The latest software update for Meta Quest, version v54, is now rolling out, bringing with it a few new quality-of-life features, such as new customization options for Home environments, in-headset app notifications, and better tracking for Quest Pro’s controller.
Customizable skyboxes let you change the sky above your head in your Home space, so you can choose from a number of presets, or even upload your own skybox to get the perfect atmosphere. Meta says its goal is to make Home Environments more personalized and customizable in the future.
The update also introduces in-headset notifications for 2D apps, such as Messenger, letting users interact with these apps without leaving their current game or app.
Meta says you’ll also be able to consolidate messages from the same source to streamline your notification feed, toggle a ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, or disable notifications entirely for specific 2D apps. App notification are an opt-in feature that should prompt the first time you open a compatible app, so you won’t just start randomly receiving stuff, which is reassuring.
Additionally, Meta says v54 has improved Quest Touch Pro controller to enhance positional accuracy. Meta says these updates are gradually rolling out to all headsets.
Solaris: Offworld Combat is getting squad support in its biggest post-launch update yet this week. The update will also introduce a brand new map, several fixes and improvements, and will enable players to freely move their non-primary hand.
When Solaris first launched it delivered on the promise of fast-paced, easy-to-pickup-and-play thrills with addictive gameplay, satisfying gun mechanics, and vibrant map designs. However, the inability to group up and play with friends was a huge issue.
According to developer First Contact Entertainment via email, squad support was “probably the most requested feature” since launch, so it’s finally getting added.
A new version of Fury is coming as well, dubbed Fury Major, which will focus on centralizing player engagement with more close quarters combat moments. Stamina is also getting reworked so you no longer lose any for sprinting and you’re only impacted for spamming slide over and over.
The other major change which should improve player immersion dramatically, at least in my opinion, is that now your free hand has full tracking. Previously whichever hand was not your primary hand (for example your left hand if you are righthanded) would just be glued to the gun at all times even if you moved the controller around. Now, they’ve unattached it, just like in the main menu, so you can move it freely. Weapon accuracy is unaffected.
There are a handful of other changes as well, such as crouching in real life triggering a slide if you’re sprinting, daily XP bonuses and weekly challenges, balance adjustments, and more.
For more on Solaris: Offworld Combat follow the game’s official Twitter and YouTube and make sure to check out our full review and launch day livestream right here.
Today solo-developer Guy Godin released version 1.8 of Virtual Desktop which includes a wide variety of improvements and new content including improved VR latency, a performance overlay feature for VR game streaming, and compatibility fixes.
According to Godin’s comments on Reddit, this update should improve latency by about 10ms when streaming VR games to a standalone headset like the Quest or Quest 2. The “Performance Overlay” option allows you to monitor framerate and latency for anything you’re streaming. Compatibility issues should also be resolved when streaming VR games like Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons from Steam, and more.
Here are the full release notes according to Godin:
Added new Modern Apartment environments
Added Performance overlay option in the Streaming tab
Added Reset to defaults button in the Streaming tab
Reduced latency when streaming VR games
Displayed VR latency is now more accurate and represents the total motion-to-photon latency
Virtual desktop microphone no longer gets disabled on disconnect
Fixed game compatibility with: Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons (Steam), Hellblade, Rez Infinite, Bigscreen (Steam), Pulsar Lost Colony, Propagation VR
The most excited bit to me though is the new ‘Modern Apartment’ environment with three different ambient settings, including a fully animated cityscape background. Not even the backgrounds in Oculus Home are animated like this. If only there was a way to port this in as my default Oculus Home environment to replace Cyber City.
What do you think of this update? Let us know down in the comments below!
Today solo-developer Guy Godin released version 1.8 of Virtual Desktop which includes a wide variety of improvements and new content including improved VR latency, a performance overlay feature for VR game streaming, and compatibility fixes.
According to Godin’s comments on Reddit, this update should improve latency by about 10ms when streaming VR games to a standalone headset like the Quest or Quest 2. The “Performance Overlay” option allows you to monitor framerate and latency for anything you’re streaming. Compatibility issues should also be resolved when streaming VR games like Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons from Steam, and more.
Here are the full release notes according to Godin:
Added new Modern Apartment environments
Added Performance overlay option in the Streaming tab
Added Reset to defaults button in the Streaming tab
Reduced latency when streaming VR games
Displayed VR latency is now more accurate and represents the total motion-to-photon latency
Virtual desktop microphone no longer gets disabled on disconnect
Fixed game compatibility with: Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons (Steam), Hellblade, Rez Infinite, Bigscreen (Steam), Pulsar Lost Colony, Propagation VR
The most excited bit to me though is the new ‘Modern Apartment’ environment with three different ambient settings, including a fully animated cityscape background. Not even the backgrounds in Oculus Home are animated like this. If only there was a way to port this in as my default Oculus Home environment to replace Cyber City.
What do you think of this update? Let us know down in the comments below!
It’s already been an entire year since Asgard’s Wrath first released exclusively on the Oculus Rift and won our Best VR Game of the Year award for 2019. We dove back into Sanzaru Games’ action RPG epic and were delighted to find that it remains just as impressive as we remember.
Asgard’s Wrath: Still Impressive One Year Later
A lot has happened since Asgard’s Wrath first released, including the announcement and impending release of the Quest 2 as well as revelation that Facebook will start selling its first Oculus Studios first-party game on Steam soon. VR is a very different landscape now. Back when Asgard’s Wrath came out, it was the big title to prove VR could be more than tech demos and two-hour walk-around-and-read stuff adventures. Now, games like Boneworks, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and Half-Life: Alyx have continued to carry that torch.
I still really, really like Asgard’s Wrath. For more specifics on why you can obviously read my full, lengthy review or watch the video version above, but to put it simply it’s the kind of VR game I’d always wanted. Growing up I was raised on The Legend of Zelda, Lord of the Rings movies, and a fascination with mythology and medieval swordsmanship. In many ways, Asgard’s Wrath is the culmination of all those things into a single, neatly crafted package.
That being said, it would be easy to nitpick and criticize individual elements from Asgard’s Wrath, but it’s much more than just the sum of its parts. Yes, combat relies on pre-made enemy animations heavily rather than the physics-driven combat sandbox of Blade & Sorcery. No, it’s not a true open world that lets you go anywhere or do anything. But within the confines of what it tries to be — essentially, a VR Zelda game complete with epic boss fights, a litany of items and gear, and head-scratching puzzles to mix things up — it knocks it out of the park.
If we take a look at all of the VR RPGs on the market, both those that released before and after Asgard’s Wrath, you’ll see there is still nothing that really compares.
Watch my interview with the Creative Director on the game, Mat Kraemer, right here:
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is perhaps the closest comparison, but you’d need to mod the hell out of it to get something that feels like a made-for-VR game and even then it’s still nine-years old. I love The Elder Scrolls as much as anyone and it’s a remarkable open-world RPG, but it doesn’t deliver the same narrative impact with a well-paced adventure through a series of dungeons. Asgard’s Wrath borrows its design more liberally from Zelda than anywhere else, as mentioned before.
Journey of the Gods isn’t bad, but the simplistic art style and much smaller scope (mostly linear levels without real dungeons totaling around 10 hours vs. 30+ hours) puts it in a different ballpark. The Wizards is a fun mage adventure, Vanishing Realms does a good job with what it’s got going for it, but is over pretty soon as well.
To put things into perspective: I don’t think there are many other VR games on the market, even a year later, that offer the amount and variety of content that Asgard’s Wrath does that isn’t procedurally generated. These are hand-crafted assets with full voice acting and wonderful world-building.
Visually, I don’t think Asgard’s Wrath has been topped in my opinion. Half-Life: Alyx nails the decrepit sci-fi dystopia without issue, but Asgard’s Wrath has it beat in terms of scale and variety. Gazing out at the snow-capped mountains of Helheim before facing off against Hela herself, pausing on the edge of a cliff to admire the ocean, or seeing intricate, ornate structures as tall as the eye can see in Asgard is all magnificent.
I’m still holding out hope for a full-on sequel of some kind after the cliffhanger ending we got at the conclusion of the story, or at least some kind of DLC to keep things going, so hopefully an announcement of some kind isn’t too far off. Now that Facebook owns Sanzaru Games you can guarantee they’re hard at work on whatever is next in VR.
Asgard’s Wrath clocks in at around 130GB on PC, so a Quest port seems unlikely, but maybe a spin-off of some kind could work. That being said, I’ve played it on the Oculus Quest 2 using Virtual Desktop and with Oculus Link and it plays great on both. The Quest 2’s sharp screen and 90Hz refresh rate in Virtual Desktop looks excellent if you’ve got a beefy enough PC and strong WiFi network.
However, you really need to have ultra-precise reaction times here and any latency, such as over wireless Virtual Desktop streaming, can make combat difficult at times. I’ll also say that this is not the best game to put down for a full year and then suddenly pick up again. It’s very complex with a wide range of companion characters, weapons, and features that I honestly spent a solid 20 minutes just trying to jog up the muscle memory. It’s a doozy — but it’s so worth it. And if you’re playing for the first time then no worries.
Here’s to hoping I can eventually play something else that will make me feel excited to binge a ~30 hour RPG fully in VR. Until then, I can always return to Asgard’s Wrath.
Population: One finally has a release date set for October 22nd, less than a week after the launch of the Oculus Quest 2 on October 13th. Big Box VR is bringing their battle royale shooter to all PC VR headsets and Quest at launch with full crossplay support for $29.99.
Population: One – VR Battle Royale
Jamie, Ian, and I all got the chance to dive into Population: One last week together as a team and you can read my impressions from that hour-long play session right here or watch a bunch of gameplay in the video up above.
The comparisons to games like Fortnite are unavoidable and obvious. Not only is this a battle royale game in which players are tasked with being the last team standing as a toxic gas slowly encroaches on the map making it smaller and smaller over time, but it also features build-anywhere mechanics to spring up cover and quick structures on the fly.
What really sets Population: One apart though is that you can climb literally any surface. All you do is reach up and hold the grip button and you’re off climbing. You can also glide from any surface with an always-equipped glider so you never need to worry about fall damage. It complements the climbing system nicely.
Population: One will launch with a single map, several guns including assault rifles, SMGs, pistols, shotguns, and snipers, as well as grenades, and each match can hold up to 18 players across six 3-persopn squads. Your teammates can revive you if you go down, but if your team is wiped then you enter a spectator mode that lets you fly around the map in the sky to watch as things unfold.
“We’ve worked hard to bring POPULATION: ONE to as many platforms as possible by pushing the absolute limits of modern mobile VR chipsets,” said Gabe Brown, BigBox VR’s CTO and co-founder in a prepared statement. “We’re excited to see how players use the Vertical Combat System to compete and win starting on October 22nd!”
Population: One is slated to hit the Oculus Quest platform and all major PC VR headsets on October 22nd for $29.99. For more on Population: One, check out our hands-on impressions right here and keep an eye out on UploadVR for more coverage and a full review later this month.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Last week we had the chance to speak with Peter Hirschmann, Game Director at Respawn Entertainment on Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond.
We already published part of that interview in which Hirschmann discussed the upcoming VR shooter’s multiplayer game modes. Now you can read the majority of the complete interview transcribed down below. Some sections have been left out to improve clarity and flow and some passages have been lightly edited for consistency without altering any meanings.
UploadVR: Let’s get started by talking about the new trailer. I thought it was great! As a piece of entertainment in and of itself it was very well done and very cinematic with lots of action. Last year we spoke about Medal of Honor as a concept was inspired by Saving Private Ryan and Spielberg as the origin of the franchise. The trailer felt like a return to those roots. Is that true for the rest of the game too?
Peter Hirschmann: The game as well? Well, you say it’s cinematic. When someone refers to something that’s cinematic, I think they’re typically referring to something that had an emotional impact through the combination of the cinematography, the lighting, the performances, the music, you know, it’s just such a key part of it all. And most importantly, whatever was happening from a story perspective around the characters, all those come together to create a cinematic moment. But a spectacle by itself is just gratuitous and pointless.
But if there’s stakes involved, especially involving characters that you’ve gotten to know, that’s when you have those cinematic moments. So with Medal of Honor, we’re trying to create those emotional moments and with VR, as you know, your head is the camera, so there’s no cutting, there’s no edits. Everything you experience, you experience literally in first person. You could say we’re putting the first-person back in first-person shooters. You don’t spend any time in cutaways, looking at other characters or looking at yourself in third person or seeing scenes that you’re not privy to. The entire experience, the entire game, is something that you experience in real-time, in first-person, from your perspective.
And the story, the immersion and stereoscopic nature of wearing an HMD just does not come through in trailers, you’re literally removing a dimension from the experience.
UploadVR: Kind of shifting gears a little bit, I know last year we talked about the length and the format of the game. I think you said it was shooting for around 10 -12 hours and there were 50 mission segments, that’s how you described it. Is that similar to how the game is structured now?
Peter Hirschmann: 54.
UploadVR: Oh! 54, okay.
Peter Hirschmann: Yeah. I think we’ve netted out it’s about 10 hours. If you play it with a consistent pace, it can certainly stretch much longer if you go after every collectible and go into every nook and cranny. But some levels are very linear, like the U-Boat. It’s just a giant metal tube. So, you know, you start at one end and fight to the back, but most of the segments are multiple paths, sometimes three or four different ways to play through it.
There are lots of different ways to play, just even one piece of geography. So if you’re not speed-running, but if you’re playing at a natural pace and experiencing the story, it’s netted out to about 10.
And when you add, well, we haven’t talked about these much, but we have what we call combat exercises. The final name might be a little different, the shipping version, but they’re sort of just shooting Nazis because it’s fun.
I gotta be careful here, I don’t want to say gauntlet-style levels, but they’re sort of challenges. We just put you into a small map and just waves come at you while we let you kind of play with different weapons.
UploadVR: Oh, great. That kind of stuff is quite popular. I feel like it’s even more popular in VR, because I feel like with a lot of VR games, especially shooters, it’s difficult to take the time to appreciate how a weapon handles when you’re in the middle of a mission. So I think people love those sorts of shooting gallery / wave arenas where they can just kind of adlib a little bit more.
Peter Hirschmann: That’s exactly it. It came out of honestly our gray box test level that we literally have as just a giant gray box that we would use to test weapons.
And then we just added some Nazis walking around that would react. And it was like, s***, this is pretty fun. And like, can we gamify this? And then, the idea of it even becoming not just a mini game, but giving the player the opportunity to play with the weapons before they’re in the mission. Thematically, it’s like you’re visiting the quartermaster and they say, ‘Here you go. Take all the time you want!’ And the gamified leap is, you know, you’re using your imagination that instead of shooting targets we give you actual fully-animated characters to shoot at as the gamey conceit.
UploadVR: Yeah, you can tell modes like this are quite popular. For Boneworks, back whenever that first came out, one of the first things people were asking for was that kind of content because when they were doing YouTube videos and stuff during development they had that sort of gray box test level that they would show off all the weapons and physics. And everyone was like, ‘Wait! Hold on! Where’s this level, I just beat the game. I never got to go there!’
Switching gears again, can you divulge any details about the opening mission? Yeah. I don’t remember if we talked about this last time.
Peter Hirschmann: Yeah. Well, the opening, the prologue, we have a prologue, so the prologue, you know, and this is getting back to. Again, pulling some elements from those original Medal of Honor games forward into this game, one of the key narrative pieces of that original Medal of Honor was the character you’re playing being nominated for the Medal of Honor before the game starts. That’s what gets you the attention of the group that recruits you.
The Medal of Honor is a sacred award. The Medal of Honor is not something that you should be earning points to unlock. It’s in the language of the Medal of Honor itself. You never talk about people winning, people are awarded it.
So we thought let’s bring that idea forward to this game. In earlier MoH games it always happened off-screen but we thought we could give you just a little taste of your character. The prologue starts at North Africa and originally it was just gonna be an of-screen sort of thing that the player goes in and does a daring rescue mission to to save some allied troops.
But that implies an existing high-level of skill and we don’t know want the player to have to do that at the very beginning of the game. So we have this conceit that you’re wounded, you’re hurt in the execution of that mission, which is true to the nature of the award. If you ever meet a living Medal of Honor recipient you’re meeting someone who should have died.
UploadVR: So essentially you play as Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, but if he had lived at the end.
Peter Hirschmann: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re waking up. I never actually made that connection, but yeah, that’s a good one to make. The medic gets you in time. And, the thing is, it’s a game about shooting Nazis. We wanted you to be able to shoot a Nazi literally in the first 15 seconds of the game.
So as you awake and look around it’s North Africa, there’s Desert Corps running around, Palm trees, and as you’re coming to the NPC allies are quickly give you context of everything.
By now you know you did something heroic. Then out in the distance you see a Nazi running at you and we give you the chance to pull your pistol out and shoot that first Nazi right then within the first 10-15 seconds of the game.
UploadVR: Going back to something you mentioned earlier about ‘Putting the first-person back in first-person shooters,’ my question about that is now that we’re almost five years into consumer-grade VR we’ve obviously had a lot of first-person shooters in VR. What are some of the ways that you feel Medal of Honor differentiates itself?
We’ve all played Onward, Pavlov, DOOM, Farpoint, Firewall, and all those kinds of games. So where does Medal of Honor sit on that spectrum and how is it different?
Peter Hirschmann: Well, every game you just named is great. We’ve played and loved and learned from them all to be sure.
We want to make it as accessible as possible. Accessibility for us is a term that has a lot of important meanings that applies to different elements of the game. Of course, you start with the controls. I mean we are on this cutting edge state-of-the-art platform and it’s one of Miyamoto’s tenants going all the way back to the early days of console: It all starts with the controller. Back then, it was a D-pad and two buttons and now, you know, it’s motion controls. I mean, it’s crazy, but that core still applies. It all starts with the controls.
We spent two years just iterating on the weapons stuff. We wanted to build something that felt immersive but didn’t overwhelm the player.
UploadVR: If I remember correctly, the reloading is not like a one-to-one simulation, like in something such as Onward. It was kind of a halfway point.
Peter Hirschmann: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. For most weapons it’s a three-step process. Eject the clip, grab a new one, slam it in and charge the weapon. And then every weapon is a little bit different. Like, maybe the bolt is on a different side, where you load it’s a little different, and so on. It’s something that becomes a slightly skill-based activity, but you build a muscle memory for it.
UploadVR: Can you tell me anything about multiplayer?
Peter Hirschmann: You know, we have conventional modes that just by the nature of being in VR and being the nature of our systems, it’s a different experience. It’s just the locomotion and being able to lean and peek and hide and say cover.
That adds a depth beyond just straight death match and TDM [team deathmatch] that’s cool. Our take on sabotage is something that you can only do in VR because of how you interact with the environment and how you interact with the mode playing off of bomb placement for bomb diffusal fantasy.
You know, there are things you can do in VR. And again, we abstract it down to the most accessible mechanics. But with VR where you’re interacting with the world and every surface is available to you. There’s things you can do that are really cool, that would be hard to do on a flat screen.
That would be hard to do with just a conventional controller. And those are the kinds of things that we really leaned into and went deep on because it’s like, wow, this again, death match, team death match, domination, whoop — gave one away!
When you put them in a VR environment you still put them in our maps. So due to the weapon handling and nature of the platform, they’re going to feel different. But at least the rule sets are the rule sets and conventional and easy to get.
UploadVR: Cool! I’m really excited to hopefully learn more about the multiplayer soon.
Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond still doesn’t have a release date, but the latest trailer from Gamescom indicates it’s still coming this year exclusively to the PC VR Rift platform. Stay up to date with all the latest Medal of Honor VR news in our coverage hub for the game right here.
What do you think of how it sounds? Let us know down in the comments below!
This year’s Oculus Summer Sale is now live with alluring discounts on some of the best VR games for the Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest headsets. The sale lasts until August 9th at 11:59PM PT.
Do you plan on getting anything in particular during this year’s Oculus Summer Sale? Let us know if anything stands out to you down in the comments below!
Every month we aim to round up each and every VR game release for you in one single place — this is May’s list for 2020. Check the bolded entries for ones we feel are particularly worth your time.
So far 2020 has not been a disappointment at all in terms of new VR games to play, even after the dust settled from Half-Life: Alyx. We’ve still got plenty to look forward to out there!
And don’t forget to watch VRecap every Friday to stay on top of the top news stories, top new releases, and our weekly VR game giveaway.
If you’re a VR game developer planning to release a game soon that isn’t on this month’s list or will be released soon in the future — let us know!You can get in touch with me directly by emailing david@uploadvr.com or hit all of the editorial team by emailing tips@uploadvr.com. Please contact us about your upcoming releases so that we can know what you’re working on and include you in release lists!
Unless otherwise stated, all PC VR releases are the Steam versions.
Rift, Vive, Index, and Windows VR Game Releases For May 2020
Facebook introduced a new virtual home environment for the Oculus Quest this week called ‘Space Station’. As you might have guessed from the title, the new environment transforms your Oculus Quest home into a futuristic space station looking down on a huge planet.
The Quest launched with only the original Quest ‘Dome’ environment, which is the default home and comes pre-installed on the device. Two more scenes were added late last year and began gradually rolling out to users from November. These two new environments were the Classic Home area, which featured the original Rift home, and a Winter Lodge environment, featuring a rustic, cozy cabin that looks down onto a snowy village.
The new Space Station setting should appear as an option to download in the Virtual Environment menu in your Oculus Quest settings. You might also be prompted to check it out via a promotional banner on the Quest welcome menu. If you can’t find the environment anywhere, then there’s a fair chance that Oculus is rolling it out gradually like previous editions, so you’ll just have to hang tight until it’s available for you.
