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Population: One Winter Event, 12 Days Of Chaos, Begins December 3
A new Winter event to celebrate the holiday season is coming to Population: One, starting on December 3.
The event is called 12 Days of Chaos and will add new bonuses in-game and change the map to a Winter-themed setting.
Developers BigBox VR shared some early details of the event with us, which it says will be Population: One’s biggest event yet with double the rewards. Players will be able to collect 100 snowflakes spread around the map and also boost points and gain rewards faster when playing with friends.
The event begins on December 3 and will run until December 14.
We also received a new screenshot showcasing some holiday season skins, pictured below, which will presumably be available to purchase through microtransactions in the game’s store.
Population: One released early last month and we labeled it the new king of VR battle royale games. It’s available on PC VR and the Quest platform with cross-play support, along with cross-buy support between Rift and Quest on the Oculus Store.
You play in teams of three players (there’s no solo mode, only squads) in a stock-standard battle royale format that follows almost all conventions of the genre. However, Population: One’s key distinctive feature is the ability to climb any structure in a Breath of the Wild-esque manner, which leads to some interesting encounters and interactions.
BigBox VR says more content is coming in December, including “continuous map updates, and additional character and gun skins.”
If you missed it, you can read our full review of Population: One for more information. The Population: One 12 Days of Chaos event starts December 3 and continues until December 14.
Population: One Winter Event, 12 Days Of Chaos, Begins December 3
A new Winter event to celebrate the holiday season is coming to Population: One, starting on December 3.
The event is called 12 Days of Chaos and will add new bonuses in-game and change the map to a Winter-themed setting.
Developers BigBox VR shared some early details of the event with us, which it says will be Population: One’s biggest event yet with double the rewards. Players will be able to collect 100 snowflakes spread around the map and also boost points and gain rewards faster when playing with friends.
The event begins on December 3 and will run until December 14.
We also received a new screenshot showcasing some holiday season skins, pictured below, which will presumably be available to purchase through microtransactions in the game’s store.
Population: One released early last month and we labeled it the new king of VR battle royale games. It’s available on PC VR and the Quest platform with cross-play support, along with cross-buy support between Rift and Quest on the Oculus Store.
You play in teams of three players (there’s no solo mode, only squads) in a stock-standard battle royale format that follows almost all conventions of the genre. However, Population: One’s key distinctive feature is the ability to climb any structure in a Breath of the Wild-esque manner, which leads to some interesting encounters and interactions.
BigBox VR says more content is coming in December, including “continuous map updates, and additional character and gun skins.”
If you missed it, you can read our full review of Population: One for more information. The Population: One 12 Days of Chaos event starts December 3 and continues until December 14.
Population: One Review – The New King Of VR Battle Royale Shooters
After spending plenty of time with the multiplayer-only VR battle royale shooter, here is our full Population: One review. We played on Oculus Quest 2, but it’s crossplay between Quest 1, Quest 2, and PC VR headsets with cross-buy on Rift and Quest.
Out of every game that released in the 2010s, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds probably ranks in the top 5 for me in terms of hours spent. I played a lot of that game when it first debuted in Early Access on PC with a single map and plenty of jankiness to go around. It’s grown a lot in the years since, expanded to consoles, Stadia streaming, and even mobile and is a very different game now. Those first couple of years it was a huge part of my gaming rotation.
In Population: One the setups is extremely familiar. You and your team of two others are dropped down into a map tasked with battling it out until there is only one person (or one team) left standing. Despite what the name would imply, there is no solos game mode — it’s trios only here with just six teams total.
The scope is a far cry from the 150-player lobbies of Call of Duty Warzone, but given the scale of the map and how differently things are perceived in VR, it’s okay. There is a damaging field that closes in, slowly shrinking the map, and you need to quickly search for guns and loot while trying your best to stay alive.
Matches are pretty quick and since you’re able to move so quickly and cover great distances in a matter of seconds with the wingsuit the play area feels smaller than it is without sacrificing map diversity.
More so than any other VR battle royale I’ve played, they’ve done a good job here of making each region of the map feel particularly unique. The graveyard, for example, is littered with tombstones and has plenty of cover points. It’s also the most reliable place to get good loot, in my opinion. The giant tower in the middle of the map can be seen from anywhere and the outcroppings of cities an other regions all have a personality of their own.
I just wish things were a bit more dynamic. There is only the one map and after enough matches you’ve really seen it all. Each game is always different thanks to the variability of where you land and where everyone else lands, but the map is very static. Some events that could pop up and change the layout or create hot zones to draw people in would be great, if not full-on map alterations of some kind. We’ve been told those sorts of things are planned but there are no details right now.
As expected, there are microtransactions in Population: One, just like basically every other battle royale game, but it’s all optional and you can earn everything by just playing the game too. This is all in the form of cosmetics like costumes and skins. They will keep adding more stuff over time and are planning seasonal-style events.
I don’t think I’ll ever spend near as many hours in Population: One as I did PUBG, but it’s got a similar appeal. Just like PUBG, it wasn’t the first battle royale game for its platform — H1Z1 and others preceded PUBG some people forget — but it definitely put the format on the map for the general public. I think Population: One has that kind of staying power for VR.
The main reason is how polished and smooth gameplay feels and just how effective its new twists on the format are at delivering fresh, exciting moments consistently. It’s able to maintain a breezy pace thanks to three key features: you can climb anything, you can glide through the air, and you can build walls and cover on the fly.
Obviously the “building” mechanic is lifted straight out of Fortnite and the “climbing” mechanic has been in several other VR shooters, such as Zero Caliber and Virtual Battlegrounds. But when you combine them together, alongside gliding, it creates a frantic playground of verticality and constant movement that makes everything feel more dynamic and unpredictable.
You’ve got your usual assortment of weapons like SMGs, Assault Rifles, Shotguns, Snipers, and so on. There isn’t a lot of variation within each gun type though, other than rarity levels denoted by color. But I didn’t notice a major difference between the tiers while playing. On top of that there’s also shield power-ups, bananas and soda cans for health, and grenades.
Combat has enough options for now, but hopefully they continue adding new gear regularly. Reloading is sort of a hybrid between something realistic like in Onward and a more arcade-style system since you only need to mime the actual gun manipulations and exact accuracy with hand placement isn’t needed.
Population: One Review Final Verdict
If you’re looking for a new, addictive VR shooter to sink your teeth into then you can’t go wrong with Population: One. The verticality and freedom of movement is unrivaled and the smooth, snappy gameplay feels fantastic even on the lower-powered Oculus Quest. My only significant gripe is that I wish there was a bit more diversity in content available, but they’ve got an amazing foundation to grow from here. Population: One is definitely the best VR battle royale shooter on the market and will hopefully find a strong audience for quite some time.
For more on how we arrive at our scores, check out our review guidelines.
Population: One is available on both Steam for PC VR and Oculus Home for Rift, Quest, and Quest 2 with full crossplay at a price point of $29.99 on all platforms. A PSVR port is planned for 2021.
You can find more details on the game’s official website.
Population: One Microtransactions Explained – Not At Launch, Cosmetic Only
The developers behind upcoming VR battle royale game Population One commented on the nature of microtransactions in the game, after Reddit users spotted them in pre-release demo footage of the game.
A screenshot of Population One posted yesterday to r/OculusQuest pointed out the presence of microtransactions, which angered some commenters. Many users seem to feel that microtransactions have no place in a game that costs $30 to begin with.
Population: One Microtransactions Explained
Lots of online multiplayer games, especially in the battle royale genre, are free-to-play with optional microtransaction cosmetics or a paid ‘battle pass’ system that gives you rewards across a season of play. This has the benefit of keeping the game’s online population healthy with free-to-play users, while also maintaining a stream of revenue for the developers throughout the title’s life cycle.
Instead, Population: One has opted to go for another route – a paid battle royale experience in VR, which also has microtransactions. Population: One developers Big Box put out a FAQ yesterday to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the topic and confirmed that microtransaction purchases give you no competitive advantage in-game, and are purely cosmetic. There won’t be any pay-to-win features in the game, in other words.
We’re seeing some confusion about POP1’s in-game store and microtransactions.
We’ve put together some quick answers for you. 🍌🍌 pic.twitter.com/FkUKHumAbG— POPULATION: ONE (@populationonevr) October 8, 2020
“The only microtransactions we have planned are character skins and gun skins. We will not be charging for guns, maps or other functionality that will separate the player-base.” The $30 price for the base game gives you access to the entire game, including progression systems that grant you free cosmetics. Big Box also noted that the ‘free-to-play with microtransactions’ model was not viable for Population: One, as they “need to be able to support the cost of on-going development, servers, coders, artists, etc.”
The microtransaction store is not finished yet, hence why it was missing from some preview builds, and will not be available at launch. Microtransactions will be available launch with the first in-game event after launch, which will also be available to players who choose not to make any in-game purchases.
If you haven’t already, you can read our hands-on with Population One here, which launches October 22 for Oculus Quest and PC VR with full cross-play support. Big Box is also hoping to bring the game to PSVR in the future.
Population: One Devs ‘Definitely’ Have Plans To Bring VR Battle Royale Shooter To PSVR
Population: One is fast-approaching launch on October 22nd and will be coming to both the Oculus Quest platform and PC VR headsets at the same time with full crossplay. But as it turns out, Big Box VR isn’t stopping their plans there. You can also read my latest hands-on preview right here.
In a recent interview about Population: One with the company’s CEO, Chia Chin Lee, and CTO, Gabe Brown, we discussed the past two years of development time, what it’s like to finally be building toward a firm launch date, and post-launch support.
You may not remember or know this but Population: One was originally a PC VR-only game. In fact, I played it way back at CES 2019 at the Vive Press Conference and really enjoyed it. This industry moves fast though and that version I saw back then never released.
Porting Population: One VR Battle Royale
“We basically rebuilt the entire engine over again, says Lee. “We built every single asset in-engine and wanted that to be delivered to any headset that became available. So it wasn’t even about Quest 1 or Quest 2, it was more about, ‘Can this work in a mobile device?’ Once that mobile device gets better and better, we want to extend that support.”
Brown continues: “On PC we had 24 players and on Quest now we have 18 currently. A lot of that had to do with rewriting a big chunk of Unity. The physics engine, PhysX, was too slow to run and it was running on the main threads. We had three cores so we needed to spread the work across all those cores and most game engines like Unreal and Unity don’t quite support that. So we had to rewrite a brand new, multithreaded, asynchronous physics engine, particle system, our own rendering engine, our networking layers runs asynchronously. So we had to write this new system that leverages quite a bit of super computing techniques for the mobile phone in order to make this possible…it was a big undertaking but overall we feel like this was the right investment because of the Quest, the Quest 2, and what the future of VR is going to be. We needed to be inclusive of all platforms.”
During the interview, following this description about inclusivity for devices with Population: One I asked about the potential for a PSVR version. Fortunately, it sounds like that’s already part of the plan.
“Definitely,” says Lee. “We want to be on every platform. But we have to first nail the Quest platform, then PC VR, and then we definitely have plans for PSVR.”
Population: One releases on October 22nd for Quest and PC VR. Let us know if you plan on playing down in the comments below!
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Battle Royale VR Shooter Population: One Lands This October For Quest And PC VR
Population: One finally has a release date set for October 22nd, less than a week after the launch of the Oculus Quest 2 on October 13th. Big Box VR is bringing their battle royale shooter to all PC VR headsets and Quest at launch with full crossplay support for $29.99.
Population: One – VR Battle Royale
Jamie, Ian, and I all got the chance to dive into Population: One last week together as a team and you can read my impressions from that hour-long play session right here or watch a bunch of gameplay in the video up above.
The comparisons to games like Fortnite are unavoidable and obvious. Not only is this a battle royale game in which players are tasked with being the last team standing as a toxic gas slowly encroaches on the map making it smaller and smaller over time, but it also features build-anywhere mechanics to spring up cover and quick structures on the fly.
What really sets Population: One apart though is that you can climb literally any surface. All you do is reach up and hold the grip button and you’re off climbing. You can also glide from any surface with an always-equipped glider so you never need to worry about fall damage. It complements the climbing system nicely.
Population: One will launch with a single map, several guns including assault rifles, SMGs, pistols, shotguns, and snipers, as well as grenades, and each match can hold up to 18 players across six 3-persopn squads. Your teammates can revive you if you go down, but if your team is wiped then you enter a spectator mode that lets you fly around the map in the sky to watch as things unfold.
“We’ve worked hard to bring POPULATION: ONE to as many platforms as possible by pushing the absolute limits of modern mobile VR chipsets,” said Gabe Brown, BigBox VR’s CTO and co-founder in a prepared statement. “We’re excited to see how players use the Vertical Combat System to compete and win starting on October 22nd!”
Population: One is slated to hit the Oculus Quest platform and all major PC VR headsets on October 22nd for $29.99. For more on Population: One, check out our hands-on impressions right here and keep an eye out on UploadVR for more coverage and a full review later this month.
Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
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