Last week we reported that Magic Leap, Oculus, and Insomniac Games were set to talk at the 2017 edition of the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas. We also took issue with the event’s annual awards ceremony.
Namely, we lamented the lack of a category for VR and AR games at the 2017 iteration of the show, and the small number of these games listed in general. It appears we spoke too soon, though; the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) that runs the ceremony today announced two new categories for it, both of which recognize the best in VR gaming over the past 12 months.
D.I.C.E. has dubbed these nominees as ‘Immersive Reality’ games, likely to allow for entries of titles on other platforms like the mixed reality Magic Leap in the years to come.
First up, we have the ‘Immersive Reality Game of the Year’, which is described as an experience that “best utilizes the attributes of the platform to entertain users.” Included in the list is Ubisoft’s soothing flying title, Eagle Flight [Review: 7.5/10], Schell Games’ mind-bending puzzler, I Expect You To Die [Review: 7.5/10], Owlchemy Labs’ super successful Job Simulator [Review: 8/10], Valve’s VR compilation, The Lab [Review: 9/10], and the manic SUPERHOT VR [Review: 9/10].
That’s a pretty good selection of VR games, and its refreshing to see a ceremony honor titles that didn’t just appear on PlayStation VR, which we criticized last year’s The Game Awards for doing.
The ‘Immersive Reality Technical Achievement’, which celebrates games with the “highest level of technical achievement within an immersive reality experience”, is a very similar category. Eagle Flight, Job Simulator, I Expect You To Die, and SUPERHOT VR are all listed. Joining them is Google’s popular creativity app, Tilt Brush, which is now available on the Vive.
As we mentioned before, other VR and AR games have been recognized in other categories; Driveclub VR is up for ‘Racing Game of the Year’, and Pokemon GO and Thumper both have several nominations. Suddenly these awards are looking like a much better representation of the year VR has had.
The awards take place just under a month from now on February 23rd at The Mandalay Bay Convention Center.
Today the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) has announced the nominees for its two new virtual reality (VR) focused categories: Immersive Reality Game of the Year and Immersive Reality Technical Achievement. The nominees feature some of the best known VR video games on the market, across a range of genres.
The Immersive Reality Game of the Year category focuses on the title that best utilizes the attributes of the platform. Elements such as design, direction and narrative are all factored into the title selection, states AIAS.
The nominees for Immersive Reality Game of the Year are:
SUPERHOT VR – Developer: SUPERHOT Sp. z o.o./Publisher: SUPERHOT Sp. z o.o.
While the Immersive Reality Technical Achievement celebrates the highest level of technical achievement within an immersive experience. Elements like artificial intelligence, physics, engine mechanics, and visual rendering are all taking into consideration.
The nominees for Immersive Reality Technical Achievement are:
SUPERHOT VR – Developer: SUPERHOT Sp. z o.o./Publisher: SUPERHOT Sp. z o.o.
Tilt Brush – Developer: Google/Publisher: Google
While these two categories are purely for VR video games, immersive titles do crop up in several other categories. These include Driveclub VR for Racing Game of the Year, Pokémon Go in Mobile Game of the Year and Game of the Year, and I Expect You To Die in Outstanding Achievement in Game Design.
The awards ceremony will take place on 23rd February 2017 in Las Vegas after the 2017 D.I.C.E. Summit, live-streamed from 7:30pm PT/10:30pm ET via live.interactive.org.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of the 2017 D.I.C.E. Summit, reporting back with any further updates.
Superhot VR is one of our favorite Oculus Touch launch titles. Like many of the best VR games so far, the thing we craved the most was more. A new update will extend the replayability of the game with several new modes that amp up the challenge.
In Superhot VR, time only moves when you do. Which means if a bullet is flying at your face and you freeze in place, it will freeze to. That gives you some time to think your way out of the situation—which probably means narrowly dodging the bullet and then making a well-aimed knife throw at the enemy, before pausing again to assess viable solutions to the next most pressing threat. It’s a novel mechanic that uniquely thrives in VR. We gave Superhot VR a 9.1 out of 10 in our full review.
Now the developers have announced the ‘Forever update’, coming next month, which will extend the replayability of the game with new challenge modes, and some undisclosed “Secrets” for players to explore:
Test your aim where only headshots take out enemies
Race against your best score in bullet time and real-world time
Try to complete the game without shooting
Get hardcore with faster enemies and less reaction time
There’s also the 10-minute challenge, which tasks players with completing the entire game in 10 minutes (we mentioned we craved more content from this game, right?).
As this information comes from an entry on the official Oculus Blog, it seems Oculus may be working more closely with the developers to expand the game’s offering. According the post, the above is “just a taste of what the update has in store,” and further implies that there will be more updates to come.
So what’s in store for fans of the first-person shooter (FPS)? Oculus has unveiled some of the challenges that player will have to face, which the company claims will add hours more gameplay. These challenges include taking out enemies using only headshots; racing against a players best score in bullet time and real-world time; completing the video game without shooting and a hardcore challenge where enemies are faster and reaction times are reduced. That’s not all though, for true SUPERHOT VR experts there’s the ten minute challenge, simply complete the entire title in that time.
Talking about the inspiration behind the new content, lead designer Cezary Skorupka said: “The community is awesome at this game—way better than us! We need to keep them happy, so we looked for ways to make SUPERHOT VR even more challenging.”
While this news certainly does answer one of the bigger questions about the Forever Update, there’s still no confirmation on when its likely to be available, or what secrets players are likely to uncover.
As VRFocus learns more about the SUPERHOT VR update, we’ll let you know.
Like a lot of Oculus Touch owners, SUPERHOT VR [Review: 9/10] was one of our favorite games at the controllers’ launch last month, but there’s no denying it was on the short side.
The game, which adapted the ‘time moves only when you do’ mechanic from the original non-VR release, lasted less than two hours in total. We were dying for more content when the credits started to roll and, fortunately, it looks like we’ll be getting some, or at least some new ways to play what’s already there.
Both the SUPERHOT VR development team and Oculus itself are teasing a ‘Forever Update’ for the VR FPS. While there’s no news post to go along with the Twitter messages, the GIF above does have its own set of hints. Set in the game’s hub world, the disk the player’s hand holds seems to have a list of what to expect in the update.
It’s a little blurry, but Reddit user Leviatein seems to have uncovered the code: challenges, achievements, bug fixes, and secrets.
Achievements and bug fixes are simple enough; Oculus games recently started rolling out the company’s in-game rewards system, and there are always imperfections to iron out in any title. Challenges, meanwhile, are a little more exciting, as they suggest you’ll be able to tackle the levels you’ve already mastered with a new set of restrictions or goals to reach for. We’d love to try some of the game’s more challenging missions by perhaps only using melee weapons or firing a certain number of bullets.
Secrets, meanwhile, could obviously mean anything, but the game’s ambiguous story leaves plenty of room for cracks to explore. Hopefully they’ll lead to some brand new levels, though maybe that’s hoping for a little too much.
No date for the new features yet, but be on the lookout for them.
For Oculus Touch owners who’re fans of first-person shooter (FPS) SUPERHOT VR, Oculus has teased an upcoming update with a Tweet today.
Called ‘FOREVER UPDATE’ the only details the tweet conveyed were through a short GIF showing some very old computers and CRT monitors. The GIF shows a floppy disc (remember those) being inserted into the central computer, doing so momentarily changes the screen to ‘Updating SUPERHOT’.
It’s whats written on the disk itself that holds the most info. In a hand written note style you can just make out what’s on the label, saying SUPER HOT UPDATE, Challenges, Achievements, Bugfixes and Secrets.
Further details have yet to be released on what challenges these might just be, but as its called the ‘FOREVER UPDATE’ there’s a good chance an endless mode for hardcore SUPERHOT VR fans could be included.
The update hasn’t gone live on Oculus Home (at time of writing) so this does look to be a early tease at present.
Last week the developers behind SUPERHOT VR teamed up with Mod DB, alongside with IMGN.PRO, Oculus, Nvidia, Intel for a #MAKEITSUPERHOT competition. It challenges modders, game designers, artists and other creative types to make stuff inspired by the video game.
As VRFocus learns more about the update, we’ll let you know.
A lot of awards ceremonies we’ve seen over the past year have had pretty uninspired recognition of VR content, seemingly only knowledgeable of the big PlayStation VR titles. It’s refreshing, then, to look at the nominees for the Best VR/AR Game at the upcoming Game Developers Choice Awards.
The awards, hosted by Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, are set to take place on Wednesday, March 1st at the 2017 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Nominees were announced this week however, and it’s the first year that VR and AR games are getting a nod.
The category has a surprisingly strong list of nominees. The one nomination we would have bet money on being there is Enhance Games’ Rez Infinite [Review: 8/10], the PS VR launch game that brought the beloved music-based shooter into the virtual realm. It’s also unsurprising to see Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator [Review: 8/10] up for the award. Both titles are popular among the VR community and the nominations are deserved, as far as we’re concerned.
More interesting nods on the VR side include Superhot VR [Review: 9/10], the recently-released (but absolutely excellent) Oculus Touch FPS that just about everyone seems to love. Northway Games’ excellent Fantastic Contraption [Review: 8/10] is also on the list, meaning non-PS VR games are getting a good amount of attention at this ceremony.
If we were to guess a winner, though, it would more than likely be the one AR game on the list: Pokemon Go. Niantic’s worldwide phenomenon wasn’t just one of the biggest reality-altering games of 2016, it was one of the biggest games full stop, getting people that never play videogames back into the lovable world of pocketable monsters and sending them off into the big wild world to explore and catch ’em all.
There’s also a solid list of honorable mentions for the category, including Thumper, Superhypercube, Batman: Arkham VR, Space Pirate Trainer, and The Lab. Drool’s Thumper [Review: 9/10] in particular has done well for itself; it’s also nominated in best audio, and best debut categories, while it gets more honorable mentions in innovation and visual art. Pokemon Go is also up for several more awards including best mobile/handheld and the innovation award. Between that and the recent Pokemon Sun/Moon, we think Pikachu has a good chance of walking away with an award in March.
Sairento VR is a new made-for-VR first person action game which manages to distil everything that was cool about SUPERHOT VR, Raw Data and adds its own locomotion system for something which promises to be even cooler than either of them.
Guns, swords and slow motion – three ingredients which have transfixed me as a movie-goer and gamer for as long as I can remember now. As such, throw some combination of the above into a virtual reality experience and it’s pretty much guaranteed it’ll pique my interest. As motion controllers for consumer VR has now become a reality for both major VR platforms as 2016 comes to a close, we’ve already seen a handful of great games to exploit my weakness for these Matrix-inspired mechanics.
SUPERHOT VR debuted alongside the Oculus Touch launch with it’s brilliantly stark take on the genre and before that the excellent Raw Data on SteamVR provided a superbly slick package. Now comes Sairento VR, an in-development first person action title which shuffles all of the things that made these games so compelling and sprinkles some neat locomotion innovations into the mix for a package which looks to be pretty compelling.
Still in Early Access on Steam, the HTC Vive title (which, thanks to SteamVR also works on the Oculus and Touch) from developers Mixed Realms and is described as ” a mission-driven, VR action role-playing game set in a reimagined Japan in the near future.” So far so predictable then. Apparently you play a member of the ‘Silent Ones’ organisation, a covert operation who draw from samurai and ninja for their martial arts skills. Why? Who the hell cares?!
Frankly it’s all a flimsy excuse to throw you the player into a futuristic world filled with swords and firearms with a roster of bad-ass skills to boot. Those skills are upgrades as you progress too, which is where the RPG-lite elements of the game are felt.
All of that aside, it’s Mixed Realms’ twist on locomotion that may elevate the package to must-play status. Throughout the game, the player amasses ‘focus’ which is illustrated via blue bar toward the bottom of your view. This focus allows you to move throughout the gameworld via a fairly standard looking point-and-click method.
I can already hear the anti-VR-locomotion brigade readying their pitchforks so let me add this: the point-and-click mechanic actually adds to the coolness of this title. If you’ve amassed enough focus, you can string together leaps in slow motion, such that you descend on your enemies to obliterate with sword and pistol. But get this, you can augment your abilities to string those leaps together mid-air, double-jump style. This opens up opportunities for the player to choreograph some extremely cool combat together as they fend off waves of enemies. On top of this, you can unleash powered up projectiles via your sword and dispatching enemies is accompanied by a satisfying splash of over the top gore.
On the negative side, the title is at present little more than a glorified wave shooter with some neat progression grafted on, and there are some crashing and interface issues which need to be handled, but it’s a promising early showing for the developers and one I’ll be keeping a close eye on. We’ve only had a small amount of time with the title thus far so can’t gauge whether the £18.99 (currently discounted to £15.19) asking price is justified, but if the stuff I’ve described above holds any interest we suspect it’s worth a punt. We’ll be back with a more in-depth look at the title later.
SUPERHOT VR is one of the standout VR games to come out with the Oculus Touch launch with its unique blend of the mechanics of a first-person shooter but with the strategy of a puzzle game. Physics-based interactions in VR are already compelling since it helps to cultivate plausibility within our brains through the expectation loop of prediction and observation. Tying your movements to the progression of time within the game provided me with a awe-inspiring experience of the fabric of space-time that’s completely unique to VR and feels like it has rewired my brain.
LISTEN TO THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I had a chance to catch up with SUPERHOT VR game designer Piotr Iwanicki at Oculus Connect 3 where we talked about how they had to ditch the original teleportation mechanic and really focus on cultivating a sense of body presence using the Oculus Touch controllers. He also talks about the joys of a moving in a slow motion ballet environment while being the midst of a non-stop, intense action-movie sequence.
Even though the bullet-dodging mechanic is primarily based upon your head positions and not your lower body movements, the low fidelity graphics offer a blank slate for you to project your full sense of body presence into the experience. As Piotr says, “most of the action is happening in your head.” So much so that one developer kicked over a monitor after getting so immersed and forgetting that their feet were not even being tracked.
There’s a distinct lack of abstracted gameplay within SUPERHOT VR; it’s based upon your physical body movements, and so it’s able to cultivate a deep sense of embodied presence. The perceived danger of red crystal enemies running at you with guns pointed at your head also contributes to the “bat test” insight (that presence can be increased when there’s an artificial threat presented). You’re also able to do a series of slow-motion actions that just make you feel like a complete badass.
Overall, SUPERHOT VR is one of the more innovative gameplay mechanics that I’ve seen in VR so far. It’s compelling enough to give new VR users a taste of what type of gaming experiences are uniquely possible within VR, but also has a lot of deep lessons for VR designers for how cultivate and maintain a deep sense of presence.
I’m listening to the soundtrack of The Matrix right now, and it’s because I just played SUPERHOT VR, a one-of-a-kind game exclusively for Oculus Touch that will make you feel like you’re in the midst of the highly choreographed slow motion action that The Matrix is known for—except in VR, you’re the director.
Superhot VR Details:
Developer: SUPERHOT Available On: Oculus Touch (Oculus Home) Reviewed on: Oculus Touch Release Date: December 5th, 2016
Gameplay
Superhot VR is built around an interesting slow-motion mechanic: time only moves forward as you move. If you stand completely still, the game world is frozen. If you begin to move your hands or head, the action picks up speed until you stop again. With bullets flying toward your face from multiple directions, you’ll find this power quite handy as you pause to think about what to do next.
The beginning of the game is a bit bland as a few enemies come at you unarmed, one at a time, looking for a first fight. The punching mechanics aren’t exactly fleshed out—the red enemies will take goofy swings at you when they aren’t even close enough, and a single punch of almost any force dispatches them with ease. You’ll be happy that it works this way later on though, when the action starts ramping up and the guy about to punch you in the face is the least threatening thing in the scene.
As long as you don’t move much, you can survey the scene around you before you act. Occasionally, a scene will start with a gun leveled directly at your head, which can be rather intimidating, as being hit with a single bullet (or any attack for that matter) will kill you instantly and take you back to the last checkpoint. You’ll find that you have no body (like most VR games), so only a shot to the head will kill you, but I found it natural to try to dodge bullets with my real body anyway, despite knowing it didn’t matter to the game. For the most part, the hit detection against you is good, though every once and awhile a bullet will come close to your head and still kill you even though it might have seemed like it shouldn’t have. Other times you’ll get hit squarely in the face and curse the unrelenting enemies… only to start the scene over and make sure they get an extra helping of pain this time around.
After the first few tutorial scenes of just punching people, you’ll move on to thrown objects. Pretty much anything that you can grab—an ashtray, a stapler, a fire extinguisher, etc—will kill enemies with a single hit. Aiming and leading in the start-and-stop reference frame of Superhot VR is challenging without feeling unfair. Later you’ll get access to guns, and you’ll delight in landing a perfectly led headshot (for no other reason than to show off skill, as a hit anywhere will kill any enemy, and there’s no bonus for a headset); if you miss it’ll be no one’s fault but your own.
Pretty much all of the gameplay elements are introduced within the first quarter of the game. There’s a number of enjoyable and challenging scenes, but Superhot VR comes up just short of the gameplay crescendo that it seems to be building the whole while. One particularly cool scene at the end really challenges you but is ultimately just a long string of a similar gameplay mechanic repeated. A few extra mechanics beyond punching, throwing, and shooting would be welcome, especially level interactivity—perhaps destructible environments or other hazards to befall you and your foes.
Never in VR have I felt like the sort of action hero that Superhot VR has made me. When you kill an enemy, the object they’re holding flies sympathetically in your direction, making for awesome moments of catching a gun right flying through the air just in time to blast the guy that’s about to kill you. You can be sure that people are going to make up their own ‘trick shot’-like challenges to enhance the difficulty of the game and to show off creative and skillful ways to kill enemies (like using only punches, or maybe only thrown objects).
At one point a scene began with me grabbing a gun and landing a headshot on a nearby assailant. I began to turn to the right where the next enemies were approaching, but the gun was at that point going to fly behind me. Thanks to slow motion, I actually managed to catch the gun with one hand behind my back, and then quickly whipped it around in front of me leveled weapons to give the next threat a double dose of hurt. It felt awesome.
Controlling the slow motion mechanic becomes second nature with ease; I honestly found myself, ever briefly after taking off the headset, feeling like the real world should be slowing down around me as I moved more slowly.
One very cool aspect of the slow-motion mechanic is that the ‘difficulty level’ is automatic in a sense. If you want it to be harder, just move faster, and the scene around you will do the same, forcing you to act and react faster. If you learn a level well enough, you can play it in near real-time, executing a series of skilled moves to dodge and defeat enemies to clear a scene in just seconds. It’s a very fun way to increase the difficulty of any part of the game.
Superhot VR tackles many of the VR game design critiques I pointed out just a few days ago in a Twitter rant. Every movement matters. Every pull of the trigger counts. My body is anchored inside the virtual world because I have to dodge punches, knives, and bullets—it’s interacting with me in a significant way. Enemies aim well, and you have to dodge better to stay alive.
Like Neo stopping the bullets for the first time at the end of The Matrix, I wanted to be able to hold up my hand and say “No,” to what I knew in an instant was the end of the game that had come a bit too soon. But, despite my training, I was not The One.
At $25, the roughly two hours of initial game time would feel a little too pricey if not for Superhot VR’s alluring gameplay. The thing is, if I could pay twice as much and get twice as much content, I’d do it (and recommend it) in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, like many of the most compelling VR experiences right now, that’s not an option.
Immersion
The world of Superhot VR is one of three colors—white for the environment, red for enemies, and black for weapons.
Enemies are human-shaped, but are devoid of any details like a face or fingers. Instead they’re represented as being made of some sort of crystalline structure, which seems like a good choice because killing one of these creatures amounts to a ‘shattering’ of the head, arm, or torso, whereas a more realistic portrayal would be technically complex to achieve (and really quite violent). You’ll fear these enemies, especially when one has a shotgun, but they don’t feel particularly human, even if they take on the silhouette.
If these people were rendered as realistic humans, this would be overtly violent.
The rest of the environment is completely white, like the minimal aesthetic of Mirror’s Edge, except even more extreme. Literally everything is white except for enemies and weapons. This lets you identify the bright red enemies—and the objects you can use to dispatch them—quickly and easily, but it does detract from feeling like you’re in a real environment. Fortunately you’ll be focused mostly on surviving, rather than gawking at the space around you.
Speaking of the space around you, each time you clear a room, you’ll be teleported to another with more foes to dispatch. You’re technically teleporting from one region of the same scene to another, and you’ll be able to occasionally see the enemies you destroyed in the previous room still shattering into slow-motion shards. It can be tough to tell how one teleport connects to the rest though; a single color on some prominent feature in the—otherwise entirely white—environment could act as a visual anchor to aid in the player’s environmental awareness.
Watching and hearing a bullet whiz by your face is seriously intense. One bullet will kill you, and when you turn to find one coming right at you, you’ll have to repress your “oh sh$%!” instinct and manage to stay still and calm until you can figure out how to dodge to survive. It can be awesomely visceral. So too can moments where bullets intercept and deflect off of one another, or when an enemy’s bullet blows apart a knife careening through the air which was your last hope of survival.
Superhot VR has a hint of a narrative framework but it doesn’t amount to much; the game is largely an arcade title that mostly focused on the unique gameplay. It would be great to see more narrative woven into the gameplay, or maybe even just eliminate it all together—right now what’s there feels like a novel distraction.
It actually seems like a bit of a missed opportunity that this game isn’t literally built on The Matrix IP, as the execution elicits that feeling of awesome bullet-time combat that the franchise is known for (not to mention all the VR themes), and would open up rich narrative opportunities. Who knows the Wachowskis? We need to introduce them to Superhot VR.
While the audio and visual design is solid, the game does have an indie vibe to it (animation and enemy pathing aren’t spectacular, and the 3D models are fairly basic). Superhot VR is an amazing foundation for a truly unique VR game with exceptionally interesting core gameplay, and I would love to see what it looks like with another step up in production value.
Comfort
Aside from a single moment that purposefully disregards the usual VR safety recommendations, Superhot VR was entirely comfortable from a VR best practices standpoint through my time playing. The game effectively keeps you facing forward toward the cameras to ensure you don’t lose tracking. Fight scenes don’t require artificial locomotion, and you’re automatically teleported to the next scene once you complete the first one.
You’re going to want the largest possible Guardian setup you can fit in your available space. The need to dodge is going to take you a step or two in either direction, and you’ll be stretching your arms out in desperate reach of weapons flying through the air and you won’t want to feel limited by the physical space around you.
Superhot VR uses a shader which adds a grid-like grain, presumably for aesthetic purposes. Since VR headsets already induce their own grain thanks to things like mura and the screen door effect, the shader is an unwelcome choice in VR. It isn’t particularly bothersome, but the game would probably appear a little bit more crisp in VR without it.
One persistent issue the game has is with centering. It would be nice to have a marker on the floor to show you where to return to after having dodged 50 bullets and shuffled to the side to grab a gun, but not such marking exists. When the ‘next’ button appears, it’ll often appear inside of your or outside of the field of view because you aren’t centered where the game is expecting. It doesn’t hamper gameplay fortunately, but can be a little annoying between scenes.
That ‘next’ button comes in the form of a pyramid which asks you to “grab” it, and then breaks when you do. Minor point… don’t ask me to “grab” something and then have it break into pieces, it’s just an odd and unsatisfying way to make an interface. If you want me to break it, ask me to punch it! Only if you want me to hold it, should you ask for it to be grabbed.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
