Onward’s next patch will introduce anti-cheat measures to the game.
The patch, due to release next week, will precede the arrival of the long-awaited 1.8.8 update. In developer Downpour’s most recent blog update, the studio reasoned that ” recent events forced us to focus our efforts on an anti-cheat system we have been working on over the past couple of months, and we are planning to release patch 1.8.7.3 for Onward that will bring this brand-new system next week.”
So if you’ve been struggling with those sorts of issues in the game of late, hopefully next week’s patch brings some fixes for you. Season 11 of the VRML Onward league officially started this week, making these measures all the more vital.
No date yet on update 1.8.8, though, which is due to overhaul game logic and improve player lobbies and game modes. It will also introduce a nighttime version of the shooting range.
Looking past 1.8.8, Downpour plans to add the Abandoned map with both day and night variants in 1.8.9 and the Turbine map in 1.8.10 with the team also looks to finally implement a party system and ranking and progression too. Plenty more to look forward to for one of VR’s most popular multiplayer shooters, then.
We reviewed the Quest version of Onward when it launched last year. “Gun handling feels great, tracking seems solid, and there’s a wide assortment of maps and several game modes to pick from,” we said, giving the game 4/5. “No matter how you look at it this is still an immensely entertaining, challenging, and downright exciting VR shooter packed with content and is easily my new favorite multiplayer VR game for Quest.”
Pavlov developer davevillz posted on Twitter a quick clip of some new Pavlov gameplay running on an Oculus Quest 2, which will feature “improved graphics” once it comes to Oculus App Lab.
Here’s the footage, sorry for the weird spacing, it’s an issue with the Streamable embed:
The clip is very brief, but it does give you a good look at just how crisp and detailed the game looks on a Quest 2. For the most part the original Oculus Quest and Quest 2 feature all of the same games and experiences, but in some cases developers may choose to tap into the extra power under the hood of Facebook’s latest headset. Back when the Quest 2 first released, the best example of that was The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.
Now in the footage above, you can see how smooth and crisp the textures look and how fluid all of the gameplay seems. Obviously things may look a bit different in the headset, but typically things look better once you’re in VR so it likely works in Pavlov’s favor here.
While the entirety of Pavlov isn’t available on Quest, you can play the game right now in the form of Pavlov: Shack over on SideQuest. You’ll need to sideload it still right now, but that process is very simple if you follow our sideloading on Quest guide.
Or, you could just wait. Pavlov is coming to Oculus App Lab which is an alternative distribution method for Quest developers to bypass the need for sideloading while still not being listed on the main official store. Pavlov developer davevillz confirmed the game has been submitted for approval to App Lab, so hopefully it’s just a matter of days.
Let us know what you think of Pavlov running on Quest 2 in the comments down below!
Alvo is a very fast-paced 10-player online VR shooter with influence from non-VR shooters like Counter-Strike that’s planned to hit PSVR first this March, followed by PC VR and Quest with full crossplay across all three platforms.
This one has been on our radar for years and it’s finally nearing release now. We first wrote about Alvo about 2 1/2 years ago and it has come a long way since then, as evidenced by a new trailer back in September. As you can see in the footage above, it doesn’t look like a game hampered by the technical and hardware limitations of the PSVR at all whatsoever. There’s good reason why it landed on our list of most-anticipated VR games for 2021.
Most notably is the speed of movement and fluidity of actions. You’ll see the player vaulting over fences, sliding around corners, and ducking behind cover with the response time of something you’d see in a PC VR shooter like Pavlov or Contractors, not a PSVR shooter. As someone that has spent a lot of time playing every VR platform out there, I can say that this does not look like a rigid PSVR game. That’s a very strong compliment.
I have a lot of love for Firewall Zero Hour and the new ground that it broke, proving there is a market for competitive-focused VR games on platforms like PSVR, but the speed and intensity of games like Alvo is definitely appealing to me as well so I’m eager to jump in and try this one out for myself soon.
According to a developer we spoke to via Discord, a closed beta for PSVR is planned for late January or early February in Europe and North America with a full release on PSVR planned for March. The footage we’ve embedded above is captured on PS4 Pro using PS Aim Controller but it will also support PS Move controllers or DualShock 4.
In terms of features, it’s got a full slate. In addition to grenades and guns like the M16, AK47, P90, pistols, shotguns, and even scoped sniper rifles (yes, real working scopes, not full-screen blackout “scopes” like in Medal of Honor or Population: One) there will be killstreak rewards as well.
This is a full smooth locomotion shooter with running, jumping, climbing, sliding, and going prone with three game modes: free-for-all, team deathmatch, and search & destroy.
The number of maps available at launch is still in flux, likely sitting around 4-6 with 2-3 nighttime variants of existing maps to add a bit more variety. Post-launch support is expected to include new maps, weapons, characters, and game modes.
The developers have already got PSVR and Rift crossplay operational, but it will eventually be coming to the Oculus Rift PC store, Steam VR, and Oculus Quest sometime after PSVR launch. There will also be PS5 optimization patches as well as HMD optimization for other headsets like Vive and Index as well.
Alvo is currently in closed beta on PSVR with a full release planned for late February or March. Releases on both PC VR and Quest are expected to follow afterward, with full crossplay between all three platforms.
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we want to know what you think is the very best VR shooter available on Oculus Quest natively?
The Oculus Quest 2 is out and it brings with it improved performance and slightly upgraded visuals for many Quest games. Now with the news that Contractors is finally officially releasing on the Quest store, I started wondering: what’s everyone’s favorite shooter on Quest?
Obviously we have a few different genres to pick from here. There are the multiplayer competitive shooters like Onward, Contractors, Pavlov: Shack, Hyper Dash, Rec Room Paintball, Laser Tag, Rec Royale, and so one. Then you’ve got co-op shooters like Arizona Sunshine, Crisis VRigade, Drop Dead, etc. And finally there are the single-player shooter adventures like Phantom: Covert Ops, Espire, and Robo Recall.
That’s a lot of games to pick from and I’ve definitely forgotten to include several I’m sure. So, based on what’s out there, what do you think is the very best VR shooter available natively on the Oculus Quest? This excludes games that are not available natively on Quest, like Zero Caliber or something else on PC that you can only play via Virtual Desktop or Oculus Link. We’re talking native only via the Quest store or Sidequest.
For today’s livestream we’re playing a bunch of Oculus Quest 2 games, showing off what’s new and enhanced for the new headset! If you’re curious about how we livestream the way we do then look no further than this handy guide for general tips and this guide specific to our Oculus Quest setup.
Today is the official launch day for the Oculus Quest 2! We’re going live with a variety gameplay livestream showing off all of the latest enhanced games with updated visuals and performance for the new standalone VR hedset.
Our Oculus Quest 2 gameplay livestream is planned to start at about 11:00 AM PT today and will last for around an hour or two, give or take. We’ll be hitting just our YouTubeand I’ll be streaming from an Oculus Quest 2 via Chomecast and some of my colleagues will be in Discord chat to help with questions.
Oculus Quest 2 Q&A Launch Gameplay Livestream
Check out the Star Wars: Squadrons stream embedded right here and down below once live:
You can see lots of our past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist or even all livestreams here on UploadVR and various other gameplay highlights. There’s lots of good stuff there so make sure and subscribe to us on YouTube to stay up-to-date on gameplay videos, video reviews, live talk shows, interviews, and more original content!
And please let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next! We have lots of VR games in the queue that we would love to show off more completely. Let’s get ready to go!
How does Downpour’s popular VR shooter stack up on new hardware? Find out in our Onward Quest 2 vs Quest graphics comparison!
This was one we were waiting for. Lots of Oculus Quest games have already seen updates to improve their graphics in time for Quest 2’s launch today. But we’ve been eagerly awaiting a patch for Onward. When the game launched on the original Quest a few months back it caused a stir with a visual downgrade that also had a dramatic impact on the PC version of the game to accommodate cross-play.
The PC version continues to improve, including some updates in today’s 1.8.5 patch, but we’re mostly interested in the differences between Quest 1 and Quest 2 in this update. The gap is pretty significant, though the Quest 1 version of the game has been updated a fair bit too.
Onward Quest 2 vs Quest Graphics Comparison
The two big visuals updates for Quest 2 include what the developer calls ‘improved level of detail bias’ and support for ‘Specular Maps’. The latter allows for much more detailed weapon models, while the former fights issues like pop in, in which objects and textures can suddenly appear on-screen.
Sure enough, we headed back to classic map, Suburbia, and were pleasantly surprised by the updates. Stand still and look out across the distance and you won’t notice much difference, though the map now carries a rather dashing evening red sunset on both versions. But grab whichever weapon you’ve selected and you’ll immediately start noticing the differences – the Quest 2 version’s weapons have better lighting, which in turn better reveals the intricate details Downpour has applied to its models.
More important, though, is the difference in pop-in. Walk down a street in Suburbia and you’ll find the map is still somewhat chaotic with this issue. Textures start bumping up in detail the closer you get and in some cases, even objects appear out of thin air. Some of this still happens in the Quest 2 version but, overall, it’s much more solid and doesn’t feel half as erratic as playing the game on Quest.
As a major test, I always like to go and look at the washing machine in the house just off Straight Street. In past versions — even on PC — it’s taken a painfully long time for the model to load fully. That’s still the case on Quest 1, but on Quest 2 you can just about see it quickly switch as you round the door to approach it.
Overall this is a pretty positive step up, then. Obviously, Onward on Quest still doesn’t approach the former visual fidelity of the PC version or even the current build with cross-play, but it’s great to see Downpour continuing to hack away at this element of the game.
What do you make of the Onward Quest 2 vs Quest graphics comparison? Let us know in the comments below and be sure to follow us on YouTube for more comparisons to come!
A new update for Onward is here and, though it’s still early days, it includes some key tweaks for Quest and PC VR players.
When Onward launched in late July we loved the Oculus Quest version, even if developer Downpour and publisher Coatsink had to make heavy technical sacrifices to get it on the system. In fact, we just rated the game highly on our updated Best Oculus Quest Games list. But the PC edition of the game also saw those same setbacks, resulting in a dramatic downgrade on maps like Suburbia.
This week’s 1.8.2 update doesn’t reverse the situation but does take some positive steps forward. Suburbia, for example, has seen some of its vegetation added back in on PC and had some lighting tweaks. Check out the update in the video below – it’s still a ways off the original but undeniably better than the original 1.8 update.
Another much-requested fix concerns gunfire. Fans weren’t happy with the muffled audio 1.8 introduced, but 1.8.2 makes gunshots louder, with further improvements to come. Plus there’s a range of other key fixes, like instances of player collision, broken map voting and voice chat issues. You can see the full changelog for the game here.
Following the outcry from the 1.8 update, Downpour made it possible for PC VR players to roll back to earlier versions of the game, but hopefully improvements like these will convince more players to migrate back to the most recent version of the game. Does the new Onward update make big strides for you or are you waiting to see what else is around the corner? Let us know in the comments below!
The developers behind competitive shooter Onward issued a patch to the PC version today meant to improve the game’s graphical fidelity.
Last week the popular shooter from Downpour Interactive came to Oculus Quest while an update the same day for the PC version brought the game up to version 1.8, enabling cross-play between both versions of the game but at the cost (at least for now) of downgraded graphics for PC users. Here’s how that difference looked jumping from version 1.7 of Onward to 1.8 on PC:
Today’s 1.8.1 patch includes “a fix for LOD popping, and fixing several assets on the Suburbia map, both to improve graphical fidelity. We’ve also sped up the death animations and tweaked ambient audio.“ Popping or “pop-in” is when parts of a game level can seem to appear or change quality distractingly right in front of your eyes. The update should be available now for Onward PC owners. The developers also say the update includes a big fix for automatic graphics settings and they suggest to check your graphics settings to “ensure you’re not on the lowest graphics settings!“
There are still some known problems and “we’re going to be improving the graphics overall” in the coming weeks, according to Downpour, alongside “more work on the audio issues like gun sounds being quiet.”
Onward also recently added for new “gun game” mode for a limited time.
If you’re an Onward player, Let us know in the comments below how these updates affect the game.
When Onwardlaunched on Oculus Quest last week it included the base, core game modes and a greyed out ‘Social’ menu. Then late last week, Downpour Interactive turned on that playlist featuring the highly popular Gun Game mode for a limited time.
In Gun Game the rules are pretty simple: everyone starts out with the exact same weapon, typically an assault rifle, and each time they get a kill they instantly have their gun swapped to somethin else. The objective is to work your way through all of the weapons in a linear order until you get a kill with each of them, completing the round. The last few are always the most difficult, culminating in the need for a knife kill.
It’s a great, classic FPS game mode that was originally popularized in Counter-Strike and has since been adopted by various shooters across the industry, including Call of Duty. What’s interesting is that Gun Game is often associated with being a very fast-paced, sometimes silly, and always unrealistic format for gameplay. This is generally the opposite of Onward’s tone, but perhaps that’s what makes it feel like such a great breath of fresh air. Instead of worrying about teamwork and objectives it’s just an all-out free-for-all to get kills with a bunch of different weapons.
Depending on the map some weapons can be really tricky. Small maps like Cargo are tough for snipers since lining up a distance shot is tough and anything with tight corridors is a curse for whoever is on the RPG step of Gun Game since if you accidentally blow yourself up with the explosion it sets you back an entire step.
Overall Gun Game is a great change of pace for Onward and ideally I’d love to see the various Social game modes to be cycled on an ongoing basis, not intermittently. Dante Buckley, Founder of Downpour Interactive, stated in the game’s Discord server that Gun Game will be available “for 2 weeks” which means it will likely end on August 14th.
Every game of Onward starts with the chance for a team to discuss and strategize around a whiteboard, drawing on attack plans and fine-tuning strategies, with players tense about the challenge that faces them. It’s an atmosphere I’d imagine is quite similar to the Zoom calls between the game’s creators after this week’s events.
It’s safe to say that Onward’s long-anticipated Oculus Quest launch has not been quite as smooth as you might have envisioned. Certainly, on Quest itself, things appear to have gone very well. Despite pared down visuals, the game has rapidly racked up a stack of positive review scores on the Oculus Store. We didn’t let the dog-eared look stop us from giving the game our full recommendation; Onward remains a brilliant online shooter. For the existing PC version, however, it’s a bit of a different story.
In order to enable cross-play between PC and Quest, a feature developer Downpour has long promised, Onward has essentially been rebuilt. At first, we thought this would simply mean the PC version would reorganize a little geometry to match the revamped Quest maps, which have been tweaked to optimize performance. But the arrival of the 1.8 PC update literally painted a very different picture; Onward on PC has been dramatically dialled down in order to accommodate cross-play.
Check out the video above, showing the popular Suburbia map both before and after the patch. The difference is staggering; foliage is entirely removed, effects like fire and smoke are gone and textures are hugely simplified. Downpour says it’s working on further graphics improvements on PC, but there’s a big gap to fill here to get it back up to snuff. Indeed, the Steam page for the game now automatically plays a trailer for an older version of the game that looks better and even touts its own graphical improvements. It’s truly an unprecedented situation in VR.
The usual next steps are already surfacing. At the time of writing, Onward’s ‘Recent Reviews’ on Steam have shifted from ‘Very Positive’ to ‘Mixed’ and the game’s Discord was filled more with cries of anger than delight until Downpour’s rapid response, allowing players to roll back to v1.7 via a beta channel while the team focuses on improving the current visuals.
Still, that a game would so obviously subject its existing version with a healthy community to such a blatant step back sends a clear message about the shape of the VR industry in 2020. Because the harsh reality of the situation is that, whatever the backlash on PC may amount to, this was the ‘right’ decision purely from a business perspective.
Whatever is said online, this is looking like a very successful week for Onward. At the time of writing, less than 24 hours from launch, the Quest version of game has nearly 1,000 reviews and the vast majority of them award full marks. The game, as pared down as it may be, now has access to an entirely new, likely much greater revenue stream. Clearly, lots of Quest owners are very happy to have the game, no matter the difference in fidelity.
The plight of PC VR owners was, it appears, insignificant in comparison.
Onward’s Quest version (left) stacked up next to the pre-1.8 PC version (right)
We all know what Quest represents to the VR industry – we’ve spoken ad nauseam about developer’s vastly improved prospects when releasing on the platform. Heck, it’s doing so well it looks like we’ll be seeing a successor in the very near future to further chip away at its few remaining quirks.
But the headset’s limited horsepower puts it at odds with competing hardware in fascinating ways. In the console business, we’re used to seeing less powerful hardware lead a sales race and supporting software reflect that. Sony’s PS2 couldn’t measure up to Microsoft’s Xbox or the Nintendo Gamecube from a technical perspective, but came out miles ahead of the competition in sales and set a precedent for developers to release on that platform irrespective of the graphical benefits they’d get from targeting Xbox or Gamecube exclusively. Something somewhat similar is happening right now with the Switch, a console so popular that developers are pulling off all sorts of sorcery to get their PS4 and Xbox One games running on it, no matter how blurry the results may be.
Quest is unique, though, in that the power difference between it and PC VR or even PSVR is far, far wider and yet the strides in accessibility are much, much more important. For developers, this means even greater compromise than we’re used to seeing in the console scene. At launch, we speculated about what Quest’s potential success could mean for the graphical fidelity and scale of VR gaming going forward. This week’s events are as close to the ‘worst case scenario’ end of that speculation for PC users that we’ve yet seen.
Exactly where the blame — if you can call it that — falls for this regression isn’t entirely clear. Yes, Downpour is the developer of the game, and says that it set the goal itself. But this week’s update also introduced UK-based Coatsink as the game’s new publisher, a relationship that hasn’t been made super transparent, and Facebook has been infamously restrictive with curation on the official Quest store. It’s not known how much of a say Facebook gets in what games launch when, but sources have in the past indicated that there’s certainly more control that you might see on modern consoles like PS4 and Xbox One. It’s telling, too, that Onward pushes the boundaries of Facebook’s outlawing of Early Access games on the Quest store, something I don’t think would happen if the powers that be didn’t think there was a buck to be made.
Whoever made the call, though, the reasoning is clear; it was more important to get the game out and selling on Quest in July than it was to maintain the quality of the existing version.
It’s a call that’s hugely indicative of the wider precedent for VR moving forward. Quest has become not just a promising new contender but the definitive destination to deliver your game to. As we move further away from the era of PC VR as the dominant platform, these stumbling blocks will be fewer and far between, but in the heat of this moment it seems some existing VR-owners are destined to lose out like this. Developers that were perhaps once pushing the boundaries of the PC platform will now be drastically scaling down what some of those boundaries are for future projects. It’s as close to collateral damage we’ve yet seen in this transition point.
I can’t help but wonder what the future holds in this regard. Is Onward a one-off? Or is Facebook currently pouring extra millions into its two remaining Rift exclusives, Lone Echo II and Medal Of Honor: Above and Beyond, to get them running on Quest too? If so, would the scale of the PC projects suffer and would we ever even know about it?
This week’s events help cement a necessary, if ugly (literally speaking), transition point for the VR industry. We are seeing an entire industry pivot to a place we didn’t think it would be in by 2020; games and experiences built for more powerful hardware are scraping to get onto Quest and developer roadmaps are now centering around that shift. The transition has threatened to be awkward and cumbersome, but actually so far is proving to be largely smooth.
But Onward has become an inevitable friction point. What is worrying is this: when developer vision and intention is compromised in the name of making the most money, something more important than profit is lost. Whether or not Onward crosses that line is in the eye of the beholder, but it paints the future of VR fidelity and vision with a slightly more troublesome brush.
