Oculus Studios today revealed their latest Rift exclusive, Defector, a high-action first-person adventure from Twisted Pixel, the studio behind Wilson’s Heart (2007).Defector aims to put players in the shoes of a veritable action movie spy, with gadgets and guns aplenty.
Set to launch in 2018 as an Oculus exclusive, Defector is shaping up to be quite a departure from Twisted Pixel’s first-person psychological thriller Wilson’s Heart. And while they’ve traded the prior game’s black and white aesthetic and ’40s era motif for a full color modern day setting, there’s still a clear emphasis on cinematic presentation. A major difference though is Defector’s emphasis on branching narratives, optional objectives, and an abandonment of the node-base movement scheme which left Wilson’s Heart feeling rather restrictive.
1 of 6
Image courtesy Twisted Pixel
Image courtesy Twisted Pixel
Image courtesy Twisted Pixel
Image courtesy Twisted Pixel
Image courtesy Twisted Pixel
Image courtesy Twisted Pixel
I got a chance to go hands-on with an early build of the game where I got a feel for the game’s new locomotion options and gameplay.
At the start of the outset, you’re asked a series of questions which determine which kind of locomotion you’d like to use; the core of it is based on free movement with snap-turning, which felt plenty comfortable to me throughout my initial 15 or 20 minutes of play. At the start of the demo I opened a small box in front of me and picked up an earpiece and placed it in my ear, then a special contact lens and placed it in my eye. The ear piece allowed me to hear my handler buddy who fed me helpful instructions and intel, while the contact lit up an augmented reality-like HUD display in front of me—both smart ways to create plausibility for necessary avenues for instruction and information.
The demo I played had me on a large, luxurious plane where I was attempting to covertly infiltrate my way to the head honcho without making anyone suspicious of my motives. I’ll let the full demo playthrough (above) speak to the gameplay, but there’s two interesting things worth calling out: the first was the moment that one of the burly henchmen gave me a virtual frisking, where I had to actually raise my hands above my head while he checked me for weapons (if I put them down he’d get angry and shoot me). It was wonderfully uncomfortable in a way that simply wouldn’t have been at all if I wasn’t in VR, making it a really rather smart use of the medium that I haven’t seen before.
And the second interesting thing is the game’s focus on branching narratives based on player choice, which can lead to some significantly different action. In the demo I played I was given the choice of whether I wanted to jump out of the plane or fight my way out. Both choices led to totally different segments of the game: one had me clinging for my life to the outside of a plane in a sort of climbing mini game, while the other led me into a gun fight, a fist fight, and ultimately to driving a sports car out of the plane’s cargo hold. Below you can see the alternative later segment with the sports care finale:
Speaking with Creative Director Josh Bear, he told me that the studio’s aim with Defector is to put players in the shoes of the ultimate spy, like a mixture of Mission: Impossible and Fast and the Furious. While the game’s price and specific release date haven’t been announced yet, he said that the studio is aiming for a similar quality bar and scope as Wilson’s Heart.
Bear also said that the studio learned a lot from the development of Wilson’s Heart, and the widespread feedback that players didn’t want to restricted to node-base movement motivated the studio to offer more freedom in how players move around in Defector. He further said that Defector wants to make cinematic action but keep the player engaged, citing moments in Wilson’s Heart where things looked good but players were just watching what was happening at times rather than participating. You can catch my full interview with Bear above.
4 I Lab, the studio behind Drunk or Dead (2017), released a trailer announcing their next game, B3,a co-op VR shooter that’s definitely borrowing some of its vibe from Starship Troopers (1997).
Not much is known about the game besides its release date, fall 2019, and its target platforms, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets.
According to the trailer, it will launch on Steam.
4 I Lab, a Belarus-based VR studio, appears to be basing B3 off their prototype game SST, which was Greenlit on Steam last year. Although it’s not certain at this point, here’s a description from the SST Steam page:
Stand at the frontline of defence and play your key role in this war, to reverse its course into humanity’s win and immortalize your name with great deeds!
SST is a first person co-op VR-shooter where you defend your base from waves of attacking monsters.The base is protected from back and sides with mountains. On the front side it has a wall with firing points. To protect the base, you need to move all around this points, using a teleport system. So, when you need to go to another point, you look on the flag above it and instantly teleport to the point.
Monsters appear from the side of the desert in random waves. They attack the wall. After the destruction of the wall monsters penetrate the base. The game is over when first monster reaches the control point inside the base. There will be several types of monsters and they will require different tactics to defeat them.
The studio has released several DLCs for Drunk or Dead in the past year, a zombie shooter that puts plenty of emphasis on bar hopping (and shooting) your way through western honky-tonks. Like Drunk or Die, we’re hoping for a high degree of polish to the Starship Trooper-style wave shooter.
Oculus is heading into its third week of ‘Rift Gold Rush’, a prize-winning extravaganza marking the two-year anniversary of Rift’s launch. To get a chance to win this week, just pop into a public match in Echo Arena (2017) during the specific entrance window.
For a chance to win a prize, download Echo Arena and play a public match on Saturday, April 14th between 1PM and 2PM PT (local ending time here). There’s no need to win a match, just compete in a single match during that time and you’re entered to win a host of prizes.
Prizes include:
An Echo Arena Gold Rush achievement
100 Third place winners will receive $25 Oculus Store credit
25 Second place winners will receive one Rift + Touch kit in addition to $100 of Oculus Store credit
Two grand prize winners will receive: A Falcon PC, One Rift + Touch & a “Golden Account” – This account will give you access to over 100 of the best titles on the Oculus Store for free
Echo Arena is the multiplayer spin-off of the award-winning VR adventure Lone Echo (2017), which took home our 2017 Rift Game of the Year for not only its engaging story and polished visuals, but also its novel locomotion style that lets you use in-game objects and architecture to propel yourself into space. Echo Arena shares all this, but it definitely injects adrenaline into Lone Echo by ramping up the speed. Not to mention, it’s completely free on Oculus Home.
Echo Arena provides 5v5 private matches in a high-flying, zero-G environment that tasks you with getting the disc into your opponent’s goal. Using the game’s extremely comfortable locomotion scheme, which lets you fly at high speeds with minimal risk of nausea, you’ll glide, boost and punch your way to victory—just make sure to clear the area first, because it can get intense.
vTime, the social VR platform, today announced the closure of a $7.6 million (£5.4 million) Series A funding round led by Deepbridge Capital with included investment from Liverpool, UK-based institutional loan and equity provider MSIF.
vTime founder and CEO Martin Kenwright says the investment will “accelerate global growth and product development, and fuel R&D for the brand’s augmented reality (AR) experience coming later in the year.”
“The advent of consumer AR at scale is allowing us to use decades of expertise to develop another unique way to connect and engage with friends and family in alternate realities,” says Kenwright. “Crucially, Deepbridge share our vision for the future – both in delivering a matchless social XR experience and our expansive plans to monetize and build upon the vTime framework with future technologies.”
According to the developers, vTime has had “almost a million downloads” since launch in December 2015, something the company can claim thanks to its many platforms; vTime supports Oculus Rift, Windows VR headsets, Google Daydream, Gear VR, Google Cardboard, as well as non-VR modes through both respective Android and iOS apps. You can find links to all of those here.
The app itself is organized similar to non-VR social platforms; vTime allows you to create a profile, chat with friends and family, and even discover new friends by browsing by common interests or languages. vTime also puts an emphasis on sharing both 360 and conventional ‘flat’ images. It (of course) comes with a pretty robust avatar creator so you can create your own unique you.
vTime’s core development and management team tallies over 40 people in both its UK Liverpool headquarters and in the USA.
Developer Tomáš ‘Frooxius’ Mariančík, known for his work on the early Oculus experience SightLine, recently announced that NeosVR, the multiuser VR world creation engine, is headed into open beta starting May 4th.
Update (04/25/18): Mariančík recently released a video announcing the open beta’s availability (seen below). In it you can see some of the complexity you can create with NeosVR, all of which is possible in the company of multiple users.
We’ll be taking a deeper look at the beta before it opens to the public next month, so check back soon. The original article follows below.
Original article (04/11/18): Mariančík describes NeosVR as a “metaverse engine,” although you might think of it more as a multi-user platform that lets you build worlds and experiences in VR itself while collaborating with others in real-time.
Here’s Mariančík in his own words:
My primary VR project – a VR universe for our ideas, thoughts and imagination, bridging the gap between people’s minds and technology. It uses many novel technologies and approaches to create a dynamic virtual world that has a mind of its own, but grants you “superpowers” to change and influence this universe, creating your own experiences and sharing them with others.
Check out the video above for a sneak peek of what’s to come. The scene, Mariančík says, was “built and recorded in NeosVR in realtime multiplayer.”
The freeform mass of floating stuff in Mariančík’s example is a worthy illustration of the complexity a single world can hold, but what is it all for?
In its latest update, named the ‘User Friendly Update’, the alpha version saw a new mechanic that allows you to interlink individual worlds, represented as tiny orbs. The “world orb” also has a 360 thumbnail and number beside it to indicate how many users are within it. This essentially allows you to build several interlinked, multiuser spaces filled with objects of all types, so you could make your own art gallery, photogrammetry-based tour through a physical place; almost anything you can imagine using NeosVR’s toolset.
If you’re interested in signing up for access to the NeosVR beta, head over to the project’s main site here(see update above). Once we get our hands on NeosVR, you can bet we’ll have a deep dive into what makes it tick. In the meantime, check out the time-lapse video below for a quick demo of just how you might make such a complex scene.
Bethesda’s recent flatscreen-to-VR ports, Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR, face a few common challenges in terms of immersion. Neither are perfect, but at this point in time, both games represent something VR users haven’t had yet: vast and rich open-world adventures that offer a high degree of customization and replayability—so called real AAA VR games. Here I’m going to attempt to break down Bethesda’s flagship VR games into some more identifiable parts so we can see who comes out on top: food for thought for the PC VR gamer who is on the fence between the pair.
At the launch of Fallout 4 VR—for whatever reason—Bethesda didn’t support Oculus Rift natively, something that was remedied on launch of Skyrim VR. Even up until today though, the company hasn’t added the Oculus Rift badge to its list of supported platforms on Fallout 4 VR, leaving it in a grey area. Yes, it technically works thanks to OpenVR, but you’ll actually have to map the Touch buttons yourself by going into a beta branch of SteamVR and opting into the “openvr-inputemulator-temporary – Temporary branch”. So out-of-the-box VR support for all SteamVR-compatible headsets isn’t perfect on Fallout 4 VR.
VR Optimization & Mods
Winner: Skyrim VR
Fallout 4 VR has undergone two major patches since release, and while it’s gotten much better in terms of VR optimization since launch, it still has its limitations. Let’s face it, it’s a modern game built on an engine that was shoehorned into VR and not built from the ground up with VR support in mind. The short of it: you’ll probably have to futz with settings and .ini files to get it exactly right on your system. An NVIDIA GTX 1070, which is widely accepted as the median ‘VR Ready’ GPU, is the bare minimum you should have when playing Fallout 4 VR, making it not only less accessible, but less stable as a VR game in general.
As an older title that was first brought to the lower-spec PSVR headset, Skyrim VR works phenomenally well on lower-end VR Ready GPUs, and rarely causes those immersion-breaking moments of popping textures, blurriness, and short render distances that you still see in Fallout 4 VR to date.
Not to mention Skyrim’s many texture and weather mods that can give the aging title a serious facelift. With Skyrim VR being so computationally cheap when compared to Fallout 4 VR, you can afford to toss on pretty much as many non-UI changing mods as you damn well please (this guy threw on 285). The winner here is clear.
Role-playing Experience
Winner: Skyrim VR
Being able to choose how the story unfolds is a large part of what makes modern RPGs great. Having the ability to select your path can make the difference between being swept up in a story, and being swept along in the story, and in that respect not all RPGs are created equal.
I’m at first tempted to say Fallout 4 VR outdoes Skyrim VR in pure choice thanks to its multiple endings, which provides a slightly different terminus to the adventure. But that doesn’t mean Fallout 4 VR offers a better role-playing experience in VR just because you can get to the end in a few different ways.
image courtesy Fallout 4 Wiki
As a voiced protagonist in Fallout 4, you’re not given the freedom to define your own role and build upon the character’s lore. Instead of having the ability to choose which response is right for you word-for-word, like in Skyrim and older games in the Fallout franchise, in Fallout 4 your responses are bland, and voiced by someone else. This essentially tasks you with piloting another, fully fleshed-out person instead of filling in the gaps yourself, which is weird in VR when the voice coming out of your head is someone else’s.
In Skyrim, the world’s lore is rich enough to provide you with all the information you need to construct your own personality, be it a Nord stealth archer abandoned at birth and forced into imperial service in Cyrodiil before landing on the scene as a deserter, or the daughter of a mage family that was blackballed from every major magic college in Tamriel except Winterhold in Skyrim. You have that freedom; it’s not just a male/female selection screen with a few avatar sliders that defines you.
While Skyrim’s end goal is more simplistic than Fallout 4’s for sure, I found it left an appropriate ‘RPG gap’ for me to fill in myself. As a developer, you can choose to close those gaps for a variety of reasons and still have a great game, but just not as great of a role-playing experience.
Leveling Up
Winner: Skyrim VR
Gaining new abilities and growing stronger is a core element of what makes Bethesda’s RPGs fun. What should be a gradual increase in natural skill acquisition ultimately becomes an exponential increase in your ability to do interesting stuff. In both games, you’re rewarded with points you can spend on special abilities, and although a few years older, I found Skyrim’s perk/skill acquisition system much more natural: you simply have to engage in your chosen activity to get ‘better’ at it.
Perk Chart from ‘Fallout 4’
In Fallout 4, you’re given a simplified Perk chart featuring selections in Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. You can basically choose whichever skill you want provided you’ve put the points into your ability first and have the required level. This, essentially, means you can upgrade a skill you’ve never used.
image courtesy Nexus Mods
In Skyrim, the time doing something you actually like doing directly translates into better skills in that area, and because it’s a ‘perk tree’, choosing correctly is salient to forming a unique character with unique abilities (unless you go hog-wild and spend an ungodly amount of time maxing everything). Main criticisms of this system are that it’s not flexible enough and you have to spend too much time grinding for secondary skills like blacksmithing or enchanting, taking away from the more primary abilities like Destruction, Armor or Lock Picking. Both systems appeal to different playing styles, but Skyrim’s way of letting you progress in levels is decidedly more conducive to natural gameplay in VR.
User Interface
Winner: Fallout 4 VR
Both games are menu-heavy experiences, a design trope that unfortunately feels like an unnatural relic in VR. But Fallout 4 really has something going for it that Skyrim VR just doesn’t: the Pipboy.
Pipboy in VR | Photo courtesy Bethesda
It, as far as user interfaces go, is a golden gift to the VR version of Fallout 4. You can lift up your arm and fiddle through settings just like you’d expect to if you were magically thrown into the Wasteland. Skyrim VR is virtually unchanged from the flatscreen version UI-wise, making it second place by a long shot, given the way that the same old menus from the flat version just pop up and float in front of you.
Combat
Winner: Fallout 4 VR
Neither combat systems are perfect; you can’t naturally sheath/holster or draw a weapon, and there’s zero hand presence to speak of. That said, Fallout 4 VR has a distinct advantage over Skyrim VR thanks to its gun-heavy combat system.
When appropriately outfitted with glow-sights and scopes (which now work, although at launch they didn’t), you can play the game basically as it was intended. VATS, the slow-mo targeting mechanic, is also something that works really excruciatingly well in VR. Giving you time to line up shots and feeling the thrill of accurately dispatching several enemies in one go is really satisfying.
image courtesy Fallout Wikia
Skyrim VR on the other hand offers some fun in the magic and bow-shooting department, but falls flat on its face when it comes to melee combat. No matter how hard you try, it’s nearly impossible to shake the omnipresent feeling that the 20 pound broadsword you’re carrying is really just a balloon animal that you can waggle back and forth to magically do damage to enemies.
‘Wow’ Effect
Winner: Skyrim VR
I’ll fully admit this this a matter of taste, and not based on anything objective in the slightest (we’re all different, right?), but this bears mentioning. Trekking over a mountain pass to solo-fight your first dragon is without a doubt one of the most exhilarating (and terrifying) moments I’ve had in VR gaming to date. There’s a lot of variety in the world of Tamriel, and as a result Skyrim VR is packed with those sorts of moments when you look around to say “wow, that’s pretty,” or “wow, that’s terrifying,” or “wow, that’s scary.” Skyrim VR is full of “wow.”
Image courtesy Bethesda
Fallout 4 VR is mostly a grey, drab and dirty world, and that aesthetic personally doesn’t lend itself to those breathtaking moments of pure awe. There are of course moments when you drop in on a Mutant running with those terrifying nuclear suicide bombs, or look out over the Wasteland from a Brotherhood of Steel airship, but I felt like those were too few and far between.
– – — – –
The Verdict
If you’ve been keeping count, then you’ve seen that Skyrim VR has taken a majority of the categories, so by now my personal verdict is probably obvious. Here’s a quick recap of the talking points:
Skyrim VR leaves more of a ‘gap’ for pure RPG’ers thanks to an immersive lore, is better optimized for lower-end systems, has a better overhead for all sorts of mods, a more natural skill leveling system, and a clear ‘wow’ effect (at least for me). Despite offering magic and bow-shooting, combat takes a hit by being largely melee-based, and UI is a straight port from the flatscreen version making a menu-heavy system worse.
Fallout 4 VR offers a rich and vast world that sacrifices pure role-playing immersion for a definitive story, has a less natural (but more flexible) leveling system, good combat thanks to guns and VATS, and a more natural UI thanks to the Pipboy. Shaky VR optimization keeps it out of the hands of some VR players though, leaving less graphical overhead for the more fun additive mods.
Trebuchet, the Montreal-based studio behind Prison Boss VR (2017), just launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new game that places you on the back of a trusty steed and puts a lance in your free hand. The multiplayer VR jousting game, appropriately dubbed Jousting Time, is targeting SteamVR-compatible headsets including Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Windows VR headsets.
Trebuchet is aiming to raise $30,000 CAD ($23,400 USD) on the crowdfunding platform in an ‘all-or-nothing’ campaign that is set to last until May 2nd, 2018—meaning if they don’t hit their goal, all backers are refunded their pledge amount. If Trebuchet’s Kickstarter video is any indication (shown above and below), the game will hopefully be just as delightful and ridiculous.
image courtesy Trebuchet
As for the game itself, according to the Kickstarter page, you control your horse with the left hand, maneuver your weapon with your right, and gain speed by yelling at your horse through the VR headset. There are several weapons available besides your trusty lance including broadsword, fencing foil, mace, bow, and battleaxe. Each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses, so understanding the specifics of each weapon and “gauging your opponent’s speed versus your own will determine who will win in the arena.”
Trebuchet is also adding a spectator mode via a web client, which will support PC and Mac at launch, and plans to also integrate community functions for Twitch streamers and viewers. Spectators will be able to vote for which weapons you want jousters to use, send emotes to show your happiness or discontent and bet on your favorite jouster to earn in-game coins which you can use to buy new reactions.
Outside of the actual gaming arena, the studio says there will also be a hub area called ‘the Feast’, a place where you hobnob with other VR jousters, launch jousting matches, and play integrated mini-games.
Estimated arrival to the lowest funding tier ($12 CAD, $9.40 USD) is slated for a November 2018 beta testing period. Higher funding tiers offer backers a shot at the game in closed alpha, which is slated to begin July 2018. Check out the Kickstarter campaign here.
Blind is an upcoming psychological thriller that puts you in a world of darkness. Given a special cane, you use echolocation to find your way through the game’s mysterious narrative.
Created by developer Tiny Bull Studios and indie label Surprise Attack Games, Blind puts you in the shoes of a young woman who has just gone blind. Led by the disembodied narrator Warden, you navigate a sprawling mansion, solve puzzles and uncover the mystery of your predicament.
Gramophones and other objects that make sound become lighthouses in the all-encompassing blackness.
Blind was inspired by Tiny Bull Studios’ prototype PC game Come to See My House, which won The Best Game award at the Turin, Italy jam site for the 2014 Global Game Jam. Tiny Bull later partnered with Australia-based indie label Surprise Attack Games to produce Blind.
The narrative-driven puzzle adventure game is said to contain “four to five hours” of gameplay and will be releasing in spring on all major PC-based VR platforms, with a version for PSVR releasing later in 2018.
Interested in jumping into the VR racing scene? This weekend you can snag discounts up to 80% on some of the best VR sim racing games out there.
Courtesy of gaming deal and charitable giving site Humble Bundle, now through Monday, April 9th at 10AM PT, you can find steep discounts on three great VR sim racing games through the ‘Festival of Speed‘ sale:
Two of these titles have found their way onto our list of the Top 5 VR Racing Sims, with Project Cars 2 sitting at #1 and Assetto Corsa at #4. Though Dirt Rally is no slouch either, nabbing an honorable mention on our list, which you should check out if you want to know more about these games to see which one best suits your taste.
Sprint Vector (2018), the VR racing game that uses a unique locomotion system to send you speeding through the world’s Mario Kart-style tracks on your own two feet, is finally getting a free access weekend on Rift. Oh, and you might have the chance to win big at Oculus’ ongoing two-year Rift anniversary giveaway too.
Already in effect, Rifters can grab Sprint Vector for free right this second and play in its adrenaline-pumping multiplayer matches. Free access continues until April 9th at 3 AM ET (local time here).
To enter in a chance to win a prize, you’ll need to play a multiplayer match on Saturday, April 7th between 1PM – 2PM PT (local end time here). And no, you don’t have to win the match to enter, you just have to play during that one-hour window. Prizes include Oculus Store credits, a brand-new PC, and the exclusive “Golden Account” that unlocks 100 games for free.
If you miss out on this weekend’s giveaway, next weekend marks the last chance to try as Oculus will open a new free access weekend for a yet-unannounced game.
What makes Sprint Vector so unique? Developers Survios dub their novel locomotion scheme “Fluid Locomotion,” a system which requires you to pump your arms as if you were running in place in order to move. You can also think about it as if you were skiing with ski poles, but instead of pushing off the ground with a pole, you thrust your arms downward while activating the trigger button on your controller, thus moving you forward.
It really is massive amounts of fun, but just make sure to keep a bottle of water and a towel handy for longer sessions. Check out why we gave Sprint Vector a solid [9/10] in our review.
