even going back all the way back to Ultima and the early days, such a big part of an MMO, obviously, the fact that it’s online is the community, right? You have to have a good core community, you have to be welcoming and accessible to new players, you have to have endgame content to keep the core community happy for months and years on end, and there’s just so many layers and facets to it. What are some of the ways that you guys are hoping to keep your community engaged and embrace and encourage social interaction and stuff like that?
Tsen: I think the community is at least as important as the game design and the marketing on the game if not more so. We’ve spent the past two years building up a really passionate and engaged and active community on our Discord where I think we’re over 25,000 people now and that’s just on Discord alone. And that’s been really exciting to see because… Well, there was a bit of time there where we were just heads down on coding and getting ready for all of the milestones we had to submit and we didn’t do much community engagement because we were so busy building the game. What was really cool to see was our moderating team and regular members of the community really come together and form a community that’s not just about Zenith, but also just about being friends and just hanging out and streaming together. We have people that have gotten married because of our Discord. They met in the Zenith Discord and they got married. And we have somebody who’s now one of our top moderators that said that he’s basically a lurker in other discords but was so welcomed by our community and felt so accepted that they actually spoke up for the first time and then became a moderator, and so now this is like a family to them. That’s the kind of community that we’re creating outside of Zenith.
Within Zenith, one of the cool things that we’ve really seen that I’m pretty excited about is our guild system. Because what we’re seeing is people are already self-organizing in our Discord around different guilds and stuff like that. We have a Guild Recruitment channel and a place where people can form guilds and tag themselves. We have a variety of social features within Zenith, obviously. Your standard friend system, parties and guilds as well as things that encourage more emergent gameplay like public events that can be completed with random people all over the world. I don’t know if you’ve played Destiny or Final Fantasy 14 with the FATEs, it’s kind of like that in terms of just having events spawn over the world that you can play together. But ultimately, I think what’s really important is just to have the gameplay reflect the need for collaboration. If you look like EverQuest is still out there today, right? That’s still making money. They still have a full team dedicated to churning out content for EverQuest because so much of it in the early days was impossible to do by yourself, right? You had to–
UploadVR: They just celebrated 22 years this week.
Tsen: Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever play by the way?
UploadVR: Oh, yeah. EverQuest is my first MMO. I played that a lot.
Tsen: Nice. WoW was my first real MMO, Classic WoW that is. What I will say is like with games like WoW and 14, they have gotten so good at basically just hitting a button and getting into a queue with someone, a random person, that you don’t necessarily need as much community. For us, it’s always about striking that right balance of yes, it’s easy for newbies to get in and party up but also, there’s enough challenging endgame content there where you still need to organize and you can’t just do pugs, you need to basically know people and form friendships and alliances.
UploadVR: That’s great to hear because my main MMO that I play personally right now is ESO. Sometimes, I could play that game for three hours straight and never have to type in the chat box, you know? So much of MMO design nowadays is about streamlining in terms of not just accessibility, but streamlining content so that you don’t have to even turn your brain on hardly. So, I think VR is not really the right medium for that type of game design. I think the more interactive and more hands-on something is, the better it is. So, I think you guys are taking a smart approach here where you’re going to try to incentivize real collaboration and communication because… And a lot of people forget every VR headset has a mic built in. So, it’s not like someone could not have a mic and not have a headset, you know? If you’re in VR you can talk, so you might as well embrace that.
Tsen: Yeah, definitely. It’s something that’s important to us. I think one thing we’re excited to explore when we have a chance to implement it, for example though, is voice modulation. I know that a lot of people want anonymity. I certainly do when I’m online. I’ve played a lot of D&D and I played a lot of– I don’t know if you’ve heard of this game, Neverwinter Nights.
UploadVR: Yeah, for sure.
Tsen: Yeah, I used to play it in a lot of RP servers online and in those worlds, you’re typing out what you’re saying so that leaves a lot more to imagination. And if you’re in an MMO, one of the things we want to do is eventually allow people to sound like whatever they want to sound like so that they can basically… they don’t pierce the veil essentially.
UploadVR: Yeah. For me, roleplay is something that I’ve done a little bit here and there in some games but whenever you’re using your real voice, you can feel shy about it especially if it’s around strangers. I definitely think that kind of thing would definitely help encourage them more and I mean, you’re putting on a VR headset. It’s kind of like wearing a mask in a way. You’re becoming your avatar more than when you’re looking at a computer screen so I think that kind of stuff is going to be really great.
Tsen: Yeah. Then the other interesting thing that we’ve seen is typically in a VR or an MMO of any kind, you want to spend several hours in there, right? For most of the, I guess, not even hardcore just like a regular MMO player wants to log a couple hours on a given weekend. At least for me the way that I do it is when I’m really busy weekdays, I’ll do dailies, right? Weekends, I want to put a lot more time into it if I have it. But in VR, you’re not talking about a 30-minute dungeon, that even feels a little bit too long for the average user to start off with. What we really want to capture is the same feeling that people get when they’re going into a game of Pop: One or Blast-On or Beat Saber. You go in and the first five minutes there’s already something that hooks you in. And that experience itself is the thing that gets you into the VR device. But then once you’ve played for five minutes, it’s “All right, I’ll just do another five minutes. And another five minutes.” So that’s been my pattern of the way I play games in VR is that I’ll jump in for a quick game of Beat Saber and then an hour later, I’ll be like, “Oh, how did this happen?”
UploadVR: Yeah, it’s tricky, right? I mean, designing an MMO, that’s the type of game that you want your players to play that for hundreds and hundreds of hours and designing it in a way that not only has the content there– You don’t want it to feel like you’re going to punish people if they don’t but at the same time, you do want to reward the people that do. It’s such a tricky balance. I don’t envy the task of trying to balance one of the first ever VR MMOs and make it sticky for all types of players out there. There’s just so many variables involved.
Tsen: Yeah, definitely. Thankfully, we’re not doing it alone. We have a great team. We have a game designer, Colin, that we brought on board that has a decade of MMO design experience. He worked on Rift, ArcheAge, and a couple really other popular games, Atlas Reactor and some other stuff like that. We’re fortunate to have a really amazing team of gaming veterans to help us start to bridge this gap between what a traditional MMO is and what a VR MMO should be.
UploadVR: Going back to that point a little bit, can you talk a little bit about the types of content that will be in the game? I mean, I’m assuming there’s main story quests and side quests and group dungeons and stuff, but for someone that jumps in to play the game, what are the types of events and activities and things that they’ll be able to do?
Tsen: You mentioned main story quests? Those will be there. We have procedural quests that will be able to ramp up depending on what level the player is and what areas they’re in and things like that. We mentioned public events earlier where you can go through and complete quests together, as well as just world boss events and also having group dungeons that people can go into and play together. There’s also just a plethora of things people can do in the world whether that’s going out and seeking treasure chests, kind of like Genshin Impact if you guys have played any of that. Or just going and leveling up the crafting. For example, one of the most fun things in this game right now is fruit gathering because you have to literally climb up the tree. And the distance grab only goes five meters, so sometimes you have to like stretch out to a branch to grab an apple and put it away. I guess what I would say is, all the core experience of an MMO is going to be there at launch, but we have plans to add a lot more on top of that later. I think the thing we want to avoid is stretching ourselves too thin so that we can’t deliver a polished experience across all the things we’re going to launch. The thing we also have to keep in mind is that we’re a small team. Right now, we’re about 10 people fulltime and with a couple other contractors beyond that. So we have to think of clever ways to not be constantly on this content treadmill that bigger AAA studios are able to do, right? If you have 100 artists and 20 game designers and 20 engineers, you can just create content without really thinking about reuse. For us, it’s all about having a really fun core gameplay experience like killing monsters, leveling up, getting loot, completing public events, and having those systems all tied together in a way that can be repeated over time.
UploadVR: Yeah, I know you’ve talked a little bit about the scale of the game, the multiplayer, sociability of it all and all that stuff. But I think the big question a lot of people probably have about games like this is how much is it truly an MMO? How many people will you see at any given time? Is it a truly open world? Are there instances or are the zones segmented? How does the actual game design look from a top level in terms of being an MMO?
Tsen: I think MMO is a term that has been really liberally used especially in mobile. And when I say MMO, what I’m trying to say is an MMO in the sense of something like WoW or Final Fantasy 14, where it will be a large world where you can have thousands of people per shard. Our eventual goal, of course, is to make it even bigger and tie the different shards together to have this infinite world, but we’re starting with just a regular MMO and a regular shard which by itself is hard enough.
UploadVR: That’s what Elder Scrolls Online did, right? They have the “One Tamriel” thing that they do where just depending on whenever you load into a zone, it’ll just assign people into that zone with you on the fly in a way. So, I mean, if I were to go fight a world boss, how many people can be there with me at any given time? Is there like a cap on that or is it just whoever is nearby? How does that work exactly?
Tsen: It’s going to be whoever is nearby, right? We need to take into account traditional load balancing issues that other MMOs have as well. You see this with Black Desert Online or Warframe and to some extent FFXIV and WoW as well. But basically, for example, if you’re in a party and you’re in a highly dense zone, your party members are prioritized in terms of latency and how well they’re rendered. And then the other people, you know, depending on what platform we’re playing the game on, are either at a lower level of detail or if there’s hundreds of people, you kind of just call it out completely. So like in Warframe, for example, you’ll be able to see most of the players around you but if you have a really dense zone like in a city or something, you’ll see players that just have name tags or kind of shadows. That’s the kind of thing that we’ll need to implement at launch to be able to support this. But our goal is to have it be a full-scale MMO with full-scale world bosses and things of that nature.
UploadVR: So you mentioned depending on platforms, I guess you’re alluding to the fact that on Quest, for example, if more than a handful of people are nearby, it’s probably you’re not going to see fully detailed avatars, right?
Tsen: Yeah. It depends on… Even within the Quest platform, there’s like Quest and Quest 2, right? And so one thing that we will make sure to do is that we’re not sacrificing anything from a gameplay perspective. That’s the most important thing to us, is that across all the different platforms people can have a… They won’t be hampered by having an older device or a weaker device versus, you know, PCVR, for example.
UploadVR: Cool. And it’s coming to PSVR as well, right?
Tsen: Yeah.
UploadVR: I got to ask, how does it play on PSVR? Because the move controllers don’t have analog sticks and so I mean, they’re kind of limited a little bit from a playability perspective. Is it going to be teleport only on PSVR or how does it work?
Tsen: Yeah. We can’t reveal too much about that yet. Partially because we’re still deep in the dev cycle for that, I don’t want to kind of say anything that might change later on. But what I can say is that we’re going to try to offer the same types of movement mechanics in PSVR as you have on other platforms. Yeah.
UploadVR: Gotcha. Yeah, there’s a lot of devs that have been creative about ways to do that. So that makes sense.
Tsen: Yeah, we have on our team people with decades of experience at Sony working on networking and gameplay so, you know, we’ll have a good idea. We’ll do a couple of iterations and I think people will be happy. Also excited about like the new controllers that have just come out.
UploadVR: I was just about to ask you. Well, what do you think about those?
Tsen: I think those are awesome.
UploadVR: They look great.
Tsen: Yeah. I am really excited about just how VR is coming together. You’ve probably been doing this for a while David, but my experience started with the DK2 back in like 2015. And every year since then, people have been saying like, “This is the year for VR. This is the year it’s going to take off.” And I really think we’re starting to kind of hit that inflection point. It’s really just about how many people have been able to hang in during that entire kind of strenuous time where there wasn’t a lot of revenue and it was the dark times.
UploadVR: Yeah. I think the important thing that the industry has seen is it’s expanded enough to have something out there for everybody, including the accessible, cheaper hardware, like the Quest 2 that is still super good, super great, has a good library. But then if you want to go high end with an index and a PC you totally can. And then you’ve got the console with the PSVR, which has an amazing library of games. Hopefully, it seems like the next headset is going to be better from a hardware perspective. I think that that’s the big thing for me, just seeing so many different options that are all viable is super exciting because for the longest time it seemed like everything felt so unfinished and experimental. But now we’re finally at that point now where I could… If I have a friend that is a gamer or something like that, I feel comfortable just recommending a Quest 2 nowadays without any caveats. Because up until then it was always like, “Oh well, if you don’t mind never turning around, you can get this headset,” or “If you don’t mind setting up and mounting cameras on your walls, then you can get this headset.” But now all that stuff’s gone and it’s exciting. And I think games like Zenith are exciting and they’re the kind of games people have been wanting to play. I’m excited to try it for myself. I haven’t gotten to try it yet, I’m really eager to try it out, hopefully.
Tsen: Yeah. Definitely love to run you through. We’re currently kind of crunching on the Alpha that, as you know, is coming out in about a month and hoping that’s going to be a really good experience for everybody. To go back to your point of kind of how you can recommend headsets to people now, I used to have to recommend people headsets. And now I’m in people’s homes like my brother-in-law, I’m just seeing people that are like- they just bought it! Not because I was like pushing it like a drug dealer, but like they have it and they’re like playing it. And one of them had a broken controller and it was like, you know, that’s how you know you’ve put a lot of hours into it when you’ve slammed your wall on accident so hard that the controller breaks.
UploadVR: Those controllers are pretty sturdy too, so that was… yeah, rest in peace that wall. That was probably pretty hard impact.
Tsen: Yeah, it was a zombie… It was one of the zombie defense games, he didn’t tell me the title.
UploadVR: Classic.
Tsen: Yeah.
UploadVR: Yeah. That’s awesome. It’s a great anecdote that I think a lot of people are starting to have more and more nowadays where instead of people asking me, “Should I get a VR headset?” It’s, “Hey, which game should I get for my VR headset?” It’s a very different question that I get more commonly now. So that’s pretty awesome to see.
Tsen: Yeah. And we were kind of excited to be able to get the major platforms really excited about Zenith as well, working with both, as you guys saw, being on the PlayStation store coverage as well as the Oculus coverage. It’s just been a really great experience for us. I think there is a unique moment in time for companies of our size to succeed right now. Basically, we are in a period of time where people want this, but AAA studios haven’t exactly committed to building MMO yet, right? Because it’s super, super expensive for that kind of scale. And so if we can deliver an experience now, we could really help set the kind of tone and define a lot of the mechanics that become known in this next group of, this next wave of MMOs to come out.
UploadVR: Yeah. You look back and Meridian 59 and Ultima, you know, those had to come before EverQuest and WoW could come. It’s a kind of a similar trajectory and, you know, it’s exciting to see. I do want to speak a little bit about some of the other things on the horizon out there. Like I know you talked a little bit about Orbus. Have you seen much about Ilysia? Is that one that you’re aware of very much? And how does Zenith compare to Orbus and the other VR MMOs that are on the horizon? What are some of the differentiating factors?
Tsen: To be honest, we’ve been really deep in development on Zenith. We haven’t had much time to come up for air. Ilysia is a game that we’ve definitely heard about, but we haven’t really delved too deep into it. What I will say is competition is always healthy, it always makes for a better product. And ultimately, I think, there’s going to be a lot of differentiating factors that players will be able to choose from when they play or choice when they have the products in front of them. I’m really personally excited about the features that Zenith has and I think we’ll be able to have a lot of people excited about that as well. Again, I haven’t done too much research into this, it’s mostly, you know, seeing it in our community. Like, “Hey, have you heard of this other game?” type of thing. But I guess a lot of it comes down to just the core game design as well as the aesthetic that we’re trying to hit. I think with us, we kind of have this JRPG, Sci-Fi fantasy, really colorful, stylized cel-shaded look. Other games are different.
UploadVR: The kind of the Cyberpunk almost sort of Sci-fi fantasy style, like you said, is not super common. I think most people when they think of MMORPGs, they have in their head kind of the Ultima, EverQuest, WoW style of medieval fantasy. But you guys are going for a little bit different of an aesthetic there while still having swords and magic, but also having skyscrapers. It’s kind of an interesting amalgamation.
Tsen: Yeah. I guess a good example of this would just be something like Final Fantasy, right? Final Fantasy, if you’re a fan of VII or any of them really, there’s always this kind of element of technology or steampunk or dieselpunk, but then there’s also kind of if you go far enough out into the open world, a lot of it can feel like fantasy because it’s natural environments, it’s wide open plains to explore, it’s lush forests. And we have all of that. I think is just… It’s going to be exciting.
UploadVR: Cool. One other topic I want to talk about is I would love to hear some more from you about the moment-to-moment gameplay. Because I know that you guys have previously described your melee combat as similar to Beat Saber. So if you could talk a little bit about what that’s like for the player, you know, like what they’ll physically be doing and how it works, that’d be great.
Tsen: Yeah. So that was like really early on. And I remember saying that and then getting coverage about it because Beat Saber was like the biggest thing back then. Well, first of all, there’s 30 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay footage on our YouTube- it’s not cut or edited at all- that anybody can just go on and check out. That’ll give people a good feel for what the gameplay is going to feel like. But second of all, in terms what we meant by in the early days having Beat Saber-inspired combat, was that you would be able to block things. You would have to time things to make sure that you were hitting things optimally. Now in the early prototype, what we had was literally lines that you would kind of slash through, and you’d have to slash it at the right time.
Tsen: Yeah, like Until You Fall style. We got some feedback on that that was a little bit too gamey for what people were looking at for an MMO. They wanted something that’s a little bit more visceral. So we modified that so that timing is still important, but it’s no longer so obvious like you have to do this or you have to like… Yeah, and so combat now is basically… I think one of the most important things is the enemy stagger gauge. The idea is that you would be doing movements in real time, like parrying, blocking or if you’re made, to sling fireballs. And then that would all be incrementing attacking the enemy stagger meter. And then when they get staggered and vulnerable, that’s when you’d go in and you do maximum damage.
UploadVR: Got it. I’m nearing the end of my play-through of Final Fantasy VII Remake. So the term stagger is very large in my brain right now because that’s a huge part of that game. Yeah, that’s common mechanics, that makes sense.
Tsen: Yeah. If you’ve seen the stagger gauge in Final Fantasy VII, it’ll feel a lot like that.
UploadVR: Cool.
Tsen: There’s also this problem with energy fatigue. If you’re going to be playing a game for two to three hours, you need to make sure people aren’t getting exhausted while they’re in there. So our goal is to kind of make the game reward reflexes and strategy more than like just raw physical prowess. It’s definitely not a game like Blast-On where you’ll be literally dodging things all the time, there’s going to be a component of just reaction time and timing and strategy.
UploadVR: Got it. And the last topic I’d love to touch on a little bit is, I know you mentioned things like loot and stuff earlier, but what is the gear system like? Are there lots of items and customization in terms of armor and weapons? Can I look down and see my entire avatar? Because you mentioned full body IK, I’m just curious to know how deep and detailed is that system.
Tsen: Yeah. Players will be able to look down and see the different armor sets that they’re equipping. We’ll have a lot of different armor types, really awesome looking unique armor sets that people will be able to put on. If you could imagine something that’s kind of like any other MMO, where you have tons of loot and gear to grind after, you know. You have modifiers and stats on those things. For us we also want to take that one step further and kind of allow people to continue making their armor sets more and more powerful over time. Enchanting those armor sets, making those better, enhancing them. That’s how we kind of think of loot. And also just making it extremely apparent when you’ve gotten a really powerful piece of loot. We want people to feel every piece of armor they get. Because again, it’s kind of like an action RPG mixed with an MMO so you can’t just get something that increases your stat value by five and like increases your DPS by one, that’s not going to make you feel more powerful.
UploadVR: Yeah, that’s very important. That’s definitely good to hear. Reminds me of two very specific important questions from one MMO player to another is, will there be transmog? Can I change the look of things to look like other things?
Tsen: We do want to have a transmog system. It depends on whether or not we can get it at launch, but that’s definitely something that we’re going to put in.
UploadVR: Okay.
Tsen: Yep.
UploadVR: Cool. And the second one is: In terms of trading, will there be like a player economy type of thing going on where high-level gear that you get from one place you can sell to someone? And will things be bound to you when you pick them up? Is that going to be part of the game design at all?
Tsen: We’re still pretty early on the player economy side of things. All I can say is that there will be one, that’s something that we promised our backers on Kickstarter when we raised that. I think what we want to do is we want to introduce it in a way that is sane. We’re not quite EVE Online where you can literally sell everything and your job is just to become a corporate overlord. We think of our ourselves more like a traditional kind of MMO where there’s some player economy in there, but there’s also a game economy outside of that. Players that choose to participate in it will be rewarded handsomely but it won’t be a requirement.
UploadVR: Okay, cool. Well, sounds like you guys are checking a lot of boxes and hitting a lot of bullet points, and I’m very excited to check out the game. Hopefully during the Alpha, I’ll find some time to try it out and play it. Why don’t you go ahead and let everyone know the dates of the upcoming Alpha, how they can pre-order, and platforms, when it’s coming out… and all that good stuff.
Tsen: Yeah, sure. The game, the first pre-Alpha starts on the 19th, and it’ll run for about a week.
UploadVR: Of April, right?
Tsen: Yeah. Sorry, April 19th. Some people were messaging me today about why it hasn’t started yet. It’ll start on April 19th and run for about a week. Unfortunately, pre-orders have closed at this point. We just had a phenomenal amount of demand and we want to make sure we can fulfill that and make sure everybody has a good experience. We’re working hard to be able to open that up, but no guarantees on that yet. I would just encourage everybody to come check out our Discord and our mailing list. Yeah, Alpha will be the first taste people get of the game publicly so we’re excited for everybody to try it out. Important thing is to just note that it is a real Alpha not like a marketing Alpha, so it’s going to be rough, it’s going to be a little bit unpolished. There’s going to be crashes and bugs, you know? We want to set expectations on that. We still think it’s going to be a really fun experience though.
UploadVR: Right. So this is an Alpha test, not a free demo. It is an Alpha test.
