Based on the popular party game Mafia (also known as Werewolf),Werewolves Within represents Ubisoft’s first dive into the world of social VR games. I first got my hands on the game at GDC earlier this year, and while it remains basically the same since I last played, really settling into the gameplay provided me with some amount of insight into myself, including just how comfortable I am lying to complete strangers. The answer: I’m surprisingly comfortable.
Werewolves Within Details:
Developer: Red Storm Entertainment Publisher: Ubisoft Available On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR Reviewed on: HTC Vive Release Date: December 6th, 2016
Gameplay
If you’ve ever played the party game Mafia, which is designed around the idea of assuming a number of assigned ‘innocent’ roles in effort to root out the bad guys, you’ll be right at home with Werewolves Within. When starting a match (requiring at least 6 people), you’re automatically assigned 1 of 11 different roles, each with their own abilities. Your job, providing you’re neither a Werewolf, Turncloak, or Deviant, is to sniff out and correctly guess who among you is a shape shifting fiend.
Thankfully the game provides a handy in-game reference guide to see what role is what, so first-timers can jump in without too much fuss. That same guide can also be used to vote for the suspected Werewolf, use your unique abilities, and mute/kick fellow players.
Because everyone was functionally a newcomer to the game, the playsessions I participated in were casual and pretty forgiving, but I can imagine savvier players picking it up and dominating once they get an instinctual handle on how each role functions.
It took a few matches until I was assigned the Werewolf, and I was surprised to see another Werewolf sitting across from me. We exchanged a furtive glance, and taking his lead we started to gang up on what was revealed to be a the Drifter sitting next to me, a British guy playing on PSVR.
Like most players, he would lean over to the left or right of him to initiate the ‘Whisper Mode’ and secretly talk to people next to him. Eventually I stood up, initiating a ‘Speech Mode’ that lets you mute all other players, and summarily accused him of conspiring against us, the peace-loving townsfolk. Hook. Line. And sinker.
Of course, once voting was over and we had falsely convicted the Drifter, my Werewolf-kin and I were ousted to reveal our true natures. Absolutely sure that no one would trust me from that point forward, I left the match for another group.
The game is cross-compatible with PSVR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, and also offers private matches so you can try out your new deception tactics on friends and family. And while the aim of the game is virtual deception, I really wouldn’t be surprised if I made real friends in the process during random quick matches.
Any which way you slice it, Werewolves Within proves to be cleverly balanced and frighteningly fun.
Immersion
Setting the right atmosphere for a game is important, and that goes doubly so for one that’s essentially static like Werewolves. Thankfully the game is absolutely dripping with cool outdoor set pieces, that because of a constant bustling of background wildlife, really makes the game feel alive. It’s actually a shame you can’t get up out of your seat and explore the Romani camp, or the little village’s various pubs, stores and churches. They’re just too expressive not to be curious.
Set in the fictional town of Gallowston, a cartoony Central European village filled with timber-framed houses seemingly pulled straight from classic monster movies like Frankenstein (1931) or The Wolf Man (1941), you’re supplied with a randomly assigned avatar. Around the campfire you’ll seeRomani fortunetellers, headscarf-clad spinsters, gruff tradesmen, hunters, and an assortment of dopey looking serfs. This is where the polished aesthetic of the game somewhat clashes with my idea of personal choice.
Firstly, you can’t choose your avatar, which isn’t the worst thing in the world I suppose. But regardless of whether you have hand controllers like PSVR Move, the Vive’s controllers or the recently released Oculus Touch, you are constricted to use automatic emotes, i.e. ‘press A for clap your hands’. This is by far my least favorite part of the game. I would much rather have the weirdness of imperfect inverse kinematics that you see in other games than downgrade my positionally-tracked hand controllers to that of a mere gamepad. Because of this I ended up not using the emotes, often times forgetting they were there and uselessly waving my controllers to no effect. The next time I play, I’ll probably use a gamepad, which is a damn shame.
Comfort
As a 100% static experience, you’ll either be sitting the whole time or standing very briefly to activate ‘Speech Mode’, so there’s no artificial locomotion to contend with. This makes Werewolves Within hands down one of the most comfortable VR games to play, which would be great for inexperienced users like curious moms and dads who just don’t quite see a point in VR just yet.
Although not specifically a point on comfort, getting out of your seat and walking around the environment proves to be a bit unsettling as your avatars head is stretched form its still seated body—so staying in your relative real-world position is a must.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Quill is Oculus’ ‘VR paint’ app, and it’s nothing short of spectacular. Tucked away inside this creative-focused app, however, is an interface that’s so simple, you might miss its brilliance.
Quill, which is available to every Touch owner for free, is impressive. I thought initially that there would be a lot of overlap between Oculus Medium [our review] and Quill (both art-focused in-house projects from Oculus), but Quill does seem to firmly maintain own its own style and functionality—Medium is to clay as Quill is to pencil & paper. Quill also feels like a substantial artist’s tool, even more so than Medium, with a powerful layer system, brush styles and opacities, exporting, and capturing functionality.
Sketching is an extremely accessible medium, and that’s recreated by Quill. But just like the same pencil & paper can make a stick figure or a detailed human body, in the right hands, Quill can do amazing things. One of the pre-loaded scenes, First Tuesday by Ric Carrasquillo, is jaw-dropping in its style, skill, and scope. It might be one of the first VR art masterpieces.
And while it’s clear that artists are going to be able to make amazing works inside of Quill, it’s the program’s dead-simple, but somehow highly functional, interface that’s the most unexpected. Graphically, the interface looks charmingly like something out of the early days of the first GUI operating systems, but what’s important is the fact that the interface takes known PC affordances and applies them easily and effectively in VR.
The interface pops up in your off-hand like a tablet, while your main hand becomes a little blue 3D cursor. On your virtual tablet you’ll find familiar buttons slightly raised up in 3D, that are just so easily pressable with your cursor. Even though the menu manages to cram lots of buttons close together, they remain incredibly easy to hit thanks to the precision of Touch, and its relatively small size which makes it easy to get your hands close together. I haven’t once felt like I accidentally hit the wrong button, even when clicking through the robust layer menu.
From the outside, this might look like a placeholder interface (and a bad one for VR at that), but it’s actually impressively functional, and it builds on decades of PC interface design.
‘How do you click’? Well the cursor and the height of the buttons makes that obvious, just press the cursor to the button you want. ‘How do you scroll?’ Well, everyone knows how to use a scroll bar, just drag it down with the cursor. Crucially, you can even hover over buttons and icons to get a modal popup that gives a text description of the button. Like our PC interfaces, Quill’s interface manages high functional density without losing precision.
The ‘back to basics’ interface design is important because it mimics what so many of us already know about using computers. That’s important for adoption, especially for a tool like Quill which, for many digital artists, may be the first time they ever use VR. And they’ll be looking for familiar things, like Quill’s layers menu which uses an easily understood structure, icons, and interactions that are similar to industry-standard digital art tools.
We’ve seen plenty of similar PC-style interfaces in VR—like SteamVR’s menu, for instance—mostly floating in front of you as a large static panel with a laser pointer in your hand. Just like leverage over a length multiplies force, an extended pointing device—like a laser pointing stretching 10 feet from your hand—amplifies the subtle movements of your hands so that a tiny hand movement makes for a much larger movement at the end of the pointer. And when the ‘click’ action is in the form of a trigger pull, that means your hand will move (and move the end of the laser pointer by a greater distance) every time you’re trying to press a button or initiate an action. The result is that the interface and its corresponding elements need to be extra large to compensate for this amplified imprecision of our hands, which then necessities large angular movements of our arms to navigate from one side of the panel to the other.
With Quill’s interface, you retain the full dexterity that your hand is capable of at a 1:1 scale since you’re hand literally becomes the cursor. The confidence of control afforded by the program’s interface makes it much prefered to many other interfaces I’ve seen in VR.
Normally I’d say that an interface like Quill’s is too reliant on old paradigms for VR, but the level of effortless functionality is rather remarkable; building on this—on what we already know about using computer interfaces—might be the best direction to head to find out what’s next.
I’m listening to the soundtrack of The Matrix right now, and it’s because I just played SUPERHOT VR, a one-of-a-kind game exclusively for Oculus Touch that will make you feel like you’re in the midst of the highly choreographed slow motion action that The Matrix is known for—except in VR, you’re the director.
Superhot VR Details:
Developer: SUPERHOT Available On: Oculus Touch (Oculus Home) Reviewed on: Oculus Touch Release Date: December 5th, 2016
Gameplay
Superhot VR is built around an interesting slow-motion mechanic: time only moves forward as you move. If you stand completely still, the game world is frozen. If you begin to move your hands or head, the action picks up speed until you stop again. With bullets flying toward your face from multiple directions, you’ll find this power quite handy as you pause to think about what to do next.
The beginning of the game is a bit bland as a few enemies come at you unarmed, one at a time, looking for a first fight. The punching mechanics aren’t exactly fleshed out—the red enemies will take goofy swings at you when they aren’t even close enough, and a single punch of almost any force dispatches them with ease. You’ll be happy that it works this way later on though, when the action starts ramping up and the guy about to punch you in the face is the least threatening thing in the scene.
As long as you don’t move much, you can survey the scene around you before you act. Occasionally, a scene will start with a gun leveled directly at your head, which can be rather intimidating, as being hit with a single bullet (or any attack for that matter) will kill you instantly and take you back to the last checkpoint. You’ll find that you have no body (like most VR games), so only a shot to the head will kill you, but I found it natural to try to dodge bullets with my real body anyway, despite knowing it didn’t matter to the game. For the most part, the hit detection against you is good, though every once and awhile a bullet will come close to your head and still kill you even though it might have seemed like it shouldn’t have. Other times you’ll get hit squarely in the face and curse the unrelenting enemies… only to start the scene over and make sure they get an extra helping of pain this time around.
After the first few tutorial scenes of just punching people, you’ll move on to thrown objects. Pretty much anything that you can grab—an ashtray, a stapler, a fire extinguisher, etc—will kill enemies with a single hit. Aiming and leading in the start-and-stop reference frame of Superhot VR is challenging without feeling unfair. Later you’ll get access to guns, and you’ll delight in landing a perfectly led headshot (for no other reason than to show off skill, as a hit anywhere will kill any enemy, and there’s no bonus for a headset); if you miss it’ll be no one’s fault but your own.
Pretty much all of the gameplay elements are introduced within the first quarter of the game. There’s a number of enjoyable and challenging scenes, but Superhot VR comes up just short of the gameplay crescendo that it seems to be building the whole while. One particularly cool scene at the end really challenges you but is ultimately just a long string of a similar gameplay mechanic repeated. A few extra mechanics beyond punching, throwing, and shooting would be welcome, especially level interactivity—perhaps destructible environments or other hazards to befall you and your foes.
Never in VR have I felt like the sort of action hero that Superhot VR has made me. When you kill an enemy, the object they’re holding flies sympathetically in your direction, making for awesome moments of catching a gun right flying through the air just in time to blast the guy that’s about to kill you. You can be sure that people are going to make up their own ‘trick shot’-like challenges to enhance the difficulty of the game and to show off creative and skillful ways to kill enemies (like using only punches, or maybe only thrown objects).
At one point a scene began with me grabbing a gun and landing a headshot on a nearby assailant. I began to turn to the right where the next enemies were approaching, but the gun was at that point going to fly behind me. Thanks to slow motion, I actually managed to catch the gun with one hand behind my back, and then quickly whipped it around in front of me leveled weapons to give the next threat a double dose of hurt. It felt awesome.
Controlling the slow motion mechanic becomes second nature with ease; I honestly found myself, ever briefly after taking off the headset, feeling like the real world should be slowing down around me as I moved more slowly.
One very cool aspect of the slow-motion mechanic is that the ‘difficulty level’ is automatic in a sense. If you want it to be harder, just move faster, and the scene around you will do the same, forcing you to act and react faster. If you learn a level well enough, you can play it in near real-time, executing a series of skilled moves to dodge and defeat enemies to clear a scene in just seconds. It’s a very fun way to increase the difficulty of any part of the game.
Superhot VR tackles many of the VR game design critiques I pointed out just a few days ago in a Twitter rant. Every movement matters. Every pull of the trigger counts. My body is anchored inside the virtual world because I have to dodge punches, knives, and bullets—it’s interacting with me in a significant way. Enemies aim well, and you have to dodge better to stay alive.
Like Neo stopping the bullets for the first time at the end of The Matrix, I wanted to be able to hold up my hand and say “No,” to what I knew in an instant was the end of the game that had come a bit too soon. But, despite my training, I was not The One.
At $25, the roughly two hours of initial game time would feel a little too pricey if not for Superhot VR’s alluring gameplay. The thing is, if I could pay twice as much and get twice as much content, I’d do it (and recommend it) in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, like many of the most compelling VR experiences right now, that’s not an option.
Immersion
The world of Superhot VR is one of three colors—white for the environment, red for enemies, and black for weapons.
Enemies are human-shaped, but are devoid of any details like a face or fingers. Instead they’re represented as being made of some sort of crystalline structure, which seems like a good choice because killing one of these creatures amounts to a ‘shattering’ of the head, arm, or torso, whereas a more realistic portrayal would be technically complex to achieve (and really quite violent). You’ll fear these enemies, especially when one has a shotgun, but they don’t feel particularly human, even if they take on the silhouette.
If these people were rendered as realistic humans, this would be overtly violent.
The rest of the environment is completely white, like the minimal aesthetic of Mirror’s Edge, except even more extreme. Literally everything is white except for enemies and weapons. This lets you identify the bright red enemies—and the objects you can use to dispatch them—quickly and easily, but it does detract from feeling like you’re in a real environment. Fortunately you’ll be focused mostly on surviving, rather than gawking at the space around you.
Speaking of the space around you, each time you clear a room, you’ll be teleported to another with more foes to dispatch. You’re technically teleporting from one region of the same scene to another, and you’ll be able to occasionally see the enemies you destroyed in the previous room still shattering into slow-motion shards. It can be tough to tell how one teleport connects to the rest though; a single color on some prominent feature in the—otherwise entirely white—environment could act as a visual anchor to aid in the player’s environmental awareness.
Watching and hearing a bullet whiz by your face is seriously intense. One bullet will kill you, and when you turn to find one coming right at you, you’ll have to repress your “oh sh$%!” instinct and manage to stay still and calm until you can figure out how to dodge to survive. It can be awesomely visceral. So too can moments where bullets intercept and deflect off of one another, or when an enemy’s bullet blows apart a knife careening through the air which was your last hope of survival.
Superhot VR has a hint of a narrative framework but it doesn’t amount to much; the game is largely an arcade title that mostly focused on the unique gameplay. It would be great to see more narrative woven into the gameplay, or maybe even just eliminate it all together—right now what’s there feels like a novel distraction.
It actually seems like a bit of a missed opportunity that this game isn’t literally built on The Matrix IP, as the execution elicits that feeling of awesome bullet-time combat that the franchise is known for (not to mention all the VR themes), and would open up rich narrative opportunities. Who knows the Wachowskis? We need to introduce them to Superhot VR.
While the audio and visual design is solid, the game does have an indie vibe to it (animation and enemy pathing aren’t spectacular, and the 3D models are fairly basic). Superhot VR is an amazing foundation for a truly unique VR game with exceptionally interesting core gameplay, and I would love to see what it looks like with another step up in production value.
Comfort
Aside from a single moment that purposefully disregards the usual VR safety recommendations, Superhot VR was entirely comfortable from a VR best practices standpoint through my time playing. The game effectively keeps you facing forward toward the cameras to ensure you don’t lose tracking. Fight scenes don’t require artificial locomotion, and you’re automatically teleported to the next scene once you complete the first one.
You’re going to want the largest possible Guardian setup you can fit in your available space. The need to dodge is going to take you a step or two in either direction, and you’ll be stretching your arms out in desperate reach of weapons flying through the air and you won’t want to feel limited by the physical space around you.
Superhot VR uses a shader which adds a grid-like grain, presumably for aesthetic purposes. Since VR headsets already induce their own grain thanks to things like mura and the screen door effect, the shader is an unwelcome choice in VR. It isn’t particularly bothersome, but the game would probably appear a little bit more crisp in VR without it.
One persistent issue the game has is with centering. It would be nice to have a marker on the floor to show you where to return to after having dodged 50 bullets and shuffled to the side to grab a gun, but not such marking exists. When the ‘next’ button appears, it’ll often appear inside of your or outside of the field of view because you aren’t centered where the game is expecting. It doesn’t hamper gameplay fortunately, but can be a little annoying between scenes.
That ‘next’ button comes in the form of a pyramid which asks you to “grab” it, and then breaks when you do. Minor point… don’t ask me to “grab” something and then have it break into pieces, it’s just an odd and unsatisfying way to make an interface. If you want me to break it, ask me to punch it! Only if you want me to hold it, should you ask for it to be grabbed.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Oculus are offering a new Touch launch bundle which packs in 5 of the best supported titles into one $90 bundle.
Oculus Touch launch day is now upon us and the company that brought us the Rift is revving its retail engines to ensure the new motion controllers are as attractive as possible to consumers. The devices ship with over 50 titles available to buy on launch day and has even more packed in for free.
However, in order to entice Touch owners to part with yet more of their cash, Oculus have laid on this new games bundle, sporting some of the most promising launch titles together with an overall discount of 25% at $90. The titles included are HTC Vive favourite Space Pirate Trainer, James Bond puzzle homage I Expect You to Die, KingsprayGraffiti, the extremely promising SUPERHOT VR and newly Touch enabled title The Climb.
It’s a decent selection of titles spanning a few genres which should give a nice starter boost to anyone building their motion controlled games collection for Rift. In case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, head over to our detailed review of Oculus Touch right here.
MARE is a new adventure title from a former member of Team Ico, the studio responsible for the PlayStation classic Ico and the (very, very) long awaited The Last Guardian. Here’s the game’s teaser trailer.
Anyone who has experienced the bewitching, desolate charms of Ico, a 2002 platform-puzzler for PlayStation 2 following a boy’s quest to escape captivity alongside his female companion, you’ll likely draw some similarities with a new title being developed for Oculus platforms called MARE.
There’s a good reason for that too as the sole developer on the title, Rui Guerrero, was also part of Team Ico until he left part way through the group’s torturous development of the forthcoming PS4 title The Last Guardian. At first glance, there are glimpses of MARE which could fleetingly be mistaken for Ico. The bleached, softened lighting cast across a world filled with ancient ruins all towering over the protagonists’ tiny form. But MARE is all new and what’s more, it’s being build for virtual reality.
Coming to Oculus platforms some time next year, MARE follows the journey of a young girl and a mechanical bird as they traverse through a lost, mythical world. In terms of what the game is actually about, little is known just yet. What we do know is that the title is roughly 50% complete and is being built exclusively for Oculus VR hardware. You indirectly control the bird, glancing at key focus points in the world such that the bird triggers key events in the landscape. The recently released trailer (which you can view in full at the top of this page) shows the bird “sailing the winds” swooping between vanes, with the girl in tow.
The game looks stunning, with vast ancient deserted structures for the duo to explore and a Team-Ico-esque attention to beautiful animation clearly in evidence. A clear visual lineage can be seen here with comparisons to be made with Ico and The Last Guardian, something which will delight fans of those game.
Again, it’s not clear when we’ll see the final version of MARE ship, but Rui Guerreiro has stated that – given his pas experience with protracted development cycles – he’s not willing to set a timeline just yet. You can however find out more about MARE’s somewhat complex development journey thus far in an excellent expose over at Polygon here.
Oculus has today confirmed all 53 launch titles that will be available on December 6th for the launch of the Touch controllers.
Among the 53 Oculus Touch titles, 22 have been seen previously on SteamVR, leaving 31 brand new Oculus Touch titles (including a few former Rift titles updated to include Touch). Those that pre-order Oculus Touch will nab and impressive lineup of eight free Touch games (non pre-order purchases will see six, missing out on The Unspoken and VR Sports Challenge). Here’s the complete lineup.
The company also revealed a brief glimpse of the new version of Toybox that will be launching free alongside the controllers, and confirmed the experience will indeed have multiplayer (though it sounds like it may be limited to just two players).
In addition to the 53 launch games, Oculus says 2017 will bring the likes of Giant Cop: Justice Above All, and the much anticipated Robo Recall (free to all Touch owners), Lone Echo, and Arktika.1.
In a rather curious move, Chinese game developer Snail Games has announced that they’ve licensed the IP for the popular PC game Ark: Survival Evolved and are using it to create Ark Park, a dinosaur theme park VR experience.
Ark: Survival Evolved is a multiplayer action-exploration game that’s all about taming dinosaurs and building increasingly advanced technology to thwart your opponents—which sounds almost nothing like Ark Park, a title which is aiming for a focus on education and “the opportunity to truly appreciate and understand dinosaurs in their natural habitat.”
It’s unclear exactly what IP Snail Games has licensed; as Ark: Survival Evolved certainly doesn’t have a claim on non-fiction dinosaurs, it may be the 3D assets and engine tools the company has built which will be repurposed for Ark Park.
Snail Games has not published any VR content before, though it is known for mobile and online games like Taichi Panda and Age of Wushu.
Ark: Survival Evolved is still in Early Access, and while it technically has Oculus Rift support via SteamVR, it is hardly designed around VR specifically. With this partnership, Studio Wildcard can continue developing Ark: Survival Evolved, while providing a different type of Ark experience from Snail Games, but this time made from the ground up for VR.
With Ark Park, Snail Games intends to provide a large theme park experience where “players will participate in a multiplayer tour, so they can share the visceral gameplay and the thrill of witnessing dinosaurs up-close and personal”, according to their announcement of the game. The vision sounds rather ambitious: “We wanted to achieve a level of visual authenticity and player interactivity that will set a benchmark in the VR industry”, said Shi Hai, CEO of Snail Games.
While they haven’t shown any videos or explained exactly how the game might play, they have confirmed that players “can watch, learn about, and interact with more than a hundred Jurassic-period creatures and dinosaurs while they explore the park”. Since Snail Games has historically specialized in RPG/MMO games, it seems likely they’ll want to make the world and multiplayer as seamless as possible, so that it feels like you’re just visiting a real life dinosaur zoo with your friends and other people. Fingers crossed that it ends up more like Jurassic Park than a cheesy mechanical dinosaur park.
Adding to the idea of a seamless multiplayer world, the company said via their Facebook page that Ark Park will have a “comprehensive weather system and a day/night cycle.” Their early art also hints towards being able to use maglevs and jeeps to traverse the park, in addition to walking on foot.
Futuremark have now released the full version of their long awaited, dedicated virtual reality benchmark, VRMark. And, after months of research and development, the company has found itself having to redefine its own views on how the difficult subject of VR performance testing should be tackled.
Futuremark are developers of some of the world’s best known and most widely used performance testing software. In enthusiast PC gaming circles, their visually impressive proprietary synthetic gaming benchmark series 3DMark has been the basis for many a GPU fanboy debate over the years with every new version bringing with it a glimpse at what the forthcoming generation of PC gaming visuals might deliver and PC hardware fanatics can aspire to achieve.
Therefore, it was inevitable that once virtual reality reached the consumer phase, the company would take an active part in VRs renaissance, in fact with immersive gaming came lofty initial hardware requirements and a necessary obsession with low latency visuals and minimum frame rates of 90FPS. So surely a new Futuremark product, one focused purely on the needs of VR users, would be a slam dunk for the company. VRMark is the company’s first foray into the world of consumer VR performance testing and recently launched in full via Steam, offering up a selection of pure performance and experiential ‘benchmarks’, the latter viewable inside a VR headset.
However, as anyone who has experienced enough virtual reality across different platforms will tell you, putting a number on how ‘good’ a VR system performs is anything but simple. With dedicated VR headsets come complex proprietary rendering techniques and specialist dedicated display technology a lot of which simply hadn’t been done at a consumer level before. The biggest challenge however, the biggest set of variables Futuremark had to account for, was human physiology and the full gamut of possible human responses to a VR system.
Futuremark initially approached the issue from a pure, analytical perspective, as you might expect. You may remember that we went hands on with a very early version of the software last year which at the time came complete with some pretty expensive additional hardware. Futuremark’s aim at that time (at least in part), to measure the much coveted ‘motion to photons’ value – the time it takes for an image to reach the human eye, from render time to display. However, you’ll notice that if you’ve popped onto Steam to purchase the newly released VRMark, it does not list ‘USB oscilloscope’ or ‘photo-sensitive sensor’ as requirements. Why is that?
We asked Futuremark’s James Gallagher to enlighten us.
“After many months of testing, we’ve seen that there are more significant factors that affect the user’s experience,” he says, “Simply put, measuring the latency of popular headsets does not provide meaningful insight into the actual VR experience. What’s more, we’ve seen that it can be misleading to infer anything about VR performance based on latency figures alone.” Gallagher continues, “We’ve also found that the concept of ‘VR-ready’ is more subtle than a simple pass or fail. VR headsets use many clever techniques to compensate for latency and missed frames. Techniques like Asynchronous Timewarp, frame reprojection, motion prediction, and image warping are surprisingly effective.”
Gallagher is of course referring to techniques that almost all current consumer VR hardware vendors now employ to help deal with the rigours of hitting those required frame rates and the unpredictable nature of PC (and console in the case of PSVR) performance. All these techniques (Oculus has Asynchronous Timewarp and now Spacewarp, Valve’s SteamVR recently introduced Asynchronous Reprojection) work along similar lines to achieve a similar goal, to ensure that the motions you think you’re making in VR (say, when you turn your head) matches with what your eyes see inside the VR headset. The upshot is minimised judder and stuttering, two effects very likely to induce nausea in VR users.
“With VRMark, you can judge the effectiveness of these techniques for yourself,” says Gallagher, “This lets you judge the quality of the VR experience with your own eyes. You can see for yourself if you notice any latency, stuttering, or dropped frames.” And Gallagher shares something surprising about their research, “In our own tests, most people could not identify the under-performing system, even when the frame rate was consistently below the target. You may find that you can get a comfortable VR experience on relatively inexpensive hardware.”
To describe Futuremark’s VR benchmarking methodology for consumers in more detail, here’s James Gallagher explaining it in his own words.
[Futuremark are] recommending a combination of objective benchmark testing and subjective “see for yourself” testing. We think this is the best way to get the whole picture, especially for systems below the recommended spec for the Rift and the Vive.
The reason is that the concept of “VR-ready” is more subtle than a simple pass or fail.
On the one hand, a literal definition would say that to be truly VR-ready a system must be able to achieve a consistent frame rate of 90 FPS on the headset without dropping a single frame. In this case, every frame you see comes from the game or app. You are getting exactly the experience the developer wanted you to have. You would use VRMark benchmarks to test this case.
On the other hand, when a system is unable to maintain 90 FPS on the headset the VR SDK will try to compensate by using Asynchronous Time Warp or frame reprojection or other techniques. In this case, only some of the frames you see on the headset are the real frames from the game. The others are created by the SDK to fill in the gaps caused by missed frames. Now, if the SDK does such a good job of hiding the dropped frames that you cannot tell the difference between it and the pure 90 FPS experience, then you could perhaps say that this second system is VR-ready as well. You can use VRMark experience mode to test this case.
Here’s an example to illustrate:
System A:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 6500
Average frame rate: 140 FPS
System B:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 5000
Average frame rate: 109 FPS
System C:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 3500
Average frame rate: 75 FPS
System D:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 2000
Average frame rate: 40 FPS
The benchmark results show that system A and System B are both VR-ready for the Rift and the Vive in the pure sense. Both have enough performance to render every frame at 90 FPS when connected to a VR headset. But the difference in scores and average frame rate tells you that system A has more headroom for using higher settings or for running more demanding VR games and apps.
System C and system D did not achieve the target frame rate. So the question now is whether the VR SDKs can compensate for the missed frames? For that, you would use VRMark Orange Room experience mode with a connected headset.
You might find that you cannot tell the difference between system C and system B when using experience mode. Even though system C is regularly dropping frames, the SDK is able to compensate and hide the effects from the user. The VR experience is as good as a true VR-ready system.
With system D you might find that there are noticeable problems with the VR experience. The SDK is not able to compensate for the low frame rate. You might notice stuttering or other distracting effects.
From this, you would conclude:
System A is VR-ready with room to grow for more demanding experiences.
System B is VR-ready for games designed for the recommended performance requirements of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
System C is technically not VR-ready but is still able to provide a good VR experience thanks to VR software techniques.
System D is not VR-ready and cannot provide a good VR experience.
I think many gamers will want to know that the system they are considering will be truly VR-ready in the technical and pure sense. You can only get that insight from a benchmark. You also need a benchmark test that runs on your monitor to see how far beyond 90 FPS a system can go. The VRMark Blue Room benchmark is a more demanding test that is ideal for comparing hardware that outperforms the Rift and Vive recommended spec.
At the other end of the scale, price-conscious gamers might be perfectly happy with a cheaper system that can appear to be VR-ready through technical tricks, for example, the new Oculus Rift minimum spec announced at Oculus Connect in October. These systems can be evaluated with the benchmark (how much will the VR SDK have to compensate) and with experience mode (how well does the SDK compensate).
With all of that laid out, I asked Gallagher to explain why, if Futuremark are now recommending people adopt a ‘see for yourselves’ methodology for VR benchmarking, why does he believe VRMark is needed at all? In theory any single VR application or game could be chosen to be used in the above methodology. Why should people invest in VRMark?
“I think the value of VRMark is that it gives you an easy way to make both these objective and subjective assessments using common content in one app,” he says, “The benchmark tests provide a convenient, easily repeated VR workload. They give you a pure test for VR-readiness. Experience mode gives you a way to judge the quality of the user experience on systems that don’t meet the pure definition.”
The latest VRMark is now on sale via Steam for use with the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and OSVR compatible headsets. Current feedback on the title is mixed, with some criticising the lack of more extensive ‘pure’ benchmark functionality. Purely as a showcase for VR, the price (£14.99 / $19.99) seem perhaps a tad steep right now, especially considering a chunk of that pretty showcase (‘The Orange Room’) is available in the free demo version. That said, VRMark is a sight to behold in VR and along with the methodology above, there are many who many find the money worthwhile.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on Futuremark’s recommended methodologies your experiences with VRMark and thoughts on how VR behcmkarking may evolve over time in the comments below.
Pinball FX2 VR arrives tomorrow on Vive and PlayStation VR along with a popular new The Walking Dead themed machine. Originally a launch title for the Oculus Rift, the game will now be available on all three major VR platforms. We take a look at Pinball FX2 VR on the HTC Vive.
Pinball FX2 VR Details:
Official Site
Developer:Zen Studios Available On:Oculus Home (Rift), SteamVR (Vive, OSVR HDK), PlayStation VR Reviewed On:HTC Vive Release Date: March 28th, 2016 (Rift), November 29th (Vive, PlayStation VR)
Having developed pinball games for almost a decade, with Pinball FX and Zen Pinball appearing on multiple previous and current-gen consoles, several mobile platforms and PC, developer Zen Studios was in an ideal position to bring their particular brand of pinball to virtual reality. Pinball FX2 originally launched on Xbox 360 in 2010, saw major improvements on Xbox One, and made the jump to VR in the form of Pinball FX2 VR on the Oculus Rift in March. No longer exclusive to Oculus, the game moves to the Vive on SteamVR and to PSVR, along with the first DLC pack of five extra tables, and introduces a new table based on Telltale’s The Walking Dead series (first seen in 2014).
Gameplay
Believe it or not, it’s pretty much pinball. This involves smacking a steel ball around with a pair of flippers, trying to score as many points as possible, avoiding the drain at the bottom. You get three balls, plus the chance to earn more during the game. Each machine has a unique design, with combinations of ramps, bumpers, additional flippers, and so on. You score points by hitting targets, rolling across ramps, or completing combinations of targets and routes. For any hope of a high score, you’ll need to become proficient at hitting specific targets repeatedly in order to advance the ‘mode’. With just three machines provided with the base game, the expectation is to become intimately familiar with each, through hours of practice. Everyone should find some immediate satisfaction from randomly keeping the ball ‘alive’, but as with the real thing, it’s only through learning a machine’s layout and quirks over time that the game becomes truly rewarding.
While Pinball FX2 VR is considered to have very realistic ball physics in terms of impacts and inertia, the design of the tables (for instance the generous angle of the flippers and the positioning of the ‘outlanes’) is such that each round tends to be more forgiving than a real machine and lasts longer; you’re less likely to drain the ball compared to the real thing. In addition, game is not afraid to introduce supernatural or unrealistic elements to the tables to enhance the fun. The result is a pinball simulation that leans towards accessibility, while remaining rewarding in the hands of an expert.
You’ll quickly find a table that suits you best, and it’s easy to become hooked to Pinball FX2 VR. But from a studio renowned for its licensed pinball machine designs, it’s disappointing that The Walking Dead table is the only licensed table available right now. With the three standard tables, five from the first DLC pack and The Walking Dead table, this is still significantly short of the 70+ tables available for the non-VR version of Pinball FX2. Understandable to some extent, as each table isn’t just optimised for VR, it is re-worked and enhanced, but there’s a big discrepancy here.
Immersion
As with most conversions, bringing Pinball FX2 VR into VR delivers a truckload of additional immersion over the original game. Developers effectively get this for ‘free’ due to the nature of virtual reality, but it is a measure of a good VR implementation that extra steps were taken to enhance the experience further. For Pinball FX2 VR, that includes creating an attractive living space, reworking some of the table elements and surrounding the player with themed visual effects in a spectacular manner that can only be achieved in VR.
You’ll find the game’s tables inside a ‘beachside mansion’, a semi-futuristic, semi-retro interior that is intelligently laid-out, although it’s a shame that a freeform teleportation system isn’t available, and you’re stuck moving between fixed nodes. As you launch a game, the mood of the space adjusts to suit the design of the particular machine you’ve picked, but it remains apparent that you haven’t left the living space entirely, which creates a more cohesive experience as you switch tables. I’d like to see some customisation of the room beyond choosing between three machines, or perhaps even several alternative play areas, for instance a ‘retro arcade’ environment.
The Walking Dead table (launching on the 29th as DLC for all versions of the game) in particular impresses with a convincingly spooky atmosphere of a zombie adventure, using the same ‘hand-drawn’ art style and original voice actors from Telltale’s popular series, with a chapter-based progression that is surprisingly effective, all contained within a pinball game.
Every table has a few visual tricks that extend beyond reality, which can become jarring at times. In the case of the ‘Paranormal’ table, the passenger plane passing inches from your nose as it crash-lands just becomes irritating after several games. Pinball is a ‘just one more go’ type of game, and the last thing you want is a repeated irritation. In general however, the balance between visual flourishes and clean design is well balanced. The game could, perhaps, offer an option to disable the external animations for those who just want to concentrate on the machine.
The original game introduced the each table’s detail with fly-by camera views; you won’t find that here in the Vive version, instead you can do your up close inspection by walking around the table and leaning towards it. As with most high-quality VR experiences, you’ll feel like you really need to walk around the machine as if it’s a physical object, and you’ll want to lean on the machine to take a closer look, when there’s nothing physically preventing you from simply clipping straight through it. And if you do, even though it feels odd, it’s a really neat way of seeing the table detail up close.
The best way to take immersion to the next level is with haptic feedback. Construct yourself a PinSim, and if you’re lined up just right, it will really feel like you’re interacting with a physical table. To reproduce some of the sensation, strapping Vive controllers (the triggers activate the flippers) either side of a table with the correct height and width can also deliver a pretty convincing feeling without much effort.
Comfort
I assumed this was going to be one of the less demanding scenarios for VR rendering, but Pinball FX2 VR turned out to be one of the clearest illustrations of the importance of high performance for VR gaming. The low hardware resolution of today’s VR headsets means that there is a significant difference in clarity even across the short distance from the front to the back of the table; it’s such a challenge to resolve the detail with this limited number of pixels.
Stand at a typical viewing distance, and you’ll be missing much of the detail towards the back. As such, the difference between the multiple resolution options (with the very high settings performing super-sampling) is very obvious, and combined with up to 8x MSAA, the image quality that can be achieved with enough performance overhead is remarkable. Pinball seems to be one of the best illustrations of an image quality difference, as the table is full of intricate geometry (the wire ramps show aliasing severely) but it is very demanding. You’ll need a serious GPU in order to hold 90 FPS on high settings, which again is particularly significant in pinball.
Thanks to asynchronous reprojection, the Vive seemed smooth as I scanned around the table on the highest settings, but the ball movement had become a juddering mess, which was affecting the all-important physics and timing. In fact, it was only at very low settings that the motion appeared to hold 90 FPS in all situations, so if you want the very best experience you’ll need a top-end GPU.
The intention is to play standing up, as you would in front of a real table. It’s very convincing, and hard to play it any other way once you’ve tried it, but the problem is that you’re constantly tilting your head down. And in order to get the best image from your VR headset, it’s best to look through the centre of the lenses, so you’re likely to have a slightly more tilted head compared to playing on a real table, which can move the lenses out of their sweet spot. On top of that, you’re wearing a headset, and the case of the Vive, a particularly front-heavy one, which adds a considerable strain on your neck. I began to feel some discomfort after just half an hour, which admittedly is longer than I’ve ever stared at a pinball table in reality.
It’s not all bad news on the comfort front. If you hit the ‘recenter’ button, it assumes you are standing and positions the table at a sensible distance below you. This means that unlike the real thing, players of any height can enjoy the game to its full potential. You can also use the ‘recenter’ button to force a different perspective, hitting the button from one position and then moving to play it in another, so that the table ends up closer to you if you’d prefer.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
The Steam Autumn sale is once again upon us, and this time around this time Valve have flagged close to a whopping 300 VR titles for discounts, including games that support both the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and OSVR.
It’s amazing how big the market has already become, especially given how niche VR still is. It seems Valve has done a good job in attracting everyone, from big to small developers, to publish on Steam, and to grow the customer base with huge sales. We can now even say that there are hundreds of VR titles being discounted at once.
In total, the Steam Sale includes 277 titles which claim VR support, 263 of those sport HTC Vive compatibility, 116 are Oculus Rift ready and 95 playable via an OSVR headset. Most of the titles included are of course built on SteamVR’s platform, powered by OpenVR. This means that Oculus Rift owners soon to take the plunge on Oculus Touch (out on December 6th) may well consider an investment in titles which support or indeed require the SteamVR motion controllers – titles which were previously not playable for Rift owners. That said, with the Oculus Touch yet to reach homes, some considerations might be important before taking the plunge, such as if the game has been built with other motion controllers in mind as opposed to generic support via the OpenVR API. Important too is whether or not the game is (or soon will be) available on Oculus Home, as Rift users may find it more convenient to launch software from.
For HTC Vive owners of course, the Steam Sale is a smorgasbord of the best and worst the platform has to offer. Just a few examples include the excellent Pool Nation VR is currently 25% off, the classic Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes 50% off, Raw Data at 20% off and Firebird – La Peri 30% off and many, many more. Check out the full list over at Steam here.
The Steam sale is now running and is due to finish on November 29th at 10am PST.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
