GameStop forever? Early investors weigh in a year after the boom
Thousands of people jumped on the Gamestop bandwagon last year when the company's stock began to surge. One year on, some are still holding on.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Devs ‘Open To’ Making A Sequel
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a big success, delivering an immersive adventure through a zombie-laden New Orleans that’s full of tense moments and action-packed gameplay. And according to developers at Skydance Interactive, it may not be the last time we get to see this brand of zombie-slaying in VR.
During a recent Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) developers from Skydance Interactive were online to respond to various fan questions. One user asked if any other games were planned within The Walking Dead universe. While not outright saying they definitely would love to work on another entry, the response from developers certainly sounds positive:
Right now we are focusing on S&S content. We loved working in The Walking Dead IP so we would certainly be open to continuing that in the future.
Assuming the game sells well and does well for the studio, it seems like a sequel could definitely be in the cards, especially considering this is the most successful (especially critically) Walking Dead game in quite some time.
Also during the same Reddit AMA, Skydance confirmed they’re actively working on new content for the game in the form of updates, which could lead to some exciting new ways of exploring the apocalypse.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners just recently launched on PSVR with great results and the studio is also targeting a Q4 2020 release for the Oculus Quest version. We haven’t gotten a chance to try that version yet or see it in action, but judging by the quality of the PSVR version we have high hopes.
Let us know what you’d want out of a The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners sequel or follow-up down in the comments below and read or watch our review for more details.
The post The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Devs ‘Open To’ Making A Sequel appeared first on UploadVR.
Half-Life Alyx On Track, New Oculus Quest Peripherals & Win Survios Games! || VRecap
This week has seen plenty of interesting stories, but we’ve rounded up just three of them for you because that’s how you love to consume information. We’ve seen updates from the Valve’s 80-strong Half-Life: Alyx team on Reddit, the death potential death of a certain 3-DOF headset, and a couple of incredible Quest periherals.
Half-Life: Alyx could have fallen prey to the number of recent game delays, but the Valve devs who took to Reddit in an AMA assured us otherwise. We reported on some of their top comments, including the fact the game was on track, and that you could put buckets on headcrabs and that it was hilarious. We also learned that it was too scary for some of the devs.
The Oculus Go seems to be dying a slow and painful death, with each of its lifelines being cut off one by one. Ouch. This week, Go has been dropped from the Oculus for Business platform, with all of those efforts now put into Quest. It is entirely understandable (and very much welcome, to be honest).
Despite everyone’s love for Quest, you’re all looking for those extra add-ons to make it a truly luxury standalone headset, and this week saw two. First was ONG Industry’s Touch controller charger stations, which replace the battery covers with their own magnetised versions to enable simple battery charging. Second, the VR Power battery pack is now heavily backordered (and you can read Tatjana’s full impressions from CES here.)
There are plenty of stories that didn’t make it into the VRecap, which you can see here:
Lenovo Announces Oculus Go Competitor For Classrooms
Valve Expects Index To Be Back In Stock Before Half-Life: Alyx Ships
Pixel Ripped 1995 Approved For Oculus Quest Store, But 1989 Isn’t
This week’s competition gives you the chance to get your hands on some of Survios’s top titles! This includes Raw Data, Sprint Vector, Electronauts, Creed, and Battlewake.
We’ll catch you same time next week with a round-up of the week’s top stories – see ya!
The post Half-Life Alyx On Track, New Oculus Quest Peripherals & Win Survios Games! || VRecap appeared first on UploadVR.
Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx Reddit AMA: All the Best Bits
There are a lot of virtual reality (VR) fans excited for the release of potentially the biggest videogame of 2020, Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx. Due to arrive in a couple of months, the normally highly secretive company took to Reddit for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session to answer a few questions from the community, addressing issues like possible delays whilst keeping things light and jovial – “any questions you have about Half-Life story spoilers will be handed over to Erik Wolpaw, who will lie to you,” notes the intro. So here’s a roundup of all the interesting bits from the Q&A.
One of the biggest worries for any gamer looking forward to a big videogame like Half-Life: Alyx being released is that of delays. Addressing that very question the team stated: “With the exception of some tweaks to the absolute final scene, the game is done. Lots of us at Valve, as well as playtesters, have played through the entire game multiple times.
“Right now we’re primarily polishing and fixing bugs, which is where we’d hope to be at this point in the development cycle. We’re confident we’ll hit our intended release. (We let the Valve Time happen before we announced the game.)”
Delving into the mechanics of Half-Life: Alyx a little more, the team address questions relating to movement and traversing this new world: “Our locomotion and comfort features are all done, including things like Seated, Left-Handed mode, etc. We have almost all our accessibility work done as well, but there’s a little bit more we’d like to do there (support for one armed play, for instance).”
“Because the game includes the ability to mantle in continuous motion, you don’t need often need to jump. For instance, if you need to get past an obstacle like a crate, you mantle up rather than jump up. The only time you need to jump is to traverse a short gap, which happens very rarely. We tried a few iterations of jumping, but ultimately found that even in continuous motion, players preferred dealing with those jumps with a teleport-style movement.”
As the Half-Life series is primarily a first-person shooter (FPS), Half-Life: Alyx is keeping to the formula so weapons play an integral part: “Our weapons all require only one hand, but they can be optionally grabbed and steadied by your offhand. We really wanted to focus on simultaneous two handed play throughout the game, so we needed the player to always be able to easily have a free hand. We keep that hand pretty busy with gravity gloves, movement, world interactions, flashlight, and so on.
“We have a few systems for inventory and weapon selection, all designed with the goal of keeping the players eyes on the environment as much as possible. We have an ‘over the shoulder’ contextual inventory system for ammo on your off hand, Your weapon hand has a quick weapon select feature, and we have a couple of wrist bags for some of the other items.”
But how much Half-Life: Alyx will there be, a short two-hour blast or a huge campaign? The team had this to say: “Playtesters have taken a similar amount of time to complete Half-Life: Alyx as they did to complete Half-Life 2. The games are comparable in terms of total amount of content.” So get playing that free copy of Half-Life 2 on Steam.
The series is loved the world over so for fans who don’t natively speak English: “We will be doing subtitles at launch for ten total languages: English, French, German, Spanish-Spain, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish-Latin America, and Traditional Chinese. VO in other languages is something we’re still considering.”
While screenshots are good actual video gameplay is better and it will be coming: “Yes, it’s our plan to release gameplay videos in the leadup to launch. Our intention is to use these to showcase not just gameplay elements, but also VR-specific elements like different movement options.”
And of course, Half-Life: Alyx AMA would be complete without mentioning the important subject of trains…: “It’s actually illegal to ship a Half-Life game if you don’t spend at least a little time riding in a train.”
Valve has yet to confirm an actual launch date for Half-Life: Alyx, just that it’ll arrive sometime in March. When further details arise, VRFocus will let you know.
Google Stadia will be missing some of its biggest features at launch
Google Stadia's unique social features like State Share and Crowd Play could revolutionize how we play games with others, but neither feature is actually going to be included when it launches this month.
5 questions the Google Stadia team needs to answer in its Reddit AMA
Google's Stadia team is planning to take part in a Reddit AMA on July 18. These are five questions we believe it must answer about the upcoming game-streaming service. Stadia will launch later in 2019.
Vive Developers Flock To New Subreddit Amidst Moderator Fallout
One of Reddit’s key VR communities is seeing something of an exodus this week amidst a moderator fallout.
Members of the r/Vive subreddit, which currently holds over 110,000 subscribers, have turned to a new hub named r/Vive_vr following disagreements with moderator and founder u/500500. The new subreddit already amassed more than 10,000 subscribers at the time of writing. Perhaps more importantly, though, plenty of VR developers have come out to show their support for the new page.
Disagreement over 500500’s leadership came to a head over the weekend. Many of the complaints stem from aggressive policies that lead to banning users and even VR developers. Reddit, in general, doesn’t allow companies to advertise their products. The site has an official premium advertising platform to cater to those needs. Technically, developers talking about their own products is advertising. Banning developers, though, robs the community of a link between creators and fans.
According to a thread on the new subreddit, banned developers include Onward creator Downpour Interactive, Rec Room studio Against Gravity and The Soulkeeper VR maker HELM Systems. Meanwhile, developers like Triangular Pixels and One Hamsa have come forth to show their support for the new hub.
Arguably the highest-profile developer to speak out is The Gallery maker Cloudhead Games. The studio’s Anthony Stevens wrote up a Medium post detailing its standing on r/Vive. “Every interaction we have with the community could be accused of self-promotion,” Stevens wrote. “But we just love the VR community and want to support it and be a part of it. Full stop.”
In the past 48 hours, u/500500 claimed r/Vive is a community “only because I allow it” and that he holds “the fate of the vive community” in his hands. In his first post today following the weekend’s outburst he appears to basically mock the entire situation.
Dear community,
I /u/500500, moderator of /r/vive, am please to announce that this subreddit gained 926 subscribers yesterday. The page view count for the day fell just short of 600,000. These figures represent a new high for the last 12 months from the available statistics . This reflects an exciting growth in the subscriber base and user activity. Yesterday, half of visitors were using reddit apps to access the subreddit compared to the 10% that is normally seen. I would like to welcome our new friends to this subreddit and look forward to your contributions to the VR discussion. I also would like to embrace the new demographics reflected by the new ways people are now accessing /r/vive.
Whether or not the new Vive subreddit flourishes remains to be seen.
Tagged with: htc vive, reddit, Subreddit
The post Vive Developers Flock To New Subreddit Amidst Moderator Fallout appeared first on UploadVR.
Chrome’s desktop browser now supports web-based VR on the Oculus Rift
The latest stable version of Google Chrome for desktop now supports the Oculus Rift headset via WebVR. Chrome automatically detects the headset, determines its capabilities, and renders web-based VR at a compatible framerate.
The post Chrome’s desktop browser now supports web-based VR on the Oculus Rift appeared first on Digital Trends.
Palmer Luckey Is Now A Moderator For The Oculus Subreddit
Today, it was announced on the Oculus subreddit forums that Rift creator Palmer Luckey is now one of the forum’s official moderators.
Luckey has had a very eventful year and a half. After departing Facebook (the company that owns Oculus) back in March of 2017 he has stayed relatively quiet, but that’s likely about to change.
As a longtime member of and advocate for the community, Luckey will likely be much more involved in conversations regarding his former employer and the company he helped build. In the past he has made statements that were loosely associated with his departure and even helped fund a hack that gets around the Oculus Home store for Vive users, but has mostly remained detached from the VR community as a whole.
“I look forward to serving the community,” writes Luckey on Reddit in response to the announcement. “It has been incredible watching this sub go from a hyper-niche enthusiast hangout to the mainstream. This has been the single largest VR community in the world since near the start, and I think it will stay that way for a long time, even as the eternal September continues.”
It will be interesting to see Luckey get more involved with the VR ecosystem once again and hopefully announce some of the projects he must be working on. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Tagged with: oculus, palmer luckey, reddit
Multiplayer FPS With Aim Support Planned For PlayStation VR
Independent developer Mardonpol Inc. have announced on Reddit that the company are working on an online multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) for the PlayStation VR that will feature support for the PlayStation Aim controller as a major feature.
The spokesperson on Reddit described the upcoming title as a blend of the Call of Duty series with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, two of the world’s most popular videogames. Further details are sketchy, with the developers so far only releasing a few examples of character models and animations, but have promised that a teaser trailer will be revealed in the next few weeks. So far, the developers have not confirmed what the title for the videogame will be.
Developer Mardonpol Inc. have previously worked on another virtual reality (VR) title, a multiplayer trivia quiz for the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift that was released on Steam in March of 2017. The trivia title, called Quiz Night Tonight! Has largely received positive reception on Steam, with players praising the atmosphere of being on a TV gameshow.
It has been noted that the jump from VR trivia quiz to realistic military shooter with online multiplayer is something of a large jump, but several posters on Reddit have already offered to Beta test the title when it gets to that stage and have begun offering suggestions and support to the developers, with many asking for features such as bot support.
Mardonpol Inc. have a challenge ahead of them to develop such a complex title and keep up with the expectations of a high-end VR FPS.
VRFocus will continue to report on this unnamed project and other upcoming PlayStation VR titles.