Lionsgate have announced that the VR experience based on the Keanu Reeves film John Wick is to be previewed next week at NYC’s Comic Con, where attendees will be treated to a 7 minute sneak peek of the Starbreeze developed title.
Part of Lionsgate’s efforts to move into the immersive content business, the virtual reality tie-in to their movie John Wick (2014), starring Keanu Reeves, has appeared on and off since its announcement in August of last year, but we’re still yet to get a handle on how the game, developed by Starbreeze, will shape up when it’s released late this year.
Now, Starbreeze and Lionsgate have announced that the most substantial peek at the title, entitled John Wick Chronicles: An Eye for an Eye, will be given at next week’s New York Comic Con where show attendees will get to go hands on with the HTC Vive version. The demo is reportedly around 7 minutes long. NYC’s Comic Con will run October 6-9 at the Javits Center.
The demo is part of a big push by Lionsgate at NYC’s Comic Con, where they’ll also be wheeling stars from the forthcoming John Wick sequel (imaginatively subtitled Chapter 2) out on stage at the show for a Q&A panel.
Starbreeze also notes that a “bite-sized” version of the full game, titled John Wick Chronicles: Arcade Edition, will appear on the company’s in-house developed 210 degree FOV StarVR headset at the opening of the first IMAX VR Center due to open in Los Angeles later this year.
Out of Ammo is a real time strategy game that combines base building with the ability to step into the boots of individual soldiers for some first person action.
Out of Ammo features eight playable maps as well as three additional missions and cooperative multiplayer. In the freeplay maps, you are tasked with setting up defenses to protect your headquarters from endless waves of enemy combatants. It plays like a tower defense game, but with the added ability to take control of any friendly unit on the battlefield and shoot from that point of view.
Out of Ammo was developed by RocketWerkz, a New Zealand based studio founded by Dean Hall, the creator of DayZ. The game made its debut on Steam Early Access in April and then made its full release earlier this month.
Out of Ammo Details:
Steam Page Developer & Publisher: RocketWerkz Available On: HTC Vive Reviewed On: HTC Vive Release Date: September 15th, 2016
Gameplay
Contrary to what you may expect from the game’s title, ammunition is actually quite plentiful in Out of Ammo and is rarely a resource I found myself focusing on while playing. Instead, the game pushes you to consider how you manage your time. Unlike many tower defense games, Out of Ammo blends the waves together so that you don’t have a really distinct planning break between each round. This means you are constantly switching between building new fortifications and inhabiting troops in order to help sway the battle in a certain area.
The first person combat is both intense and satisfying. Out of Ammo features five different soldiers that you can step into (three combat, and two support) and they each carry a different weapon. You will also face a variety of enemies, some of which require you to inhabit a specific soldier type to fight back with. Because of this, and the need to keep building up your base, you never spend a long time in the boots of any single soldier.
While the freeplay mode is a lot of fun, I wish there was more advancement and progression in it. As it currently stands, there is no way to ‘win’ a freeplay mission. You simply keep fighting until some combination of enemies and circumstances wipes out your headquarters. I couldn’t help but feel defeated every time, even after setting a new high score, and I think some sort of reward system would help balance that out.
Out of Ammo also features three standalone missions that remove the tower defense and strategy aspects and leave you with solid first person shooting. The newest mission, Vertigo, has players hack into a computer while fighting off enemies with a tactical shotgun. This mission felt very much like a heist from the Payday series, because you would frequently have to abandon your cover in order to complete an action on the computer to keep the timer moving. The level is a lot of fun and provides a nice alternative to the freeplay maps.
Despite the level of polish throughout most areas of the game, Out of Ammo still has its fair share of bugs. On one of the first-person survival missions, I found my perspective thrust up into the sky with no way to teleport down. This effectively ended my mission and left me momentarily disappointed. Also there are still some pathing issues where units won’t be able to enter a defensive structure you’ve built, especially on the sloped areas of the D-Day map. While the bugs I encountered were disruptive, they weren’t very common, and I’d expect them to be fixed through an update.
Speaking of updates, I bought Out of Ammo around the time of the Vive launch, back when the game was in Early Access, and it’s impressive how much they’ve added and refined over the last five months. Huge features like multiplayer and the three first-person missions were all added very recently. Being able to follow their development and their responses to feedback makes me feel confident in the value that I’m getting as a consumer, and this is no small part of the reason I will be willing to pay for their DLC in the future.
Immersion
I initially passed on Out of Ammo when it came up in my Steam queue because of the blocky graphical style. After watching some of the first-person footage, however, I decided to give it shot. Something that didn’t come across in the videos is the scale of the environments. When you are in the commander view, the entire battlefield feels like a Lego playset and the blocky models feel slightly more appropriate. It sets an oddly playful tone that stands in contrast to what you would expect on from an active battlefield.
Some of the in game menus can be obscured by the fortifications which can make things difficult if you don’t already have a good sense of the controls.
I’m not sure if this is an intentional aspect of the playful style, but all of the weapons feel unusually big. At first I thought this was possibly a personal calibration issue, but I’ve heard the same comment from game streamers as well. Additionally, some of the menus suffered from usability issues because of their choice of background and positioning. Most of the issues were minor oversights and only ended up being an inconvenience once I was familiar enough with the controls.
Not surprisingly, the most immersive part of Out of Ammo is when you inhabit your soldiers and actually have the gun in your virtual hands. The game features a nice collection of guns and each one has a unique feel to it. The sniper rifles, in particular, require you to physically steady your aim in order to make an effective shot. I found that the difficulty there actually makes the experience feel much more rewarding. On multiple occasions I found myself rapidly sniping enemies from my elevated tower like a scene out of Saving Private Ryan (1998).
Another important aspect of the immersion was the reload actions. Most games have players press a button and then sit back and watch as the gun magically goes through the reload process by itself. Out of Ammo requires you to actually pull out the spent magazine, throw it on the ground, pull a new magazine out of your pocket, and place it back into the gun.
The mounted machine gun is even more involved, requiring you to feed in a new belt of ammunition from the ammo box on the ground, close the feed cover, and then pull a charging handle, all before firing back at the incoming enemies. The faster you get at completing the reloading actions, the better player you become, and that is a fantastic feeling that goes beyond just getting good at aiming.
Comfort
Thanks to the largely stationary nature of the game, I encountered no major discomfort or motion sickness while playing Out of Ammo. For the freeplay maps, players are initially placed in an elevated view of the battlefield with the ability to walk around at room-scale. All of the defensive structures that you can inhabit as a soldier are fairly small so there is not much of a need for much physical movement there. Most of my freeplay battles lasted between 20 and 30 minutes, and I would play a few in a row without any problems.
The three missions and the menu area allow players to teleport around in the same point-and-warp fashion that players are familiar with in games like The Lab, but other than that, virtual movement is mapped to what you can do in your physical room. My one complaint with the teleportation implementation is that it doesn’t prevent warping into an object. It would be nice if the teleportation bounds prevented that, but it was easy enough to work around and didn’t detract from the overall experience.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Grav|Lab is a physics-centric puzzler which has you devising ever more elaborate ways to guide balls from one point to another. A simple premise, but one that lools instantly appealing.
One of the HTC Vive’s most effective showcases early on was the wonderful room-scale application of the classic flash game Fantastic Contraption. It provided the perfect demonstration of how powerful freedom of movement and motion controllers can be in VR and that tactile gameplay executed well enough need not be weighted down with bloated plots to be a captivating experience.
Grav|Lab is a puzzle title which aims to take that tactile ethos and throw some extra physics-based gameplay into the mix. The game has you guiding spheres from a spawn point with your mission simply to get said spheres to the goal by any means necessary. Those ‘means’ take the form of a selection of platforms and tools made available to you and magicked into the world via a very near controller-bound menu system.
You may well have seen standard 2D titles like this before, the Incredible Machine series for example. But leaving aside the obvious appeal and instant gameplay satisfaction motion controls give you, constructing solutions to these physical logic puzzles within a 3D space you’re free to move around in, looks altogether more fun, challenging and rewarding.
As you progress, the solutions required by the game become more elaborate, and as well as platforms with physics-altering properties (downhill becomes uphill), the developer seems to be having great fun devising numerous gizmos to include. Mini launchers that propel the balls greater distances, requiring you to judge elevation and velocity as you build for example.
Grav|Lab is still in development for both HTC Vive and Oculus Rift & Touch and will be available this year via Steam’s Early Access program. No firm release date has been announces just yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything.
Focusing on cross-headset support, Valve aims to make Steam the go-to place for virtual reality content distribution. Now touting more than 600 VR titles, the platform’s VR apps are steadily rising through the ranks of the entire Steam library.
Among Steam’s top 10 best reviewed games, 30% are VR compatible, including the #1 position which has been held by Valve’s The Lab since at least as far back as July, and is now the best reviewed game among Steam’s entire library of more than 10,000 games.
While The Lab and Rec Room certainly get a boost in positive reviews thanks to being free, VR-compatible title Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, a cooperative bomb defusal game, holds the #10 position even with a $15 pricetag.
Built as part of an in-house game jam, Ninja Theory’s debut VR title DEXED is a beautiful on-rails shooter that pulls inspiration from the Sega Saturn classic Panzer Dragoon and a dash of cult shooter Ikaruga.
It’s interesting to see older, classic game concepts and mechanics brought up to date inside an entirely new medium such as VR. For Ninja Theory’s developers, clearly in touch with their retro gaming past, Sega Saturn classic Panzer Dragoon‘s core ‘look to target’ system, was liberally pilfered for their latest title DEXED. Although, to this old time gamer, there’s a also more than a hint of cult shooter Ikaruga here too.
Ninja Theory, developers of the forthcoming (and very pretty) brawler Hellblade, held an internal game jam to promote creative thinking and to perhaps find the next killer concept for a new game. Teams of developers at the studio had one month each to build something that they thought would make a game they thought was cool. Of all the concepts that came forth from the Jam, DEXED was the one it was felt showed the most promise.
The title, out today for HTC Vive, has you flying through various fantastical dream-like landscapes holding two controller, each one instilled with it’s own opposing type of projectiles – one ice, one fire. Perhaps predictably then, in order to defeat enemies in your dream world, you need to blast enemies with the corresponding opposing projectile – ice beats fire, and so on. Enemy targeting is handled by the aforementioned ‘look to lock’ mechanism, and if you’ve played Rez you’ll know that the aim is to target as many (or as many points of) an enemy as possible before unleashing multiple auto-targeting salvos. The ice vs fire (red / blue) twist is where I make parallels with Ikaruga whose central premise was that your ship switched states to tackle different coloured enemies.
If this title has appeared somewhat out of the blue, Ninja Theory agree. “Where has this come from?!? You may ask,” they said via press release, well quite. Once the initial game jam was complete and the DEXED team had been chosen as winners, they were given a further two months to refine the title ready for release – and thus Ninja Theory’s debut VR title was born. Today see’s the title for the HTC Vive via Steam for £6.99/$9.99/€9.99.
Alien: Isolation is one of the best VR games never released. We look back at why the title was so revered by VR enthusiasts and that there’s now finally hope we’ll see an official VR release after all.
One of the best video games based on the hugely popular Alien franchise in many years, Alien: Isolation was taut, tense and just plain terrifying in places. The title was received warmly by critics upon release and seemed to indicate a return to form for a franchise which had suffered a seemingly endless string of sub-par video game entries. Everyone was happy, with the exception of VR enthusiasts.
You see, in the run up to Alien: Isolation‘s release on standard 2D gaming platforms, Oculus had featured the title prominently in its showcase line up whilst attending various gaming trade shows throughout 2014. Then demonstrated on the Oculus Rift DK2, people were treated to a special made-for-VR demo which had the player trying to escape the clutches of our favourite xenomorph, and it was a huge success, reported widely in the gaming press, such that Alien: Isolation‘s became one of the most anticipated VR releases ahead of the Rift’s consumer launch.
And then, nothing. Prior to the game’s release in 2014, Eurogamer asked Creative Assembly what was up with VR support in the full game and the studio stated that “At present, it’s just a prototype and does not represent a game currently in development at this point in time. It’s a truly amazing experience though and brings the game to life in ways we could not have imagined when we started the project. It’s one of the most terrifying demos you’ll ever play.” The title eventually disappeared from Oculus’ showcase list and the game was launched with no mention of virtual reality support.
Many in the VR community were disappointed and some more than a little angry that such a promising VR title, one that could have been such a powerful ambassador for VR as a gaming platform would now not materialise. However, to some community members, it seemed likely that the advanced level of VR support demonstrated in Alien: Isolation at trade shows indicated that a significant amount had effort had been put into the game as a whole to make it work. Therefore, it was pretty unlikely that support would have been removed entirely from the game prior to release and instead it was merely hidden, waiting to be unlocked again.
Sure enough, within just a few days of Alien: Isolation‘s full release, community gumshoes found that altering just a few lines of config files were enough to enable support for their Oculus Rift DK2 headsets. When this was done however, it was immediately obvious that the game’s VR support was even further along than many had hoped. With some minor exceptions, this game was fully playable in VR and what’s more, it looked incredible!
That’s not to say there weren’t problems. The very nature of Alien: Isolation‘s gamepad based locomotion and resulting yaw rotation meant that it could be uncomfortable for some and scripted moments in the game wrestles camera control away from the player, a definite ‘no no’ when it comes to VR comfort. These challenges, along with the fact that consumer VR headset releases simply hadn’t happened yet, would probably be the primary reasons as to why VR support wasn’t included in the released game.
Unfortunately, as Oculus’ development towards a consumer headset continued and their drivers and SDKs advanced, Alien: Isolation‘s unmaintained VR support became deprecated and it is now no longer usable without some serious hacking about on older runtimes. Which means, those wishing to sample the game’s immersive delights on their consumer Rifts (or Vives for that matter) were, to be blunt, shit out of luck.
Jurgen Post, COO Sega Europe
Recently comments made by Sega’s European boss Jurgen Post, have stirred hopes that a fully VR enabled Alien: Isolation may now surface after all. Speaking to MCV, Jurgen said that “VR has caught the whole company’s attention,” going on to state, “We have a lot of VR kits in the office and people are playing with it. We are exploring ways to release games. We’ve not announced anything, but we are very close to making an announcement.” Heartening indeed, but Jorgen then went on to allude to titles which might be first on the VR release roster and, predictably, Alien: Isolation was mentioned. “We did Alien: Isolation about three years ago on Oculus Rift, it was a demo that was bloody scary,” said Post. “To bring that back to VR would be a dream and dreams can come true… VR will take time, but we will start releasing some titles just to learn. It is a platform for the future.”
Nevertheless, there are some in the community who feel so passionately about being given the opportunity to experience the game on their consumer grade VR headsets, that they’ve started a petition to urge Sega to return to the title and finish what they obviously had begun years ago. The movement currently has over 750 signatures, and if you’d like to join the cause, head over to the Change.org page right here to show your support.
With virtual reality’s consumer push now underway, the need for substantial, triple-A content to entice people to buy into this fledgling technology is stronger then ever. Alien: Isolation, if done right, could be one of those key titles for Sega.
MNGOVR’s new title for HTC Vive is a wildly colourful and fantastically fun PVP title which seemingly draws inspiration from the Hudson Soft classic Bomberman and is at once wonderfully simple and frantically addictive.
Bomberman from Hudson Soft represented some of the purest forms of multiplayer bliss throughout its many iterations and variations spanning multiple gaming platforms. The aim was to place bombs in a top-down maze at strategic points to blast your opponents to bits, collecting power-ups as you went. It was frantic, it was fun and I spent many an hour with friends discovering its many nuances.
Now, Chinese developer MNGOVR have taken some of the essence from Hudson Soft’s classic and transposes it to virtual reality on the HTC Vive platform. Bomb U! places two players, you facing an AI or human controlled online adversary, atop your own destructible platforms suspended high above a lush, technicolor landscape.
The aim is simple, blast the floor from your opponent’s feet so that they fall to their demise. To do this, you’re supplied with spawning bombs which, using your SteamVR controllers you pick up and hurl in your opponent’s direction, they then have the opportunity to chuck it back at you before it explodes – and so on and so forth. From time to time, you’ll be treated to power ups, thus far restricted currently to a gun which you can aim either directly at your opponent or beneath their feet.
That game’s look and feel is infused with the kind of bright and positive Japanese-style visuals we haven’t seen an awful lot of in VR to this point and it makes a refreshing change from gritty, dark or neon futuristic surroundings. The animation too is spot on, with robotic avatars darting around their mini-arenas desperately lugging explosives in a bid for survival.
The title is simple and this is reflected appropriately in the publisher’s price as Bomb U! can be had for just £1.99 (around $2.50) on the Steam store and is available via Early Access right now. It’ll be interesting to see how the developer sees the game evolving towards an eventual final release, but we like what we’ve seen so far.
HBO premiered a VR experience for their new Westworld series at TechCrunch Disrupt, and they used Spherica’s camera stabilization technology in order to pull off an extended live-action tracking shot in VR. Common advice given to new VR filmmakers is to not even try to attempt to move the camera since any shaking or sudden unexpected movements can be a motion sickness trigger. But Spherica has been able to create stabilization platform using a GoPro mount and remote-controlled rover that is able to comfortably move a VR camera through a tracking shot.
I had a chance to catch up with Spherica’s CEO Nikolay Malukhin and managing partner Alina Mikhaleva at TechCrunch Disrupt where we talked about their rover, drone, and cable camera stabilization solutions, collaborating with HBO on the Westworld VR experience, scaling up their rig to Black Magic and eventually RED Epic cameras, and some of their upcoming content and hardware projects including a first-person perspective helmet mount.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
You can watch a high-res demo of their Spherica technology in this Immersive Combat demo for the Gear VR, or watch it on YouTube here:
The marketing agency Campfire was responsible for designing the physical Westworld booth experience at TechCrunch Disrupt, which created the feeling that Delos was a real travel agency. The actors running the booth were telling attendees that they were showing a virtual reality experience that featured one of their destinations, and so I didn’t have any idea that what I was about to see was really an immersive advertisement taking me into the surreal and dystopian world of a new HBO series starting on October 2nd.
Here’s some photos of the booth and the travel brochure they were handing out:
Note: The VR component of this game is still a work in progress which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current state and will not receive a numerical score.
After an extended period in Early Access, The Solus Project launched earlier this year for non-VR gamers and the critical reaction was mixed, with its blend of survival and storytelling missing the mark for some. Fast forward a couple of months to July and developers Hourences and Grip Games delivered a massive update that implements what they describe as “work in progress” VR support. Although technically not finished, this VR experience for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive offers a lot more than you might expect and leaves a lasting impression of its strange, alien world. Can VR elevate The Solus Project to new heights?
Gameplay
There’s a moment in most people’s lives where they confront their irrational fear of the dark. Standing in pitch black, hair on the back of the neck stands on end as primal instincts woven into the animal parts of our DNA collide with the rational brain that knows there’s nothing to fear. The Solus Project in VR delights in messing with those lingering animal instincts.
Another in a long line of in-vogue survival games, The Solus Project sensibly lets the threat of your imminent demise fade into the background. Exploration and a sense of mystique are more important than making sure you have enough burgers and Coke to survive.
Starting in orbit around a distant world as part of a crew tasked with finding humankind a new home, disaster strikes and your ship crashes spectacularly onto the surface. You find yourself alone on an alien world surrounded by twisted metal and flames. Survival is the first order of business as you rush to meet your basic needs; huddled in a cavern against the freezing cold, but you need to press on. Are there other survivors? Can you make contact with anyone back home? Will you ever get off this planet? If you want to find out, you will need to leave the relative safety and warmth of the crash site.
At first you will explore timidly, greedily gathering nearby supplies and rapidly filling your inventory, before building enough confidence to strike out further and further. This is a rare game that makes you feel like you are embarking on a journey into the unknown; one that will take you across alien terrain, through caves, and deep underground. Inside VR, The Solus Project has an incredible sense of place, of scale, and of wonder. This is a singularly alien world with moons that loom large on the horizon, throwing the outline of distant and enigmatic shores into sharp relief, and it only becomes more unsettling as you make your way through the game’s eight hour run time.
Most of your time is up with the exploration of large though not vast areas, incurring loading screens as you move between them via caves or tunnels. You’re going to need to bring some light with you because there’s a full day-night cycle and when you find yourself underground the world falls into an ominous pitch black. You will cower at strange sounds and imagined movement from beyond the aura of your flaming torch, or the eerie glow of luminescent shards. There will be objects to discover and collect as you solve rudimentary puzzles and combine items to overcome obstacles. The more things you find the more things you can do and therefore the more progress you will make towards your goal.
The survival elements of the game will require you to find food, water and medical supplies, all of which follow sensible rules: if you’re active, you’ll burn through calories and water, both of which will need to be topped up with food and good old H2O. Go out in the cold and you’ll expire through hypothermia; get wet and then go out in the cold and you’re going to very quickly turn into a popsicle. Try not to fall off a cliff, as this has predictable consequences. Rain storms and meteor showers—genuinely terrifying the first time—ensure that even getting from A to B isn’t always as simple as you’d imagine. Your trusty PDA holds all the key information you will need, and the computerised voice of your suit will delight in telling you your condition; “Operator wet,” nice observation, genius, it’s raining!
As good as the setting is, the game does indulge itself with some clunky storytelling at times. At one early point your character delivers a monologue to impart some sudden realisation… except it’s not sudden, and you will have had this realisation yourself a good half an hour earlier. You are left to construct much of the backstory yourself, by observing your surroundings and reading crew logs conveniently strewn about the place. It’s good to know that even in the distant future humankind still write their logs on paper. Fireproof, crash proof, waterproof paper.
Compounding the inconsistent quality of the storytelling is the fact that the VR support isn’t final, with the game itself referring to it as a work in progress, and this does intrude on the fun from time to time: the tutorial is poor, regularly it’s evident that the environment wasn’t built for VR navigation, there are occasional UI oddities, and the controls can be really fiddly. Over time I’m hopeful that those rough edges will be smoothed away, especially given the already impressive support, but be aware that the present build will require you to make more effort than most other games would demand. Once you have spent some time playing it all starts to make sense, however. The interface is fairly complex; it’s convoluted, but it’s fully functional and after an hour or so becomes almost second nature.
The Solus Project offers up a very compelling world to explore and secrets to unravel. Revealing too much of the story or the setting would be to ruin the sense of unfolding mystery the game builds so well. It wasn’t built with VR in mind, but aside from some clunky interface and control issues you wouldn’t know. It is a world that begs to be experienced in VR… unless you’re afraid of the dark.
Immersion
I can’t overstate how atmospheric The Solus Project can be. The day night cycle, the ominous looming moons, the distant shores, the strange architecture all combine to form a cohesive world – ambient sound effects and music combine well to round out the mood. Standing on a shoreline watching the waves roll in as a meteor shower explodes around you and a moon crests the horizon never gets old. As the rain started to fall heavily I felt exposed, and then genuine relief when finding some cover and standing under it. Caves with roaring fires feel almost cozy after being exposed to the wild surface of the planet. Pushing deeper into a cave, with only your small nimbus of light to see by, is exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds. At times I was completely immersed in the illusion.
There are some UI oddities that break the immersion somewhat: when you take a fall the glass in your helmet cracks, but it doesn’t feel like you’re wearing an helmet, it just looks like a perfectly in focus texture right up against your eyeballs. Same with the moisture effects when you’re caught in the rain. They’re neat effects, but not quite pulled off in VR. The focus dot in the centre of the screen also occasionally zooms toward you distractingly, as it focusses on something near to you – not a bug so much as the non-VR version peeking through. There’s the Rift bug when you sleep and the screen fades to black everywhere except at the extremes of your vision where you can still see through to the world. The loading screens are also just black empty screens, with the loading indicators slightly visible just out of your field of vision on the Vive.
Your main tool throughout the game is a chunky PDA that is ever-present in your left hand, but you also use your left hand to target the slightly twitchy system for Vive teleport motion; it only works when targeting a flat surface which makes, for example, climbing a staircase a lot more annoying than it needs to be. In your right hand is the currently active item from your inventory, in my case this was a flaming torch 90% of the time. The right hand also functions as a laser pointer for things that your PDA can examine. On the Rift these items appear in fixed locations that track with your gaze; suffice it to say this feels more like the non-VR version of the game and loses some immersion as a result, and you must use your head to point at items in the world rather than your hand as with the Vive.
In both cases it can be a little difficult to keep your arm or head steady as you wait for the readout on your PDA to tell you what you’re looking at; if you lose focus on the target the scanning process resets which became frustrating very quickly. The Vive’s motion controllers are more natural here, as you point imperiously at your target with one hand and raise the other closer to your eyes to get a better view of the readout in true Star Trek Tricorder fashion. After a while playing with the Rift I grew more adept at just shifting my gaze slightly rather than my head, but it is a distraction that took me out of the experience.
Using the Vive’s VR controllers and holding a torch in your hand, sweeping around and illuminating the environment, makes you feel much more the rugged explorer; there’s a real Tomb Raider quality to some of the environments and reaching my arm high above my head to expose details of a cavern was a constant delight. When I first jumped down into a pool of water the torch was doused and I was plunged into terrifying darkness. I had a visceral panic response, and scrambled to reignite it. Through my own stupidity I had my hand too low and let the torch hit the water, and thereafter I became much more aware of my limbs and the world around me. The game became much more real to me as a result. Using a traditional controller just isn’t the same. Given the impressive support from the developers so far I’d imagine Oculus Touch support will be added to The Solus Project later in the year, and that really would be the better way to play compared to a gamepad.
Comfort
HTC Vive users are offered a teleportation solution for getting around the world, although this is slightly confused by there being an actual teleporting tool you get in the game which becomes a core part of some later puzzles. There are those that find teleporting around a VR world completely breaks the immersion, and for them there’s the option to directly control your forward and turning motion with the track pads. When using this method of locomotion, the direction of travel is wherever your head is pointed, but the track pad can also be used to swing your view around.
Oculus Rift users lose the teleportation option, but retain everything else and gain the ability to strafe. Both sets of users get a comfort mode option that snaps turns to 90 degrees and also have the ability to reduce walking speed from 100% down to whatever they find comfortable. Best of all, the game lets you mix and match. I am highly susceptible to simulator sickness, so many games with joystick have been known to ruin me for hours after taking off the headset. But there are also times when teleportation—especially in games where it wasn’t designed in from the start—can be an hinderance or reduce the immersion. The Solus Project doesn’t make you choose one or the other, you can move between them as you wish while you play.
I found my perfect balance to be the Vive with a combination of teleportation, with occasional snap-to-turn to untangle me from the cables, and smoothly moving forward with direct control of my forward motion using my gaze to fine-tune. When first exploring an area I’d take direct control to soak up the ambiance, but when I was backtracking or just wanted to get somewhere fast, the teleportation is excellent and actually lends the game a feeling not unlike the original Myst or the recent Obduction. This lets me choose how much of the joystick locomotion I wanted from moment to moment, rather than having to make an upfront choice or, worse, not having a choice at all.
Using joystick locomotion, you will frequently find your viewpoint jumps up and down as you walk over items in the world, or if you use the jump button. This could be uncomfortable for some, and can be avoided almost entirely by using the teleportation to move. Rift owners susceptible to simulator sickness will just have to suffer through it until/unless Touch support is patched in. That said, Rift owners will doubtless already know where their comfort limits are with these things. I found I couldn’t play The Solus Project on the Rift for more than 20 minutes before starting to feel simulator sickness kick in. If you know you have a higher tolerance, or are impervious to the effect, then you could doubtless go for much longer. Conversely, on the Vive, I was easily able to play for 90 minutes in a session without issue by using teleportation mixed with joystick locomotion.
On the framerate performance front, the game offers a lot of configuration options to give you the optimal experience for your machine. It recommends that you set detail much lower than you would normally in order to run well in VR, as you’d expect, but I found that my 980Ti and i7 6700K was able to run with almost everything cranked up to maximum. For those running closer to the entry level, you’ll want to turn down the world detail and shadow quality.
The only essential setting is supersampling, so those on less powerful machines will want to sacrifice other options to enable this. At 150% it took the PDA from an unreadable mess to a sharp, crisp readout. This will save you squinting too hard at the PDA, or bringing it so close to your eyes that you smack the controller into the headset, which totally didn’t happen to me, repeatedly, until I ramped up the supersampling.
Conclusion
Despite some rough edges The Solus Project in VR is a great experience. The eerie atmosphere is expertly built, and the game lingers with you long after you’ve removed the headset. With so many options for comfort and control, and support for both high end VR offerings, aspects of the game stand as an example that other VR developers would do well to follow.
Important Note: I ran into some severe performance issues with the game at first. This manifested itself in seemingly random spikes where the frame rate dropped low enough to break the head tracking and induce significant simulator sickness – it literally rendered me unable to go back into VR for a full 24 hours. A little bit of Googling revealed that others had suffered a similar problem, and the developers offered some INI file tweaks to address them. I had to go a step further and make a change suggested by other users but, thankfully, in the end I was able to achieve perfect frame rates and resolve the problem completely – if there was a visual trade-off for disabling these features I didn’t notice it. If you find the performance dropping, and you know your hardware should be able to cope, perhaps these INI tweaks will work for you:
I took a short break during my time at PAX West this year to checkout VREAL’s new streaming platform at their office in downtown Seattle. At the office, I strapped on a Vive and jumped into VREAL’s virtual lobby with a couple of others to try things out. After a quick tutorial on how teleportation and avatar controls worked, we moved our characters over to a small floating island depicting a scene from Cloudlands VR Minigolf and teleported in to launch the game.
As a spectator, I was able to teleport around the golf course and view the action from wherever I decided to point my headset. Cloudlands already supported multiplayer so that concept wasn’t particularly ground-breaking by itself, but the important part is that VREAL says this same experience can be viewed by an endless audience of viewers in VR.
After the golf demo we went back to the lobby and then hopped into a tower defense game. In this game I was able to see some of the neat perspective features that VREAL offers developers. Depending on where in the map I teleported, the scale of the entire scene would change to fit the action. Teleporting near the lanes brought me down to a frontline perspective while teleporting away towards the edges brought me back up to a more strategic overview perspective.
During the demo, I was also introduced to VREAL’s new virtual camera feature. By placing virtual cameras in the world, VREAL streamers can broadcast their gameplay from a fixed point of view. So while I was viewing from within a Vive, people in the lobby were watching on a 2D screen, but without the shaky perspective view that most streamers are currently stuck with.
After the demo, I sat down with VREAL CEO, Todd Hooper, to ask some quick developer-oriented questions about their platform.
Todd Hooper, CEO at VREAL
Road to VR: What is the performance impact to the streamer? Todd Hooper: Most of the VREAL tech actually runs on the CPU, not the GPU. We have not seen a massive performance hit on games. It seems to be in the region of a couple percent. Basically we are capturing the game state and sending up to the cloud so that’s not something that touches the GPU at all. Most games are GPU-bound not CPU-bound so so far that hasn’t been a challenge.
Road to VR: How does a developer make a game work with VREAL? Todd Hooper: We have an SDK for Unity and Unreal 4. When we identify a developer that we want on the platform we give them the SDK. Our goal is to be able to have VREAL up and running for them in a day. We are not there yet, but for the beta at the end of the year, we should be able to get a new developer up and running on the SDK pretty quickly. It’s one of the design considerations for the system because there’s lots of ways you might be able to build something like this but would require the developer to do a lot of work. If you can’t get developers on board a system like this fairly quickly, it’s going to be challenging to get a lot of traction.
Road to VR: How would an interested developer get started? Todd Hooper: We are happy to talk to all VR developers so visit our website, there is an address for the developer relations team there or hit us up on twitter, we’ve got a full time team that is talking to developers. We’ve had a lot of interested developers. I think they’ve seen that a way to stream VR games now doesn’t really exist, you just stream the headset. Once developers have that streaming experience they get really passionate about it.
Road to VR: How many developers are on the platform so far? Todd Hooper: We haven’t announced any of the titles yet. We are going to be announcing titles at the end of the year.
Road to VR: What platforms will VREAL support? Todd Hooper: The Vive and the Rift are the launch platforms. We are Sony partner and will be talking more about Sony later. We also have a way to do 360 video capture so you can render that and consume it on a mobile VR device as well.
HBO premiered a VR experience for their new 
