Mixed Realms is bringing its action-packed cyber ninja simulator Sairento VR (2018) to Rift users for free this weekend, which includes a campaign mode and online multiplayer for up to four other players in PvP and PvE modes.
Now out of early access, Sairento VR was recently revealed to be in the top 24 best-selling VR games on Steam of 2018 (so far). There’s reason: high-flying ninja power fantasies galore.
With the ability to fly high into the air, executing quadruple jumps, wall runs, power slides, and back flips, you rip through enemies with katanas, guns, bows, throwing glaives, shurikens, and kunais—everything the aspiring ninja may need with its nearly 20 weapons at your disposal.
The free weekend for Rift users is already in effect, and continues through Monday, July 9th at 3:00 AM ET (local time here). Check out the game here.
Oculus has been holding free weekends for select multiplayer games for some time now, and it’s a great way to pack the servers with fresh players so you can see a multiplayer game at its best. These tend to coincide with sales to entice permanent ownership of the game; Sairento VR is now 20% off, knocked down from $30 to $24 for the duration of the free weekend.
Hawkeye and Blackwidow—not the most important, or even most powerful character’s in the Marvel Universe—but the underappreciated Avengers are coming to Sanzaru Games and Oculus Studio’s upcoming co-op game MARVEL Powers United VR just the same.
Oculus has been doing piecemeal reveals for the past few days on their blog, charging up the Marvel VR hypetrain as it’s just about to leave the station. To boot, the company posted a new video featuring the characters, which gives you a quick idea of what abilities each hero has.
At the time of this writing, the full character line up is: Black Widow, Hawkeye, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, The Hulk, Rocket Raccoon, Deadpool, Black Bolt, Crystal, and Thor.
Marvel Powers United VR is slated to arrive on Rift July 26th, and will ship on with 18 playable heroes, eight villains to battle, and ten recognizable locations.
Here’s the character bios in case you haven’t followed the films or comics closely.
Hawkeye: Orphaned at a young age and protégé to a master archer, Clint Barton is one of the world’s greatest marksmen. His archery skills have be honed through rigorous training and commitment to never miss a shot, and his ability with a bow and arrow is equal to the superhuman powers of many of his teammates and foes. His Bow Shot and combination of specially tipped Trick Shots keep him even on the battlefield with his team and the enemies they face.
Black Widow: A specialist in espionage, Natasha Romanova finds her true calling as the Black Widow! Using her highly trained-and deadly-skill set to protect the world, Black Widow brings a decisively strategic element to the team with her Widows Bite gauntlets, elite marksmanship, and unmatched espionage excellence.
The Virtual Reality League is an ESL Gaming organization partnered with Oculus that oversees eSports tournaments for online VR multiplayer games including Echo Arena, The Unspoken, and Sprint Vector. While ESL cancelled the competition a few days ago, something that was done after competitors engaged in seven weeks of bracketed 1v1 battles, the company now says it’s reverting back to the original plan to send the top four players to compete at Oculus Connect 5 after all.
Update (July 7th, 2018): An ESL spokesperson took to Reddit, and announced the company has worked with Oculus to reinstate its plans to run ‘The Unspoken’ tournament finals at Oculus Connect 5. Here’s the relevant bits:
“While The Unspoken has seen a decline in signups, we were wrong to believe this warranted a lack of interest in the Grand Final. We’re thrilled to see the passionate community surrounding The Unspoken so eager to prove themselves in front of an audience at Oculus Connect 5—both Oculus and ESL are happy to oblige. After discussing with Oculus, we will keep the original plan: the top four players from The Unspoken will be invited to Oculus Connect 5, provided travel, and will compete for a share of the overall VR League prize pool.
We are still fine tuning the plans for Oculus Connect 5 and more information will be released in the coming weeks—stay tuned.”
The original article detailing the cancellation follows below:
Original article (July 5th, 2018): Starting back in May, VR League hopefuls began competing in The Unspoken tournaments with the promise of getting a chance to shine at OC5. For many, this represented not only the opportunity to win the bulk of a $220,000 prize pool for claiming victory at the tourney, but also get a chance to travel to San Jose, California for Oculus’ biggest event of the year, the Connect 5 developer conference.
The finals however have been cancelled mid-tournament, and won’t be appearing alongside Echo Arena’s league finals at the dev conference (see update above).
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
The official reasoning behind it, Community Manager Hung Lai (‘Gravity’) says in a the company’s Discord channel, is due to shrinking player numbers. The decision, he said yesterday, was decided “less than 48 hours ago,” and that The Unspoken is being entirely dropped from the VR League as a competitive eSport.
Image captured by Road to VR
Players invited to Oculus Connect are offered comped travel, hotel, and no entry fee to the conference—a valuable prize in and of itself for many competitors looking to rub elbows with VR devs and enthusiasts from all over the world. With two months of battles behind them, participants are rightly dismayed to find out they’ve been wasting their time, and investing their hopes in something that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Only a day after the competition started, Insomniac Games Senior Community Developer Tim Salvitti had this to say on the game’s Discord channel:
“We are excited for VR League Season Two and can’t wait to check out the action online. However, at this point in time we have no new updates planned for the game. We have been listening since the last update and certainly know some of the wish lists everyone has. We would love to see as many of you as possible playing in VR League and hope we can push to make The Unspoken one of the games Oculus brings to OC5! As always, we will continue to watch and listen, and we thank each and every one of you for playing and helping make the game what it is.”
The company also previously stated on the competition’s website that from the onset, Unspoken league competitors could “earn points to qualify for the Wold Qualifier bracket for OC5.” That statement has since been removed from the league website.
Where a list of upcoming cups once was now stands a blank sheet.
Last year’s Unspoken finals winner ‘Charizard’ told us a little more about how he feels after having the rug pulled out from under him:
“I think that it’s important to understand that players who are passionate about this game are going to be upset about it being cancelled. That’s not the core of the issue though. ESL has held a 7 week tournament on the assumption that this prize was going to be paid out. Players have spent time and money preparing for this, and ESL has gained attention and marketing by holding this on the assumption of those prizes being followed through. So yes, none of the passionate players of this game want to see it go, but beyond that, they have been lied to in what they can expect by investing in this game on a competitive level. It’s beyond just disappointing, it’s downright criminal.”
While The Unspoken playerbase is dwarfed in comparison to other traditional eSports, at the end of the day what matters most is the players, many of whom invested countless hours in learning how to play the game at a professional level. With real prize money on the line, it’s clear ESL hasn’t done right by its community (see update above).
We’ve reached out to ESL for a statement, but haven’t received any word yet regarding a more detailed reason behind this. We’ll make sure to update as new information comes out.
A special thanks goes out to Shaun Lane for pointing us in the right direction.
Just in time for the end of Steam’s summer sale, Valve has released a list of the top selling VR games of 2018 so far.
Broken down into a series of ‘Best of 2018‘ charts, we got our annual eye-full of just how well VR games have done when roughly compared to each other in the ‘Top Selling VR Games’, which is broken down into several tiers: Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze categories.
The list on Steam doesn’t specifically show the exact rankings according to sales within the tier (reload the list and games are shuffled).
Last year we used SteamSpy to get an idea of how many units were sold, and around how much revenue the games generated. SteamSpy is unfortunately less accurate after its death scare earlier this year, so we’ve listed the games in alphabetical order to forgo any assumption that those stats are reliable enough to report.
Take note: some games were bundled with the Vive at some point, and are figured into Valve’s list below.
Platinum
Arizona Sunshine (2016)
Beat Saber (2018)
Budget Cuts (2018)
Fallout 4 VR (2017)
GORN (EA – 2017)
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades (EA – 2016)
Job Simulator (2016)
Onward (EA – 2016)
Orbus VR (EA – 2017)
Pavlov (EA – 2017)
Superhot VR (2017)
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR (2018)
Many of the games on the list above are repeats from last year’s Platinum tier, with the exceptions of Pavlov, Orbus VR, and the new 2018 entries—a testament to the staying power of truly fun games, however also a bit concerning considering so few games published this year made the cut.
Gold
Audioshield (2016)
I Expect You to Die (2017)
Raw Data (previously EA – 2017)
Rick and Morty Virtual Rick-ality (2017)
Sairento VR (previously EA – 2018)
Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope (2017)
Space Pirate Trainer (previously EA – 2017)
Sprint Vector (2018)
Stand Out: VR Battle Royale (2017)
The Talos Principle VR (2017)
Tilt Brush (2016)
Virtual Desktop (2016)
Another near repeat of last year’s list, there’s been a bit of shuffling and only one new game to make it, Sprint Vector, a 2018 title.
Now for the rash of Silver and Bronze tier games; all 2018 games besides The Mage’s Tale, Hatsune Miku VR, Psychonauts: The Rhombus of Ruin, ARK Park, and Apex Construct are Early Access titles, or were previously available in Early Access at some point—another clear indication that smaller indie VR developer teams are driving the bulk of new VR games on the platform.
The heyday of virtual pets like Tamagotchi and Digimon may be long gone, reaching the height of their popularity in the late ’90s, but with new mediums come new possibilities, and new ways to interact with virtual pets too. Enter Waba, an impossibly cute, amorphous little guy that aims to wobble your heartstrings.
Created by Los Angeles-based indie studio Edwon Studio, Waba needs your care and attention; you hatch a Waba, feed it, and put the squishy little chub-monster to rest.
The original concept, studio head Edwon says in an introduction video, was to see what it would be like to touch something in VR. Three years later, Waba has grown from a cute concept to a full-featured virtual pet that stretches and wobbles around as you interact with him.
“He really enjoys getting slapped around at first, but if you slap him around too much, he’s going to cry and he’s going to run away. You should really be more gentle with Waba, and he’ll like [you] for sure.”
In your inventory, you have access to a number of locations: a feeding area, a play zone for playing fetch, a paint section to change the color of your Waba, and a bedroom where you gently rock him to sleep after a day of playing and eating.
Waba is launching on Steam Early Access (Vive, Rift, Windows VR) and the Oculus Store (Rift) July 10th. Edwon says he plans on adding more content over the next few months.
With Marvel Powers United VRheaded to Rift next moth, the hype train for the official Marvel superhero co-op game from Sanzaru Games and Oculus Studios is just about left the station. The next set of villains on this list: the sentient (and evil) robot Ultron and the dastardly symbiote Venom.
The game, which is headed to Rift July 26th, features co-op missions, where you use each superhero’s unique powers in online multiplayer, revisiting some of the familiar Marvel locations made famous in films past. Pre-orders for Marvel Powers United VRare already live, with the game priced at $40.
This brings the number of revealed villains to four; Ronan The Accuser, Loki, Venom, and Ultron. It’s uncertain how many are coming at launch, although the Marvel Powers United microsite has 12 spaces in total.
Superheroes already announced include Black Panther, Rocket Raccoon, Deadpool, Captain Marvel, The Hulk, Crystal, Black Bolt, and Thor.
Oculus and Sanzaru are playing pretty tight-lipped on what the villains can actually do, although if you haven’t heard of either (how that’s possible, I’m not sure) the studios released a short bio for each:
Venom: The creature known as Venom is the convergence of two beings who share a fierce hatred of Spider-Man: disgruntled journalist Eddie Brock, and a spurned alien symbiote. Bonded and fused at the molecular level, Venom possesses incredible new strength and abilities as well as knowledge of Spider-Man’s true identity. He is driven by an insatiable hunger to destroy Spider-Man and those who follow him.
Ultron: Though the creation known as Ultron was created with the best of intentions, no one could have predicted that the sentient robot would rebel, becoming a threat to all humanity. After being driven off into the far reaches of the cosmos by the Avengers and their allies, it was believed Ultron had been destroyed. However, his frayed consciousness persisted until he came into contact with a techno-organic alien race which assisted him in unifying his fragmented consciousness back into focus and into a new upgraded body. Ultron has targeted Earth and its mighty heroes once again, but this time he is coming prepared with new powers, abilities and strong allies.
For VR users, the following question inevitably arises in some shape or form: why isn’t ‘x-studio’ making my favorite ‘y’ game in VR? While the answer usually ends up being a lack of sufficient profit motive on the part of established studios, sometimes indie devs step up to deliver what people are clamoring for. Case in point: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) in VR—at least tantalizing pieces of it, including epic (and super nostalgic) boss battles.
Developer Aklar_45 has been recreating The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in Unreal Engine as a hobby project for a year now,. While it’s admittedly been an exercise in learning the ropes of game development, Aklar has also kindly included a number of discrete VR builds, featuring extremely slick-looking boss battles including Ganondorf, Stallord, Ganon, Armogohma, Volvagia, and Darknut (download links in video descriptions).
Battles are admittedly much better suited for HTC Vive players, as Oculus Rift players will need a full 360 setup because the lack of directional controls such as snap-turn, or directional teleport. The battles aren’t unplayable on Rift, however it’s clear the control scheme was created with Vive controllers in mind (the bow is at a very odd angle for Touch, and the control menu at the start of the level is Vive-specific).
Image captured by Road to VR
Using Link’s iconic Master Sword and Triforce-emblazoned shield in hand, you slash at baddies when they’re down, and block ranged attacks to send them bouncing back at your enemy. Like in most Zelda games, you have your trusty bow by your side, and of course Navi to flutter around your head as you battle the dark forces of Hyrule.
Some points of VR-specific critique: sweeping camera shots and some artificial camera shake is a bit of a downer; it’s usually not a great practice from a comfort standpoint. But it certainly doesn’t break the overall sense of awe as you stare down the lovingly created, and beautifully up-resed villains from Zeldas past.
If you don’t have a VR headset, check out the epic Ganondorf fight below to get an idea of what you’re missing out on:
Using state-of-the-art photogrammetry technology with millimeter accuracy, Simon Che de Boer of Reality Virtual and Experius VR have digitally scanned Nerfertari’s tomb, letting owners of Vive, Rift, and Windows VR headsets step inside the fabled burial site and learn about the over 3,000 year-old Egyptian queen’s life, religion, and culture.
Nefertari was an Egyptian queen who died around 1255 BCE, and as the first of the Great Royal Wives of Ramesses the Great, her death was commemorated in the same way many Egyptian nobles were at the time: entombed in a lavish underground structure tucked deep into the hills of the Valley of the Queens in southern Egypt.
The VR tour shows you Queen Nefertari’s tomb in a way no other person has seen it in a century, lit by oil lamps and devoid of artificial lighting—except for your hand-held flashlights, giving you the sense that you’re truly discovering the 520 square meter tomb far away from modern-day tourist groups.
Image courtesy Experius VR
While the 360 video below is actual footage captured from within the tomb, VR users are treated to a decidedly more realistic version, replete with textured walls that appear so real you might actually be able to accidentally chip away the 3,000 year-old paint. As you teleport around the tomb, you can also activate a helpful guide who explains the more important images of both the gods and Nefertari and what they meant in her culture.
Nefertari: Journey to Eternity (2018) is free on Steam and Viveport, offering a prescient glance at what the future of photogrammetry can provide VR users.
Unreal Tournament (1999) was one of the staple arena shooters of my youth. It’s simple; find the best gun you can, stock up on as much health and armor as possible, always keep moving until you die, respawn, rinse and repeat. In this respect, Ubisoft’s latest foray into VR has replicated much of this, which paradoxically leaves me undecided if I really like Space Junkiesor not from what I’ve seen from the closed beta.
If you haven’t followed along with Space Junkies, here’s the skinny: Ubisoft’s Montpellier studio is producing the classic arena shooter for Rift and Vive, but in the wild world of zero-G. The closed beta just kicked off this week, and features two vs two deathmatches, free-for-all matches for up to four players, and duel mode for one vs one. Only quickmatches and private matches are available for the beta, which run five minutes in length.
image courtesy Ubisoft
I’ve had a few opportunities to play Space Junkies throughout its development, and from the very start it’s been a supremely polished and comfortable experience. It’s clear that care and a unique understanding of the medium has gone into it, what with the lifelike hand gestures, cool-looking characters, badass collection of weapons and secondary gadgets, and engaging level design across its four available maps. That said, Space Junkies personally feels just a little too familiar to be called truly innovative in the year 2018.
Here’s the counterpoint that balances this out somewhat: it’s masterfully done, and includes enough VR-native controls and clever design tropes to make it a breeze to pick up and play for almost anyone. Comfort is a big issue that Ubisoft has almost entirely cracked with their previous VR titles (especially Eagle Flight), and in Space Junkies it really shows. Playing for multiple hours was an easy prospect, and left me feeling absolutely nausea free.
Options are aplenty too, giving you the choice to toggle FOV blinders on and off, use room-scale or snap-turn locomotion, and head or hand-relative movement. The studio really pulled out all the stops to try to listen to the community’s preferences.
Counting the pros over the cons, it’s clear Space Junkies is not your run-of-the-mill VR game either, but my gut feeling says it needs more player engagement to capture the casual user – more reason for people to come back week after week than I saw during the closed beta. Multiplayer games are set at a much higher bar than their single player counterparts simply because when the userbase dries up, the game is as good as useless. We did get a taste of some promising systems, like its earnable coins that you can spend on cosmetic items like name placards and player icons, but it’s not really enough for me at the moment.
Objective-based gameplay that requires real cooperation has definitely found a home in VR, and in that sense I really wanted to find a reason to engage with fellow players outside of the standard chat-up between matches. As it is, nearly every deathmatch I played was entirely quiet; at its current point, the nature of the game requires no real cooperation outside of swooping in by mistake next to your teammate and trying to gank a fool. Ok. So maybe this isn’t (dare I say) Echo Combat, and maybe it doesn’t need to be, but it still seems like objective-based gameplay is missing for now.
Reviewing my game footage of my full match, it dawned upon me that Space Junkies is actually trying to cater to a scene I’m much less familiar with. It’s being positioned as a budding eSport; the monitor view, which you would record for a livestream, comes replete with death cams, kill counts, death counts, and kill to death ratios, etc. Players move up and down the leaderboard, and all of the relevant info is laid out for easy watching. If Ubisoft is going to get behind a Space Junkies eSports league, that may be fuel enough to keep the studio interested in pushing regular content updates.
Image captured by Road to VR
While shooting fools in deathmatch is fun, there’s a very real possibly the critical mass of players simply won’t be there months down the road – if Space Junkies follows in the footsteps of Ubisoft’s other VR games (Eagle Flight, Werewolves Within, and Star Trek: Bridge Crew before its TNG DLC). All of these games are functional, well-researched exercises in what makes VR great, and are fun in their own right, but they’ve lacked content updates and were left to languish for months on end. If Space Junkies really is resting their hopes on eSports to save the day and keep the servers going, and can also manage to keep the updates coming, we may just see a bustling arena shooter after all. I’m certainly hoping so.
Whatever the case may be, we’ll be there to find out when the game goes live when it launches soon. In the meantime, check out this video of a full match to whet your appetite.
Medium, Oculus’ first-party VR sculpting and modeling tool, today gets a major update in version 2.0, bringing better performance, improved tools, and the ability to export your creations into your own Oculus Home space.
Having launched Medium initially back in late 2016, Oculus has been continuing to tune the tool for the needs of professional artists and modelers. Version 2.0, now available, adds useful tool enhancements like grid snapping and multiple lights, while also bumping the layer limit up to 100. The company also promises improved performance for large and high resolution projects thanks to a new Vulkan-based rendering engine.
Medium 2.0 also brings a new file management system and a “major UI facelift,” designed to help artists work better and faster.
But the tool is also quite approachable by novices, and luckily (since I won’t be sculpting anything worthy of being 3D printed any time soon), Medium 2.0 will allow users to export models directly into their Oculus Home space to show off virtually—a feature that’s been promised for some time.
Oculus says it’s also launching new Medium tutorials as part of the 2.0 update, which will detail new tools like Elastic Move.
