Austin-based Gunfire Games is one of the more experienced game studios in the world working on VR. With around 60 people employed there today, the company behind Darksiders III also produced five VR titles stretching across Rift and Gear VR, including third-person role-playing game Chronos, shooter Dead and Buried and mobile title Herobound: Spirit Champion.
Gunfire’s latest game, From Other Suns, takes Rift owners soaring across the galaxy in a game that mashes together a shooter with one of the most addictive games I’ve ever played — FTL. If you’re unfamiliar with FTL, the PC game is also available on iPad and sees players managing a spaceship as it makes its way warping across the galaxy gathering resources by defeating enemies to purchase more weapons and upgrades for the ship. The game gradually scales in difficulty as you approach your destination so you need to constantly be getting stronger while both its enemies and environments are generated anew with each game so it is constantly a fresh challenge infused with the need for a bit of good luck.
From Other Suns is very similar, with you embodying one of the ship’s crew members and heading on away missions to ships and stations in hopes of harvesting enough resources to survive the trip to Earth. Games Editor David Jagneaux gave it a “Good” rating, concluding “the real test for replayibility in a game like From Other Suns though is going to be how well Gunfire can support it post launch and how much the community embraces it.” As a fan of both Star Trek and Star Wars, I hope the game continues to evolve after launch because the genre Gunfire is honing in on is an absolute dream for many of the starry-eyed gamers buying into VR.
Designing virtual reality software is incredibly challenging, as I’ve covered at length diving in deep with developers like Owlchemy Labs and outlining, for example, how it took hundreds of hours just to make a realistic cup of coffee in Job Simulator. And earlier this month we posted a guest article authored by engineers at Leap Motion exploring the creation of more intuitive user interfaces. With From Other Suns, we see Gunfire working to make a fun multiplayer game while simultaneously pushing user interface design as far as they can in VR. The game features wrist-mounted maps and teleportation buttons, floating holographic storage systems and dashboards meant to intuitively allow players to control the ship’s functions — all ideas that if they could be developed further might become integral parts of much more dynamic virtual worlds.
Gunfire’s work from Herobound and Chronos to now shows a quick evolution into more immersive and intuitive VR design, and I hope the company gets the chance to keep pushing these design ideas further. I recently spent an hour or so in VR with Design Director John Pearl and Level Designer Cindy To both interviewing them and playing the game. Check out my 11-minute edited version of our talk that runs through some of their gameplay and design decisions.
Yesterday’s big news from virtual reality (VR) developer Gunfire Games was the release of its highly anticipated sci-fi adventure From Other Suns, which launched exclusively for Oculus Rift. The studio also happened to make a passing mention to one of its earliest and most well known videogames Chronos, revealing that it would be getting Oculus Touch support this week.
For those new to the Oculus Rift platform, Chronos was an original launch title for the headset, a third-person role-playing game (RPG) where the hero is on a lifelong quest to complete an ancient labyrinth. Inside holds the secrets necessary to save his homeland but the unique twist in the story is that the labyrinth can only be opened once a year. If a player fails in their quest then they’re cast out and must return one year later. This means as each subsequent attempt fails the character ages and therefor loses the benefit of youth, from being quick and agile replacing those qualities as they age for wisdom and magic.
It’s no surprise that Gunfire Games has decided to update the videogame to support Oculus Touch due to Oculus’ new bundle which sees the Xbox One controller now discontinued from the pack in favour of its own devices. As an original launch title, Chronos may be over looked by new players so the addition of motion control support will help in it finding a new lease of life.
VRFocusreviewed the title back in 2016, giving it a full 5 star rating, saying: “The pacing lends itself to the compulsion to see what lies in wait in the next room, and though the occasional puzzle or environment layout can lead to a bottleneck there’s rarely a point during the videogame’s extensive campaign that is cause for disappointment. Chronos is a genuinely compelling videogame that sets a high standard for Gunfire Games to follow with their next VR project.”
Chronos is available on Oculus Store for £29.99 GBP, with the Oculus Touch update due to arrive this Friday, 17th November 2017. As ever, VRFocus will continue its coverage of Gunfire Games and all of its titles, reporting back with any further announcements.
Today, Gunfire Games, the studio that helped to make Dead and Buried with Oculus Studios, Chronos and Herobound: Spirit Champion, has released its biggest virtual reality (VR) title to date, the intergalactic adventure From Other Suns.
From Other Suns puts players in command of their own ship and crew, having to survive the perils of deep space travel as they to try to save humanity.
Explaining the story, Gunfire Games states: “It was supposed to be a simple job. Test an experimental folding drive to travel beyond the fringes of explored space. Return safely for a big payout, and retire on a small colony to never be heard from again. Things don’t always work out as planned. On the return trip, something followed you back. Something ancient. Now it’s a race to make it back to Earth before the ancient alien threat wipes out everything in its way – including you.”
You can either take on the challenge of fighting ruthless pirates, lethal robots, and deadly aliens on your own, or you can team up with up to three friends for some co-op action. As captain of your ship you’ll need to manage its various systems and challenges, upgrade components and weapons while negotiating with merchants for the best deals.
The title is a first-person shooter (FPS) at heart though, with plenty of firefights to contend with. To make sure you’re not out gunned there are over a dozen unique weapon types, with over 2,000 possible variations. And just to mix things up even further should you die at a particularly difficult spot, Gunfire Games has added a fully randomised universe so that each playthough, from alien encounters to locations are never quite the same.
If you like the look of From Other Suns you may have taken advantage of the pre-order offer which reduced the price slightly and gave you two Golden Laser Pistols. With the launch that offer has now ended so you’ll have to pay the full price of $39.99 USD/£29.99 GBP.
Check back with VRFocus later in the week for a full review, and as further announcements are made VRFocus will keep you updated.
From Other Suns is finally releasing to the public today! Developed by Gunfire Games for Oculus Rift with Touch, From Other Suns is a tense, cooperative, first-person action game set in a galaxy where a deadly alien species is bent on destroying the Earth. It’s up to you and your crew to get to the Earth before they do and mount a final stand. By combining ship-based combat and strategic battles with fast-paced first-person shooter missions, it’s unlike any other VR game out right now.
From Other Suns includes a relatively lengthy tutorial that covers everything from aiming, shooting, and moving in the game, but it drops the ball in terms of actually showing you what to do. Since From Other Suns is basically a big, procedural sandbox for you to go out and explore, there isn’t really a right or wrong way to play. However, this is what we usually do each time we start a new game.
Once you load up a new game head to the teleport bay and grab a second pistol off the rack on the right, as well as a stimpack and hackatron. The stimpacks are for healing and the hackatrons let you hack into ship computers and steal cargo. Now head to the bridge and open up the Star Chart (covered in more detail down below) to plot your course. The general goal is to make your way towards the right side of the map hitting other ships, space stations, and small quests along the way.
When a pirate attacks you and disables your FTL drive you can either blow up the ship to escape with a small amount of its salvage in tow, or you can disable their tactical systems (rendering them unable to attack) and board the ship before they get a chance to repair it. This way you get all of their cargo and salvage, but also loot the captain, who usually is carrying some really powerful weapons.
Just keep doing that until you die and restart (this is a roguelike after all!) or reach Earth itself.
Understand How to Use the Star Chart
The Star Chart is a tiny bit confusing at first. Basically, all of those little dots are like waypoints that you can visit. The ones that are just dots by themselves have a random chance of being any one of numerous different types of encounters. You might run into pirates, you might come across some aliens, you could encounter a Trader looking to do business, or something else entirely.
The horizontal, circular icons are space stations where you can buy and sell gear, as well as upgrade your ship’s various systems. And the vertical spiral icons are other large ships. Usually these have longer, more difficult missions that involve clearing out hostiles from a ship, rescuing crew, or hacking into a faulty computer system. The risks are often higher, but so are the rewards.
Swap Weapons Frequently
Similar in some ways to Borderlands, you’ll find new guns all the time in From Other Suns. After you kill ship captains they’ll drop their guns, some low-level enemies drop guns and other items, and you’ll even find guns on racks and recharge stations all over the place.
The deeper you get into the game, the better the gear is that you find. That’s why that auto pistol you love so much should be discarded ASAP when you come across a laser rifle that does twice the damage. Difficulty spikes are a real issue in From Other Suns so the better gear you can get, the better off you’re gonna be. There is only a limited amount of inventory space so don’t get attached to any guns.
Don’t Neglect Crew Members
NPC crew members serve two core functions in From Other Suns: they can be given orders and they serve as your extra lives for respawning. From the Bridge in your ship you can select crew members to assign to different rooms during a battle with another ship. If an enemy is destroying your engines, disabling your tactical capabilities, or wreaking havoc on you in some way, then you can send a crew member to a specific area of the ship for repairs — that way you don’t have to go do it yourself.
Also, if (actually it’s more like when) you die, then you assume the role of one of your crew members. You’re a blank slate once again and need to go back to where you died to retrieve all of your guns and items. That’s why recruiting new crew members is always a focus anytime I play when visiting trading posts.
Stand Up While Playing
Finally, you should really try and stand up as much as possible when you’re playing From Other Suns. The most obvious reason is because you can more easily move your body to dodge enemy fire and get behind cover, but it goes a bit further than that too. If you’re standing up then that means you can crouch down behind boxes and consoles in the environment, making it even harder to hit you.
Standing up also helps aid with the immersion factor, but you should be careful if you’re sensitive to motion sickness. When I play I use the full, smooth locomotion system with smooth rotation so I can twist, move, and aim as quickly as possible. This may not work for everyone though.
Let us know what you think of our tips and the game itself down in the comments below!
Today at UploadVR we decided to revive our livestream efforts via our Twitch channel. With the embargo lifted on From Other Suns (read our review right here) we decided to take that one for a spin in some cooperative multiplayer fun. From Other Suns is a procedurally generated roguelike cooperative first-person shooter that’s all about looting and pillaging the starships of pirates and aliens. It releases tomorrow on Oculus Home for Rift with Touch.
I hosted a game for myself and Senior Editor, Ian Hamilton, that lasted for about an hour and a half. We were eventually joined by another player but couldn’t hear them since they weren’t in our chat party. If you missed out on watching us playing live, don’t worry! You can see the full stream, archived in its entirety, right here:
And you can also see a ton of other gameplay videos on our YouTube channel as well for From Other Suns and other games. We’re trying to make an effort to start livestreaming more, especially with so many VR games releasing these days, so you can plan on seeing more of that from us in the coming weeks and months. Especially with the launch of Skyrim VR on PSVR coming up very soon!
Let us know what you think of From Other Suns down in the comments below!
[Editor’s Note] – Our From Other Suns review was originally published as a review-in-progress on November 13th, 2017 and has since been updated on November 14th with a final score and expanded analysis.
Given the relative youth of the VR industry at this stage most VR games I’ve played set out to do one specific thing well in the hopes that the simulation feels real enough or the mechanic is fun enough that you’ll keep coming back for more. Because of that, it still seems rare to come across a VR game that aims to check a lot of the boxes you’d expect to see in a non-VR title and it’s even rarer that a VR game manages to do all of that well.
From Other Suns, the latest VR title from Gunfire Games, isn’t a perfect space-faring VR adventure, but it’s so ambitious and so full of content that it’s hard not to walk away in awe of the accomplishment.
The premise in From Other Suns is dead simple: aliens are invading and you’ve got to get to Earth to face the armies and fight them off. Practically speaking though, From Other Suns is a bit more complex. For starters, it’s roguelike, which means the majority of the game is (randomly) procedurally generated and is meant to be played repeatedly with variations and nuance to keep you engaged. No two games will ever be the same.
In From Other Suns the gameplay loop consists of meeting up with your crew (up to three total human players can be in a game together,) plotting a course on the star chart, and getting into a bit of trouble. From the map I could choose to seek out a random encounter (such as potential pirates, abandoned vessels, loose salvage, or getting attacked by gruesome aliens), visit a space station to upgrade and refuel, or go directly to one of the larger ships. On these vessels I’d often interact with NPCs, go on short quests, and do what I can to earn enough wealth and power to fully explore the galaxy.
There aren’t any experience points to gain or levels to earn as all of your progress is more experiential than anything. As you loot and plunder ships you’ll find all manner of new weaponry that can be stored back on your own ship, but that’s just about the extent of the character development aspect. I felt myself wishing for a Borderlands-style progression system with different classes and abilities that could be unlocked and improved by earning XP as I played the game, but none of that existed. A big part of most roguelikes that really make you feel the devastation of death and thrill of success is the constant advancement of your character. With nothing to lose between games other than accrued weapons and vague progress towards the end, death lost a lot of the sting.
Luckily the variety of guns on display does a great job of alleviating that initial disappointment a tiny bit. While I may have started the game with nothing more than a simple laser pistol, before long I had a rocket launcher that shot three rockets at once, an auto laser rifle, a scatter-shot shotgun, an electricity beam rifle, and even a gun that shot a glowing orb to ricochet all over the environment, doing damage to anything it touched. All the weapons, like the areas themselves, are randomized in terms of stats, type of weapon, and various effects. All weapons can be recharged/reloaded at weapon stations scattered across every ship in the game.
Even though you can teleport onto enemy ships and clean them out using brute force, you have other options as well. During my time I was able to negotiate with NPCs, threaten them, and even engage in ship-versus-ship combat with a system that felt very reminiscent of both Star Trek: Bridge Crew and FTL.
The flexibility in how you approach situations and the creative solutions that come to mind was liberating. In many ways, From Other Suns evokes that same sense of curiosity that tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons do. When presented with an NPC talking at me, do I just listen and follow along, or do I pull out my gun and shoot them? From Other Suns lets you answer that curiosity with action.
I’ve been having a lot of fun playing From Other Suns cooperatively and while it technically allows for you to play the game alone, I can’t really recommend it. The difficulty spikes are outrageous when by yourself and it’s just not the same if you don’t have someone by your side to revel in the victories and share the excitement about that awesome new gun you found. And even with a full squad at times sometimes the game is just unfairly difficult and you’ll end up wiping your game and having to start off. It can get very frustrating and I hope the developers will patch in some balancing measures.
The crew member system could have been taken a step further to alleviate some of those issues, but it wasn’t. As it stands you hire crew members to occupy your ship. During ship battles they can be assigned to certain rooms (such as the engine room) to perform repairs and when you die out in the field each crew member on your ship represents a single respawn. I’d have loved for the ability to take crew members with me on missions as AI companions, just to balance things out a bit.
And when compared to the boots-on-the-ground gameplay the ship battles are a bit underwhelming. You’re just poking buttons on a screen and it lacks the chaotic intensity of something like Star Trek: Bridge Crew or FTL. It can serve as a nice change of pace from the constant barrage of first-person shooting action, but overall it’s nothing more than filler content for the most part. I ended up only using the ship combat as a way to better setup my boarding of the enemy ship in most cases by disabling certain systems to allow entry.
Final Score:7.5/10 – Good
From Other Suns is an ambitious VR title that gets a lot right. Fans of sci-fi are going to find a lot to love here and it’s some of the most fun I’ve had playing cooperative VR to date. There is an immense amount of content and enough variety to mostly prevent things from feeling too stale. The real test for replayibility in a game like From Other Suns though is going to be how well Gunfire can support it post launch and how much the community embraces it.
If FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) and the Borderlands franchise had a baby, the freakishly hard offspring would invariably be From Other Suns, a first-person shooter/spaceship management sim from Gunfire Games, the makers of Dead & Buried (2017), Chronos (2016) and Herobound: Spirit Champion (2016).Like its procedurally generated spiritual progenitor FTL, FOS will leave you gasping for breath at every turn, never sure if the two to three hours you spent fighting pirates, aliens, or zombies will amount to a win, or (more likely) a soul-crushing loss.
Developer: Gunfire Games Available On:Oculus Reviewed On:Oculus Rift Release Date: November 14th, 2017
Note to the reader: Before I start, I want to make it clear that system-to-system jumping in FOS is accomplished with a single button press. The map is finite, making you travel from left to right and the only piloting you’ll be doing is jumping system to system. If you’re looking to pilot your own ship and fly wherever you want, I would suggest you take a look at the Steam ‘space sim’ category for starters. Now, on with the review.
Gameplay
You’ve been thrown to the far edge of space after testing out an experimental warp drive, bringing with you a terrible virus-like alien species that nips at your heels on you way back to Earth. As a captain of a tiny Skimmer-class ship, you’ll have to collect enough scrap (the universal currency), and buy, scrounge, or steal enough fuel and missiles to fight your way safely back home. Sounds easy, right? Just grind around some star systems, complete some missions, shoot some fools and you’re home free! Not quite.
From Other Suns, Star Map
Servicing, upgrading, stocking missiles and fueling your ship is only a part of the game’s balancing act. You’ll also have to maintain an NPC crew, because when you die guns ablazing on an enemy ship, spare crew members become an extra life. Once you’re out of crew, you’re out of lives, so the challenge becomes keeping at least one meatbag alive on your ship so you can keep moving forward. This gets especially hectic when you’re in multiplayer mode and your whole three-person team is wiped out, which sometimes can leave you with a designated meatbag to protect as the rest of you continue on as robots. You can of course purchase new crew members, but they’re both rare and expensive.
Repairing internal systems in real-time while fending off enemy boarding parties during a ship-to-ship battle is only a taste of some of the desperation you’ll get as you scrape by before your inevitable death. And once you’re dead, you’re dead. Everything resets. You can quit during a private gate and save your progress, but you can’t revert to any sort of savepoint once you’re dead. This may sound like a damning appraisal of the game, but it really isn’t. It’s just fair warning that dying is an integral part of how you play the game. You’ll win eventually, but it’ll take luck, a hard-won understanding of the enemy types, and the help of permanent items awarded through in-game achievements.
you’ll get used to seeing this screen
As one of the only ways to truly get ahead in FOS,banging out the game’s achievements to get permanently-available high-spec guns and better ships essentially act as a difficulty slider that rewards Sisyphean persistence over technical skill. There is no other way to adjust difficulty. If you’re like me though, both lazy and inept, the only safe haven you’ll find will likely be in multiplayer, where other players have done the heavy lifting for you. That’s right, you can always be a designated meatbag if you don’t want to spend hours killing hundreds of pirates from a certain faction for that next ship-unlocking achievement. Just don’t expect to be popular.
Ship-to-ship battles are oftentimes forced upon you by an enemy’s FTL-jammers, so you either fight to the death or throw everything you’ve got at the overpowered pirates subsystems and hope to knock them hard enough to either releasing you from the jam, or bringing down their tactical capabilities so you can transport over and clean them out manually. That last part is my favorite, as it really amps up the feeling of danger. Ship-to-ship battles are fairly basic (fire on baddies, repair subsystems), and you’ll know almost immediately if you’re headed for an instant game over based on the enemy’s stats.
Because so much depends on your ship, the first-person shooter element offers a welcome pause to the otherwise technical resource management nature of the game. I wouldn’t call it a perfect VR shooting experience though, as the game’s slew of comically large blasters don’t provide any way of looking down sights, leaving you to spray and pray until you can get a feel for where and how the gun shoots. There are about 5 or 6 classes of guns that vary in strength and magazine capacity, so you’ll have to keep a look out for better guns as you stalk through enemy ships. In the end, I was hoping it wouldn’t be all about single-handed weapons and eventually offer some two-handed weapons too, but alas, you’ll find yourself wielding rocket rifle-sized “pistols” throughout.
Carried via a 5-gun max inventory and two hip holsters, the inventor system can leave you scratching your head as you accidentally grab a gun from the floor or wall instead of selecting the desired weapon, but you do get used to it over the course of the game, making sure to correctly highlight the gun and stay away from walls and other guns on your quest to find the biggest and baddest hand cannon available. The inventory, for all its flaws, is so much better than scrolling through a flat UI though.
Despite all your numerous problems to balance, ammo isn’t really one of them, as both enemy and your ship has enough recharge stations littered throughout to keep you refilled on pewpewpew juice. Shooting can become a tiring exercise after a while though due to the lack of visual indicator of enemy health, leaving you asking yourself just how many times you have to shoot an unshielded human in the head with an explosive grenade until he/she turns to plasmatic dust.
Along with guns, the game’s consumables—stimpacks and cargo hold hacking units—are found solely on other ships, so you’ll have to be lucky enough to find them and have enough room in your secondary inventory to bring them back for next time.
gun inventory
In all honesty, it might be a bit too masochistic in single player mode. It’s bad enough to have clueless AI crew members that get slaughtered at a moments notice, whereas in multiplayer mode you could send a real live person to do the job of defending the ship’s vital guts. Multiplayer lets you plan out strategies, sweep through levels quicker, and generally absorb more consumables to build out a respectable cache back at your ship. It’s also just more fun to play and learn from others as everyone tries to crack the code on how to get to Earth the fastest and most efficiency. This is somewhat hampered by a difficulty level that scales according to the number of live crew members aboard, but I’d wager multiplayer is still easier than single player by a long shot.
From Other Suns is massively fun with the right crew, just like Ubisoft’s Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2016), so if you’re thinking of going solo, you better have a hard head on your shoulders.
With the big bad alien mother ship jumping forward at a steady pace, leaving every ship and station destroyed in its wake, you’re never really given much time to grind for anything, as the 5-10 times playing through the game you’ll be mostly depending on sheer luck and maybe a wise tactical upgrade or two to get to the final goal. And even then, you may have just limped in with crappy upgrades, one last stimpack and a do-or-die attitude that you’ve honed after playing 10 hours spanning multiple runs at the game. This sort of existential panic, be it single or multiplayer, has a great way of robbing attention from you, snapping you into the action until the bitter end.
Risky fire fights aside, what falls flat on its face immersion-wise are the times when you’re just hanging out and exploring ships. Hardly anything is interactive, which feels like a missed opportunity of galactic proportions. Poker chips sit undisturbed in the mess room, a TV is dead and grey in the crew quarters, and your hand clips through everything completely in vain. Another small list of grievances: NPCs don’t react when you try to move them out of the way, and you aren’t afforded so much as a satisfying gun clank, as your weapons clip through each other too.
Because of the snap-to inventory system, even simply handing a gun to another player becomes a chore. You have to—and I’m not joking—either find a recharge station/wall holder to exchange guns or throw the gun on the ground which doesn’t always work. You’ll also have to learn how to throw guns on the ground so they don’t automatically snap back to your inventory too.
no TV? looks like somebody’s ex changed their Netflix password
When nothing feels solid and hardly anything reacts to you presence, you learn to ignore an overwhelming bulk of the environment, scanning only for the few highlighted consumables and key cards. You sort of check out internally as the promise of switches and doohickeys is dashed within the first gameplay session. This is a true shame, because the procedurally generated interiors are visually rich, and they should ideally deliver equally rich object interaction.
That said, environmental audio is excellent, offering a variety of hums and whirs to make the ship really feel alive. The soundtrack too is something worth more praise than I can give, lending moments of true cinematic quality when needed. Voice acting is a grand mix of American and East London accents, most of them convincing and very well done too.
There’s a marked lack of positional VOIP, meaning your shipmate’s voice always sounds the same regardless of where you are, but this is a pretty minor grumbling.
Comfort
There are a number of locomotion styles available, giving most everyone a style they’re used to and even one fairly underused one, something Gunfire calls ‘comfort mode’ but is more accurately described by calling it ‘third person teleportation’ mode. In this mode, you pilot a copy of yourself forward while your POV stays behind. Once you find the spot you want to be in, you instantly blink teleport there. This keeps you honest as your third-person copy is still vulnerable to damage, but gives you the added benefit of VR’s the most comfortable locomotion style outside of natural 1:1 room-scale locomotion.
There’s also head and hand-relative first-person locomotion, which gives you more of a traditional FPS feel. I tended to play mostly in seated mode, which gives you smooth forward motion relative to your body. This lets you move forward while looking left and right and doesn’t require a lot of body movement. Both smooth and snap-turning is available.
The inclusion of comfort mode and snap-turning along with ‘force grab’ for items makes this an exceedingly comfortable game that can be equally played sitting down or standing up.
Last month Gunfire Games announced that its next title, From Other Suns,was available for pre-order on the Oculus Store for Oculus Rift. With a couple of weeks left to go before the official launch the studio has revealed a little bonus for anyone that does decide to buy the videogame early, a Golden Laser Pistol.
Unveiled via its twitter feed, Gunfire Games doesn’t detail any real abilities or special functions the gun may have other than a nice shiny exterior. What it does allude to however is the famous Golden Gun that first appeared – and been copied many times since – in GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 (N64) back in the 90s. This gun – as many of you should know – was one shot one kill, but it had to be reloaded after every shot which in the right hands meant it could be very deadly.
Featuring both single-player and multiplayer modes, From Other Suns puts you in a sci-fi universe where you’ll come face to face with ruthless pirates, lethal robots, and deadly aliens across procedurally generated environments. You’ll be able to upgrade your ship, stockpile weapons, and more whilst exploring the galaxy.
“Randomization is a key element in From Other Suns,” said Gunfire Games’ Development Director Ben Gabbard previously. “It affects the weapons, the encounters, the characters, and the level design. This helps to keep the game fresh and interesting for players the first time or the hundredth time they play.”
VRFocuspreviewed the title earlier this year, saying: “There’s a lot going for From Other Suns. It’s great to just look at, from the ship’s corridors, dials and gun detailing to the animation of enemies, everything feels solid and robust. The gameplay mechanics work nicely, the guns rewarding to use as you blow apart another robot, and movement options are extensively covered. Due to arrive later this year From Other Suns should be one to keep an eye on.”
From Other Suns will be released on Tuesday, 14th November for $39.99 USD / £29.99 GBP. If you want to grab some money off then pre-ordering the title will save you $5/£5.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Gunfire Games and From Other Suns, reporting back with the latest updates.
Gunfire Games’ upcoming FTL-inspired shooter From Other Suns now has an official street date after celebrating a successful open beta last weekend. The co-op shooter is expected to launch November 14th.
From Other Suns is launching exclusively on Rift (Touch required), coming with a price tag of $40. Pre-orders are already available via the Oculus Store at a $5 pre-discount, bringing it to $35, which includes a pre-order bonus of “the Golden Laser Pistol.”
image courtesy Gunfire Games
“As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter over a dozen unique weapon types, each with hundreds of possible variations,” says Gunfire Games Design Director John Pearl in an Oculus blogpost announcing availability. “To us, this is a really an exciting feature, since it lets players really customize the way they play.”
Gunfire says the game’s procedural ability to customize the environment also extends to level themes too. “During away missions, the layouts of various locations are generated according to the mission’s smart randomization parameters, and the level’s theme is generated from there,” the company says, essentially meaning the theme might camouflage something like a T-Junction hallway in a way a player wouldn’t recognize.
Like everyone with a Rift + Touch and a few spare hours last weekend, we got a head-first dive into the open beta. Proving to be an engaging cross between FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) and classic shooter mechanics, we’re definitely waiting to get past the beta weekend’s 10 jump max. Check back November 14th for our review.
This past weekend Gunfire Games held an open beta weekend for its upcoming first-person shooter (FPS) From Other Suns for Oculus Rift – that beta is still going until 12:00pm PST today. Those who’ve played the title and are looking forward to its release will be pleased to know that a launch date has now been announced and pre-orders are now live.
From Other Suns will be released on Tuesday, 14th November for $39.99 USD. If you want to grab some money off then pre-ordering the title will save you $5.
Featuring both single-player and multiplayer modes, From Other Suns puts you in a sci-fi universe where you’ll come face to face with ruthless pirates, lethal robots, and deadly aliens across procedurally generated environments. You’ll be able to upgrade your ship, stockpile weapons, and more whilst exploring the galaxy.
Revealing a little more about the final version of the videogame, Gunfire Games’ Design Director John Pearl said in a statement: “As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter over a dozen unique weapon types, each with hundreds of possible variations.To us, this is a really an exciting feature, since it lets players really customize the way they play.”
So you might find the Laser Scattershot for example, which lets you get up close and personal with your enemies, or how about the Plasma Launcher for dispatching clusters of hostiles from afar. “No matter the type of player you are,” Pearl explains, “there’s a gun for your play style!”
As previously mentioned the From Other Suns open beta is still going for a few more hours, or check out VRFocus’preview for an in-depth look at the videogame.
