Resident Evil 7 is one of the best horror games in recent years and its VR support is still, over four years later, exclusive to PSVR. We take a look back at the title, analyze what makes it work so well in VR, and imagine how great Resident Evil 8: Village could be with VR support.
Some mild spoilers for Resident Evil 7 follow below
Resident Evil 7 and VR Horror
Let me preface this by stating that I’m a nerd for horror. I love the challenge of a new horror game. There’s something so raw and exciting about being terrified and that’s why I love horror games in particular. With the rise of VR, horror is getting more chances to truly shine. That’s why I jumped at PSVR on day one and awaited a true showcase of its horrifying potential.
I’m driven to play horror games in VR in search of the answer to one simple question: Can this game scare me more than I’ve ever been scared before? The launch of Resident Evil 7 VR in 2017 answered that question in spectacular fashion.
With VR now solidified as a well and truly established platform, we have the capacity to be scared by developers to levels that we could only have imagined way back when the first Resident Evil game came out in 1996. After the brilliantly spooky showcase of Resident Evil Village and the internet’s collective obsession with tall vampire lady, I got to thinking about my terrifying experience with Resident Evil 7 in VR and what it might mean for the future of the series.
Resident Evil 7 was a huge departure for the franchise as a whole. Just how Resident Evil 4 changed camera angles for a more personal approach, Biohazard placed you in first-person—as close to those molded and grotesque Bakers as possible. This after all, was a giant lateral sidestep for the series. Not in terms of quality, but in terms of its roots. This was the return of Resident Evil the survival horror game and away with the games that tried to have unnecessary over-the-top macho action.
Following Resident Evil 4, the next two main entries in the series went for bolder and bigger setpiece action sequences. Resident Evil 7 on the other hand was much more focused, offering a more stripped back and primal experience. As series producer Masachika Kawata said in an interview with us back near the game’s launch, they were hoping to “make an experience that’s more intimate which allows for higher immersion.” They more than succeeded.
Adding VR into the mix was like holding a magnifying glass to the horror genre as a whole, amplifying everything. The tension, the scares, the action, and the incredibly detailed environments all came to life like never before. The Baker mansion itself feels like a character when you’re this invested inside its walls.
So, what makes Resident Evil 7 and it’s VR mode so damn terrifying? As the first game made using the RE engine, Resident Evil 7 is a very good-looking game. Even the inevitable visual compromises made in VR have very little impact on how gorgeous it is. In fact, seeing things in VR allowed me to see many more details that were just not as pronounced when looking at a flat TV screen.
Everyone is aware of that infamous dinner table scene with the Baker family. The difference it makes when it’s not only Ethan, but you, the playeras well, getting some kind of horrendous rotten meat shoved in your mouth really ramps up the intensity and disgust.
Not only that but every single confrontation is transformed. I’ve played the game since without VR and the scares, fights, and key moments of high tension are, while still powerful, just feel a little flat (pun intended) without VR by comparison. The boss fights gave me goosebumps, especially with Marguerite in her four-legged form.
Having to physically look around with your head to locate where she could be crawling all over the walls felt incredibly haunting. When you hear those 3D audio sounds to let you know that she’s behind you and you have to look over your shoulder, it really sends a chill down your spine; I never want to do that again.
The moments where nothing is happening are probably the parts where VR makes the biggest change, as strange as it sounds. There were two occasions in my first playthrough where I literally paused the game and had to stop due to simply unbearable tension.
This happened when wading through the water in the introductory section and when crawling through the pitch black vent on the abandoned Annabelle ship. The atmosphere alone is what made these sections so terrifying.
The silence, the not knowing if or when something is about to happen, was all too overwhelming for me. Since I’ve played my fair share of horror games before I just knew that something was probably going to happen. Each time I removed the headset, took a deep breath, and questioned if I was ready to dive back in.
The discomfort of being in VR with water up to your neck is something that can’t be explained, it needs to be experienced. As someone that’s already scared of tight spaces, it was a real nightmare. The rancid water bubbles in front of you as you’re trying, desperately, to keep your head above were disgusting. And then after all that, guess what? Nothing happens. You just drop out and continue. But the sheer weight of not knowing in VR meant I almost couldn’t continue.
If you haven’t already and you enjoy horror, you simply have to experience Resident Evil 7 in VR. Despite the fact that it only uses the DualShock 4 and not any motion controllers, no other horror experience has come close for me. It completely terrified me and I wish I could experience it all over again for the first time.
And now, I want Capcom to top it. I’d love for them to scare me more than I’ve ever been scared before once again. I want to see all 9 feet of Lady Dimitrescu and that beautiful castle of Resident Evil Village in VR. They haven’t confirmed VR support (yet) but I really, really hope they do.
I’m ready to be frozen on the spot and begging for reprieve all over again.
Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs released in 2019, bringing the famed franchise into VR for the first time. Since its release, the game has received a wealth of updates and new content. But does the transition to VR bode well for the birds or does it all come crumbling down? Here’s our full Angry Birds VR review.
Angry Birds has been around since 2009, originating as a mobile game that spawned a bunch of sequels, spin-offs, merchandise and even a film series. 10 years on from the original, Resolution Games released the franchise’s first foray into VR with Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs. Initially just featuring 52 levels set across over four worlds, the game has received frequent free content updates over the last two years and become quite a beefy package.
Angry Birds VR Review – The Facts
What is it?: A VR arcade game where you slingshot birds at evil pigs housed in charming but unstable structures. Platforms: PC VR, Oculus Quest, PSVR Release Date: Out Now Price: $14.99
In addition to the original main campaign, there’s now a set of 52 ‘spooky’ levels and a full custom level creation system, with the ability to upload, play and rate levels created by others. If you’re an Angry Birds die-hard who just got a VR headset, there’s a lot to love.
Watch Those Birds, You Dirty Pigs
For a game that originated as a 2D mobile game, the iconic Angry Birds gameplay has translated remarkably well to roomscale VR.
Much of the gameplay is similar, if not identical, in concept to the original game, with some small adjustments to take full advantage of the new medium. It’s a fantastic translation — not only is the core gameplay preserved, but it all works intuitively in virtual reality with little to no explanation needed. If you had never heard of Angry Birds before playing Isle of Pigs, you could be forgiven for thinking the game was an original concept made for VR.
For those who have been living under a rock, here’s the quick version of how almost any Angry Birds games plays out. The evil green pigs have stolen the birds’ eggs. To get them back, you’ll play through short levels that involve slingshotting birds at structures housing the pigs, with the aim of taking out all the pigs before you run out of birds. You can do this by damaging the structure and causing it to collapse, or shooting the pigs themselves. Given your limited number of birds and increasing number of pigs per structure, you’ll often want to go for the former.
The structures are made out of ice, wood and stone, and different types of birds work better against certain materials. The standard red bird is the all-rounder, while the yellow bird is effective against wood, the blue bird against ice and the explosive black bird against stone. The birds also possess power-ups that can be activated with the trigger after they’ve been shot — yellow will speed up and fly completely straight, blue will split into 3 birds heading in slightly different directions, and black can be detonated to cause explosive damage to blocks around it.
You progress to the next level by killing all the pigs, but you’re also given a 3-star rating on your performance. The less birds you use and the more of the structure you destroy, the better.
Shooting Into Roomscale VR
All of this is standard fare for any Angry Birds game. Where Isle of Pigs differs is the subtle changes it makes to enhance the experience in VR. Instead of playing 2D levels where you shoot towards a structure from one angle, Isle of Pigs gives you much more freedom. The levels consist of stunning and creative 3D structures housing the pigs, which can be approached from 2 or more different shooting angles.
There’s no right or wrong approach to the levels, but assessing all angles will often reveal secrets or weaknesses that proves useful. An alternate angle might reveal a hole that exposes a TNT block in a critical position, for example, guaranteeing a higher score.
It’s a perfect change for VR that adds a richness and depth to the strategy of the levels that’s not found in the traditional 2D versions of the game. Plus, it means that the game deftly avoids the need for almost any guardian management while playing. A common design pitfall in VR games is not considering smaller play spaces and the annoyance of constantly managing your guardian while playing, which can hinder full immersion.
By using specified shooting positions, the player almost never has to worry about the outer limits of their guardian or having to recenter it. Had Resolution Games not specified any shooting positions and encouraged players to simply walk around the circular structures of each level, the size of your play space would have an impact on your ability to enjoy the game and become fully immersed. It’s a small but absolutely sublime design choice that eliminates an annoyance prevalent in so many other VR games.
Pigging Out On Content
There’s an incredibly solid amount of content available in Isle of Pigs.
The main campaign is a quaint reintroduction to the traditional Angry Birds mechanics and gameplay. It slowly introduces each bird type as you progress through the four worlds, gradually increasing the difficulty and requiring you to think about levels and structures in new ways.
As a veteran Angry Birds player, I managed to cruise through the main campaign in about an hour with 2 or 3-star ratings on most levels. The difficulty does ramp up as you progress, but it’s definitely still pitched to someone who hasn’t played Angry Birds before, or is getting started with VR in general.
A newcomer would likely find the levels more challenging. Likewise, the target demographic for Angry Birds games has always understandably skewed to the younger side. The difficulty starts to feel appropriate when you take that into consideration as well. Nonetheless, veteran players will want a bit more of a challenge.
The second ‘spooky’ campaign that was added gradually post-launch provides a little more of a challenge. These 52 extra levels aren’t necessarily much more difficult, but they introduce some new mechanics and require you to approach things in new ways. Unlike a lot of the main campaign, there are situations where you can’t just brute force your way through. These levels often rely on one specific creative solution, which you’ll need to discover and perfectly execute in order to progress. In some cases, there’s only one method and you’ll just have to experiment until you find it.
While this does mix up the gameplay and prove more challenging, it’s not always for the better. One of the best parts of the Angry Birds formula is being able to find your own approach and feeling that wonderful ‘a-ha’ moment when you discover a flaw in a structure. Those moments make you feel smart, as if you’ve discovered a loophole in the level, even if it’s likely a carefully designed option by the developers.
This feeling is lost in some of the spooky levels, and it sometimes feels more like a puzzle game than one of strategy. Not all of them are limited in this way, but the ones that are can be a bit frustrating and less compelling. The Angry Birds physics and interaction system is also a bit wonky by nature — a structure will never fall the same way twice, even if you use the exact same method. This can lead to some moments of confusion, unsure if you’ve not found the right solution or if something just went slightly wrong in your execution.
That being said, this is bonus campaign is clearly trying to offer something different from what came before it. Had it been more of the same, I might have felt equally disappointed. It’s still worth playing through and it’s fantastic to have extra content, the levels just have a different pace of play.
Build Your Own Chaos
One of the major post-launch editions to Angry Birds VR was the level editor, allowing you to create and share you own Angry Birds levels. The creation tools are mostly intuitive (but a duplicate attachment like the one in Gadgeteer would be a nice quality-of-life addition to speed up building) and allow you to build crazy structures with pigs abound. You can pick which 3 birds will be used in the level, along with their order, and then test it yourself before uploading the level online for others to play.
You can browse other users’ levels online, with a system in place to rank ‘hot’ levels, based off the post-game thumbs up or down rating users can give a level after finishing it.
My one gripe with the custom level system is the absence of the 3-star rating of your performance found in all ‘official’ Angry Birds levels. It’s an understandable omission — each level in the official campaign probably has the threshold for each star rating calculated manually by the developers, and can’t be done automatically — but it’s nonetheless disappointing. The goal simply becomes to destroy all the pigs, with no motivation to go back and do better on a second attempt.
Angry Birds VR Review – Final Verdict
Angry Birds VR is a truly fantastic, intuitive VR title. For younger VR players or fans of the Angry Birds franchise, it’s an absolute perfect fit. The move to VR works seamlessly, retaining the gameplay from the original series while adding in some new VR twists that give it just enough of an edge to be different.
While I found both campaigns to be pretty easy, I think it’s important to keep the target audience in mind. Angry Birds has always been a franchise for the younger demographic and for them, this is a perfect VR game. It’s got a mix of interesting campaigns, a fun aesthetic, some challenging levels and huge creative potential with the level editor.
The main campaign itself was already a massive win for Resolution Games, but the mountain of additional free content that has been added since release makes this an absolutely fantastic package. This is a VR game that is easy to pick up and hard to put down, even if you’re an absolute beginner. Don’t sleep on it.
For more on how we arrived at this score, see our review guidelines. What did you make of our Angry Birds VR review? Let us know in the comments below!
Due to the ongoing pandemic, this year’s Super Bowl is set to be very different. If you have a VR headset though, you can still host that Super Bowl Sunday party with your buddies while staying safe at home. Here’s how you can watch the Super Bowl in VR for free with with your friends using the Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, and all SteamVR-compatible headsets.
There won’t be any 360 immersive video options to watch the game like in years past, however you can leverage VR to watch the normal TV broadcast of game in a huge virtual theater where you’re sitting right next to your VR headset-owning pals.
For this method to work you just need two things:
1. At least one PC user with access to a stream of the Super Bowl on their computer (CBS will stream the Super Bowl for free without any subscription at CBSSports.com).
2. A headset that supports the Bigscreen app (free).
Bigscreen is a cross-platform VR app that lets you and multiple friends get together in a virtual reality personal theater where you can stream your computer’s desktop screen onto a huge virtual screen that everyone can see.
Image courtesy Bigscreen
Bigscreen is free and available on Steam (supporting Vive, Rift, and WMR), Oculus (supporting Rift, Quest), and WMR (supporting Windows VR headsets). Luckily, Bigscreen is also cross-play between all of these headsets, so even if your friends have different headsets you should have no problem watching together (note that Bigscreen unfortunately doesn’t support PSVR).
Once everyone who will join your social viewing of the Super Bowl in VR has downloaded the Bigscreen app on their headsets, the rest is pretty easy.
How to Watch the Super Bowl in VR With Friends using Bigscreen
Note: Thanks to its 100+ streaming channels, the app also provides public access to CBS Sports. however it’s a public room so it may not be best for party viewing. Until Bigscreen makes streaming TV available in private rooms, we’re suggesting the following tips for now:
1. Select someone in your group with access to the Super Bowl stream on their PC to be the host (it will be easiest if the host is also using a VR headset on their PC, but if no one in your group is using a PC VR headset, you can still stream your PC’s view into mobile headsets by following these instructions). Ideally your host will be whomever has the best bandwidth so that guests will see decent quality when streaming the Super Bowl in VR (easily check your bandwidth here).
2. Have the host launch the Bigscreen app and select the ‘Create a Room’ button under the ‘Browse Multiplayer Rooms’ tab (house icon). Give the room a name (select ‘Big Room’ if you plan to have more than four friends watching). Set the room to Private, unless you are open to strangers joining your viewing.
3. Once the room is created, click the ‘Invite Your Friends’ button and copy the Room ID and share with guests who will join the viewing (the Room ID looks like this: room-uqaebpj4). Guests will enter this Room ID into their Bigscreen apps to join your session once it has been created.
4. Now the host should put on their VR headset and use their floating desktop screen to pull up the Super Bowl stream on their computer. Once the stream is playing, open the Bigscreen interface and click ‘Display on the Big Screen’ (this will now show your monitor to everyone in the room).
5. Click the Desktop Audio button (speaker icon) to allow guests to hear the stream audio. (if you or your guests are hearing echoing audio, check this support page)
6. Kick back and enjoy watching the Super Bowl in VR with your friends in a multiplayer personal theater.
Tips for maximizing your social Super Bowl in VR viewing experience:
Any stream will work: This method will work with any Super Bowl stream, whether it’s the official stream through CBS in a browser, or another stream through a TV provider’s PC app. As long as the host can get a video of the game to show on their monitor, you’ll be able to stream the video into Bigscreen for friends to see.
Test ahead of time: It’ll take you a few minutes at least to find your way around Bigscreen. Don’t risk missing the kickoff, be sure to test ahead of time to iron out any issues.
Move your screen: When you first get into Bigscreen, anyone on PC will have a small screen floating in front of them which is sometimes in the way. Using your controller you can point to the screen and drag it out of the way, or use the ‘Customize your screen’ tab (monitor icon) on the Bigscreen interface to make further adjustments.
Pick the ideal viewing environment:Bigscreen offers a range of environments from a modern living room with a projector screen to a huge movie theater cinema. Use the ‘Choose an environment’ tab (world icon) to pick the one that suits you.
Bandwidth = quality: The more people in the room, the more upload bandwidth the host will need to ensure guests are seeing good quality video in their headset. If guests are complaining that quality is low, the host can adjust the streaming quality to reduce bandwidth. In Bigscreen, use the Settings tab (gear icon) and Multiplayer menu turn down the ‘Video Stream Resolution’ option until guests are consistently seeing smooth video. As a last resort, consider changing the room environment to any of the environments with the green leaf icon, which reduces the performance demands on the host PC.
Update (February 2nd, 2021): Included all supported platforms and additional links for livestreams.
In this feature we investigate how Paw Stamp Studio aims to recreate the simple farming pleasures of Stardew Valley in VR with their in-development game, Land of Amara.
Note: This game has been in development for several years and has undergone significant changes. The images and videos embedded in this article may not represent the game’s final version.
Land of Amara
Developing a game is a lot like farmwork. At least, that’s what Finn Pinkenburg discovered when he created Paw Stamp Studio and started his debut game, the VR farm simulator Land of Amara. It’s based on Pinkenburg’s love of games such as Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, but like with starting a new game of Stardew Valley, Pinkenburg quickly realized the magnitude of the task ahead of him.
“I changed or completely reworked the project a lot of times and changed direction because I realized things weren’t working the way I wanted them to or the project wasn’t scalable,” Pinkenburg said. “That’s because I learned [game] development while doing it and made a lot of mistakes (and still am making quite a lot of mistakes). But it’s becoming better and better.”
Before founding Paw Stamp Studio Pinkenburg worked as a level designer for Quantum Frog Software in Hamburg, Germany. He became interested in programming after a while, which opened a new door for him.
“I realized I’d like to make something on my own because it’s totally a different thing when you do something for other people’s ideas instead of pursuing your own vision,” Pinkenburg said.
That vision was rooted in VR almost from the beginning. Pinkenburg first started tinkering with various test builds on PC, starting with an AI-controlled sheep. Shortly after that the seed for his idea sprouted and he purchased his first VR set, the Oculus Rift DK2, just to see how challenging VR development was.
The ease of creating a scene and, moreover, experiencing what Pinkenburg calls “real 3D” convinced him it was time to nurture his project in earnest.
“It was super easy,” Pinkenburg said of his first small VR development attempts. “You basically only had to exchange the camera rig to see everything in 3D. When I saw the sheep in front of me in 3D, I was blown away. It’s hard to describe. That’s when I decided to start Land of Amara and haven’t stopped since.”
Despite his newfound determination, Land of Amara was still very much a vulnerable seedling at that point.
“The project didn’t start with a vision of what it should become,” Pinkenburg said. “The only thing that was there was my experience playing games I always loved, like Stardew Valley and Harvest Moon. I had a goal to do something similar, but because I wasn’t aware I wanted to make my vision a fully playable game.”
He started a Land of Amara Patreon account in August 2018 to gauge interest in the project. The positive fan response — which Pinkenburg attributes to the absence of AAA developers in VR — encouraged him to continue, and in 2019, he brought a friend on board to help with design so he could handle programming. That’s when the difficulties started.
Like planning a new field, figuring out Land of Amara’s foundational features became Pinkenburg’s first challenge.
“I learned you can’t just go for things, since everything is a separate system on its own,” he said.
The first few builds released, including 2018’s playable demo, focused on testing prototypes and contained no actual gameplay systems. The latest playable version, released December 20, 2020, is the first with recognizable farming gameplay loops and a host of additional improvements, such as a tutorial system, new scenes, and a stamina system. It’s also laying the groundwork for relationships with NPCs through a new gift-giving mechanic. Additional systems leading to deeper relationships are still a ways off, though, since they aren’t as crucial for shaping the core experience.
Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley VR Ambitions
One thing Pinkenburg said he loves most about farm-sim games and wants to focus on is how, if designed well, they make simple grinding tasks feel worthwhile.
“I always felt Stardew Valley has a good balance between grinding and not giving you the feel it was grinding, when in the end, everything is grinding,” he said. “Relationships are a grinding system because of how you approach the townspeople every day. But it doesn’t feel like it because the end goal is a good way of making the grind feel rewarding. The same is true for other tasks like feeding the animals.”
Skill-based activities form another important element Pinkenburg wants to include, and he used Stardew Valley’s fishing as an example. While you can buy upgrades to make fishing easier, skill and learning the system ultimately determine success.
“You cannot lose the skill,” he said. “You gain it and always have it. So even if you start a new Stardew Valley game, you’re still good at fishing.”
Though he has a few physics-related ideas in mind, Pinkenburg said he’s not sure what kind of skill-based mechanics he wants for Land of Amara just yet.
However, adding gameplay elements with such evident similarities to existing games presents another challenge: balancing the heritage crops with the new hybrids. While Pinkenburg said he believes familiar mechanics feel fresh in VR just because players have to use them differently, he still isn’t satisfied with grafting other ideas onto Land of Amara.
“I don’t like copying things.I initially tried too hard to be different [with Land of Amara], and that caused my development progress to stop in some ways,” Pinkenburg said. “But I realized it’s way too hard to learn [game development] and re-invent the wheel at the same time. I think it’s pretty much impossible not to copy something from other games anyway.”
Pinkenburg used fishing as an example again. Land of Amara’s current fishing mode has players casting their line into the clouds beneath their island, but it’s mechanically similar to Stardew Valley’s fishing. Players use their hands to reel the line in and try to keep it in the sweet spot long enough to catch the fish.
It’s good enough — for now. Pinkenburg said he wants Land of Amara’s mechanics to stand out for more than just using VR physics and plans on overhauling them in future builds.
Speaking of VR mechanics, Pinkenburg ran into a bit of a quandary shortly after starting Land of Amara’s development, one that had far-reaching effects.
One thing Pinkenburg appreciates about VR is how it removes the extra interface between player and game.
“There was always something in between with other games, like a controller or keyboard, that converted actions,” he said. “VR doesn’t have that restriction, so the brain directly understands how things work because we know how to use our hands and how throwing works or how to chop a tree. That’s a huge difference, this instant transition into the game with your bare hands.”
That’s all well and good, but Pinkenburg soon realized it doesn’t make for a relaxing farming experience.
“I realized there are only a VR few games where you can just sit in your chair and chill while playing,” he said. “Imagine a game like Stardew Valley you sometimes play for hours in a row, and you have to move all the time. That would be way too exhausting. You should be able to play the game without doing anything physically, just sit in your chair and press one button again and again and get in this brain AFK mode.”
Pinkenburg took a four-month break from active updates earlier in 2020 to develop a solution to the problem, one that transformed both how he approaches Land of Amara and how players will experience it.
Instead of using a first-person approach with physics-based controls built in, Land of Amara now lets players swap between first and third person at will. First person uses movement and motion controls, while in third person players see their farmer and move them around with controls, just like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon.
He said he’s confident Land of Amara’s graphics and VR’s real 3D will keep players immersed, even when playing in third person, and perhaps even more so because they can appreciate the music and other effects even more.
Pinkenburg has a few ideas in mind for Land of Amara’s music that he thinks will likely raise some eyebrows. Stardew Valley uses a blend of retro and synth, while Harvest Moon gets by with charming, bucolic tunes for each season. He plans on Land of Amara’s farmers handling their daily routine accompanied by a specific kind of hip hop.
“I listen to a lot of lo-fi music when programming, and I discovered lo-fi is quite fitting,” he said. “So I put in some low-fi tracks which in some way is uncommon. The bass in lo-fi hip hop is not really something I know from most other farming games. I’m interested to see people’s reactions when they hear hip hop lo-fi in the latest version.”
Pinkenburg knows lo-fi hip hop won’t match everyone’s tastes, though, and added a radio system in the most recent version so players can import their own downloads to the game for a custom soundtrack.
Writers have speculated about virtual reality and augmented reality for decades. We take a look at how close film and television of the past got to the actual tech that exists today.
We have all watched the scene in countless films before: our protagonist pulls on “VR goggles” and is transported to a complete world with perfect representation of the character’s body, delivering full immersion. When I saw this as a kid in various movies or tv shows, I immediately knew I wanted that experience. I wanted to enter a world where I can enjoy the exhilaration of flight or engage in a Wild West adventure.
We can see these moments now and know how much Hollywood companies have exaggerated virtual reality gaming or augmented reality capabilities. But for all those that got it wrong, there are those that got it right. So let’s take a look at the most notable of examples both–and I will try to keep to only minor spoilers.
Hollywood VR: What They Got Right
There are older films with VR, but Lawnmower Man may have been the one that people point to as the “VR movie.” Released in 1992, we have a scientist played by Pierce Prosnan using VR and questionable pharmaceuticals to make Jeff Fahey smarter–and eventually into a psychotic, technological god.
Though the early CGI feels dated, it still works through the lens of a game’s specific graphic style. There are early scenes of characters playing games with just headsets, and later VR use in a lab with full haptic suits in rigs that suspend them in air for three-dimensional movement. Yes, there is some exaggeration, but this feels like a glimpse of what VR actually can be like these days and in the near future.
A 1999 film that dives into a virtual world is Existenz, from cult director David Cronenberg. We follow Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh as they explore a VR game created procedurally through the minds and intentions of everyone playing the game.
At times the film is more bizarre and atmospheric than story-based, but the use of actual video game conventions such as NPCs and breadcrumbs in questlines gives it an air of authenticity. Ultimately, this is our first example of VR somehow instigating reality immersion to the point that someone forgets their identity and real world, but it is played here ambiguously to great effect.
No discussion of virtual reality representation on screen wouldn’t be complete without mentioning scifi anthology series Black Mirror. Episodes of note include the augmented reality horror story Playtest, which gives a realistic take on what AR gaming will look like before it veers into mind games. Then there is Striking Vipers, which takes on the wish fulfillment of VR and relationships not restrained by reality.
But the most famous of the anthology’s stories would be San Junipero, the award-winning episode about virtual worlds based in different decades of our history, and one couple’s rocky courting there. Yes, it features the exaggeration of sending your mind into a virtual reality, rather than using actual VR tech, but the sense of virtual travel and social interaction rings true.
(Content Warning: adult language)
Another recent example of VR done right in a TV series is the British show Kiss Me First from 2018, about a group of friends in a VR MMO whose manipulations by one of the members takes a deadly turn. The show features some DIY headsets and haptic gloves, with visible wires and chips, as well as high-end futuristic looking gear.
Once again, the translation of people into virtual reality is too realistic, movements too fluid, but the stylized CG is spot on. As is the social dynamics of virtual friends and all the pitfalls that can result as compared to friendships in the real world.
No list of films that get this tech right wouldn’t be complete without touching on the best use of augmented reality in film. Spielberg’s scifi action flick Minority Report may be from 2002, but it is prophetic about the UI and motion controls of an AR computer system. Tom Cruise gestures and explores files, physically move windows from a tablet to a PC, interactions that give us a glimpse of what is becoming possible through our own motion controls and virtual offices.
There are other great pieces to talk about that also touch on VR and AR. There are the representations of AR operating systems in a diversity of films throughout the last 40 years, from Terminator, to Robocop, to Iron Man.
There are also warnings about VR tech out of control, such as the violent game of indie film Avalon from director Mamoru Oshii or the noir film Thirteenth Floor or the conspiracy plot of cult anime show Serial Experiments: Lain.
And there is the fun kids movie Spy Kids 3D that embraces video gaming in VR or cerebral TV series Caprica, which carefully explores the social ramifications of a virtual world.
What They Got Wrong
There are almost too many examples of films and shows that got virtual and augmented reality incorrect, but here are some that are indicative of the ways they usually miss the mark. These are usually entertaining films where the writers and directors didn’t let the reality of VR get in the way of their storytelling.
A Michael Douglas drama from 1994 called Disclosure had VR. It is mostly about sexual harassment and corporate maneuvering, but in one scene our protagonist uses a VR prototype to access the company’s private records. Now, the headset is tethered, the motion control glove looks believable, and he is standing on a motion detection platform.
From the equipment to the first-person POV shots, it looks believable. But this isn’t how people use VR. No one is going to walk down a huge hallway just to access a file. Shot after shot of Douglas traveling through a green screen set feels ridiculous. And who connects a live company database to prototype tech they are demoing to the public?
Another trope that continuously comes into play with stories involving VR is people getting lost in it, to the point that their identity or real life is forgotten. The previously mentioned Existenz tiptoes on this line, but there are many other films that are really guilty of this. In 1990’s Total Recall, we are not sure if Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually on Mars, or taking a virtual vacation.
Characters try to convince him it is virtual, and not real, but the logic of how he deduces the truth is a bit iffy–especially when the last moments of the film he himself once again brings up that it all may be virtual. Inception, the 2010 masterpiece, also ends on a similar note of uncertainty. Of course, actual virtual reality will likely never get to the point that it subverts your brain functions to the point where you do not remember who you are or what your real life is actually like.
Speaking of Inception, another plot that comes up again and again is entering the virtual world of someone’s mind. I suppose this may technically not be VR technology, but it is often portrayed that way in the shows and films. The fore-mentioned Inception is guilty of this, but so are older films like Brainstorm (1983) and Dreamscape (1984).
The best example of this may be the cult-TV show VR.5 (1995). A tiny show that was canceled after one season, but gained a following for the technology-driven plot and interesting characters. The story involves the mysterious death of an inventor of VR, and his computer-savvy daughter investigating his murder, and also helping others, via VR that let’s you enter people’s minds. (Trigger warning for the video below, for both the ’90s cheesiness and sexual assault depiction.)
Attention should also be paid to The Matrix, probably the most popular and influential film on this list. This 1999 scifi action film from the Wachowskis became a huge part of our zeitgeist. The directors wanted to show the crazy action of an anime in live action form, and used the setting of a virtual world that humanity is trapped inside as a means to do so.
This is not only a case of my earlier subject of people not knowing the real world, but it supposes technology even more advanced in the way it interfaces a person with technology. Not only do you experience a world and life identical to the senses as the real one, it treats the human brain as software, where you can just upload skills, manipulate the body, or even be infected by a computer virus. It remains to be seen if the upcoming Matrix 4 will be more true to real-life VR.
Other honorable mentions include examples as diverse as action film Gamer, where people control other people using tech similar to VR, animated masterpiece Paprika, where people enter and manipulate others’ dreams, Upload, the streaming dramedy where the minds of dead people are transported to virtual worlds, the obscure-but-ahead-of-its-time show Profit which unfortunately used VR in boring, corporate ways, and a mediocre thriller named Virtuosity, where an evil VR artificial intelligence gets a nanotech body and goes on a killing spree, but the VR is barely utilized except as a way to present an AI in the beginning.
What the Future May Hold
There are two works that afford a special mention, two notions of virtual reality that have proven more influential than others, and still may be possible in the future.
Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987, a second series that follows up the classic scifi program of the ’60s. One of the new features that this future version of the starship Enterprise had was the holodeck, a programmable room that you walked around in and, through the use of solid holograms, tricked your senses. It introduced millions of people to the concept of technologies that can take you to other worlds. When the Vive headset, with its room-tracking capabilities from Valve’s Lighthouse sensors, came out in 2016 it was continuously compared to a holodeck. It is still quite possible, whether through haptic clothes or other technology, we will get a technology where you can walk around a room and things touch you back, interacting with a world physically and not just seeing and hearing it.
A more recent work that has changed the course of virtual reality is the 2011 book and 2018 film by the same name, Ready Player One, from Ernest Cline. In this possible future of 2045, a virtual reality platform called the OASIS has supplanted the Internet as the most important technology. People go to work in VR, go to school in VR, and, obviously, play games in VR. While not being high art, the book’s full embrace of ’80s culture and games, and the concept of a virtual world where you can see anything and be anyone, resonated.
Oculus once gave the book to every employee, and as well as all attendees of their Oculus Connect conference. The recent film version and the newly released sequel may not be the blockbusters that the original was, but it may still be significant to VR: will virtual reality ever become as ubiquitous as OASIS, touching every aspect of our lives? Considering the Internet and cellphone technology’s spread, it is certainly possible.
There are some other books of note that inspired VR and may continue to effect future tech. The cyberpunk works of William Gibson from the ’80s and ’90s feature technology becoming completely tangled in people’s lives, including coining the term of Cyberspace. His later books show an augmented reality future, a level of hologram marketing and interactions on top of the real world. Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snowcrash includes the appearance of the Metaverse, a term still used today by VR fandom to signify a virtual social world that everyone connects to.
And I would be remiss to mention cult series Otherland by Tad Williams, a four-book series published from 1996 to 2001. It is a conspiracy thriller through various virtual worlds based on such diverse subjects such as Alice in Wonderland, the Illiad, and World War I. It even inspired a Steam-based MMO in 2015.
It is clear from decades of work, that Hollywood, and writers in general, are enamored with virtual reality and augmented reality. Concepts of future tech have always inspired creators to weave stories that use technology, whether just for light entertainment, or for deep dramas that use virtual worlds to hold up a mirror to our actual world. This will likely continue as the popularity of VR seems to be increasing with the higher sales of each new Oculus headset, the cutting edge capabilities of each new PC headsets, and the possibilities afforded by upcoming AR headsets.
Perhaps one day we will even see true-to-life VR use on Law and Order or some other paint-by-numbers TV show. But that just may be a fantasy.
Let us know other TV shows or movies you’ve seen that depict VR and what you thought about the representation down in the comments below!
It’s the time of the season again for reflection, when we look back at this year’s greatest achievements in VR gaming and remind ourselves just how far we’ve come in the four years since consumers first delved head-first into truly immersive worlds.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, this year was plunged into an global economic cooldown which saw many industries grind to a halt. Comparatively unaffected though was the games industry, which could thankfully continue as developers took to finishing their projects at home from a safe distance.
In our fourth annual Game of the Year Awards, we again put ourselves to the task of celebrating this year’s greats in VR gaming. Moreover, we salute all developers for offering up their hard work and steadfast curiosity in the face of the same personal adversity we’ve all no doubt shared. We’re grateful for having safe places where we can connect and explore, and for lighting a world which at times may have seemed grim and unrelenting.
For many, this steady stream of VR games has been a lifeline to sanity, as physically stepping outside of our homes could mean either putting ourselves or our loved ones in danger’s path. We thank you for willing your virtual realties into existence for all of us to enjoy.
If you would have told anyone back in 2016—the year the first consumer PC VR headsets hit the market—that Valve (of all companies) would one day build a AAA Half-Life game (of all franchises) specifically for VR, we’d say you were crazy. Yet here we are, in 2020, giving Half-Life: Alyx our PC VR Game of the Year Award.
But before the release of Alyx earlier this year, there was still plenty of skepticism to go around. It was Valve’s first full-fledged VR game and the first Half-Life game in more than a decade. Could Valve deliver anything to possibly meet all that hype?
Well, the answer is now resoundingly clear. It turns out that Valve’s old-school, methodical (if sometimes messy) approach to game design works just as well for VR games as it does for non-VR games.
From the very opening scene—where players are, for the first time, truly standing before the monolithic Citadel in the middle of City 17—Alyx is immersive through and through thanks to heaps of detail, an engaging and interactive world, and one of the most memorable sequences seen in any VR game to date… the dreaded ‘Jeff’.
With excellent pacing that weaves together combat, exploration, and puzzles, Alyx takes players on a seamless journey through the well-realized streets, cellars, and rooftops of City 17, all the way to a mysterious conclusion that has serious consequences for the future of the franchise.
Against all odds, one of the most legendary game developers brought one of the most legendary franchises to VR in stunning fashion. Given that the studio stood to make tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) more in revenue by making a non-VR game, it’s hard to call Alyx anything but a love letter to the VR medium.
Half-Life: Alyx stands as VR’s new benchmark in graphics, immersion, and scope, and I’m sure that Valve itself is as eager as the rest of us to see who will be next to raise the bar.
While it surely brings ample opportunity, there’s nearly an equal amount of risk in using the likeness of an iconic character like Iron Man. While the character has plenty of backstory to draw from, delivering the experience of actually stepping into the character’s shoes—the experience of actually being Iron Man rather than just watching him—is no trivial task, especially in the still young and often ill-defined medium of VR.
Before Iron Man VR arrived to the rescue, there really were no standout superhero games in VR. There were attempts, certainly, but none that truly planted a flag and said “this is how it’s done.” Developer Camouflaj, however, turned out to be up to the task.
And they did it in a most ambitious way. While choosing to focus their game on a superhero that didn’t fly would have surely avoid plenty of headaches, picking one that did fly forced them to tackle the serious challenge of keeping players comfortable even as they sailed through the sky.
What’s more, the game’s innovative flying system was specially designed around Iron Man’s character—around his palm-mounted repulsor jets specifically—bringing an immersive flair to the way players control themselves in the game by aiming their hands to control thrust. The result was a truly fun and thrilling method of locomotion that balanced high-speed maneuvering with aerial combat.
But more than just coming up with a novel flight system for VR, Iron Man VR contextualized its gameplay with an engaging story that explored the man behind the mask, Tony Stark, nearly as much as his superhero persona. Combined with immersive details sprinkled throughout, Iron Man VR delivered a package that felt whole and delivered the fantasy it promised.
It wasn’t clear what to expect from Skydance Interactive’s take on the storied The Walking Dead zombie franchise. The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners could have easily been a ham-handed attempt at shoehorning a standard first-person shooter into VR. We’ve seen them before, and they weren’t pretty.
As soon as you start the game though, it becomes immediately apparent that Saints & Sinners demands the player to invest themselves completely in the experience—it’s a true VR native. In this scaled-down RPG, moral choices meet zombie-killing carnage in a way we simply haven’t seen in VR up to this point. You’re instantly thrust into a world where supplies are scarce, crafting useful items is key, and coming in contact with any zombie is a fight for survival.
It’s a gruesome and realistic experience in all the right ways: a zombie can be hacked to pieces with any manner of sharp object, but you’ll lose precious stamina than you’ll need as you run away from the evening horde. If you’re a decent shot, you can try to stick to headshots the entire way, but as the mob grabs at you, you’re left with very little choice but to look them straight in the eye sockets and brain them with a knife, cleaver, or pointy stick. Complete your mission and get the hell out of dodge, or face the consequences; with each zombie presenting potential death, the horde isn’t something you’ll ever want to face.
Outside of its impressive physics-based melee and gun combat, one of the most frightening parts is navigating the muddy waters of the New Orleans gang life, where you literally choose to side with one faction by stoking blood fueds by personally executing NPCs, or by walking your own path as a freelancer. Although the adventure isn’t open-world, discrete maps are so large and rich in detail that you’ll probably forget in the first five minutes anyway.
The standalone version of the game on both Quest and Quest 2 is lower res than its PC VR forbear, but that’s saying very little. As is, the game is more than the sum of its parts, and shines even with the obligatory knock in visual fidelity for a game of this scale, polish, and depth.
Each year we try to come up with games that shine in specific departments, so we tend to highlight titles that haven’t already won our platform-based awards. This year though, there’s simply no ignoring the titanic effort that went into making Half-Life: Alyx the most immersive VR game of 2020.
From the liquid shaders inside the many errant bottles laying around, to flippable light switches, to the full baby grand piano, every object has been loving realized with one thing in mind: immersing the player into the world of Half-Life like never before.
While full, unfettered object interaction is great for immersion, this also lets players get creative with how to use seemingly banal stuff to their advantage, like carrying a basket full of grenades when you run out of space in your inventory.
In Half-Life: Alyx, there are only a few misses in terms of immersion, which are more linked to stylistic choices by Valve. You can’t melee enemies, and the gesture-based menu pulls you out a bit from the action, but even with those minor offenses, Valve has effectively created VR’s most detailed game to date that will be difficult to rival in the years to come.
Building a new car is, for the most part, putting new spin on a concept that’s largely already been figured out by those that came before. While non-VR game development similarly stands on the shoulders of past giants, in VR, almost any step you take is likely to mean breaking fresh ground—right down to rethinking how players will even move around your game world.
Developer nDreams embraced the unknown and built an entire game around a novel locomotion scheme that had players sleuthing through sluices in a tactical kayak.
It might sound a little ridiculous on the surface, but dive a little deeper and you’ll see that it really fits VR well. Not only is paddling a much more immersive and intentional way to get around than using using a joystick, the kayak worked great as a sort of ‘inventory’ system for the player thanks to weapon and ammo holsters along its sides.
While a smooth moving and turning kayak could surely prove challenging from a comfort standpoint, nDreams managed to come up with a snap-turn solution that worked seamlessly with the kayak locomotion, allowing more players to enjoy their time on the waterways.
The locomotion innovation of Phantom: Covert Ops makes us excited to see what the studio comes up with next.
Flying an X-Wing in VR has been the dream ever since EA Games released the free X-Wing VR Mission DLC for Star Wars: Battlefront Rogue One in 2016 on PS4. And in a big way, EA’s Motive Studios delivered on that dream with this massive first-person dogfighter, which lets you play through an well-crafted singe-player campaign, or cross-platform online battles.
Motive Studios took on the mantle of making Star Wars: Squadrons feel like a native VR game which lets you play with a giant pool of players, delivering support for PC VR, traditional PC monitors, PSVR, PS4, and Xbox One players together. And when it comes to dropping in for a casual dogfight, you simply can’t waste time waiting around.
To boot, playing in VR has its clear advantages, as you can naturally track enemies by looking through your cockpit’s canopy windows, all while keeping an eye on your 3D radar. One of the hopes we had for the game was motion controller support for added immersion, however simulator enthusiasts know that the most immersive way to control a vehicle in VR is using a HOTAS setup, which lets you play with physical thrusters and flight sticks so you can truly feel like you’ve stepped into your own Star Wars universe spaceship. You can also play with gamepad, which is fun too since the game offers up arcade controls instead of pure simulator-style flying like you might find in Elite Dangerous (2014).
Both the world inside and outside of your canopy is a visual treat. While cinematic cutscenes are reduced to 2D windows, the game makes up for this by putting you on the deck of each ship to speak face-to-face with some of the most detailed character models we’ve seen in VR. Crafted with motion capture, the game’s NPCs seem to inch very close to the far side of the Uncanny Valley—something you’ll appreciate more from the inside of a VR headset.
In all, Star Wars: Squadrons gives VR gamers everything it has to offer on traditional platforms and more. It also sends a clear message to AAA studios that VR doesn’t have to be a second class citizen when it can slot in so well.
Cubism is a spatial puzzle game that shows that an interface can be beautiful through simplicity. The interface strikes a perfect balance between recognizable affordances and VR native flourishes like the use of depth and placement within arms reach. When it’s done the job selecting a level, it gets completely out of the way, allowing the player to directly interact with the puzzle before them.
The interface also hides a little secret which also doubles as a subtle but enjoyable means of ‘progression’ in the game. Each puzzle you complete represents a musical chord which you can hear when you select the level. Played one after another, each of these chords is part of a complete song which is every bit as beautiful in its simplicity as the interface itself. Once you complete all puzzles, the song is yours to enjoy.
There’s not much else to say—and that’s the point. Cubism’s interface does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more.
Indie studios take risks that larger, more established names in the industry simply won’t. And supporting those indie devs can mean playing some of the most unique and inventive games out there. Granted, there was a tad less risk involved for Pixel Ripped 1995, a retro-inspired VR game that follows in the footsteps of its popular predecessor, Pixel Ripped 1989 (2018). Still, it’s an amazingly creative slice of mid-90s nostalgia that’s expertly interwoven into the pioneering genres that made so many of us fall in love with games in the first place.
Pitching a unique ‘game within a game’ storytelling style, Pixel Ripped 1995 acts as the setting for its constant flights of fancy, mashing up the fourth console generation’s pioneering genres into a charming 3D world. Without brushing to close to infringe on any copyrights, Pixel Ripped 1995 authors a love letter to the generation’s colorful platformers, side-scrolling beat ’em ups, and RPGs.
At five hours of gameplay, it’s short and sweet, but critically doesn’t overextend itself either. Its linear gameplay offers a virtual smorgasbord of variety as you’re always left guessing at what’s next, leaving little room for boredom.
Release Date: Available from July 7th- November 15th, 2020
The Under Presents (2019) wasn’t released this year, but it did host a very special limited time immersive theater show to Oculus Quest and Rift-owning audiences that delved into some seriously interesting experimental territory. In a sea of graphical and technical marvels this year, the game’s immersive reinterpretation of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest took the cake.
In a time when live actors are mostly out of work, The Under Presents invited expert thespians to lead groups of up to eight VR users through a rejuvenated retelling of the popular 17th-century theater piece. Built with user participation in mind, it felt more like acting in a high school theater play, with roles dolled out on the fly.
Showing up in the lobby, which is conveniently placed at the entrance of the game’s main area, participants were greeted with interesting toys and magical object to play around with as you hang with your fellow amateur actors. Once the show begins, you’re transported to a campfire to meet a live actor, who in the show’s meta-narrative took on the role of Prospero and many others. The guide weaves the story throughout dreamlike set pieces, and gets everyone involved in acting out parts in the story. Since players are mute, your guide acts as a professional voice over artist by filling in your lines.
In a time when interacting in large groups can be dangerous, The Under Presents The Tempest offered up a truly novel and creative experience that, even with its low-poly art style, felt like a tantalizingly real break from reality. We’re hoping to see more from developers Tender Claws in the near future, whether it be encore presentations of the experience or entirely new interactive theater pieces yet to come.
Note: Games eligible for Road to VR‘s Game of the Year Award must be available to the public on or before December 13th, 2020 to allow for ample deliberation. Games must also natively support the target platform as to ensure full operability.
Flavortown is an episodic series brought to us by Coatsink, VR veterans who’ve previously published Onward and Shadow Point. Episode 1 released on October 30th and though we don’t know when the remaining episodes will arrive, read on for our full Flavortown VR review.
You might not realise it but even before Episode 1’s launch, Flavortown has already graced us. Developed by Last Hope Of The Internet, it arrived on Steam last year as Flavortown: VR, seeing you investigate who murdered the Mayor of Flavortown (Of course, it was Guy Fieri). Though it got delisted back in March, LHOTI began working with Coatsink to create a brand new story within that same universe. Launching as an episodic release, it brings a fun experience that feels like Sausage Party mixed with a comedy cop show, but one that ends all too quickly.
You start off in a strange coma sequence, fading in and out of consciousness from a hospital bed. When you finally wake up, you’re inside a rather ominous room, given instructions by a monitor and there’s a pentagram with a cookie in it. After grabbing this for a snack, you need to fight a series of zombie meatballs, eventually reaching a dead end before fading back into “reality”. At this point, you’ll be introduced to the fellow meatball members of Flavortown’s Police Dept and you’re the team rookie. Henceforth referred to as “Rook”, your case is simple, investigate the Grill Scouts after the CCO was recently charged with embezzlement. Believing there’s more to this story, the Chief assigns you to a recon mission with fellow cops Biff and Buddy.
You’ll be given a full combat rundown in the training room, showing us how to use guns and holstering them. We’re also given a watch, which acts as your menu screen upon clicking it, advising you of current objectives and offering some case notes. It also contains a powerful laser but that isn’t available immediately. You can move freely across environments, grabbing items with the trigger and grip buttons after highlighting them. This can be done from long-range too and though that feels rather clunky in locking onto them, there’s some enjoyable gunplay here with good aiming.
When you arrive at Grill Scouts, you can’t just meet the CEO, there’s minigames to perform before advancing. This includes a “Simon Says” task that involves force feeding a group of overstuffed muffins, using colour co-ordinated food. You’ve got a telemarketing game, letting you choose automated responses off a soundboard to bizarre client calls. Finally, it offers a fishing game where you hook treasure chests via harpoon gun, assigning the contained letters to the applicable staff member after listening to their voicemails. Though Simon Says is enjoyable, the other minigames won’t hold your interest very long. Fishing has issues with precision shots and whilst chests are easy to grab, choosing the wrong letter means they re-emerge in the water, taking ages to hook.
Flavortown – Comfort
Flavortown VR doesn’t have many options for movement. There’s no teleportation option available or head/hand-based options, though you can select which hand your watch appears on. It uses smooth control stick locomotion for movement on the left controller, using the right stick for snap turning and it lets you adjust the turn rate. For those spectating your game, you can choose four different viewpoints.
Though the gameplay isn’t particularly strong, one of Flavortown’s most enjoyable aspects comes in its world building. It holds a strong sense of humour that’ll make you laugh, one that’s sometimes crass and often sweary, so it won’t appeal to everyone, but adds personality to this sea of interesting characters. That said, even by episodic standards, Episode 1 is short. You can finish it in just over an hour, maybe two if you keep replaying the minigames, but those will not occupy your time for long.
Flavortown Episode 1 Review – Final Verdict
Last Hope Of The Internet have brought us an interesting action-adventure premise with Flavortown. Though I cannot check how it compares with the original release, there’s a solid idea at the core, packed with good humour and enjoyable combat. Unfortunately, it suffers some minor issues with grabbing objects and whilst it offers replayable minigames, they don’t do much to increase the brief gameplay time. For $6 an episode though, there isn’t much risk here and I’m certainly curious to see how this saga unfolds.
You can find Flavortown on Steam for $6 an episode, with further episodes due to release later on. This review was conducted via an Oculus Rift S but it’s compatible for Valve Index, HTC Vive, alongside Oculus Quest 1 and Quest 2 through Oculus Link — not natively. You can find further details on the publishers’ official website.
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused article series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we are focused on the evolving topic of PlayStation’s outlook on VR and if you think we’ll see an actual PSVR 2 eventually?
Over the last week a lot of news has come up regarding Sony, PlayStation 5, and the PSVR. As it turns out, not only does PlayStation’s CEO and President, Jim Ryan, think the future of VR is still a few years away at least, but it sounds like there won’t be any PS5 games with PSVR support at all. Both Hitman 3 and No Man’s Sky developers have indicated that PSVR support is only there for the PS4 versions of games — not the newer, more advanced PS5 versions. That’s a bummer.
To be clear: it does seem like, at this moment, they’re still committed to the future of VR. Ryan had positive forward-looking statements and we’ve heard from them in the past about allusions to a new headset. But with PS5 launching in less than two weeks for the US we don’t really have any indication of what their VR plan is for the console. That’s potentially troublesome for the state of consumer confidence in PlayStation’s future as a VR platform.
Given all the new revelations of the past week: Do you think Sony will ever actually release a PSVR 2 for PS5? Will this be like the PSP <-> PS Vita in terms of a successor? Or will PSVR go down as a forgotten platform like the PS Vita is now?
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
In an interview with The Washington Post’s gaming vertical, Launcher, Sony Interactive Entertainment / PlayStation President and CEO Jim Ryan said in an interview published today that he does not believe VR will be a “meaningful component of interactive entertainment” for some time still. According to him,”the future of VR” won’t arrive until after next year. This potentially means no new PSVR 2 headset until at least 2022.
The Future of PlayStation VR
The interview is all about immersion and how the PS5 hits your senses more directly by using 3D audio and the DualSense controller’s impressive haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. As explained in my editorial this week, the controller is extremely impressive and bodes well for the future of VR haptics and interaction — that is, assuming it’s ever used for VR gaming in the first place.
In the aforementioned interview, Jim Ryan seems rather unconvinced on the promise of VR despite PSVR selling over 5 million headsets:
“I think we’re more than a few minutes from the future of VR,” Ryan said. “PlayStation believes in VR. Sony believes in VR, and we definitely believe at some point in the future, VR will represent a meaningful component of interactive entertainment. Will it be this year? No. Will it be next year? No. But will it come at some stage? We believe that. And we’re very pleased with all the experience that we’ve gained with PlayStation VR, and we look forwarding to seeing where that takes us in the future.”
Admittedly, his stance isn’t all that surprising. Just a month ago Ryan was quoted as saying that VR is still an “unproven space” but that he is “intrigued and really excited by it.”
They seem to be playing the long game here and will likely release a new device when it’s ready to make a significant leap forward, likely in late 2022 if I had to make a prediction.
The VR version of Blair Witch releases very soon for the Oculus Quest later this month. Dubbed ‘Blair Witch: Oculus Quest Edition’ this new version of the first-person psychological horror game was rebuilt for VR and is dropping on the Quest platform first on October 30th before coming to other headsets later.
We got the chance to send a few questions over to the Blair Witch VR Project Manager, Szymon Erdmanski, to see what it was like working on such an iconic horror property in VR.
Blair Witch VR Developer Interview
UploadVR: What about BlairWitch felt like a good fit for VR?
Project Manager, Szymon Erdmanski: BlairWitch is a psychological horror story, it does not depend on a lot of action and fast movement to deliver an intense experience. Quite contrary, scares using atmosphere and the experience of being alone in dark woods with just a flashlight and monsters hiding in the dark. This is a perfect match for a VR where fast paced action just does not work and will make you nauseous at best.
VR is all about atmosphere and story, and those are also BlairWitch strongpoints, so that just made a perfect fit right there. We obviously had to do a lot of redesign to make BW work for VR but we didn’t have to turn the whole project upside down because the strong foundations were already there.
UploadVR: This is now the third VR game you’ve done, counting the Daydream version of Layers of Fear and then the full Layers of Fear port for PC and Quest. What are the main takeaways you’ve learned while developing for VR?
Erdmanski: There is a huge difference between traditional gaming platforms and VR from a gameplay standpoint. What works well on PC or consoles will not, in most cases, work in VR. Fast paced action with a lot of player movements is especially a big no no in VR. What works well is manual interactions with VR controllers, limited player movement, great storytelling, and building atmosphere using visuals and sound effects.
UploadVR: Can you explain what it is about VR that feels like such a great fit for horror games?
Erdmanski: As I mentioned before, fast paced action and a lot of player movement is very difficult to make work in VR. Psychological horror games are rooted in atmosphere and story, and the genre’s slow build up using visual and audio cues works really well in VR.
UploadVR: For BlairWitch, I noticed it indicates it’s “redesigned” and “rebuilt” for VR and I see lots of physical interactions in the trailer that weren’t possible in the non-VR game. Can you explain just how different this version is? Is the story still the same? How much new content is there?
Erdmanski: The story is more or less the same. Levels were redesigned and rebuilt from scratch for Oculus Quest for a lot of reasons. We found that a lot of walking around, which created the atmosphere of being lost in the woods in the original game, turned out to be pretty frustrating in the VR version. Remember you don’t want to move a lot in VR, so we redesigned the levels from scratch, to make the game a more compact experience with gameplay condensed in a smaller space. That alone made the experience more intense. We also added a bunch of interactive physical items which always work great in VR.
What we believe is the most important improvement is the interaction with your dog, Bullet. In the Oculus Quest version of the game you can pet your dog, grab his paw and play with him using VR controllers almost like you would with a real dog in real life. One of the new features is playing fetch with the dog, you can grab sticks and throw it for Bullet to bring them back to you.
UploadVR: Why did you choose to launch on Quest first?
Erdmanski: We have a great relationship with Oculus and Facebook. Oculus is one of the fastest growing VR platforms and the Quest 2 is just astonishing as a standalone VR headset.
Of course other platforms are also ok and we will work on them too. 😉
UploadVR: Will there be any Quest 2-specific enhancements in comparison to the Quest 1 version of the game?
Erdmanski: Yes, there are visual improvements for Quest 2, since it is significantly better performance-wise then the old Quest. Most noticeable is that the dog will look significantly better on the new Quest and we added more foliage in the woods.
UploadVR: Once BlairWitch VR launches on the Rift store, will it have cross buy with the Quest version?
Erdmanski: We’re working on that – stay tuned.
UploadVR: Are there plans to eventually bring The Medium to VR or Layers of Fear 2?
Erdmanski: We are focusing on BlairWitch, but you never know.
UploadVR: Can you at all speak to how well Layers of Fear VR is doing in terms of sales on Quest vs PC?
Erdmanski:The Quest is a dynamically growing platform, especially with the new Quest 2. We are a public company and we can’t share numbers, but sales are meeting expectations.
UploadVR: Finally, if you could work on any established IP, whether it be a film, book, TV show, game, etc — and adapt that into a VR game, what would it be and why?
Erdmanski: We can handle a variety of IPs and when it comes to horror, we want to work on it all! The team is packed with horror fans of all kinds, and we would love to work on stories from John Carpenter, Steven King, or Silent Hill.
Do you plan on playing Blair Witch VR this halloween when it releases for Oculus Quest on October 30th? Let us know down in the comments below!
Instead of using a first-person approach with physics-based controls built in, Land of Amara now lets players swap between first and third person at will. First person uses movement and motion controls, while in third person players see their farmer and move them around with controls, just like Stardew Valley or Harvest Moon.
