Developer Overkill Software and Starbreeze Studios recent held a livestream for the virtual reality (VR) version of their popular heist videogame Payday 2 to play the title and ask questions.
During the livestream a number of questions were asked towards Tobias,one of the producers on Payday 2 and Payday 2 VR which, when answered, gave some interesting insight into the development of the VR title and what might be coming in the future.
For those who are unaware of Payday 2 VR, this version of the title allows for players to experience the title like never before in a fully immersive way. Once more, the VR version is crossplay with other players on PC even if they are not using VR themselves. This means that friends can get together to pull of heist and play with their preferred method of control, VR or keyboard and mouse. Recently the developers made Payday 2 VR available within the main section of the title and it is available to all who own the videogame, completely free of charge.
One of the main questions that was asked was around the weapons within the title, more so the missing crossbows and bows. The team said: “At the moment the crossbows and bows are not available in VR, we are still looking into the development process there because they need to be handled slightly different then regular weapons because of how a bow actually works so we wanted to take a little extra time with those.” When a viewer raised if they could handle like a throw-able item in VR, Tobias responded by saying: “We are looking into making bows work like proper bows so pull the arrow and shoot like a bow but like i said, we are still developing this and we’re still looking into it.”
This lead onto a question about the possible addition of a new frying pan melee weapon: “I don’t know, we have so many cooking utensils already, with the BBQ pack we got psycho killing knife, spatula, I think we have half a kitchen as melee weapons already. I don’t think we are looking into a frying pan melee weapon at the moment.” Tobias explained.
On a more technical note the viewers asked how Payday VR handled aim assist and if it was different from the non-VR version of the title. “It has a similar system to PC, because it is the same game right. We’re not trying to give a clutch to VR we’re just bringing the systems over with a few tweaks here and there.” This was followed by the question over which of the currently available head-mounted displays (HMDs), HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, were best for the title
“That is going to be very much to your prefer,” Tobias said, “I wouldn’t say that one is better than the other. The ones that we use in house are the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, so those are the ones we are officially supporting. The development has been on both of these, to make them work to the benefits of how the players usually play on the different headset as that does change. Vive is out of the box room scale, so a Vive player has more tendency to use the dash system where as Oculus plays tend to prefer the joystick movement. So we try to make these feel as functional and balanced as possible.”
One other interesting question that was answered by the team was the if they had any plans to add support for text chat within Payday 2 VR to allow players to respond to their team. Tobias explained: “This is again something we are looking into on how to solve. We have a few different ideas that we want to try for how to solve text chat, at the moment on the tablet you have on your arm, you can swipe to see text chat but there is no way to interact. We are looking into how we can give the VR players some ability to communicate. That is of course a little bit more tricky as a PC plays has a full keyboard in front of them so we will have to look into a solve for how that could work.”
This is only a taste of the content from the full stream which is over an hour long. You can watch it in full over on Starbreeze’s Twitch channel here.
For more on PayDay 2 VR in the future, keep reading VRFocus.
Originally