Vertigo Games, a VR development studio and publisher, announced it has acquired Amsterdam-based VR development studio Force Field, which has worked on VR experiences like Anne Frank House VR, Coaster Combat, and Landfall. The studio will continue on as Vertigo Studios Amsterdam and is purportedly in development of a new AAA VR game.
Force Field, which will continue on as Vertigo Studios Amsterdam, has a long track record of VR projects dating back to the early days of Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR with titles like Landfall and Term1nal.
Vertigo Games says the studio is currently in development of “an unannounced AAA game based on a well-known IP.”
Vertigo Games—which is well known for VR titles like Arizona Sunshine and the upcoming After the Fall—was itself acquired by Koch Media (part of Embracer Group) last year for some $60 million. The deal includes various performance milestones over the next 10 years which could bump the purchase price by up to another $80 million in cash and shares.
Vertigo Games is split into three major sections, Vertigo Studios, focused on in-house development, Vertigo Publishing, focused on third-party publishing, and Vertigo Arcade, focused on out-of-home VR arcade experiences.
Vertigo Games has been expanding quickly with strategic acquisitions since it was acquired by Koch Media last year. Ahead of the Force Field acquisition, which grows the company’s Studios section, Vertigo Games also acquired VR arcade platform SpringboardVR earlier this year, bolstering the company’s Arcade segment.
Vertigo Games isn’t shy about where it’s parent company thinks things are headed, noting in the announcement that the Force Field acquisition “is another clear indication of Koch Media investing in VR and the exciting future it holds.”
Arizona Sunshine and After The Fall developer Vertigo Games is acquiring Amsterdam-based Force Field.
Vertigo acquired all of Force Field’s shares for an undisclosed sum. Force Field will be renamed to Vertigo Amsterdam and, according to a press release, will continue work on “an unannounced AAA game based on a well-known IP.” The core Vertigo team itself is based in neighboring Rotterdam and was last year acquired by Koch Media.
Force Field has developed multiple VR apps over the past five years, from full-on games to experiential pieces. In the early days of the Oculus Rift it developed an isometric shooter named Landfall and, more recently, it’s released Time Stall on the Oculus Quest. It’s non-gaming experiences, meanwhile, include Anne Frank House VR and National Geographic Explore VR.
This is the second acquisition Vertigo has made since Koch acquired the studio. In February, it announced it had bought VR arcade platform, SpringboardVR. As well as developing and releasing its own experiences the studio is also publishing titles from other VR developers, and earlier this year, announced it would be publishing the next game from A Fisherman’s Tale team, Innerspace.
There’s plenty in the works at the studio, then. As for the core Vertigo development team, work continues on upcoming zombie shooter, After The Fall. The game was recently delayed from its summer launch window and is now expected to arrive later in 2021 on Oculus Quest 2, PSVR and PC VR. The original Quest version has been pushed into 2022, with no specific launch window beyond that.
Dutch virtual reality (VR) developer Force Field Entertainment has released a couple of title up to now, Term1nal for Samsung Gear VR and Landfall for Oculus Rift. The studio has now unveiled its third videogame – and it’s first for Oculus Quest – Time Stall.
As the name implies, Time Stall is all about time manipulation, namely slow motion. “Time Stall is loosely inspired by Quicksilver’s classic Pentagon kitchen scene from X-Men: Days of Future Past, where Quicksilver neutralizes all kinds of threats in slow motion,” states the developer in a press release.
Set in a luxury spaceship – which looks like the one out of Fifth Element – players have complete free-roam inside this semi-frozen moment in time where they have to solve a range of puzzles. From physics-based to time-based puzzles, these all need to be solved in order to save all the guests onboard.
The story goes that you play a Volunteer Safety Human aboard the Fantastic Leap, a crowdfunded luxury escape cruise. Alas, as a crowdfunded project which didn’t meet its funding goal lots of cost-cutting went into the design of the ship, leaving it with one or two safety issues. Which is where you come in, saving the ship from disaster over and over again, in any way you see fit. Those decisions can then lead to disastrous or hilarious results – depends on how evil you’re feeling.
“Designed with complete freedom in mind, Time Stall is a room-scale experience where you can freely roam through an action scene almost frozen in time, manipulating the trajectory of hazardous objects, as such the game is ideal for an untethered headset,” said Martin de Ronde, Force Field’s Chief Creative Officer in a statement. “Time Stall is a unique room-scale action-puzzler built exclusively for Oculus Quest.”
Force Field Entertainment will launch Time Stall for Oculus Quest on 15th August 2019. VRFocus will continue its coverage of TIme Stall, reporting back with the latest updates.
As the virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) industries continue to grow so do the opportunities to get involved if you have the right skills. Today’s job list features some of the leading innovators in the field, looking for new applicants to help create the next big immersive experience.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Virtual reality (VR) content creators Force Field have been working in collaboration with Oculus Studios to create a new VR experience for the Samsung Gear VR that lets users travel back in time to meet one of the world’s most famous artists, Rembrandt van Rijn.
The experience combines CGI environments with live actors to create historical journey. The user will find themselves in 17th Century Amsterdam, home of iconic Dutch painter Rembrandt, a witness to key points in the life of the painter, including the creation of one of the most valuable paintings of all time ‘The Night Watch’.
“One of the cool things about VR is that we can bring history to life in a very immersive way.” says Arthur Houtman, CEO of Force Field. “It’s as if you are actually there, up-close with Rembrandt, in his atelier, in his house, as he interacts with you and lets you understand why his work was so controversial in that day and age.”
The experience was designed to display the true capabilities of interactive mobile VR, and how lifelike and immersive such experiences can be. Unlike 360-degree video, Meeting Rembrandt: Master of Reality features interactivity in that Rembrandt will respond and react to the user’s actions.
Meeting Rembrandt: Master of Reality is available as a free download for Samsung Gear VR users from the Oculus Store.
VRFocus will continue to bring you news on new and upcoming VR experiences.
Force Field VR, the studio behind the recently launched Landfall on Oculus Rift, debuted its next project at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017, a stealthy hacking adventure that’ll support Samsung Gear VR called Term1nal. Rather than the all out action of Landfall, Terminal goes for a far more thoughtful approach, demonstrating even at this early stage a nuanced approach to virtual reality (VR).
Set in a future of high tech robots and dangerous corporations, you play a hacker who’s been hired to infiltrate STRIDE Industries, a security and robotics firm. But rather than staring at reams of code on a computer screen, you remotely take over an experimental robot that’ll run through STRIDE’s security, sneaking past sentry robots, avoiding lasers, unlocking doors and hacking computer terminals.
Term1nal is played from a lofty third-person viewpoint, essentially as the hacker you see everything through the building’s CCTV cameras. The videogame utilises a Bluetooth controller to move your character through the maze of rooms, hallways and traps in your path. As you navigate between them the camera angle will change depending on the room, but it’ll always provide the optimal viewpoint, there was never a moment in the demo where anything felt blocked.
This was an early build of Term1nal, and as such only one level was available to play through. But this was still enough to get a feel for the mechanics and the types of challenges that needed to be overcome. The goal of the demo was to locate a key in one area and bring it back to another. If you’ve played Landfall you’ll instantly be at home with running your character around, with the controls feeling precise. There are moments where you have to quickly duck around robots, hiding in lockers to avoid their gaze which never posed an issue.
Stealth is of paramount importance, you robot isn’t equipped with any weapons, get spotted and you’re restarting the area until you get it right. Once the key is found it turns out to be a small robotic dog that’ll follow you around and obey your commands. The dog can then be used to distract robots and unlock previously impassable doors. Term1nal certainly tries in this short period of gameplay to offer a variety of puzzle elements to keep you thinking on your toes, although that’s easy to do. The real challenge will be to see if Force Field VR can come up with a significant selection of puzzles without too much repetition, a trait titles in this type of genre can fall foal of.
From this initial play though Term1nal has all the right elements to be a fun, engaging puzzle experience for Gear VR. Its looks nice, the challenges were varied and plentiful, with just the right amount of difficulty to make you stop for a second and think without being frustrating. For those that like this element in their VR videogames, Force Field VR looks to be on the right track with its first project for the mobile headset.
Force Field VR, the studio behind the recently launched Landfall on Oculus Rift, debuted its next project at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017, a stealthy hacking adventure that’ll support Samsung Gear VR called Term1nal. Rather than the all out action of Landfall, Terminal goes for a far more thoughtful approach, demonstrating even at this early stage a nuanced approach to virtual reality (VR).
Set in a future of high tech robots and dangerous corporations, you play a hacker who’s been hired to infiltrate STRIDE Industries, a security and robotics firm. But rather than staring at reams of code on a computer screen, you remotely take over an experimental robot that’ll run through STRIDE’s security, sneaking past sentry robots, avoiding lasers, unlocking doors and hacking computer terminals.
Term1nal is played from a lofty third-person viewpoint, essentially as the hacker you see everything through the building’s CCTV cameras. The videogame utilises a Bluetooth controller to move your character through the maze of rooms, hallways and traps in your path. As you navigate between them the camera angle will change depending on the room, but it’ll always provide the optimal viewpoint, there was never a moment in the demo where anything felt blocked.
This was an early build of Term1nal, and as such only one level was available to play through. But this was still enough to get a feel for the mechanics and the types of challenges that needed to be overcome. The goal of the demo was to locate a key in one area and bring it back to another. If you’ve played Landfall you’ll instantly be at home with running your character around, with the controls feeling precise. There are moments where you have to quickly duck around robots, hiding in lockers to avoid their gaze which never posed an issue.
Stealth is of paramount importance, you robot isn’t equipped with any weapons, get spotted and you’re restarting the area until you get it right. Once the key is found it turns out to be a small robotic dog that’ll follow you around and obey your commands. The dog can then be used to distract robots and unlock previously impassable doors. Term1nal certainly tries in this short period of gameplay to offer a variety of puzzle elements to keep you thinking on your toes, although that’s easy to do. The real challenge will be to see if Force Field VR can come up with a significant selection of puzzles without too much repetition, a trait titles in this type of genre can fall foal of.
From this initial play though Term1nal has all the right elements to be a fun, engaging puzzle experience for Gear VR. Its looks nice, the challenges were varied and plentiful, with just the right amount of difficulty to make you stop for a second and think without being frustrating. For those that like this element in their VR videogames, Force Field VR looks to be on the right track with its first project for the mobile headset.
Several weeks ago Force Field VR held two back to back beta weekends for its twin stick shooter Landfall on Oculus Rift. This was to gauge not only interest in the title but also to iron out any issues and add fixes prior to release which happens to be today.
Landfall is a top down action shooter with both single-player and multiplayer modes available. Taking control of the commander, players are able to unlock 12 different loadouts each with their specialised weapons and mechs. The mechs are the major armament in Landfall providing a range of offensive and defensive capabilities when called upon.
Set on a world engulfed by civil war after a flood significantly reduced the landmass available for habitation, Landfall single-player campaign can also be played in co-op, while the main mulitplayer mode allows for 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2 combat. As players progress they’ll gain experience which can then be used to unlock the various loadouts for more devastating attacks. At certain points players can also activate a first-person mode to get right into the action and mow down enemies.
Landfall supports the Xbox controller and retails for £22.99 GBP. For the latest updates from Force Field VR on Landfall, keep reading VRFocus.
When I was a young child my friends and I used to orchestrate elaborate games of Lego-crafted warfare. We hadn’t heard of Warhammer 40,000 or we likely would have been addicted, so what we did instead is create elaborate bases from Lego bricks at opposite ends of my room. We would then craft vehicles and transport ships to move our troops (Lego figures) across the battlefield (my carpet). We’d roll dice to see how far we could move units and launch projectiles to see which bricks were blown off (flicked with our fingers to simulate damage). It was a scattered, imprecise, and incredibly chaotic house rule-driven game of war, Legos, and destruction.
I’ve got fond memories of those made-up games of Lego War (that’s what we called it) and Landfall on the Oculus Rift, the first virtual reality (VR) game from newly formed game studio Force Field reminds me of it quite acutely. During my recent preview of the game, I likened it to Halo Wars meets a twin-stick shooter and after spending several more hours between the single player campaign and multiplayer game modes, I can safely admit that comparison rings truer now more than ever.
In Landfall you’ll take control a super-powered soldier at the helm of a group of specially trained operatives fighting for either the red or blue team. The campaign is split up into several missions that serve as an excellent way to not only learn the fundamentals of the game, but also how to play each of the complex class loadouts. The story is trivial at best, but does feature some solid voice acting if you’re paying attention. Like most wars, the battles in Landfall are fought over the ownership of land and valuable resources. Those motivations just don’t really bleed into the shooting and killing enough to pay attention to it after the opening cinematic.
During actual battles, your soldier has a special assortment of equipment depending on which loadout you chose. They’re all controlled the exact same way, but differ in terms of which weapons they actually carry. For example, regardless of which loadout you choose, the same buttons are used for shooting your primary weapon, throwing your specific type of grenade, and calling down your massive mech suit/robot hybrid strider. They look and feel like titans from the Titanfall series, but move at a much slower pace.
Since the entire game takes place from a top-down perspective, it’s unlike any other shooter you’ve played in VR so far. It at first feels a bit like a strategy game, such as AirMech Command, but that comparison only works in terms of the visual style and perspective. In Landfall you don’t build bases or issue commands, but instead control just your single hero unit.
Every mission is a collection of smaller objective-based games that take place at different locations throughout an overall environment theme. The types of games range from simple deathmatch style battles and objective captures, to more elaborate point capture-and-hold missions, or even escort assignments. That fluctuation and variety is what kept me coming back for more while playing and will likely keep people engaged long after release. No two matches ever felt the same as I was changing loadouts, switching sides, and swapping partners frequently.
While it doesn’t add much to the experience, the Oculus Touch controllers are technically supported. There is no motion functionality, as the buttons are simply remapped to the individual Touch controllers as if they were a standard gamepad. This didn’t feel appropriate to me and I found myself using an Xbox One controller in all instances after testing Touch once in this game.
But don’t let the game’s lack of first-person antics and motion controller support fool you: Landfall is better because of VR. Your HMD lets you get closer to the action and see it from new perspectives you couldn’t otherwise. You can see where your opponent’s avatar is looking and you can inspect other areas of the map while your unit is still being controlled out of sight with the gamepad. Rather than looking at a screen, you feel like you’re floating in the sky; you become an all-powerful God of War.
While the core of single player and multiplayer is the same, the real meat of the game exists online. As a result, playing with other people comes in three basic flavors: cooperative, 1v1, and 2v2. The entire campaign is playable from start to finish in co-op, which is a great way to learn the game together with a friend. But once you’re off the ropes and know the basics, the real fun is found online.
As you play either 1v1 or 2v2 matches, you’ll gain experience points (XP) based on performance and level up. With each level you increase, you also earn the ability to choose a new loadout to unlock. For the first dozen or so levels, this creates a steady stream of fresh content to explore, especially considering it takes several matches before you can really grasp the nuances of each unit and accompanying strider.
For example, playing with a loadout that has a default short-rang burst machine gun as opposed to a single-shot long-range sniper rifle is almost like two totally different games.
Some units are better at capturing points, while others are better at getting kills. Some units are better at taking down other striders, while some are better at defending a position. You can return to your base and change loadouts at any time, or swap when you respawn.
During my time with Landfall I was just aching to see more people in the game. Playing with colleagues, peers, and developers is great — but I want to see what the VR community does once they get their hands on striders of their own outside of the Beta weekend.
Landfall feels like the type of game that will live and die by the frequency and quality of its updates. 12 loadouts is an excellent start, but new gear, classes, and maps will be necessary on a consistent basis to keep people interested. Luckily, the complete single player campaign is more than sufficient to satisfy urges if servers get quiet.
Final Score:8/10 – Great
With Landfall, Force Field has delivered one of the best examples of gamepad-focused VR we’ve seen in some time. The action is intense, the gameplay is crisp and precise, and the tactical strategy required to emerge victorious feels both creative and fresh. Updates will be needed to keep people coming back for more, but this is an excellent twin-stick shooter that delivers on all fronts.
Landfall is available starting today for Oculus Rift on the Oculus Home Store for $29.99. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
If you happened to have missed it, last weekend Force Field VR held an open beta for its upcoming strategy title Landfall for Oculus Rift. It seems as if the studio learnt a lot from the release, so much so that its launching a second beta for this weekend.
Landfall has been made available to download again through Oculus Store for everyone to engage in further twin-stick shooter action. This time though the experience will have been slightly changed as Force Field has added several improvements.
Taking to Reddit the studio revealed its now added a second map Wide Horizon to the beta, putting players in a lush green valley to fight it out. Also addressed were issues relating to players having problems joining matches, saying: “Our big takeaway from the weekend was that matchmaking still caused problems for some players. For the past few days we’ve been working on improving the system and we think that we’ve been able to address the biggest issues.”
Other additions for this weekend’s beta are:
Added intro cinematic.
Decreased volume of environment and aircraft in the main menu.
Decreased loading times.
Tweaked Chillbone cluster rockets damage
Reduced Roaster special ability damage for both Strider and Pilot
Reduced Heavy Strider weapon damage
The beta is free to download and play, if you want to read more about Landfall prior to playing it checkout VRFocus‘ preview, describing it as “an intensely engaging experience.”
For any further updates on Landfall, keep reading VRFocus.
