Here’s a video of one of VR’s best games being played with its most promising new controllers.
Brian Lindenhof, a VR developer best known for his work on Climbey, has uploaded a video of him playing Ready at Dawn’s Oculus Rift exclusive, Lone Echo, using the Revive app. The new controllers, which were shipped out to developers earlier this month, seem to work pretty perfectly with the game, right down to replicating Oculus Touch’s limited finger tracking (but obviously not providing the full extent of Knuckles’ own finger tracking).
Lindenhof also has an older video of himself using the Knuckles with Bethesda’s Fallout 4 VR (after failed attempts to boot up Skyrim in VR). There’s a bit of tweaking at the start of both videos but, at the very least, Knuckles seems to be more than capable of imitating the controllers that have come before it.
Of course, it’s difficult to judge just how improved the experience is without seeing a game that natively supports Knuckles. Right now the only app to do that is Valve’s own demo for the controllers, set in its Portal universe.
We don’t yet know when and how Valve plans to ship Knuckles out to VR fans, nor how much they’ll cost. Hopefully with kits now in developer’s hands, though, it won’t be too much longer.
The Open Beta for Echo Combat is live and running until Sunday. If you have Oculus Home installed already, you may have noticed that the Echo games have undergone a bit of re-branding. Instead of Echo Combat and Echo Arena existing in the launch separately, there is now just Echo VR and when you load into the lobby you pick which game you want.
Echo Arena is the disc-based mixture of Quidditch and Soccer that we loved last year in our review, while Echo Combat is a zero-G shooter that blends Overwatch with Echo-style movement. It’s a ton of fun as well. If you missed it, we livestreamed yesterday for over an hour, but due to server issues only played a handful of games in that time.
We’ll be livestreaming Echo Combat on PC using Rift with Touch starting very soon (which means we’ll start at approximately 3:00PM PT) and aim to last for about an hour or so. We’re going to use Restream to hit both YouTubeand Twitchat the same time!
The Open Beta for Echo Combat is finally here! If you have Oculus Home installed already, you may have noticed that the Echo games have undergone a bit of re-branding. Instead of Echo Combat and Echo Arena existing in the launch separately, there is now just Echo VR and when you load into the lobby you pick which game you want.
Echo Arena is the disc-based mixture of Quidditch and Soccer that we loved last year in our review, while Echo Combat is a zero-G shooter that blends Overwatch with Echo-style movement. It’s a ton of fun as well.
We’ll be livestreaming Echo Combat on PC using Rift with Touch starting very soon (which means we’ll start at approximately 2:20PM PT) and aim to last for about an hour or so. We’re going to use Restream to hit both YouTubeand Twitchat the same time!
If you didn’t get a chance to jump into last month’s Echo Combat open beta weekend, the upcoming online shooter expansion to Echo Arena, then you’ll have another chance soon, as the studio is opening up their pod bay doors to all Rift users starting today, August 16th.
Update (August 16th, 2018): Echo Combat Open Beta 3 kicks off today at 10:30 AM PT (your timezone here) and ends Sunday August 19th at 10:00 AM PT. Developer Ready at Dawn has confirmed that the so-called ‘Gear Patch’ brings three new features: Arc Mine, Stun Field, and Energy Barrier. The patch also includes a range of gameplay and balance changes, as well as bug fixes. You can find the full patch notes here.
Update (August 7th, 2018): A third Echo Combat open beta is set for the weekend of August 16th, the folks at VRespawn reported. As with the prior open beta, we expect it will open sometime around 10:30AM PT (your timezone here).
According to a video on the official Echo Games YouTube channel, the August 16th open beta weekend will also usher in the ‘Gear Patch’, which we expect will focus on tweaks to equipment like grenades and abilities, possibly even introducing some new elements.
Update (July 19th, 2018): Celebrating the one-year anniversary of Lone Echo (2017) and Echo Arena’s release, the upcoming team shooter Echo Combat is getting its second open beta period this weekend, starting July 20th at 10:30 AM PT (local time here) and going through July 22nd at 10:00 AM PT (local time here). The latest open beta is said to deliver “a more stable gaming experience,” and the ability to use your weapon in your left hand.
According to a Ready at Dawn blog post, this weekend’s open beta “is the first of many scheduled throughout the rest of the year and leading up to Echo Combat’s official release. Alongside more opportunities to play Echo Combat until release, players can also look forward to new content monthly.”
Original Article, Updated (June 20th, 2018): Echo Combat throws you into a beefier combat-ready avatar with a few guns and abilities at your disposal. Offering a payload-based objective, much like the gametype in Team Fortress 2 (2007) or Overwatch (2016), you push the cart on a track through the winding maze as an attacker, or defend the advances of the cart by pushing it backwards and running down the three-minute game clock. Check out our full hands-on from the closed beta for a better idea of what to expect.
Ready at Dawn says that players can expect continued open beta periods leading up to the game’s launch later this year. The full release is slated to cost $10, so now is a great time to find out if the zero-G shooter is right for you.
With the Echo Combat open beta just around the corner, we took a few minutes to catch up with Ready at Dawn CEO Ru Weerasuriya who filled us in on the newest abilities coming to the game, how it might change prior to launch, and the studio’s commitment to VR.
With one week until the Echo Combat open beta, Weerasuriya told us about new abilities that weren’t available in the recent closed beta: the Ark Grenade which, unlike the basic explosive grenade, expands into a large sphere and acts like an EMP, stunning enemies that touch it, and giving the attacker a chance to close distance and finish off the kill. There’s also a Shield, a new piece of equipment (alongside the Repair Matrix and Threat Scanner) which deploys into a large piece of cover which can be climbed upon and also shot through (from one side only); the shield can be especially good for the defensive team as it allows players to set up temporary cover in otherwise vulnerable areas.
As for the closed beta, Weerasuriya said that it validated a lot of Ready at Dawn’s approach to Echo Combat, but with the game not coming out until later this year, he expects more will change before its final debut, even following the open beta.
“One of the things that we’re also going to do is add to the game,” Weerasuriya told me. “One goal that we always had was—especially Echo Combat—was gonna be a game that was gonna start with the closed beta with a subset of things that you had, and you see today that we’ve already added a couple more things. And the goal really is, by launch of the game at the end of the year, that we actually put something together that has more functionality, potentially more modes, but more ways to play the game. [We want to really] build this into a way where you get into the game, you play the way you want to on the map that you want to, and the mode that you want to.”
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Echo Combat is novel compared to other VR FPS games because of the way that weapons aren’t separate items, but are instead actually built into your suit and deploy from your hand. Weerasuriya said that the studio eventually came to this conclusion after testing a more traditional item-based approach to weapons.
“One of the very first [approaches we explored] was using weapons in your hand that you can actually equip—that means that you would hold weapons, different kinds of weapons, and you could equip them them and shoot—but then we quickly realized that it went against the idea of why our movement mechanic kind of was something that people adapted to and loved, so we decided the guns need to be integrated, they needed to actually be part of your hands,” Weerasuriya said.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
He told me the first three or four months of developing the game were about figuring out how players would interact with weapons. By opting to integrate weapons into the player’s hands, the grip button can continue to be used for the game’s novel zero-G locomotion which has players grabbing the environment and pushing themselves off of it. The guns even have a subtle animation where they fold slightly out of the way when you grab onto a surface, to make room for those beautiful procedurally animated hands.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
When Echo Combat launches, it’ll be integrated into the very same lobby where players currently go to Echo Arena matches and practice their Arena skills. And beyond the Echo Combat expansion, Weerasuriya said that the studio continues to focus on expanding the Echo universe in a cohesive way.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
The way he described it, it sounds like Ready at Dawn wants to expand the range of things that players can do from the single lobby space, rather than isolating players by creating content that functions as a completely new game, disconnected from what’s already available in the Echo universe. In that sense, it’s starting to sound a bit like Rec Room, which has a host of activities all under the same roof, allowing players to seamlessly have many different VR experiences without jumping between apps.
And while Echo Combat is nearer on the horizon, Weerasuriya affirmed that the studio isn’t done telling the story of Jack & Liv, the AI and human pair that are the central characters in Lone Echo (2017), the lauded single player counterpart to Echo Arena & Echo Combat, which left players with quite a cliff hanger.
“There is a lot behind the story of Jack & Liv that we want to keep on exploring. There’s more to that story, there’s more to what happens after you finish Lone Echo, there’s more to things that happen to them before,” he told me. “We’re trying to figure out how to best leverage not only the IP but what people are expecting of this in the future. We haven’t decided really yet what that truly is going to be as in like if it’s just going to be just an add-on or more. We truly hope that actually it’s going to be […] an experience that is as satisfying as the one that you’ve had in the past if not more.”
Image courtesy Ready At Dawn
In Lone Echo and Echo Combat, Ready at Dawn has succeeded in making two of the most praised titles in VR to date. With Echo Combat well underway and some sort of Lone Echo continuation planned for the future, VR has become an inseparable part of the studio’s identity, and not something they intend to stop working on any time soon.
“I think VR is an amazing medium purely because we’re learned so much in the last three years of being in VR that we can’t see ourselves kind of detaching from it, because we’d lose part of who we’ve become as a studio,” said Weerasuriya. “We’re currently exploring a lot of ideas that would guide things that we haven’t seen in VR. In the future we hope to actually address certain things that we see today that we take for granted maybe that are not possible in VR, but we’re very much looking into breaking those boundaries and seeing how we can do things that are not being done yet, and kind of move the medium forward.”
This article was originally published on June 7th but is being republished today since the Open Beta officially kicks off tomorrow, June 21st.
Echo Combat is poised to be one of the Oculus Rift’s biggest exclusives this year (in addition to the spy-thriller action game, Defector, and Marvel Powers United VR if it actually releases.)
We went hands-on with the game a few weeks ago at pre-E3 preview event and came away impressed with how effortlessly it melds classic shooter mechanics with Ready at Dawn’s amazing zero-G movement system.
Thankfully, fans won’t have to wait long to try it out for themselves. If you’re going to E3, then you can give it a whirl by stopping by the Alienware booth in South Hall (#647) for some 3v3 action. Or if you’d rather play from home, Echo Combat enters Open Beta on Oculus Rift June 21st.
For more details on the game, including our hands-on impressions, you can read all about it right here. In the meantime, what do you think of what you’ve seen so far?
First there was the rather excellent Lone Echo, then followed by team-based esport Echo Arena, and now Ready at Dawn will soon be rolling out its third title in the Echo franchise, Echo Combat. Exclusive to Oculus Rift, Echo Combat will be taking zero-g first-person shooters (FPS) to a new high when the open beta launches later this month.
Echo Combat takes what Ready at Dawn has learnt from its previous two virtual reality (VR) titles and combined them to make a frantic, competitive, FPS in zero-g. Sticking with the futuristic military robot characters fist seen in Lone Echo, the objective-based battles are made up of teams of three, with the only mode revealed so far is a defend/attack a payload.
As you can see from the image above this payload takes the form of a giant pink bird (flamingo?) which defending players can either sit in or grab hold of whilst trying to protect it. This makes for easy target practice for the opposing team, as the payload follows a predefined path, so they can use whatever cover is on route to hide and ambush the defending team.
You move the Payload by being in close proximity to it. The more team members within range of the Payload, the faster it’ll move towards your opponent’s base. Similarly, the more opponents there are around the Payload, the slower it will go and it may even start moving backwards if you’re not there to chase them off.
All the matches start off in a War Room, where players get a good overview of the map and have time to discuss tactics. Movement is going to be pretty much the same as Echo Arena and Lone Echo, with wrist-based thrusters to help players move around when they’re not grabbing hold of a ledge or the payload, plus the addition of boost and brake to maximise zero-g fluidity.
With Echo Arena and Lone Echo having already built up a fan base on Oculus Rift, Echo Combat is likely to be a big hit this summer. The open beta begins on Thursday, 21st June and is completely free to sign-up for. A launch date has yet to be confirmed but Echo Combat will retail for $9.99 USD when it arrives. For any further updates, keep reading VRFocus.
This article was originally published in early June and is being republished now to coincide with the upcoming Open Beta weekend, which starts tomorrow, June 21st.
After playing lots of Echo Arena over the past year and being intimately familiar with the mechanics of Ready at Dawn’s groundbreaking zero-gravity movement system, I can still say that Echo Combat is about as complex of a shooter I’ve seen in VR. All my hours of Tron-like disc battles couldn’t prepare me for how deep and action-packed a match is in Echo Combat.
I consider that lack of familiarity I felt to be a very good thing. It proves that Ready at Dawn’s formula wasn’t a one-trick pony and can absolutely be adapted to new, exciting games.
Instead of throwing a disc at goals and playing keep away from the other team, you have different high-powered sci-fi guns and abilities to contend with and a payload to move across the map, just like in Blizzard’s insanely popular FPS Overwatch.
However, unlike Overwatch, you won’t pick a pre-defined hero with a list of abilities because you can instead customize your weapon choices before the match. Adjusting team composition with the right loadout and actually working together (and communicating) is incredibly important.
Since you’re shooting guns in Echo Combat it totally changes the dynamic of the game. For starters, every weapon has its own force feedback. In a zero-gravity environment each gunshot sends you backwards. The most basic laser pistol causes short spurts of movement, but the more powerful railgun-esque weapon rockets you back in big bursts.
Luckily you can hold onto things in the environment to anchor yourself before shooting, but then that makes you an easy target.
In addition to the different guns you have to pick from, each players also gets to choose an alternate weapon and an ability. Alternate weapons were either remote detonation discs that you could toss out and explore like disc-shaped grenades and static orbs that shocked opponents it touched. There are only a handful of abilities to pick from as well, like being able to drop a shield or heal your teammate.
Like Echo Arena, there is only one game mode in Echo Combat. Every match is split into two teams designated as either Attacking or Defending. The Attacking team must advance a swan-shaped payload across the map to the goal zone at the end. Each time a checkpoint is reached the timer resets and the spawn point is updated. The Defending team simply has to stop them from moving the payload.
Sounds a lot like Overwatch, right?
Perhaps more than anything else what I found the most difficult to get used to in my time with Echo Combat is being aware of my avatar’s legs in the VR space. With the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers I have full control over my head and hand movement, as well as orienting my body, but everything below my upper torso was hanging freely, including my legs. This means if I grab onto an entrance way or pillar to stabilize myself or take cover, sometimes my legs are still exposed, which led to a lot of people in matches flipping upside down and hanging down from the ceiling to hide their lower body.
It was a really surreal tactic that took a while for me to wrap my head around. Echo Combat is a VR game that not only encourages, but requires that you take full advantage of your 360-degree space at all times.
Just in the two brief matches I played I can already see entire team strategies unfolding. With a rapid fire pistol, long-range railgun, and short-range shotgun to pick from, you can cover all of your bases in the tense 3v3 matches. Or, if you’re so inclined, you could really buckle down with shields and shotguns to hold bottlenecks at many of the tight corridor areas of the map.
Since it’s not just variations in play style with a disc, but actually different weapons and team compositions, the ways in which a match can differ one game to the next are much more nuanced.
At first on the Attacking team I tried to just hold onto the payload and ride it to the next checkpoint, using its base as cover. But wait — this is a zero-G VR shooter, not a 2D shooter like Overwatch — that’s not going to work. Enemies easily flew up underneath me and shot me from below, or sniped my dangling legs below the payload.
When I played on defense, I tried camping the choke points, like the corridor you see up top in the featured image, but that didn’t work well either since the other team stacked shields up and down the corridor while riding the payload. The shields may only have a limited amount of HP before they can be destroyed, but if timed well you can stack them back-to-back with teammates.
Sneaking around the side of shields and blasting players in the head was extremely satisfying thanks to the game’s location-based damage multiplier. Headshots are certainly more satisfying when they do exponentially more damage than getting shot in the toe.
Echo Combat is as thrilling as it is creative. As a VR game we’ve seen many of its elements already, but not all of them put together into the same package like this so elegantly before. In some ways it reminds us of Space Junkies, another upcoming zero-G shooter, but with a personality all its own.
We will be going hands-on with Echo Combat again at E3 next week, but in the meantime let us know any questions or thoughts you have down in the comments below!
An Open Beta will for Echo Combat will begin on June 21, 2018, so stay tuned for more details on that.
Ready at Dawn, the studio behind zero-g adventureLone Echo (2017) and its companion multiplayer sports game Echo Arena (2017), held a closed beta session with their upcoming Oculus Rift expansion Echo Combat last week. Given a beefier-looking avatar and a few guns—reflective of my new goal of disintegrating the opposite team members with impunity—the game essentially presents you with a gametype that fans of Team Fortress 2 (2007) or Overwatch (2016) will instantly recognize: payload—push the cart on a track through the winding maze, or defend the advances of the cart by pushing it backwards and running down the clock.
Before getting into the gameplay aspect of matches though, let’s first talk about the lobby, the place where you can practice and learn the finer points of the game before foisting yourself into a match. This is where you learn to use the game’s zero-G locomotion style which lets you move through the world by physically grabbing onto structures (and people) and pushing off with your hands. Echo Combat features the same amped-up version of this seen in Echo Arena, and it’s an absolute joy to see it in the context of a shooter, as it’s both comfortable and extremely immersive—making you forget that you’re actually in your apartment punching that stupid lamp and loudly cursing at 3 AM.
Awakening in the new lobby for the first time, I was immediately struck by the size of the place now that the doors to Echo Combat are open; it feels at least two times as large as the lobby was before, and is filled with spaces to chat, customize your avatar, or practice shooting.
The shooting gallery, which features a few structures stocked with moving dummies, has a console where you can change your guns and see what effect each gun has on the dummy’s health bar. Currently there are three guns available: a one-handed shotgun (Nova), an automatic laser pistol (Pulsar), and a powerful semi-auto railgun pistol with a laser sight (Comet), a gun that features both a charge-up and cool-down time.
Captured by Road to VR
You’re also given a single, slowly respawning detonator grenade that you can pull from behind your back to do further damage. A second ordinance weapon was greyed out, so there’s likely to be something else to choose from in the future. Additionally, you have one of two secondary abilities at your disposal—group health regeneration, or a threat scanner that can temporarily reveal enemies from behind walls. All of these things are pretty well understood in traditional shooters, so anyone familiar with Team Fortress 2 should immediately grasp the gametype.
After screwing around in the shooting gallery, I was ready to head back to the main hall of the lobby to search for a match. Like Echo Arena, there’s a miniature version of the map available in the lobby, so you can exchange the finer points with other players. Since nobody really knew what they were doing at this early point in the game’s life, most of us just gawked and shrugged our shoulders, hitting the ‘find match’ button on the lobby’s console, and starting without a care for strategy.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Randomly assigned, I first started on defense, which gives you a head start to make your way to the enemy’s farthest spawn point, the first of many checkpoints between the payload and its goal on the opposite end of the map. After being absolutely amazed at the size of the map, which features strategically placed choke points, multiple side areas, and plenty of nook to hide in and behind, I finally make my way to enemy spawn to see the cart is actually a big pink flamingo, like an oversize version of the pool inflatable. Grabbing onto the flamingo, you automatically push it in the desired direction on its glowing blue track.
Like Echo Arena, there’s also a few launch tubes available to get you back into the action a little quicker.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
It seems everything comes in threes with Echo Combat. You have three minutes on the game clock to battle in the three vs. three match, with three guns to choose from.
It’s important to pick the right gun too, because you can only swap out when you spawn in the small waiting area during matches, and because the guns are physically integrated into your robot hands, you can’t pick up an enemy’s gun or dual-wield either. While I was initially hoping for more than just three single-handed guns, I get the sense that the studio thought long and hard about making every choice a team-based decision, and creating necessary bottlenecks to create interesting gameplay.
These bottlenecks force you to cooperate with others and divvy out responsibilities like “Ok, you two be medics with shotguns and push the payload, and I’ll cover with scanner and the Comet and snipe from behind.” Because everyone has a mic, that sort of cooperation is to be expected, the team with the best ability to organize will probably win the match.
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
Initially I thought playing the game’s single map would get tiring after a few matches, but it’s actually big enough to provide hours of gameplay. Of course, I would love to see more maps, more guns, and more objectives in the future, but my guess is many players will still find the game engaging enough in its current form to keep the servers bustling for some time, as it’s proven to be a balanced and super satisfying shooter in its own right.
That said, Echo Combat will likely need a greater iteration cycle over its sports counterpart Echo Arena to stay relevant in the long run, which largely gets a pass for featuring a standard playing field, much in the same way any physical sport does. Either way, users should be happy for some time, as the franchise’s zero-G movement scheme has proven to be robust enough to allow fast, comfortable, and extremely fun gameplay, and I personally can’t wait to see what comes next.
Once the game goes live, we’ll have a full review to better assess everything coming to the game at launch. In the meantime, check out our video of a full Echo Combat match.
Developer Ready at Dawn recently hosted a closed beta of the upcoming Echo Combat, an expansion to Echo Arena, which brings a brand new objective-based FPS arena game into the mix, complete with various weapons and abilities. We’ve got footage of a complete match so that you can see how it all goes down.
Echo Combat’s objective gameplay plays out very similarly to the popular ‘Payload’ gametype seen in games like Overwatch (2016) and Team Fortress 2 (2007). If you’re unfamiliar, that means one team is defending and one team is attacking. The attacking team’s objective is to move the payload (an object which looks like a space-age flamingo inner-tube) along a predetermined path and into the goal zone before time runs out. Players move the payload forward by holding onto it, and the more players that do, the faster it goes.
The defending team’s objective is to prevent the payload from reaching the goal zone until time is up. Defenders can even move the payload backwards by holding onto it and keeping enemies at bay.
Captured by Road to VR
There are several payload checkpoints along its route, wherein the payload pauses for a brief moment while doors to a new section of the arena open up. Each section of the arena has a unique feel to it, ranging from squat and claustrophobic to highly vertical with some large openings, with geometry that’s strongly evocative of an adult-sized McDonald’s Play Place (that’s a good thing, I promise). Sadly, there’s no ball pit.
Players are smart to choose weapons and equipment depending upon whether they’re attacking or defending, and which part of the map the fighting is happening in. You’ll can choose from three weapons which can be changed mid-match at the respawn station. It’s the usual suspects: Nova (close range shotgun), Pulsar (mid range automatic), and Comet (long-range sniper).
Captured by Road to VR
Things get a little more interesting when it comes to equipment. There’s two ‘Tac-Mods’ (with a third apparently locked as of now): Threat Scanner, which temporarily highlights enemy players through walls, and Repair Matrix, which heals you and nearby teammates. There’s also ‘Ordinance’ (with one available now and another presently locked): Detonator is a disc-shaped explosive which can be thrown (putting those Echo Arena skills to good use) or planted, then remotely detonated at any time. Unfortunately the Ordinance was having some issues in the closed beta, so you don’t see it used in the match above.
