Facebook Spaces, the company’s social VR application which launched in beta one year ago, is getting an entirely new avatar system and customization tool, something Facebook says in a recent blog post was designed to make avatars “more expressive and customizable than ever.”
The new avatar system, which includes “hundreds of new options” will feature new head shapes, hairstyles, facial features, and the ability to choose your body type. The update will also come with new controls to adjust the size, position and angle of your avatar’s features, as well as an overhaul to the automatic avatar creator which runs your photos through a machine learning algorithm to extrapolate an avatar.
The company says the update will arrive sometime this week. Check out a preview of Facebook Spaces’ new avatars below:
“Bringing together artists and engineers from across our team, we drew on techniques from film animation, graphics, game character design, and mathematics to create a whole new, re-vamped version of avatars for Spaces,” the company said.
“We’ve worked on making avatars feel more present in the VR space with richer materials, better lighting and shadows. We’ve also fine-tuned the tech under the hood to make avatar body movements look more fluid and natural,” Facebook Spaces creators continued.
an evolution of ‘Spaces’ avatars, image courtesy Facebook
Released in beta last year on Rift, the app essentially lets you connect with friends and family in a private multiuser environment where you can communally watch 360 videos, draw in the air, and play mini-games. You can also interact directly via Facebook by posting VR selfies to your Timeline, engage in a Messenger video chat with anyone regardless of whether they’re inside VR or not, and even livestream your in-app exploits directly to Facebook Live.
Facebook Spaces has since updated to include support for HTC Vive, which includes cross-platform access. Facebook’s head of social VR Rachel Rubin Franklin said late last year that Vive support is “only the beginning: We’re working to bring Facebook Spaces to even more VR platforms and devices in the future, so stay tuned.”
Skyrim VR (2017), Bethesda’s premier virtual reality port of the hit open-world RPG Skyrim (2011), has finally made its way to PC VR headsets after its November 2017 launch on PlayStation VR. Unlike the studio’s recent release of Fallout 4 VR (2017), it appears being an older title, and having to squeeze into the lower graphical confines of PSVR, has done it a literal world of good, as it both looks and feels more like the Skyrim we know and love. Barring some imperfections, Bethesda has successfully opened up the giant region of Skyrim to a platform that can boost the pixels where it counts, giving you that immersive mountain vista you always craved, or the moody evening in the tavern reading up on the world’s ancient lore.
Note: It’s been a while since I played the original Skyrim, but I’ve had the opportunity to put in nearly 100 hours of questing across the flatscreen game’s vast terrain over the years. Time limitations only allowed me a fraction of that in the VR version, so for the purposes of this review, I’ll be focusing on the mechanics specific to the PC VR release, and try my best to balance my appraisal of the game for both new and returning players. I’ve also never had the chance to play Skyrim VR on PSVR (our review here), so this is an entirely new review specific to the PC VR platform.
Gameplay
An open world rife with possibilities; the chance to step into the boots of the Dragonborn, a foretold hero who appears once in a millennium who can speak the language of the dragons, a magical species woven into the world’s mythos. Thought long-dead, the winged overlords of the world of Tamriel appear just as you enter the scene as a prisoner on the chopping block. I won’t spoil it any further in case you’re new to the game.
Offered the choice of a variety of races, each with their own proclivities to magic, strength, enchantment, etc, you set out into the world’s sword and sorcery narrative. The entire avatar creator is here from the original Skyrim, replete with nose, eye, head, hair, complexion, and scar modifiers—something I don’t waste my time on since you never see yourself again anyway. Unlike the original, there is no third-person view, because, after all, this is a first-person VR game.
image captured by Road to VR
This is where you’re given the first of your moral choices, the ones that help shape your expectations of the world, and the world’s expectations of you. Do you start the game as a shiftless thief, sneaking into homes and taking everything that isn’t bolted down? Or are you a reserved, honorable warrior who doesn’t boast pridefully of your accomplishments, never taking anything that isn’t owed to you? Many of these moral choices are decided through the game’s text-based dialogue system, which admittedly isn’t ideal in VR, but it’s really the only way of inserting your opinion into the game’s narrative.
Skyrim VR plays very well on PC, and it’s really no wonder why. As a seven year-old game that first found life in VR on PSVR, I got it to run on max settings, supersampled via SteamVR’s automatic tuner at 176% with only minor hiccups on our test rig, the Exemplar 2, which is admittedly a step above the game’s recommended spec of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB and Intel Core i7-4790. Thanks to a bevy of options, lesser VR-ready systems should be able to chew through Skyrim VR on lower settings.
Perfectly rendering everything as far as the eye can see is an impossible task though; the max render distance is great, although rendering finer geometry is pretty noticeable in larger areas as you see grass and plants spring up in front of you to fill out the ground’s basic textures. There are plenty of options including various render toggles, but the only choice for anti-aliasing is predictably temporal anti aliasing (TAA) which isn’t exactly ideal. I didn’t find any issue though visually, as there’s not much TASS-related blurriness to speak of. Some textures can ‘pop’ and glare at certain angles, but this is only a seldom occurrence. Generally speaking, Skyrim VR for PC is the Skyrim VR you were promised, and can bet all of these things can be finagled into working more smoothly with a little elbow grease thanks to the knowledge base of the game’s robust modding community (see note on modding at article’s end).
There are only two fundamental locomotion options: teleport and hand-relative direct movement. Neither are incredible in my opinion, but are still serviceable. Teleporting across the region of Skyrim is laborious and it feels a little too cheaty for my tastes, so I immediately opted for direct movement (also called ‘free locomotion’). I personally am not a fan of hand-relative free locomotion, and would much rather have head-relative movement, which better helps me make natural micro-adjustments along my forward path. You can choose between snap turning with a variable degree, or smooth turning with variable rotation speed.
I found all control schemes, including scrolling through the game’s vast amount of menus, to be much more simple on Oculus Touch than with HTC Vive motion controllers. When played on Vive, the game makes extensive use of the Vive controller’s touchpad, so selection is mapped to thumb swipes and not verifiable clicks of the touchpad itself. I never really got the hang of it to be honest, and found myself much more readily playing with Touch simply because of the ease of navigating the game’s menus with the thumbstick over the touchpad. It’s also a bit awkward to use the Vive’s left grip button to jump while resting your thumb on the touchpad to move forward. Many times I found myself confusing controls and accidentally crouching when I wanted to jump, or ‘Fus-Roh-Dah’-ing the townsfolk and guards because I depressed the right grip button instead of the left to sheath my sword. Oh, you can also play on gamepad, but where’s the fun in that?
An adjustable height slider is available in the settings so you can appear taller in-game, something I turned to the max so I could sit down and still be at a reasonable height while running through the world and talking to the world’s six foot-tall NPCs. A physical ‘sneak’ is available, i.e. letting you physically bend down to ‘sneak’, although if you’re already seated, you’ll always be in sneak mode, so I tended to stick to the toggle sneak option which activates with the push of a button. One issue with that it sneak mode makes you physically shorter in-game, making your seated lower point of view even lower. To remedy this, I would physically stand in dungeons and activate physical sneak, so I could be the correct height and forgo the automatic height readjustment of the sneak mode toggle altogether.
Image courtesy Bethesda
Combat, while somewhat of a mixed bag, is serviceable. Melee combat isn’t great simply because your weapons, which are stuck to your hands, don’t really telegraph any in-game weight, so you can waggle what appears to be a 20 pound battle-axe as if it weighed nothing. Blocking with a shield isn’t really that great either, as it seemed to work only a fraction of the time I used it, making it basically a non-starter from the get-go. Archery and magic casting are really where Skyrim VR shines though, which should be good news for stealth archers and mages alike.
Image courtesy Bethesda
Immersion
Bad news first: one of the worst parts of Skyrim VR is the predictable (and entirely necessary) continuation of the base game’s menu system. On a standard monitor, these make absolute sense, but in VR you’re faced with a floating window where all of your things are displayed in text form, which takes away from the majesty of the world and replaces it with an ancillary task that just doesn’t fit in the rustic world of Tamriel. Even though I understand the confines of the game don’t allow it, ideally all items would be represented physically so you could holster them appropriately, and so you would ideally have the option of keeping a sword on your hip, a bow and quiver on your back, and a satchel of food and medicine by your side. Instead, you just go through a menu and equip or consume whatever you need at that moment, and in a paused state so you can scroll freely without fear or being attacked.
image captured by Road to VR
If the menu is any indication of how things are, then its obvious that object interaction just isn’t going to be a natural experience in Skyrim VR, as you’ll see a potion on a shelf and spirit it away with a single button press into your inventory where it will go never to be seen again. Hand presence is also null, as the models of your high tech VR controllers are rendered when you haven’t actively equipped something, which is totally out-of-place in the context of the world.
Despite these misgivings, I can’t underline enough just how awesome it is to look over a mountain vista and see the vast, explorable world ahead of me. And while graphics are clearly showing their age, it’s all rich enough to make it a cohesive and frankly still breathtaking experience for anyone starting for the first time, or returning to a lovingly remembered place like a well decorated house Breezehome, or the dank sewers of Riften.
Image courtesy Bethesda
Besides that, you can cook, blacksmith, enchant items, collect tons of readable books, hunt, ransack houses, and help every bratty child in the game without even so much as an afterthought for the main questline. And if you do, you’ll have a seemingly endless amount of time to digest the game’s world-building elements, be it side missions to uncover revelations of the past, or through the hundreds of books scattered throughout the game that detail Skyrim’s well-crafted history. The game is undoubtedly vast and rich—something which is precious and few in VR at the moment. Not only that, Skyrim VR includes a number of official add-ons including Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn, adding more questlines and flavor to the world.
Both locomotion styles, teleportation and direct movement, are exceedingly comfortable ways of moving around. While you can run, turn and jump in-game, an adjustable FOV filter helps keep things feeling comfortable. You can turn this off for maximum FOV, although I found it both useful and non-intrusive at its default setting.
Because the game was designed first for flatscreens, the game’s architecture is littered with stairs, something that if not created with care, can possibly lead to nausea. Stairs are seemingly randomly designed to either let you glide smoothly upwards (good), or make your POV feel every bump on the way up (bad), which isn’t very comfortable in the short-term. Despite this, I still found Skyrim VR to be a mostly comfortable experience which didn’t hit any of those simulation sickness buttons in my brain I recognize all too well.
Modding: Mods should hypothetically work, although I wasn’t personally successful in getting any, either manually or through a few of the handy modding tools including LOOT, Mod Manager 2, or Nexus Mod Manager. None of these are tuned to recognize Skyrim VR currently, so easy mod installation isn’t likely until those services are expanded to include the VR version too, or cleverly tricked into working and correctly assigning boot load. Considering users cracked into Fallout 4 VR on launch day, I suspect similar results from other more familiar with manual mod installation even though I had no personal success. I’ll update this when more information is available.
After getting our hands on VR rhythm lightsaber game Beat Saber at GDC 2018 last month, we’ve been looking forward to more information on the game’s release date, which is now confirmed for May 1st. Last week developer Hyperbolic Magnetism revealed a new track, which will launch with the game’s Early Access version.
Update (4/6/18): Hyperbolic Magnetism today told us that the anticipated VR rhythm game Beat Saber is set to release in Early Access on May 1st, and will be available on both Steam and the Oculus Store. The studio says that more details about what will be included in the Early Access launch will be shared the week before the game’s release.
PSVR support hasn’t been confirmed yet, but the studio notes, “we are actively working on other platforms and we will give you more info when we are ready.”
Original Article, Updated (3/30/18):Beat Saber will launch on Steam in Early Access on May 1st. The game’s composer, Jaroslav Beck, last week revealed another one of the game’s 10 confirmed launch tracks, titled Legend. A mixed reality video from LIV.tv shows off the new track while giving a fresh look at the game in third person:
Developer Jan “Split” Ilavsky said last week on Twitter that the new song is “hopefully the last song released before the game release.”
Owlchemy Labs, the studio behind Job Simulator (2016) and Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017), are back again with a new whimsical take on the simulator-satire genre – Vacation Simulator.
Unveiled at this year’s GDC, we got a chance to go hands-on with the colorful, object-based game that puts you in an imperfect simulation of what life must have been like before all the jobs (and now vacations) were replaced by automated labor.
Taking what they’ve learned from their previous titles, Owlchemy Labs is setting Vacation Simulator apart from Job Simulator by offering multiple interlinked areas which can be traversed by node teleportation, letting you pop into sections of the game that offer room-scale activities like playing beach games, building sand castles and chomping down on popsicles you can buy with sand dollars (replete with a $ dollar sign). There’s also a narrative at play, although we’ve only seen one area in the demo, so what that’s supposed to be, we just can’t say.
Survios, the studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018), debuted a new single player VR game this year on the GDC expo floor, an upcoming arcade boxing title that puts you in the shoes of Adonis Creed, son of Apollo Creed and protegé of Rocky Balboa.
It’s hard not to stop and gawk at people playing Creed: Rise to Glory in pair of actual boxing rings on the expo floor. While a small crowd of curious onlookers formed around the side-by-side rings, we got a chance to record a first look of the game in action.
The demo first puts you in the gym with a lifelike Sylvester Stallone where you train with heavy bags and punching dummies, each their own minigame. Later you’re tossed into the ring to experience the game’s unique desync mechanic which not only slows down your in-game boxing gloves as you lose stamina, but can knock you completely out of your body if you get staggered or even knocked out.
Survios hasn’t announced which platform the arcade boxer will hit when it arrives later this year, although we’ve seen it demoed both on Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Survios, the studio behind Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018), showed off Electronauts at GDC this year, their upcoming VR music creation app for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift that makes DJ’ing so easy that even the least musically talented person can do it.
While it hasn’t substantively changed since we saw it first at CES in January, it’s the first time Electronauts has been put on display in a public venue.
The app lets you easily mix music and create something actually listenable because every interaction in Electronauts is quantized, meaning every time you activate an instrument or loop a track, it automatically clicks on beat. Using your in-game selector wands to toss out ‘beat grenades’ or jam on samples using an orb-like drum kit – well, that’s something only available in virtual reality. Check out our hands-on with Electronauts to learn more.
Electronauts is still slated to release sometime in 2018. There’s already a Steam page, and Survios is currently entertaining applications for their ‘Creator Beta’ which will launch soon for Vive and Rift owners.
Indie VR developer Mixed Realms, creators of badass VR ninja simulator, Sairento, announced this week plans for their next chapter, coming in the form of Sairento Reborn. Described as “bigger and better,” SairentoReborn hopes to open up the title, allowing cooperative hack & slash fun for both VR and PC players.
Speaking this week at the HTC’s Vive X demo day in San Francisco, Singapore-based indie studio Mixed Realms said that their first title, Sairento, has turned a significant profit, to the tune of a claimed “3,000% ROI” on an initial development fund of $30,000 (which would work out to $900,000); the developers tell us they’ve sold about 40,000 units so far.
Sairento, which plays like a mashup between Raw Data (2017) and Superhot VR (2017), offers players the chance to become an agile super-ninja, wielding swords, guns, bows, and more. The game has been released across all major VR platforms (Steam, Oculus, and Viveport), and holds respectable ratings across the board. The title began its life in Early Access on Steam in late 2016 and claimed its full launch in February, 2018.
Image courtesy Mixed Realms
Aiming to springboard off of their initial success, developer Mixed Realms said during the Vive X event that they’re planning to raise $3 million for the production of the next chapter, Sairento Reborn. From the description offered by the developers, the new title sounds more like a reboot, with a much larger scope than the original, and one major goal being to open the door to PC players as well as VR players, allowing both to play with and against each other.
The plan, the developers say, is to offer the same kind of first-person action as the original, for VR players, while PC players will play the game in third person. The studio plans to balance each side fairly, but uniquely. Mixed Realms says they plan to sell Sairento Reborn at a lower price than the original, but will monetize further with subscription and microtransaction options—they pointed to Overwatch (2016) as a game successfully monetizing with this model.
During the event Mixed Realms also affirmed plans plan to bring the original Sairento to PSVR, and expect it to hit the platform in 2018.
Update (3/30/18): An earlier version of this article mistakenly transposed some digits and stated that Sairento had earned $9,000,000 in revenue instead of $900,000; this has been fixed accordingly.
Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence platform designed to understand natural language, launched support for Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017)across all VR platforms back in June of last year. Last week, Ubisoft said in a forum post that it was pulling support for Watson due to unspecified “technical reasons.” The company has since reversed that decision, saying Watson-powered voice controls will remain online “through 2018.”
Update (03/31/18): Ubisoft is overturning their previous decision to take down IBM Watson voice controls in ‘Bridge Crew’, which was slated to go into effect March 29, 2018. The company says in a forum post that they’re extending Watson“through 2018.” The original article follows below.
Bridge Crew players could choose between multiplayer and single player modes, the latter of which allowed you to fill in the roles of the ship’s other posts—Engineering, Tactical, Helm—by clicking a few boxes to issue orders. You could even jump in and take command yourself, although it was decidedly a much slower way of dealing with incoming Klingon threats. Adding Watson integration essentially allowed a sole player to issue orders to the non-human-controlled posts from the captain’s chair using natural language such as “lock on target, dude!” – “fire photon torpedoes, dumdum!” – or “go to warp now, please! And make it snappy!”
Ubisoft says that the nine-month access period has been “enriching,” but that Watson will be “discontinued for technical reasons on March 29, 2018.”
Frankly, Bridge Crew has undergone very few updates following its May 2017 launch. Minor bug fixes in June were followed by Watson integration, and then the game was opened up to non-VR players in a bid to rejuvenate its multiplayer mode. For such a solid game—we rated it [9/10] in our review—the company has done minimal work in expanding the campaign or offering DLC.
It’s unclear what Ubisoft will do in its wake, although the company has said more information about upcoming updates should arrive “very soon.”
At GDC this year, I had a chance to step into Beat Saber, an upcoming rhythm game from Czech Republic-based indie studio Hyperbolic Magnetism that tasks you with slicing flying cubes with lightsabers to electronic dance music. If that sounds cool to you, then you’re in luck. It is cool – but more than that, it’s also ridiculously well executed.
It’s a deceptively simple concept; blocks appear about a 20 meters away marked with colored directional arrows. The color of the arrow corresponds with the color of your lightsaber, so you have to slice the right block in the right direction, and do it on the beat (more or less). The tutorial level I played before actually getting into the gameplay was about as short as that description.
In case you missed the teaser that went viral earlier this year, garnering 1.5 million views so far, here it is:
Obstacles are tactically placed to get you moving. A combo-breaking glass wall will periodically slide into view, sometimes making you move to the left or right, and sometimes making you duck for cover for fear of losing your precious combo multiplier. Blocks bearing an ‘X’ force you to not only be accurate in your slices, but move your sabers to safe positions so you don’t accidentally hit them.
Slicing a few blocks isn’t that difficult. The challenge comes in economizing your movements so you can whip through a dense patch of blocks, slicing downwards and resetting for a quick left and right swipe.
Without knowing it, I was dancing – not as great as, say, Kent Bye from Voices of VR Podcast (seen below),but I was unexpectedly moving my feet, getting into the rhythm of the game and having a blast. Even though the game doesn’t give out points for style, Beat Saber created an immediate need for me to be stylish.
Some of this can be chalked up to the game’s haptics, which create a satisfying buzz in your controller when you touch anything with your sabers. I found myself artfully dragging my lightsabers against the glass barriers while slicing down blocks, and feeling the rumble of what my brain plausibly accepted as an energy beam slicing through anything and everything. This little addition helped be feel like the swords were really there, and gave me an instant mental model of their size and reach.
The impossible, twisting architectures swaying ahead of me and neon lightshow blazing in the background are an exclamation point at the end of every interaction I had with Beat Saber. Despite the outside optics of spazz-dancing (who cares anyway), I felt cool.
Coming to Early Access in April to SteamVR-compatible headsets, Beat Saber will arrive with 10 songs, each with 5 levels of difficulty. Developer Ján Ilavský told Road to VR that there’s a possibility of also releasing a level editor in the future that could allow you to place blocks and barriers yourself. Music, for now, is created by video game composer Jaroslav Beck, although Ilavský was adamant that the studio was actively reaching out to other artists to fill out exclusive, purpose-built music for the game moving forward.
The Beat Saber website features the PlayStation VR logo, indicating future support, although Hyperbolic Magnetism hasn’t officially spoken about when PSVR support will arrive.
Based on Klaus Teuber’s popular board game Settlers of Catan (1995), the VR version of Catan is available now on Oculus Rift and Gear VR, and will be a launch title for Oculus Go. The game features cross-play multiplayer, and is said to be coming to more VR platforms in the future.
Described as “true to the classic but optimized for virtual reality,” Catan VR was developed by VR studio Experiment 7 in partnership with Klaus Teuber and his sons Guido and Benjamin, along with the Catan and Asmodee Digital teams. The board game takes place in a virtual room with views of the island of Catan itself through the windows.
Speaking to Gamesbeat last year, Experiment 7 managing director Demetri Detsaridis explained how VR offers a different experience to other digital versions of the game. “When you have the entire field of view in front of you – and Catan is on a big table – the pieces get to be larger than life,” he said. “The ‘screen’ is enormous. You can do cool things like have sheep run around or have water flow or have wheat blowing in the breeze without it looking like you’re peering into the inner workings of a wristwatch.”
Image courtesy Experiment 7
Classic Catan AI opponents are available for single player, and the game supports cross-platform multiplayer with friend invites and matchmaking. For now, the game is playable on Oculus Rift and Gear VR, and will form part of the launch line-up for the Oculus Go. The game was playable at GDC 2018 this week, with Rift and Go devices at the same table, as seen during Tested‘s Oculus Go video. Additional platforms are said to be on the cards, but Experiment 7’s previous titles have not jumped beyond Rift and Gear VR yet, despite Dungeon Chess (2017) being confirmed for PSVR many months ago.
Image courtesy Experiment 7
Originally due to launch in late 2017, Catan VR is the third release from Experiment 7, who specialise in bringing board and tabletop games into their ‘Magic Table’ platform, an immersive environment designed for ‘social presence’ that supports cross-platform multiplayer. The team’s long-term goal is to attract other developers to the Magic Table platform. Their first game Magic Table Chess (2016) introduced the concept, followed by the Dungeons & Dragons-themed Dungeon Chess.
“The first time I saw Catan on the Magic Table, I was fascinated by what VR has to offer,” said Teuber. “The game I made in our living room with my family 25 years ago in Virtual Reality? It’s incredible. I never imagined actually stepping into the world of Catan when we first started making cut-outs and dreaming about exploring new lands.”
