Another big Oculus Quest 2 game just got support for one of the headset’s most important features; Echo VR 90Hz support is live.
A hotfix for the zero gravity multiplayer hit, launched yesterday, enabled official support on the new headset. That means matches of Echo VR will look smoother and more convincing than they did before and still do on Quest 1’s 72Hz display. It could just be that 90Hz support gives you the edge in online matches, too.
Elsewhere the hotfix addresses issues with controller dead zones, which reportedly weren’t working quite right on the new Quest 2 controllers, and there’s plenty of other fixes and tweaks.
Echo VR remains a high-ranking title in our like of the 25 best Oculus Quest games, so it’s great to see the title get continued support on the platform. That said, in September, developer Ready at Dawn confirmed that it isn’t currently working on bringing the game’s expansion, Echo Combat to Quest, though plans could change in the future.
Meanwhile, the now Facebook-owned Ready at Dawn continues to work on Oculus Rift exclusive, Lone Echo 2, which now looks to be releasing in 2021. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything solid from the single-player follow-up, and we’re wondering if there might be any significant changes to its release. Could we perhaps see the game come to SteamVR much like tomorrow’s release of the Facebook-published Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond?
Will you be checking out Lone Echo 2’s 90Hz update? Let us know in the comments below!
Ready at Dawn, the developers behind Lone Echo, gave a short development update for their upcoming sequel, Lone Echo 2.
But don’t get too excited, as it looks like we’ll still be waiting for a while longer.
If you were hoping for a release date, you’re out of luck — the team has “no new information regarding a release date for Lone Echo II to announce right now.” However, the team is still “diligently working to bring you Jack and Liv’s next adventure together as soon as we are able.”
As with many studios, Ready at Dawn has had to adjust to working from home due to the ongoing global pandemic. Sadly, the team also confirmed that the accompanying challenges in this switch have resulted in a delay for Lone Echo 2, beyond the initial target release date. We had originally hoped the game would be out earlier this year. The team has, however, delivered Echo VR on Oculus Quest this year.
We know that Ready at Dawn was targeting a 2020 release, but the team has now “needed to stretch development beyond our desired timeframe” due to the shift to a work-from-home setup. Whether this means a 2021 release date is unclear. “As we push towards a launch date, we will continue to update the community with the latest information.”
Lone Echo 2 is set to release as a Rift platform exclusive, with no confirmation on the potential for a SteamVR or Quest release. Back in 2019, David tried the first-ever playable demo of Lone Echo 2 — you can read his impressions here.
Ready At Dawn provided an update on a potential Echo Combat port for Oculus Quest, and it’s bad news for anyone who was holding out hope.
Echo Arena launched on Oculus Quest in open beta earlier this year, and moved out of beta into full release last week. Back in May, Ready At Dawn held a poll on its Discord server to gauge interest in bringing Echo Combat over to the Quest as well, but it now looks like that definitely won’t be happening.
Given the recent release of Echo Arena on Quest, Facebook-owned Ready At Dawn provided fans with an update on the potential of Echo Combat coming to the standalone headset:
To put it simply, we are not working on bringing Echo Combat to Quest. If there are any changes in the future, we’ll let you know at that time.
So what are we working on? Right now we’re focused on new features and tools for Echo VR, some of which have been in the works for a while whereas others are newer but vital to ensuring the game is fun and welcoming for all Echo Units.
Ready At Dawn encourages players with a VR-ready PC to enjoy Echo Combat on Quest using Oculus Link, but that’s obviously no consolation to those who only own the Quest and were holding out for a standalone port.
On the other side of the VR pond, PC VR players are still holding out for any news on Lone Echo II, the bigger, longer and more involved sequel to Ready At Dawn’s Lone Echo from 2017. The sequel was scheduled for an early 2020 release as of last year, but we’ve not heard anything for a while. We’ll keep our eyes on Facebook Connect coming next week for any updates.
Competitive multiplayer game Echo VR has left open beta and is now available for free on Oculus Quest.
In Echo VR, you play in a zero-gravity room with a single disc in the middle. There are two teams, and the aim is to push and boost yourself through the floaty environment to grab the disc and fling it into the goal. It’s a simple concept but one that could only work in VR. The game has been a multiplayer staple since it first launched for the Oculus Rift.
After a long wait, Echo VR released an open beta for Oculus Quest earlier this year. Now, after a few months of testing and minor adjustments, the game moves out of beta and into full release on the Oculus Quest store.
Despite leaving beta, if you’ve already tried the game you probably won’t notice any huge changes. In an interview with Facebook, Ready at Dawn Studios said that the beta helped them “scale to support the continued growth of the community” from the Quest launch, plus make a few tweaks to the social features as well.
“Before Quest, our players have been a dedicated core group that started on the Rift three years ago and have evolved with the game as we released updates,” said Ready at Dawn producer Johnny Wing. “The new players on Quest found it difficult to use our social controls, so in our final product, we made it easier for individuals to use our social controls like muting and ghosting. We also introduced new default social settings that help players determine how interactive they want to be with others in the lobby.”
Last month, we named Echo VR the best multiplayer experience available in Quest, so it’s exciting to see it finally move into full release.
Have you tried Echo VR on Quest yet? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Facebook continually buys smaller companies it sees are worth bringing under its banner, with the latest being virtual reality (VR) studio Ready At Dawn; the team behind the Lone Echo franchise among others.
Ready At Dawn has a long history in videogames, creating titles like Daxter and The Order: 1886 before moving into VR development. The studio’s first was the epic sci-fi adventure Lone Echo which was well received by gamers and critics alike. This was then followed by multiplayer videogames Echo Arena and Echo Combat, pitting players against one another in zero-g environments.
Currently in development is Lone Echo II which was originally slated for a 2019 launch, before being pushed into 2020. Recently the team said that even with the coronavirus pandemic and remote working, Lone Echo II should be arriving later this year.
All of Ready At Dawn’s VR titles have been for Oculus headsets so Facebook has now secured that knowledge and expertise going into the future. Ready At Dawn will now be part of the Oculus Studios team although it’ll remain as an independent studio working from its current offices in Irvine and Portland. And all jobs will be secure with the entire team transfering over.
As for further details on Lone Echo II the studio had none to share at this time. An Oculus blog post did have this to say: “Ready At Dawn has exciting plans for future games, and we hope to bring those experiences to as many people as possible, but we’re not ready to share details at this time.”
Ready At Dawn joins Sanzaru Games which Facebook purchased earlier this year. Sanzaru Games is the studio behind VR Sports Challenge, MARVEL Powers United VRand Asgard’s Wrath. The acquisitions help Facebook solidify exclusive content for its VR headsets from teams now well versed in immersive content development. As and when further studio purchases are made, VRFocus will let you know.
Ready At Dawn Studios is the latest VR developer to be acquired by Oculus maker Facebook.
The social networking giant purchased the California-based studio for an undisclosed amount. Ready at Dawn will join Facebook’s roster of first-party game development studios working on VR titles under the Oculus Studios banner.
Ready at Dawn got its start making spin-off titles of popular PlayStation franchises for Sony’s PlayStation Portable system, including Daxter and God of War: Ghost of Sparta. In 2015, the company released a Sony-published PlayStation 4 exclusive named The Order: 1886. That same year, at Facebook’s first reveal event for the original Oculus Rift, the company confirmed it was making an exclusive game for the headset.
Lone Echo And Echo Arena
That game turned out to be two projects; 2017’s single-player adventure, Lone Echo, and a separate multiplayer game called Echo Arena. Each game utilizes a zero gravity locomotion mechanic in which players can float through the air, propelling themselves by pushing off the walls. In Lone Echo, players control a robot named Jack that assists Captain Olivia Rhodes on a dangerous mission in deep space, whereas Echo Arena offers futuristic esports. Both titles were critical successes; Lone Echo was, at least for a time, Facebook’s fastest Rift game to reach $1 million in revenue, and Echo Arena spawned an expansion in Echo Combat.
Currently, Ready at Dawn is working on a port of Echo Arena, now named Echo VR, for Oculus Quest. That’s now free to play in public beta testing, whereas Lone Echo 2 is set to release on Oculus Rift later this year. Facebook isn’t announcing any additional projects for the studio today.
Ready at Dawn is the third VR developer acquired by Facebook. In late 2019, the company bought Beat Saber developer Beat Games and then in February of this year announced the acquisition of the Asgard’s Wrath team, Sanzaru Games.
Following the launch of Half-Life: Alyx and subsequent spikes in virtual reality (VR) adoption rates (more on that later), there’s a real buzz around VR at the moment which is highly encouraging but tempered slightly by one key omission: the lack of AAA videogames in VR. As with most new technologies, game development to date in the VR industry has been almost exclusively the preserve of small, independent studios. The reasons for that are clear: small studios can operate off reduced budgets and so are more willing to experiment with new technologies and game design techniques.
These indie studios have done an incredible job, but it’s undeniable that as the VR space matures and grows the lack of large, highly polished AAA titles, particularly from key third party studios, is a notable weakness in the overall offering. Anyone who’s recently finished Half-Life: Alyx and then craves a similar experience will know that feeling only too well. However, I would argue that now is the perfect time for AAA studios to take the plunge. The key reasons being:
Flatscreen AAA game design has largely stagnated and gamers are desperate for a proper ‘next generation’ experience when the new console generation begins.
Core VR game design principles are now well established and have been successfully implemented in a large range of titles.
Unlike in the over-saturated AAA flatscreen space, there is not much competition in the AAA VR space – any new AAA game is a big event.
AAA flatscreen games have lost their sense of wonder and excitement
I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey during lockdown as I managed to snag it cheaply on Steam during a sale. It’s the first AAA flatscreen game I’ve played in a long time. Its a fun videogame and I’m enjoying it, but I find that it just washes over me and that it very much feels like a game I’ve played before. The incredible amount of polish and craftsmanship on display is impressive, but it can’t help but feel generic and similar to any number of other flatscreen open-world titles. There’s no moment of genuine excitement when I discover a new area, enemy, weapon or mission. There’s no sense of wonder as I’ve seen variations of what it has to offer many times before, just at a lower resolution and graphical fidelity. This is not an issue specific to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Look at any AAA flatscreen videogame released in the last three years and it’s hard to escape the thought that there really hasn’t been much progress – outside of improved visuals and scale – since the PS3/Xbox 360 days.
It’s a well-recognised problem in the AAA space that developers have been struggling with for many years: how do you make the latest iteration of a game feel new and exciting when the input method – a gamepad or mouse and keyboard – is essentially the same as it has been for two decades. How do they make a videogame feel truly next-gen outside of improved graphics? VR is the answer. Half-Life: Alyx demonstrated how powerfully new an established franchise can feel when it leverages the potential of VR. It absolutely felt like a Half-Life game, even down to having a very similar, linear structure to previous outings. However, by being in VR, and leveraging what VR does best (and notably by not taking any big risks with VR mechanics – most of Alyx’s mechanics have been seen before), it is elevated far beyond a typical sequel. The ability to actually stand in City 17 and manipulate objects in that environment with virtual hands while shooting and reloading a gun and using real-world objects like you would in real life instils a sense of presence and wonder into an existing template that is fresh, fun, immersive and feels truly next-gen.
Just imagine what Ubisoft could do with Splinter Cell or Assassin’s Creed in VR, or Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto or Activision with Call of Duty. As discussed further in this piece, the building blocks are already there. In many ways, it’s the simplest way for the big studios to breathe new life into their existing franchises.
Core VR game design principles have now been established
Crucially for AAA developers, many key VR mechanics have already been discovered and tested with a sizable player base and so they wouldn’t be starting with a blank piece of paper. Movement in VR can be implemented effectively via smooth locomotion or teleportation. There are well-established comfort settings for those who suffer from motion sickness. Climbing is huge fun in VR and numerous videogames have been built around that core mechanic. Gunplay in VR is realistic and intuitive and games like Boneworks, PavlovVR and Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades have shown how immersive it is to use a virtual gun just like you would a real life gun. Inventory systems, physics simulations, hand interactions, throwing and sword fighting have all been implemented in numerous videogames and so there is a blueprint for how to successfully incorporate these mechanics into a VR experience.
Hell, one really simple way for a AAA studio to effectively implement VR into their franchise would be to buy an existing VR engine and use that as the foundation for their game. Imagine a Call of Duty that is built off of the Boneworks physics engine and gunplay. That’s a mouth-watering prospect. The key point here is that we’re now several years into VR development and a lot of the significant design barriers to entry have been removed.
The install base is already sizeable and growing at a fast pace
As has been widely reported, the latest Steam survey pointed to some highly encouraging VR adoption figures during April 2020. Even with coronavirus supply shortages making it difficult to buy a headset – the Valve Index has been sold out for months and Oculus headsets have only just come back to the market – the launch of Half-Life: Alyx saw almost a million additional VR users connecting headsets to Steam VR over the previous month and overall the userbase has been growing rapidly month on month over the past year.
This huge spike in users now means that it’s estimated that 1.91% of Steam users actively use a VR headset which equates to roughly 2.7 million VR users on Steam (and it’s worth noting that a considerable amount of Oculus PC VR users don’t use Steam). Sony has sold over 5 million PlayStation VR headsets and while Oculus has never been forthcoming with sales numbers we know the Quest has been a big success – Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that “Quest is selling as fast as we can make them”. All of this is to say that across the various platforms there is a significant amount of existing users and crucially the install base is growing rapidly month-on-month. With the next generation of consoles around the corner and with Sony reportedly committing to a PlayStation VR 2, Oculus seemingly about to bring out a new headset and Valve fully supporting VR, not only is there a sizeable market already but it looks highly probable that it will be an exponentially bigger one in the coming years.
Any AAA VR release will be a BIG event
As of today, we’ve only really had one proper AAA title in VR – Half-Life: Alyx. Lone Echo, Asgard’s Wrath, Blood & Truth and Stormland come close, but in reality the scale of those projects and the teams that worked on them were relatively small compared to a flatscreen AAA project. I’m also not including AAA titles that have been adapted for VR – such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR and Fallout4 VR– as while enjoyable they weren’t built from the ground up for VR and so don’t fully take advantage of what the technology has to offer.
As such, and as seen with the release of Half-Life: Alyx, a AAA release is a big event in both the VR space and in the broader gaming community as players react (sometimes not so positively) to seeing a beloved franchise in a new medium. The VR community were hyping Half-Life: Alyx for months before its release and the gaming community is still talking about it now, mainly due to how it’s unlike anything anyone’s seen before. With so many AAA games releasing in the flatscreen market – most have annual releases – gamers find it hard to keep up with and play each AAA release and they have in many ways lost that ‘big event’ release buzz.
Half-Life: Alyx has reportedly sold over 1 million units since its launch at the end of March, it was played by over 40,000 players concurrently on Steam just after launch and was also watched by 300,000 Twitch viewers on release day – by far the most viewed VR title ever and comparable, and in many cases surpassing, AAA flatscreen games. Furthermore, the amount of press coverage and articles written about Half-Life: Alyx has been huge. Sure, some of this has been down to the return of a gaming franchise that hasn’t had a release for over 10 years but much of it is due to the decision Valve made to make it in VR. There has been a big and enduring buzz around the game and it has felt like a real video game milestone event.
VR as part of the AAA space
This is all not to say that somehow AAA VR videogames should replace indie VR titles or that we should no longer have flatscreen AAA games. There is, of course, a place for both of them in the wider gaming ecosystem – I’ve enjoyed Assassins Creed Odyssey and find it relaxing, and we need indies to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible – but it’s undeniable that flatscreen AAA games have lost some of their wonder and excitement and a bump in resolution and fidelity will not be enough to provide that crucial next-gen experience. Whilst at one stage developing in VR was a daunting prospect, the core mechanics have now been worked out and there’s a healthy and rapidly growing user base that’s craving AAA content. It’s time for the big studios to get involved.
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we want to know what has you the most excited in the VR space right now?
Now that we are comfortably on the other side of Half-Life: Alyx, Valve’s marquee multi-year AAA project built from the ground up for VR headsets, it’s important to keep looking forward.
There is a lot to get excited about still coming in 2020 and especially beyond. There are still major releases slated for this year from Facebook for the Oculus Rift platform, like Lone Echo 2, Phantom: Covert Ops, and Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. On Quest it seems like something new and exciting happens once or twice a month that we never expected, not to mention anticipated games like Onward, Solaris, and Population One.
Outside of the Facebook sphere we’ve got Dreams and Iron Man VR to look forward to on PSVR and plenty else on the horizon like LOW-FI, After the Fall, and another Walking Dead VR game, among many others.
So, there is a lot to look forward to then. What has you most excited in VR, AR, and otherwise in 2020 and beyond? Let us know down in the comments beow!
Today, during the first-ever all-digital Facebook: Game Developers Showcase, Ready at Dawn announced that its upcoming Oculus Quest port of competitive zero-gravity disc game, Echo VR, will have a Closed Alpha test later this month on March 26th.
Echo Arena pits two small teams of players against one another in what’s basically a zero-gravity game of ultimate frisbee. The objective is to pass and throw the disc down the arena and through the goal to score a point. You can fling the disc as hard as you want, punch the other team to stun them, and get creative with bank shots around corners. It’s really a ton of fun.
When we tried out Echo VR on Oculus Quest back at Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) we noted that it was clearly an inferior version of the game, but all things considered it seemed to play and perform well. The limitations of the Quest’s four external tracking cameras are apparent when you start to reach behind your back a lot or generally hold the disc low, out of sight for the device.
As of now it seems like only the Echo Arena portion of Echo VR is making its way into the Quest port, but maybe we will get Echo Combat on Quest too sometime soon.
If you’re interested in joining and helping the developers test the game, you can fill out the form right here. Let us know if you plan on participating in the Closed Beta down in the comments below!
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today, we want to look ahead to the remainder of 2019 and into 2020 to see what your most anticipated upcoming VR games are.
This has been a big year for VR games. We’ve reviewed a lot of really great releases this year and still have a lot of promising games coming soon. Asgard’s Wrath was an immense adventure full of amazing depth and detail and now we’ve got Pistol Whip that just came out, Stormland is hitting soon, Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets looks lovely, Budget Cuts 2, Boneworks, and Golem are all still coming this year too. Not to mention The Walking Dead: Onslaught, Espire 1, and Phantom: Covert Ops are all supposed to be coming out before the end of the year as well!
It’s a big time to be a VR fan. Given all that there is to look forward to right now: What are your most anticipated VR games? Is it coming out in 2019, or 2020, or you still don’t know?
Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below!
