Oculus Connect 5 is now officially in the books! The past few days in San Jose, CA have been full of excitement and news for the VR industry from all of the upcoming Rift games like Stormland and Defector to the official announcement of the $399 standalone VR headset, Quest. We’ve got a lot to unpack today and discuss, along with a live Q&A for all your burning questions!
We’ll be livestreaming ourselves (that’s me, David Jagneaux and Ian Hamilton) from meat space as our actual selves in the real world in front of a green screen to show footage and images. The stream will be starting at approximately 2:20 PM PT and we’ll aim to last for around an hour or so. We’ll be livestreaming directly to the UploadVR Facebook page will also be using Restream to go directly to YouTube, Twitch, Periscope, and Mixer as well. Either way, you can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:
There really haven’t been a whole lot of good VR strategy games. It’s a bit surprising because when they’re done well (Brass Tactics, AirMech Command) they seem to fit the platform like a glove. Pointing to where you want units to go, grabbing troops to issue commands with your hands, and getting a bird’s eye view of the battlefield from inside the headset all feels great — but it’s just been rare. Final Assault, the next game from Phaser Lock Interactive, the same team behind Final Approach (air traffic control arcade game) and Twisted Arrow (a bow and arrow action adventure shooter) is here to try and help make it a more common occurrence.
Some strategy games have tried to toe the line between complexity and accessibility, such as Skyworld, or suffered from crippling balance issues, such as MoonStrike, so those are certainly major areas of concern the devs at Phaser Lock will need to look out for.
During our original demo with the game back at GDC, we got a good taste of the PvP offerings by going head-to-head on the urban map you see featured in a lot of the screenshots. For this latest demo it was a solo match against AI on the snowy level.
In both of my demos the objective has been the same: destroy the enemy base. During a match, each side has infantry constantly spawning and automatically marching down the two lanes around the center courtyard, a bit like a MOBA. Along each path are guard towers with turrets that shoot at enemies automatically, a bit like a tower defense game. And as you play you’ll earn currency that can be spent to spawn more powerful units that you can send out to attack enemy units or to go down specified lanes, a bit like an RTS.
Clearly, Final Assault is the VR melting pot of strategy genres.
As of right now my biggest concern is with depth. There are supposedly a large number of different factions, but I get the feeling so far that they’re all going to feel about the same with slight variations. Both of the maps are basically the same with two bases at opposite ends, a center courtyard, and two lanes around the courtyard. Hopefully the final product has more to it, but it’s certainly lacking the depth and complexity that RTS titles are known for.
There’s good unit variety between jeeps, fighter planes, tanks, bomber planes, artillery units, anti-air units, and more. The main crux of Final Assault’s strategy boils down to pushing down the lane as fast as you can, countering enemy spawns, and trying to hit the enemy’s base before they take out yours.
One thing I noticed is that it was very easy to get tunnel vision and only focus on one lane at a time, but that’s only a good strategy if you don’t like winning. Doing so can easily result in getting overran on the other lane or simply flanked through the central courtyard. Having to pay attention to so many conflict zones, in addition to air vs. ground battle, really does offer a lot of tension, but hopefully every match doesn’t just boil down to the same sticking points.
Final Assault is currently slated for a late 2018 release without a firm date for both Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. You can read our original hands-on preview from earlier this year for more details. Let us know what you think of the game so far down in the comments below!
Echo Combat is the next iteration of the excellent Echo franchise from Ready at Dawn, but instead of being about zero-gravity ultimate frisbee in VR like Echo Arena, Echo Combat is all about shooting. In past demos we’ve seen the Fission map with the Payload-focused game mode, a lot like Overwatch, but at a recent preview event last week we got the chance to check out not only a brand new King of the Hill-style point capture game mode, but a brand new map as well.
The new map is called Combustion and this Echo Combat variation of King of the Hill has been dubbed Capture Point. I was starting to get worried there would only be the one map and mode when Echo Combat launched, but thankfully their adding a bit more to the package. You can see gameplay clips down below:
Just like anything Echo-branded, the concept is simple, but fun to try and master. At the center of the Combustion map there’s a large space known as the Capture Point. Once the zone is active, someone must claim it by hanging out inside until a meter fills. You can only earn points while you own the zone, but you don’t need to stay in the zone to keep control.
In other words, once you claim it, you can move anywhere in the map and still own the zone until someone from the other team claims it. So it’s a bit like Domination from Destiny, but just a single point instead of three.
Matches are still two teams of three and you’ve got the same assortment of weapons and abilities to pick from, but the strategies are much different this time around. For example, once you own the zone, do you all camp out at it and just defend it at all cost, or do you send one or two teammates out hunting for the other team to try and disrupt them? Since no one needs to sit inside the zone, you could leave it exposed as bait, then ambush them while they’re eager to try and grab it.
Oculus has stated that “even more content” is expected following the game’s launch, so maybe that means more game modes and maps to come. I’d also love to see each of these two maps tweaked just enough to support either game mode to give even more variety to what’s already there.
When we did our break down of Space Junkies and Echo Combat we noted a preference for Echo Combat due to the excellent movement mechanics, wonderful polish, and satisfying gameplay. Now with even more variety in terms of game modes, Ready at Dawn’s competitive shootout is looking better than ever. Make sure and check out our past livestreamfor more footage of the original Fission Payload map’s gameplay.
Echo Combat is currently slated for release on November 15th exclusive for Oculus Rift and will be accessed from the Echo VR portal in the same lobby as Echo Arena. The next Open Beta starts today, September 26th, and runs until Sunday, September 29th in which the new map and mode will be the only accessible portions of the game.
Let us know what you think of the game so far down in the comments below!
Speaking on stage at Oculus Connect this morning, Oculus CTO John Carmack gave his signature unscripted talk, somehow going into depth despite covering a wide range of topics from Go to Quest to Rift, and plenty more. Part of his talk offered some insights into the relative power in the Quest headset and the expectations that developers and users should consider.
Oculus Quest is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chip which isn’t uncommon to find in modern smartphones. Because it doesn’t have to be crammed into the tight confines of a phone, however, the processor can be run more aggressively without overheating. In fact, Quest has a fan inside to further dissipate heat and keep the headset at peak performance.
Photo by Road to VR
But how does a Snapdragon chip with active cooling translate to actual processing power and what kinds of games and graphics can developers expect to achieve? Oculus CTO John Carmack offers some insights..
“In terms of raw processing power […] Quest is in the neighborhood of the power of a previous gen Xbox 360 or PS3 […],” Carmack said at Oculus Connect. “But the important thing to keep in mind is that most games in that generation rendered a 1,280 × 720 view at 30 FPS and most of them didn’t have very good anti-aliasing. While in VR, we’re hoping you can render at 1,280 × 1,280—twice for stereo—at 72 FPS, which is eight and a half times more pixels than you would have on an old [Xbox] 360 game. Plus you want to be at 4x MSAA and Trilinear Filtering which are some percentages additional on top of that.”
So even though Quest has roughly the processing power of an Xbox 360, the greater demands for rendering VR content at higher resolution and framerate mean we shouldn’t expect to see ‘Xbox 360’ graphics from Quest any time soon, says Carmack.
“So it is not possible to take a game that was done at a high quality level, like a AAA title for [the Xbox 360] generation, and expect it to look like that in VR—it’s so many more pixels to wind up rendering.”
But, Quest isn’t without at least some advantages, which developers should hope to exploit to optimize their titles.
“On the upside [Quest has] far more texture memory and far more main memory in general than [anyone] had on those platforms, so some of the development can be easier, and in many cases you can trade really rich textures for complex shaders and multi-pass rendering in different ways,” Carmack said.
But whether or not Quest can deliver graphics which come close to what’s seen on PC today doesn’t impact the “core magic”, as he puts it, that Quest can deliver.
“I do stand by the statement that I made that the core magic of any Rift experience can be brought to [Quest],” he said. “But you can’t ignore the level of processing power differences. A big high-end PC can use up to 500 watts of power, and something like [Quest] is burning 5-something—there’s almost a factor of 100 difference in the total power.”
Image courtesy Oculus
Given Quest’s positioning between the low-end Go and the high-end tethered Rift, Carmack believes that Quest will be look at by customers as a portable gaming device, and that means direct competition with Nintendo’s popular Switch console.
“Essentially, realistically we are going to wind up competing with the Nintendo Switch as a device where I don’t think there’s gonna be that many people who say ‘I’m not gonna buy a PS4, I’m gonna buy a Quest instead,’ I think we’re gonna have people that—like I’m a gamer, I’ve got my brand of choice for the main console, maybe I’ve got a PC to play games on—I’m gonna pick up a Quest as a mobile device, very much like the Switch is [perceived by consumers] right now.”
If that’s true, it means Quest will need to deliver very compelling content and tremendous value to customers in order to be relevant to a large number of users, especially considering that Switch sells for $100 less than Quest, and could be even cheaper by the time Quest launches in Spring 2019.
Legendary programmer and Oculus CTO John Carmack took the stage today at Oculus Connect to have another one of is famous off-script, stream-of-thought talks. Carmack was instrumental in architecting the company’s mobile VR platform, so when he talks about the 3DOF standalone headset Go, pretty much everyone listens. There’s a few sore spots in Oculus Go that Carmack thinks could be solved in the next generation of low-cost VR standalones.
“One of the really gratifying things to me is that the problems that people have with Go right now, they tend to be real world problems rather than ‘VR geek’ problems,” Carmack explains, starting off into his hopes for the next generation of casual mobile devices.
According to Carmack, the most important area for improvement is battery life. This, he explains, could be done in a number of ways, including putting in a bigger battery, a higher-spec battery, having more power-efficient silicon, or streamlining code. Even with a higher-spec battery though, one of the areas that definitely needs to improve is fast charging.
“It’s great to hear people have a device that they’re upset – that they’ve used Go earlier and it’s not fully charged up and they want to use it again. That’s a good problem to have.”
Image courtesy Palmer Luckey
One area that still needs a lot of work, Carmack says, is in the comfort department. In typical Carmackian fashion, he spoke candidly about Oculus’ priorities, saying he didn’t think the company has really put comfort at the top of the list. “It’s all been about packing the technology in and somehow wrapping a comfortable shape around that technology,” he said somewhat dejectedly, later pointing to hardware hackers who’ve improved Go by replacing the headband with a halo-style band, similar to the one found on PSVR.
“If we start getting to a point where we’re willing to sacrifice some technology in some cases in the name of comfort, for a lot of people that’s going to be the right trade-off.”
More internal storage is important too, but what Carmack calls a “failure of the product” is the Go’s controller inherent ability to drift, requiring a user to recenter its virtual position to match the physical object. Here, in the casual class of standalone VR hardware, there’s an argument to be made for inside-out depth sensors and some kind of optical controller tracking like that implemented in Oculus Quest, the newly announced high-end standalone headset with positionally tracked headset and controllers. The associated cost to the system’s compute overhead however makes this a daunting task.
Better resolution is also on the list, although Carmack thought cellphone companies would have started producing 4K resolution panels for smartphones by now, which the VR industry would co-op into VR headsets. “VR companies are going to have to foot the bill on next generation display density increases,” he concludes.
Photo by Road to VR
The seemingly lesser items on Carmack’s list garnered quick mention, including hand tracking, which could technically replace a controller for casual media consumption, although it comes with a significant computational cost.
An ambient light sensor could allow the headset to automatically adjust the displays illumination intensity for those moments when you’re in a dark room and don’t want too much light leakage to disturb another person.
Because the sun’s rays can ruin VR displays by magnifying through the headset’s lenses, sunburn protection for a next generation device makes sense to Carmack. An LCD layer that darkens upon contact with the sun’s rays could work, although a quick fix could be making the faceplate of the headset so it isn’t flat so users don’t leave it resting on tables, lenses pointed upwards.
Photo by Road to VR
In the end, Carmack reveals that the Oculus Go was initially a side project, and that Oculus Quest was the big gamble. Since the headsets were developed contemporaneously though, and targeting different sectors of the market—Oculus Go focused on media consumption, and Oculus Quest focused on gaming—there hasn’t been enough time to learn from Go and implement much into Quest, meaning some of these outstanding wishes aren’t entirely solved by the upcoming Quest.
If you wondering if Oculus’ claims yesterday that its Go headset was beating its expectations was just PR babble, John Carmack, the anti-PR just reiterated that statement.
The Oculus CTO said that he was “the most optimistic” member of Oculus about Go’s chances before launch, and it still managed to beat even his expectations. He said that user retention was “as good as Rift”, which he also said was very strong.
Oculus hasn’t shared official sales figures for Go, yet, though it was always intended to be an accessible device that as many people as possible could pick it up.
Demographically, he said Go’s users tended to be slightly older, and was even performing very well in Japan, much to his surprise. The 64GB version of the device is also apparently the more popular of the two (the other being a 32GB version).
Go launched back in May for $199. It’s a standalone VR headset, meaning all you need to jump into VR is embedded inside the device, though it doesn’t have the tracking capabilities of the Go or Oculus’ new standalone headset, the Quest.
I’m a simple man. I like zooming around in space, I like shooting stuff, and I like VR. Space Junkies is a game that combines all of these things with the polish of a AAA title directly from Ubisoft and it’s shaping up to be one of the best new competitive shooters in the VR space.
By doubling down on competitive multiplayer, Space Junkies does a lot right. The tracking is excellent, the visuals are superb, and the sheer breadth of ways you can customize your loadout and upgrade your avatars makes this feel like, end-to-end, one of the most feature-rich shooters we’ve seen.
Please do me a favor and watch this trailer. Just do it. It’s only a minute long and it’s guaranteed to make you smile:
Space Junkies is a very, very fast game. The standard movement speed is already very quick as you zip around maps in zero-gravity, but you can also engage an extra boost to escape hairy situations or close the gap on your enemies. Each of the various avatars all have their own stats for health and speed, varying between fast and squishy with low health or slow and tanky with lots of health. In the past I’ve played basic modes like Team Deathmatch and Free-for-all, but this newest demo gave me a first look at a brand new “King” game mode.
In King, there is a crown placed on the map. When picked up, that player is labeled as the “King” and has a floating crown over their head and all enemy players can see their location at all times. The match we played was just 2v2, so things didn’t get too crazy. The objective of the mode is to possess the crown until your team’s score reaches 100 — you can only gain points while someone on your team is wearing the crown. Once the crown is picked up, the only way to get it is to kill the person currently wearing it.
This isn’t that inventive of a concept, we’ve seen iterations on this sort of game mode in shooters over the years, but it’s nice to see they’re delivering some variety beyond the typical deathmatch scenarios. Other objective-based modes would be really cool to see hopefully in the future.
The other tidbit of newness we got to see during this latest Space Junkies demo was a brand new map. At the center was a large open area and it was surrounded on all sides by corridors and cave passages. Certain areas of cave walls and even floating barrels can be destroyed to alter the map’s pathways and cause some delicious mayhem.
So far I’ve been really impressed with Space Junkies visually and this map only strengthened that feeling. Colors are bright and eye-catching and the team at Ubisoft has done a great job of giving everything a strong sense of personality. It’d be very tough to mistake Space Junkies for any other game, which is a great credit to the art team that’s worked on this one.
Every time I’ve played Superhot VR in the past, it has always been a bit bittersweet. On the one hand, the game’s levels are slick, clean, and wide open in a way that few VR games are. On Rift, Vive, and PSVR I can lean and move around enemies or reach out and punch them and watch them shatter into a hundred crystalline pieces. It feels amazing. But since the game requires you to physically move in order for time to move, it’s as if the world beckons you to more freely explore. I want to run around freely. But you’ve still got a wire connecting you to a PC or game console in all other versions of Superhot VR — that’s not the case when playing on Oculus Quest.
It didn’t take long for that to sink in during my hands-on demo at Oculus Connect 5 yesterday and once I started to take full advantage of the headset’s capability, it felt amazing and freeing in a way VR hasn’t really yet.
Obviously this isn’t the first example of wireless positionally tracked VR. I’ve used the TPCast add-on, the Vive Wireless Adapter, and even the Pico Neo. But those first two examples still need you to be within range of your PC and the latter has a content problem. When Oculus releases Quest next year, it side steps both of those concerns. I was playing a Rift-caliber VR game on a headset that was entirely standalone. It felt like magic.
Honestly, Superhot VR on Oculus Quest quite frankly feels like the way the game was always meant to be played.
In the video above you can see me moving around the wide open space without issue. For the first minute or so I was hesitant, but when I noticed how well the tracking worked, I threw all caution to the wind. I picked up bottles and tossed them at enemies, grabbed guns out of the air, reached behind my hand to throw a shuriken across the map. I did everything I’d have done if I were playing on Rift, but without the burdens that a PC-powered VR headset carries.
In my hands-on impressions of the Oculus Quest I wrote about how every now and then the tracking faultered, such as if I moved my hands out of vision for a while then brought them back slowly, or if I tried to grab something out of view. That was very rare and it wasn’t frequent. As you can see in the video at the top, I could reach back to throw an object without losing tracking, even when my hand passed behind the headset’s cameras.
I’ve got a feeling that, if developers are willing to take the time to port games down to the Quest’s Snapdragon 835 chipset, we could be opening up a whole new class of VR gaming. Games that previously suffered from movement restrictions and PC-tethering can be re-experienced in brand new ways, just like Superhot VR.
For VR users that already have a three-or-more sensor setup for Rift or have and HTC Vive, then Quest is going to seem less impressive — and that’s fine. If you have no desire of ever using VR outside of your dedicated VR space and you’ve got a wireless adapter of some kind, then Quest doesn’t offer much. But if you’re not in that upper-echelon of VR users already, the Quest is really impressive.
With over 50 launch titles on the horizon when Quest launches in Spring 2019 for $399, there is a lot to look forward to. In addition to Superhot VR Oculus has already confirmed Tennis Scramble, Dead and Buried, and Face Your Fears 2 (all three of which we’ve played) in addition to Moss, Robo Recall, and much more.
What do you think of Quest so far? We’ve been really impressed with it — let us know any thoughts or questions down in the comments below!
Oculus Quest, the latest VR headset from Facebook, enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking for both head and hands using the company’s new inside-out system called Insight. This brings the standalone headset closer to Rift-quality tracking than ever before, but it’s still not perfect.
Gabor Szauer, Developer Relations Engineer at the company, spoke a little about the tracking limitations of Quest (and, more specifically, its controllers) at a talk called ‘Porting Your App To Oculus Quest’ at Oculus Connect 5 yesterday. Quest is fitted with four wide-angle sensors at the corners of its front faceplate that deliver a wide field of view (FOV) for your controllers, but they don’t cover the area behind the user and may get lost if you stretch your arms far off to the side. Szauer called for developers to keep this in mind when porting games.
“This doesn’t sound like a big deal but you have to keep in mind that your field of view is not infinite, it’s actually attached to your face,” Szauer explained, showing the above slide that displays the headset’s tracking limitations. “There is some more obvious design considerations like if you’re reaching behind your head to grab something, you’re going to lose your controllers. Those are actually not too bad, if you’re only going to lose your controller tracking for a second or two you can usually fake it pretty easily.”
‘Faking it’ might mean some simple prediction algorithms that will allow you to carry out quick tasks behind you. It’s more of a cheat than anything else, but it’s worked for other inside-out systems like that seen on Windows VR headsets. “But some of the situations you get into aren’t so obvious,” Szauer continued, stretching out his arms to either side to imitate holding guns. “Like, let’s say I have two guns and there is a really, really loud sound coming from my right so I look over. All of a sudden, my left hand just left the field of view.
“For the most part it’s not going to be an issue but it is something to keep in mind.”
Szauer also warned that some interactions that would have users holding one controller over the other could occlude one’s tracking, which is another thing to be aware of.
We won’t really know how much of an issue this could be until we’re using Quest ourselves on a day-to-day basis. The headset’s coming in spring 2019 for $399.
Marvel: Powers United VR‘s roster of playable heroes ended up being a pretty decent selection of spandex-wearing super people. But well all know there was one major omission from the Oculus Rift exclusive – Iron Man.
At Oculus Connect 5 this week Steve Arnold, Head of Oculus Studios, talked to us about why Tony Stark didn’t make it into this summer’s release, and if we’ll see him added in later down the line.
“Everyone wants to play as Iron Man,” Arnold said. “Whenever you deal with Marvel there’s always a give and take on which characters you’re going to get. They’ve been a fantastic partner so far, but there is no Iron Man presence today as you know, but I do hope to see him at some point in the future. The door is not closed. We do think a representation of Iron Man in VR would be just amazing. It’s almost the perfect character for it.”
We agree with Arnold; Iron Man would be the perfect character to include as DLC (which developer Sanzaru Games says is coming for free). Marvel already has flying characters included, and using Touch controllers to wield Stark’s repulsor blasts and using head-tracking to lock on missiles could feel incredibly intuitive. In fact, the idea is so promising that Twisted Metal developer David Jaffe had been prototyping Iron Man’s very own VR game, though it sadly never came to fruition.
Plus, Marvel could definitely use some more unique characters, as the lack of variation between some heroes was one of our biggest complaints about the game.
