Category: robo recall

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Oculus Studios Promises ‘Months Of High Profile Rollouts’, Here’s What’s Coming

Oculus Studios Promises ‘Months Of High Profile Rollouts’, Here’s What’s Coming

Yesterday, Oculus announced the release date for what will be one of its first big Studios games this year, Rock Band VR. But there’s plenty more where that came from.

Following the news, Jason Rubin, Head of Content at Oculus, tweeted out a tease that the launch of the Harmonix music game was “Starting Months of high profile rollouts” for the headset, suggesting we’re going to see many more Rift and Gear-exclusive games in the coming months.

That’s a very exciting thought, but it left us wondering: “What exactly is coming?”

So we decided to round up all the Oculus Studios projects we know about right now and shine a spotlight on them below. Keep in mind we don’t have release dates for any of these games yet so we’re not sure how far away from release they are.

Arktika.1

What Is It?: Made to showcase the power of Touch, this is a gritty underground shooter where you’ll use inventive weapons to take down monstrous and robotic enemies, making use of cover and highly customizable guns.

Who Is Making It?: 4A Games, which is known for the Metro series of shooters. They’re tonally very similar to Arktika, set in a bleak apocalyptic wasteland. This team knows a thing or two about making convincing environments.

Why Are We Excited?: 4A has plenty of experience in making moody, atmospheric shooters quite unlike anything we’ve seen in the VR industry so far. Arktika could prove to be a genuinely engaging VR FPS with a meaty campaign that takes us on an epic journey.

Landfall

What Is It?: A first and third-person multiplayer warfare game, where you lead machines and soldiers into battle in a fight for what remains of the Earth’s resources. It is more top-down shooter than it is strategy game.

Who Is Making It?: Force Field VR, a new studio that’s dedicated to the technology and is making several Studios projects. We’re expecting big things from them going forward, not just in VR but in augmented reality too.

Why Are We Excited?: If you got into the recent beta that was available on the Oculus store then you should know. Landfall is proof that great gamepad-based games aren’t going anywhere now that Touch is here. The game is releasing later this month, so keep an eye out.

Lone Echo

What Is It?: A Touch-starring sci-fi adventure in which you navigate around a space station using your hands. A routine repair job soon turns into a catastrophic incident, and players will be left fighting for survival in the cold depths of space.

Who Is Making It?: Ready at Dawn, which is known for its graphical prowess. Games like PS4’s The Order: 1886 and the PSP God of War spin-offs pushed the hardware on which they were running to their limits, so we’re expecting them to do the same for Rift.

Why Are We Excited?: Lone Echo is easily the best-looking Rift game we’ve seen so far, but it includes some exciting gameplay mechanics too. Not only that, but there’s a very promising multiplayer mode to go with the solo campaign. We have high hopes.

Robo Recall

What Is It?: The automated future is here, and robots do a lot of jobs for us. Only this specific batch of droids has malfunctioned, and you’re here to take them back in. One problem? They don’t want to come with you, so they’ll have to be returned piece by piece.

Who Is Making It?: Epic Games. You know, the guys behind Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, and the Unreal Engine that so many developers use to make their VR projects. We expect great things from such a high caliber developer.

Why Are We Excited?: Epic knows how to make AAA blockbusters better than anyone, and we’re expecting them to make one of VR’s first. The best part is every Touch owner will be able to play it; Epic and Oculus are releasing the game for free.

Wilson’s Heart

What Is It?: A noir adventure game with a trippy horror twist. Wilson’s Heart has you using Touch controllers to explore a seemingly abandoned mental asylum, where you’ll quickly find yourself questioning what’s real and what’s in your head.

Who Is Making It?: Twisted Pixel, a studio that made its name back in the days of Xbox Live Arcade with the Spolsion Man titles. They excel at making quirky, experimental projects and this looks to be no exception.

Why Are We Excited?: Wilson’s Heart makes the best use of the Oculus Touch controllers we’ve seen in a game, and what we’ve played promises one of the most intriguing stories in VR so far. This is one of our most anticipated VR games in general, let alone from Studios.

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Watch: Epic’s Robo Recall is Coming, New Developer Diary Charts its Evolution

This latest video developer diary from Epic gives a very brief, but insightful overview of how Oculus Touch and Rift tech demo Bullet Train became fully fledged release Robo Recall, and what the developers learned along the way.

Epic‘s Robo Recall is heading to Oculus Rift in Q1 of this year for free, but how did the title evolve from tech demo, Bullet Train, designed to show off Oculus’ long awaited Touch motion controllers to the wonderfully frantic arcade shooter we’ll play soon (Q1 2017 in fact)?

This new developer diary walks you through key lessons learned by the team. The evolution of the teleportation mechanic for example, which began life as a restrictive form of locomotion in Bullet Train but in Robo Recall allows a free choice of destination and orientation all with the minimum of input effort on behalf of the player. They also share an interesting tidbit about the rendering choices made for Robo Recall, specifically aiming for the sharpest, cleanest visuals possible by using a “simplified forward renderer” to apply MSAA (Multisample Anti-Aliasing).

Here’s a snippet from what Ben Lang had to say about his time with Robo Recall after he went hands on with it at last year’s Oculus Connect conference:

With Touch, guns are a natural gameplay mechanic, and Robo Recall is full of them. With Epic’s characteristically impressive design, the weapons you’ll wield in the game are satisfying from their look to their sound, right down to the way they blow enemies to pieces. Waves of killer robots will be on the receiving end of your firepower, but this isn’t the gritty serious action of Call of Duty, it’s an arcade slugfest where a high score underlines the action.

SEE ALSO
Watch: 12 Minutes of 'Robo Recall' Gameplay with Oculus Touch

We shouldn’t have long to wait until Robo Recall is finally with us, but to keep you sated until then, you can check out 12 minutes of gameplay from the title recorded Oculus Connect last year.

The post Watch: Epic’s Robo Recall is Coming, New Developer Diary Charts its Evolution appeared first on Road to VR.

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Epic Games Discusses Robo Recall’s Bullet Train Evolution in New Dev Diary

Due to arrive in early 2017, Epic Games’ first fully fledged virtual reality (VR) title Robo Recall debuted only a few months ago at Oculus Connect 3 (OC3). Exclusive to Oculus Touch, the first-person shooter builds on the lessons learnt from Bullet Train, a tech demo unveiled at OC2, and today the team discuss this evolution in a new dev diary.

In this latest video the studio looks at the development from the perspective of Unreal Engine 4, the in-house middleware that Epic Games has built. The company has made very specific improvements to the engine to assist VR developers using the engine, and this shows in the difference between Bullet Train and Robo Recall.

One change between the two is the visual fidelity. For Bullet Train the studio used temporal anti-aliasing to create a softer image, while in Robo Recall the team used a simplified forward render to ensure as greater clarity as possible.

This is the third video in the series with previous releases talking about the ‘arcade action feel‘ and the ‘narrative & backstory’. VRFocus has been following the progress of Robo Recall closely, previewing the experience and talking to the team about its development.

For any further Robo Recall updates, keep reading VRFocus.

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Epic’s New Robo Recall Dev Diary Details The Game’s Evolution From Bullet Train

Epic’s New Robo Recall Dev Diary Details The Game’s Evolution From Bullet Train

Robo Recall is easily one of the most exciting VR experience coming in 2017, but its roots actually trace back to a relatively simple tech demo from 2015.

Fans of the Rift will remember when developer Epic Games took to the stage of the Oculus Connect 2 keynote that year to announce a tech demo for the then-unreleased Oculus Touch controllers, called Bullet Train. The demo was a first glimpse into what Touch could do for VR shooters and served as the foundation for Epic’s first larger VR game, Robo Recall. In this new dev diary, the first in a new series, focuses on the upcoming game. We can see the developer talk in more detail about how the two are linked, something Nick Whiting, Technical Director at Epic Games, alluded to in our interview from October.

Members of the Epic team are on-hand here to discuss how Robo Recall builds upon what the studio learned in Bullet Train. Teleporting, for example, is no longer assigned to specific spots in a level, but instead allows you to move to any position, much like other modern VR shooters.

Most importantly, though, you’re getting lots of new footage of the game here. There’s no two ways about it; Robo Recall is looking gorgeous, no doubt thanks to the intimate knowledge the developer has with its popular development toolkit, Unreal Engine. In the game, you’re tasked with taking down hordes of malfunctioning robots and encouraged to get inventive with creative kills, not too dissimilar to Epic’s own Bulletstorm, only with a much more comic-book, cartoonish style. We cam away very impressed from our time with the game at OC3 last year.

Bullet Train, meanwhile, can now be downloaded on Rift for free. Epic will also release Robo Recall for free, exclusively on Oculus Rift with Touch, and it’s easy to see why: this is as good an advertisement you’ll see for the engine as you’ll see.

There isn’t much longer to go until Robo Recall hits; it’s due in Q1 2017 and we’re already a month through that window. Expect a few more entries in this diary series before it launches.

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