Developer CM Games announced that its VR debut survival horror FPS game Into The Radius is leaving Early Access on June 20. The game initially launched on Steam and other platforms in 2019 in Early Access with less content, but now the game will enjoy a full release with all the content added during the development cycle over the last several months.
Set in an open-world Soviet wasteland, Into The Radius is a survival shooter with a sprinkle of horror as well. When we interviewed Brandon Marsh from CM Games earlier in the year, he described the game as “much more of a survival / stealth game, not a straight forward guns blazing FPS.” You need to use your navigation skills and prepare the right equipment for each mission, using modifiable weapons that will also need to be maintained to avoid jams.
The Early Access build started with just the open map and a handful of missions, leading some players to note that it had a slow pace and felt a bit unfinished. However, Marsh also noted to us back in February that a lot of content was being added during Early Access, such as more maps, voice acting, the full storyline and special missions, as outlined in the Early Access milestones. Once the game reached Milestone 6, it was ready for a full launch, which is now set for June 20. There’s even a new gameplay trailer to celebrate the launch, which you can view embedded above.
It’s clear that Into The Radius has come a long way since the beginning of Early Access. It launches for PC VR on June 20 on the Steam and Oculus stores, plus it will also be available through Viveport Infinity.
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 has you the most excited in the VR space right now?
Now that we are comfortably on the other side of Half-Life: Alyx, Valve’s marquee multi-year AAA project built from the ground up for VR headsets, it’s important to keep looking forward.
There is a lot to get excited about still coming in 2020 and especially beyond. There are still major releases slated for this year from Facebook for the Oculus Rift platform, like Lone Echo 2, Phantom: Covert Ops, and Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. On Quest it seems like something new and exciting happens once or twice a month that we never expected, not to mention anticipated games like Onward, Solaris, and Population One.
Outside of the Facebook sphere we’ve got Dreams and Iron Man VR to look forward to on PSVR and plenty else on the horizon like LOW-FI, After the Fall, and another Walking Dead VR game, among many others.
So, there is a lot to look forward to then. What has you most excited in VR, AR, and otherwise in 2020 and beyond? Let us know down in the comments beow!
Don’t worry, Downpour Interactive hasn’t forgotten about the Onward Oculus Quest port it promised nearly a year ago.
Onward was confirmed to be coming to Facebook’s standalone VR headset in mid-2019, just after the kit’s launch. We’d assumed that that might have made it a 2019 window game, but the developer has actually been pretty quiet about the Quest version since. An update this week provided us with a little more clarity.
“We know you are anxiously waiting on news, and we are working very hard to get you a Quest port that not only runs well and retains Onwards core gameplay and feel, but a port that looks Amazing,” the studio wrote in its monthly update blog. “We are actively alpha testing, and will soon be in beta testing, in which we will introduce more QA testers from the community.”
Not only that, but the developer provided an updated Development Timeline that tells us a few things about Onward’s roadmap. First up, the next update for the game will be a bug fix and performance patch. Following that will be the Quest release which, at the same time, will see Downpour start working on an update that will bring the PC VR version of the game out of Early Access.
The team’s also working on a Player Ranks update and, of course, new gamemodes and content, which are the furthest down on the list of priorities right now. No actual timelines were given for any of these updates, but it’s good to know at least what order they’ll arrive in.
We’ll keep our eye out for more Onward Oculus Quest news, then. In the meantime, let’s all get a bit more practice in on PC, shall we?
Into The Radius is an open-world hardcore post-apocalyptic story-driven VR shooter with heavy influences from a wide gamut of entertainment media properties. It released on Steam Early Access last November and is dropping on the Oculus Home Store in Early Access today.
Game developers that work in VR often cite very different influences than the ones that work on non-VR games. If you ask a developer what got them into traditional game development you’ll likely get a list of old-school retro games, maybe some movies and TV shows, or books that they wanted to emulate. But in the case of VR, since the medium is so new, a lot of developers cite modern, contemporary games as key influences. In the case of Into the Radius, it’s a bit of both.
Taken from the game’s store page description:
Into the Radius is a single-player survival shooter developed exclusively for premium Virtual Reality headsets. The game is a dark mix of eldritch horror, open-world exploration, realistic weapon handling and intriguing storyline that will make you feel like you’re in the middle of the post-apocalyptic Pechorsk Radius zone.
Life and death intertwine inside the Radius, lurking somewhere in the middle of everything is the answer to a question you can’t quite remember. Through the flickering memories of your tarnished life as a former resident of Pechorsk and now UNSPC specialist, your only means of survival is to stalk the strange and threatening zone and complete the missions assigned to you.
We spoke to Brandon Marsh from CM Games about the game’s release, early reception, and future plans. These questions and answers were conducted over email in late November, but due to a busy release season, holidays, and packed schedules we’re just now publishing it to coincide with the Oculus Home release.
UploadVR: Tell me more about some of the main inspirations for Into the Radius, both VR and non-VR inspirations.
Brandon Marsh: The source material the game is based on is ‘Roadside Picnic’ by the Stugatsky Brothers. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R series and their mods share the same source material, it has a diehard community and we see Into the Radius as following in that tradition.
Other Non-VR inspirations include Myst (solo exploration with a narrative) and Darksouls (Hardcore gameplay, subtle / cryptic story, Death is included as a mechanic).
VR inspiration would be Onward, which was one of the first games that showed that free locomotion shooters have commercial appeal.
UVR: Many of the main complaints about the game early on seemed to be about the slow pace and “unfinished” feeling — are these things you plan on addressing.
BM: Early Access was a major milestone for us, the primary focus was to implement the systems with placeholder assets, make the game more immersive and focus on playability and functionality over style and cosmetics. We’ve been able to quickly test everything and got a lot of feedback from the community on what is working and what needs improvements.
Right now the game has its core mechanics fully playable. There is a big open terrain map to explore, a hub to pick missions, along with buying and selling of a basic arsenal of firearms and helpful items.
Regarding the game’s pacing, Into the Radius is much more of a survival / stealth game, not a straight forward guns blazing FPS. We strive to provide tension via player decisions, skill and exploration of the unknown rather than an overwhelming sensory stimulation.
UVR: What are some of the major ways you plan to update/improve the game while in Early Access?
BM: We’re still finalizing the development roadmap from now until launch. When it’s ready we’ll be sharing it out with the community. Next week we are releasing to Oculus Store Early Access as well as setting up a HTC Viveport ‘Coming Soon’ page.
Since the release, the team has been doing a lot of bug fixing and patching getting the game in a stable, playable state for everyone. We are working on the balance especially for starter players to make the difficulty more manageable, same with improving the tutorial (which is iterated every release.)
We’ve made a quite complex systemic game with an indie sized team, there are a lot of placeholder assets to be replaced, textured and finalized over the next few months. Things like additional content (maps, weapons, anomalies and artifacts), replacing the cassette tape subtitle and text-to-speech placeholders with voice actors, the storyline and special missions will start to be inserted into the game.
UVR: How has the reception been so far in terms of sales? You probably can’t give specifics, but if you could describe the reception versus expectations that would be great.
BM: We knew getting into this that the VR games market is very niche and our game is even more niche (catering to single player hardcore). Very few premium VR games even manage to surpass 5000+ copies sold, so our expectations were pretty tempered.
That being said, initial sales have been slow, we’re launching on more platforms and continuing to do a strong marketing push to build up momentum for the full release.
UVR: What other games have you worked on before?
BM: As a group we’ve all been in the industry with an average 6-12+ years experience. Starting from PC-console game outsource to development of top mobile games.
Some of those titles include: Nitro Nation, Mushroom Wars, The X-Files: Deep State, UFO: Resistance (Android), ZooCraft, Digger HD and Hot Wheels Infinite Loop.
Into The Radius is available on both Oculus Home for Rift and Steam for all major PC VR platforms for $29.99. The Steam page states an expected Early Access duration of 6-10 months, meaning a planned full release sometime later this year. The price will increase when it comes time for full launch.
For today’s livestream we’re going to dive into the slick and realistic VR FPS, Zero Caliber. It’s a modern military focused FPS with solo gameplay across various maps, in addition to co-op and forthcoming PvP modes. 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.
Miss me? I haven’t streamed in almost two months but we’re getting back to it now!
Today we’re diving into the realistic military shooter, Zero Caliber! It uses a bunch of different guns across various maps to pit you against waves of enemies. There is co-op as well, which you can watch here if you’d like, but today we’re focusing on single player as we check out new maps and content. It’s been a while since we’ve played!
Bear with me, I haven’t played this game in like a year. The stream is planned to start at about 1:30PM PT and will last for about two hours. We’ll be hitting just our YouTubeand Harry will join me via Discord to help out with chat. You can see the full stream embedded via YouTube right here down below once it’s up, or find it here on this page:
You can see lots of our past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist 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, 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.
Christmas is a time for coming together and helping others, it’s why VRFocus is happy to be part of Perp Games’ Combat AdVRent Calendar event this festive season. So not only are we helping put a smile on VR fans faces with a competition but also aiding UK charity Crisis which fights to end homelessness. If you’ve been following the campaign since 1st December, then you’ll know each day has a theme based around combat, and VRFocus’ is multiplayer gaming.
Perp Games originally held a similar calendar event last year, purely for the PlayStation VR titles it published. This year’s fun advent calendar event not only highlights entertaining virtual reality (VR) titles but also gives you a chance to win (most of) them.
It’s the 23rd December and with two days left to go until the big day, multiplayer videogames seemed particularly apt. So VRFocus has selected six titles with five of them available to win. Let’s start with military combat experience Onward, a videogame well known to a lot of VR players having also featured in Oculus’ VR League. A classic first-person shooter (FPS) developed by Downpour Interactive, VRFocus has both Steam and Oculus Store codes to give away.
Fire-Point Interactive’s Sabre VR for PlayStation VR is a very different beast. With a very bold cel-shaded art style, this is an arena FPS putting players inside mechanised animals called S.A.B.R.E.’s, offering cross-play functionality between VR and non-VR players.
Next up VR MOBA Cradle of Sins by British indie team U24 Solutions. Offering four playable characters and 28 weapons to select, Cadle of Sins isn’t yet available on Steam but the studio is currently running a $10k tournament which the competition codes will give you access to.
If none of those are quite your thing, then how about winning real-time strategy (RTS) title Final Assault from Phaser Lock Interactive on Steam? VRFocus gave the videogame a commendable four-star review saying: “There’s plenty to love about Final Assault. Providing a leaner less complicated approach to RTS gameplay, most fans of the genre apart from the die-hard stalwarts should find there’s enough depth and reply value to keep coming back for hours on end.”
The last videogame you can win is Survios’ high seas action experience Battlewake, offering a single-player campaign as well as multiplayer modes. Another decent entry from the developer, in Battlewake you captain a pirate vessel through hostile waters, using both magic and cannonballs to vanquish enemies.
The only title to make the list which isn’t winnable is Solaris: Offworld Combat. The next title from Firewall Zero Hour team First Contact Entertainment, Solaris: Offworld Combat promises 4 vs 4 battles in futuristic arena-style locations.
When it comes to supporting homeless charity Crisis its all part of Perp Games’ online store. Here the company sells all of its PlayStation VR hard copies, for those players who like to own a physical disk version. During December, Perp Games is donating 100% of the profits from each videogame sold to Crisis to help in its festive fundraising efforts.
Downpour Interactive announced the update yesterday on Steam and Reddit. Custom map support is a big deal because it’s the biggest bottleneck of new content for shooters like this and was, until now, the main feature that Pavlov (Onward’s main, direct competitor) had that Onward was missing. There is also a Google Doc full of detailed custom content guidelines to follow.
Watch The Onward Update 1.7 Trailer:
Notably, Downpour Interactive even have custom map support on the Oculus Home version of the game, not just Steam. On Reddit the Downpour Interactive Community Manager explained, “This was the hardest part! Since we can’t use Steam workshop, we had to implement a different kind of workshop that would work for both Oculus Home and Steam users. To access the workshop and download user made maps, simply navigate to the workshop tab in the ingame menu. there you can download maps and rate them!”
Perhaps this means custom map support and crossplay is possible on the forthcoming Oculus Quest version too. The developers have even crafted their own custom maps and released key community maps that were created before the update went life that are already available as examples.
The other big piece of this new update is the revamped A.I. which is long overdue. When you play solo or in co-op you can face off against enemies on selected maps, but previously they were quite basic and predictable. This update aims to change that.
Now, enemies have different classes, operate in squads, and are no longer on set patrol paths with the same spawn points. According to the update, “AI will move to cover to react to players, initiate an attack, or to protect themselves from grenades. Rifle squads will patrol between choke points and intersections. Snipers will move to overwatch positions and take cover to wait for players. Assault, CQB, and Light squads will hunt players down.”
Additionally, A.I. sight is now “based on how much of the player can be seen” as well as how far away and how loud they’re being. They can also now use any weapon or attachment that players can.
The full list of updates has tons more included making this one of the biggest and most-exciting updates yet to the over-three year old military sim VR shooter.
VR tactical shooter Onward (Steam page here) released an update this week re-adding three maps which were previously removed during a major graphics overhaul.
It also adds a new map, new map variants, and introduces some major optimizations.
Maps Are Back
In late May an update was released which overhauled the game’s visuals, particularly the lighting. The changes were however so fundamental that they had to be manually applied to each map. Given the time taken to do this per map, Downpour Interactive decided to temporarily remove three maps from the game: Jungle, Abandoned, and Snowpeak.
Jungle’s relatively thick vegetation and changes in elevation results in very low detection ranges, which brings up the heartrate of even the most experienced players.
Abandoned takes place in a more traditional western woodland valley setting, with an abandoned military base and plenty of open spaces.
Snowpeak also features an abandoned military base, but this time in the snowy Russian mountains with more verticality and less visibility.
New Map, New Map Variants
A brand new map has been added called Turbine. Turbine takes place on a hydroelectric dam, an interesting setting which should make for a good variety of engagement distances.
The update also adds night time variants of Abandoned and Snowpeak. Night time variants have a real effect on gameplay, forcing players to adapt to the lower visibility.
Major Optimizations for Onward
Over the past few months, Downpour has been gradually implementing significant optimizations to Onward to improve the framerate and reduce instances of stuttering. We’ve noticed these improvements while playing recently, which are especially important to reaching the higher refresh rate settings of the Valve Index headset.
This week’s update significantly lowers the loading time of the game and maps. It also significantly reduces RAM usage by several gigabytes according to Downpour Interactive.
Love virtual reality (VR) and kick-ass on titles like Beat Saber and Onward? Well if you live in Europe – close to Belgium preferably – then pay close attention, because GameForce, the largest gaming expo in Belgium, and R.A.V.E.N., a specialist in VR experiences have announced the Belgian Championship VR, where successful players have a chance of winning part of a €2,000 EUR prize pool.
The Belgian Championship will feature both aforementioned VR experiences, with Onward being a team-centric competition while Beat Saber is purely for solo players. For the first-person shooter (FPS) only teams of three will be accepted, with four qualifiers taking place and the best team of each qualifier will be selected for the finals at GameForce.
The winning Onward team will receive a reward of €850 EUR, while the teams in second and third place will win €400 and €250 respectively.
For Beat Saber players will need to set a high score in one of four locations. The best player from each location will be invited to GameForce, competing for the crown and a top prize of €350. Players in second and third place will take home €100 and €50.
Both tournaments are open to all players and teams. Onward teams will need to register here. Players competing on Beat Saber can register in advance, but this isn’t required and you can simply turn up. The locations for the qualifier events are:
31/08: Westland Shopping Center – Anderlecht
07/09: Shopping Gent Zuid – Ghent
14/09: Woluwe Shopping Center – Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe / Woluwe-Saint-Lambert
21/09: Anspach Shopping – Brussels
For those living in the UK who want to show off their Beat Saber skills, then don’t forget about the charity Beat Master Tournament which is being held in 2020, with signups still open.
Downpour Interactive’s Onward is still an Early Access title which has gained massive popularity in the VR community, selected for a number of VR tournaments including Oculus and ESL’s VR League: Season 3. Beat Saber’s popularity shows no signs of stopping, fully released in May whilst adding a level editor and support for Oculus Quest. Plus there are more official songs incoming.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of VR tournaments from around the world, reporting back with the latest updates.
Onward, the first-person mil-sim shooter for PC VR, is heading to Quest at some point—that’s what Downpour Interactive founder Dante Buckley announced back at the ESL VR League Season three championship earlier this month. Now, Buckley says the studio is currently also developing Onward to be cross-play compatible with PC VR headsets too.
In a video spotlight with VR League (linked below), Buckley announced that the full consumer release of Onward will feature custom maps, and map building tools so users can recreate whatever maps they’ve always wanted to play in the team-based shooter.
Buckley further says that Onward will also feature a ranking system, something the Early Access game has lacked in spite of its dedicated fanbase. Onward currently offers support for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Valve Index.
It’s uncertain how Downpour will implement cross-play between Quest and PC VR headsets and whether the custom map builder will be available on all platforms. In contrast to the VR shooter Pavlov, which is also consequently headed to Quest, Onward’s fist-party map builder might help ensure that the entire game is playable for all platforms. Pavlov relies on Steam Workshop for its user-generated content, which would necessarily fragment the maps available to its playerbase.
We’ve asked Downpour for comment on how the map builder will work between Quest and PC VR, and will update this piece when we hear back.
