Superhot is joining Beat Saber in the double-platinum club; the game’s sold over two million copies.
Superhot VR was one of a number of titles to share sales news today as Facebook provided anniversary updates on the Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest headsets. This figure includes all versions of the game sold; Superhot VR launched as a timed exclusive on Oculus Rift in late 2016 before arriving on SteamVR and PSVR later down the line. It was a launch title for the Quest standalone headset, too.
To celebrate the news, the game will be going on sale across a range of platforms on May 21st.
“2020 is shaping up to be our best year yet,” Superhot team’s Alastair Hebson shared in a prepared statement, “sales of SUPERHOT VR are up at least 195% compared to this time last year, and we couldn’t be more proud.”
The game has remained one of VR’s most enduring titles. As you undoubtedly know by now, in Superhot time moves only when you do. This mechanic is turned into a superpower, as you slowly Matrix your way to victory, dodging bullets and executing cinematic, stylish kills. It still ranks highly in many of our best VR games lists.
We were never actually told Superhot VR passed the original million milestone, but indications from the developer over the past few years suggested as much. In December, the team shared that it had grossed over $2 million in revenue across the Christmas week. Plus the team said launch sales for the game on Quest were “300% higher” than Rift. The game doesn’t support cross-buy between the two platforms.
The only other confirmed VR game to pass two million units in sales is Beat Games’ Beat Saber, which passed that milestone back in March. Though we don’t know exact sales figures across platforms, it seems like the Quest versions of each were instrumental in getting over that line.
Superhot VR (2016) has now gone double platinum, putting the stylish red-guy-smashing action game at over two million copies sold across all VR platforms.
Released in 2016 on Rift as an Oculus Touch launch title, Superhot VR eventually made its way to nearly every VR platform, including SteamVR headsets, PSVR, and most recently Oculus Quest.
And it’s only gotten more popular over the years since launch, with its Quest release in 2019 seeing a 300 percent sales increase on the first day over its initial launch on Rift.
“Across all sales platforms, we’ve managed to achieve something that not many developers manage to do in any medium, and that’s pretty meaningful to us so we thought we’d send a press release about it,” said Callum Underwood, Director of Special Projects at SUPERHOT Team. “VR has enabled us to do all the cool stuff we do here, and is paying for the livelihoods of over 45 people to put it bluntly.”
“2020 is shaping up to be our best year yet, sales of SUPERHOT VR are up at least 195% compared to this time last year, and we couldn’t be more proud,” said Alastair Hebson, Director of Other Special Projects at SUPERHOT Team.
The studio says various sales for Superhot VR game will start May 21st, and that users on all platforms should keep any eye out for savings.
The Humble VR Bundle cleared $1 million in payments for its incredible packages of games.
Several days remain to buy the game bundles which unlock at three tiers. The least expensive starts at $1 and includes Smashbox Arena and Cosmic Trip. Things start to get interesting if you pay more than $14.28 to add Gorn, Budget Cuts, and Space Pirate Trainer. Exceed $15, though, and you also add Superhot VR and Moss.
The bundle represents an incredible savings on a number of great games and, as of this writing, more than 70,000 bundle purchases have been made. The bundles also cleared $1 million in total payments, according to the Humble Bundle site. Soundtracks for some of the games are also included as a bonus.
When you make a Humble VR Bundle purchase you can choose how to distribute the funds to publishers and a charity of your choice. The games are delivered as Steam keys which makes it very easy to distribute any of the ones you already own to other people. After all, some people are likely to be getting into PC VR for the first with the March 23 release of Half-Life: Alyx and they’ll be looking for more games to play afterward. The titles in this bundle represent a fantastic introduction to several genres. We know a lot of VR gamers already have some of these games so, in addition to donating to a charity and supporting development, you could also help introduce new headset owners to some games they might have missed in the first few years of consumer VR.
Did you pick up the bundle? Let us know down in the comments below!
After a slow start, 2019 rounded out to be an undeniably strong year for consumer VR, setting up a springboard into a big 2020. Here’s an overview of the major happenings in VR over the last year, and a glimpse of what will come in 2020.
5 Major New Headsets and What They Mean for the Market
2019 started out slow as the industry waited with baited breath for the launch of the latest wave of headsets, but things started heating up once they finally hit the market. Here’s a look at the biggest headset launches of 2019 and what they’ve meant to the industry so far.
Oculus Quest
Image courtesy Oculus
Oculus Quest is surely the most important headset to launch in 2019. We called it the “first great standalone VR headset” in our review, thanks to a reasonable $400 price point, full 6DOF tracking (which allows it to play games functionally on par with high-end VR headsets) and no PC required.
As a standalone VR headset built on smartphone hardware, Quest can’t compete in the graphics department against high-end PC VR headsets, but there’s no question that it’s the class leader in ease-of-use (a place where tethered headsets are still struggling). And if you happen to have a gaming PC anyway, Quest also doubles as a PC VR headset.
On those fronts, Rift S seems to have largely succeeded; its $400 launch price was half of the launch price of the original Rift with Touch controllers, and we certainly haven’t been missing the external sensors of the original since getting our hands on Rift S. Thanks to the backing of a strong content library, Rift S packs a lot of value, making it easy to recommend as the best entry-level headset for PC VR.
Valve Index
Image courtesy Valve
After tons of speculation, Valve finally jumped into the VR headset space with its own first-party hardware in 2019. While the company had originally collaborated with HTC to create the Vive, this time around Valve opted to handle everything on their own.
In our review we called Index “the enthusiast’s choice” thanks to category-leading visuals, ergonomics, and audio, as well as solid controllers. And while it’s a lovely headset once you’re inside, there’s no denying the significant $1,000 price tag and sub-par ease-of-use due to external tracking sensors and last-gen boundary setup.
Still, Index is a hugely important headset because it acts as a high bar that future headsets can strive toward and demonstrates the continued existence of an enthusiast class of VR consumers who are willing to pay for a high-end VR experience. But it’s also made for an awkward relationship between Valve and HTC who are now positioned more as competitors than partners.
Vive Cosmos
Image courtesy HTC
In 2019 HTC launched Vive Cosmos, its first true successor to the original Vive headset. Like Facebook with Rift S, HTC opted to make its latest headset easier to use by ditching external tracking sensors for inside-out tracking.
In our review we called Cosmos “a decent headset up against stiff competition.” Indeed, worst-in-class tracking and iffy ergonomics has left Cosmos overshadowed by the considerably less expensive Rift S and the more expensive but higher-fidelity Index. And while HTC had positioned Cosmos as a move toward a more user-friendly headset, the device’s awkward reliance on Steam (despite a Viveport front-end) arguably takes it a step back in user-experience compared to the original Vive.
While Microsoft and its other VR partners seem to have largely abandoned the Windows VR platform, HP surprised us in 2019 with the launch of Reverb, its second VR headset. While it’s still stuck with Windows VR (and the worst-in-class controllers that come standard with such headsets), Reverb leads in pixel density, making it a compelling choice for simulator enthusiasts who tend to value resolution above other specs.
While Reverb’s launch in 2019 shows that HP is seriously committed to PC VR, it hasn’t done much to alleviate the feeling that Microsoft is knowingly allowing the Windows VR platform to wither away.
Big VR Game Launches and Growing Developer Success
Since the first consumer VR headsets hit the market in 2016, developers have been steadily honing in on what makes a great (and successful) VR game. While it’s been a painfully slow process for developers and consumers alike, 2019 saw the launch of games which have objectively moved the needle forward in VR game design and set new records for developer success. Here’s a look at the most important moments in VR gaming in 2019.
Beat Saber’s Full Release and Developer Acquisition by Facebook
Image courtesy Beat Games
It wasn’t long after Beat Saber’s early access launch in 2018 that it was a clear success for its small indie developer Beat Games. Later that year the game launched on PSVR where it remains one of the best rated games on the platform. In 2019, Beat Games added new music & features and brought feature-parity to all versions of the game, culminating in a full launch out of early access alongside the launch of Quest on May 21st, 2019.
Even before the game launched on Quest, it reached a huge milestone as the first VR title—as far as we know—to have sold 1 million copies. This staggering success caught the attention of Facebook, leading to the surprise acquisition of Beat Games. This was likely primarily a defensive move in order to keep platform competitors from getting their hands on what is surely Quest’s most important game. But there’s an offensive element too: Facebook seems keen to accelerate the game’s adoption of new Oculus platform technologies aimed at driving user engagement.
Asgard’s Wrath Delivers the First Great VR RPG
Image courtesy Oculus
Purportedly VR’s largest game production yet released, Asgard’s Wrath capitalized on the longstanding desire for a meaty VR-native RPG. Players were treated to some 30 hours of content and a game which has been called a “must buy” by many. We thought enough of the title that we gave it our 2019 Game of the Year Award for the Oculus Rift.
The Oculus Studios-backed title appears to have been a success, but it also sets a very high bar for third-party (and mostly indie) developers to follow.
Stormland’s Innovative Open World and Developer Acquisition by Sony
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
Developed by veteran game and VR studio Insomniac Games, Stormland raised the bar in VR open-world game design with an innovative take on locomotion which offers players a sense of large scale freedom rarely seen elsewhere in VR. The game successfully combines a handful of different locomotion schemes and integrates them with satisfying combat for a core gameplay loop that’s easy to love.
We expect VR game design concepts from Stormland to proliferate into VR titles in 2020 and beyond. For its contributions we gave the title our 2019 Design Award for Excellence in Locomotion.
While Facebook scooped up Beat Saber’s Beat Games, Sony acquired Stormland’s Insomniac Games in 2019. Though the company probably bought the studio primarily for its success in the non-VR space, it was a strategic blow to Oculus nonetheless.
Blood & Truth Proves PSVR is Still Going Strong
Image courtesy SIE London Studio
Blood & Truth was PSVR’s biggest game to launch in 2019 and managed to delight players with an action-packed narrative full of interesting moments. Blood & Truth is an impressively crafted experience that is not only expertly designed around the limitations of the aging PSVR, but even manages to raise the technical bar for character rendering and performances on any VR platform, even against much more powerful PC hardware.
By making nearly everything in the game physical and interactive, Boneworks delivers on player’s expectations of agency in a way that often goes far beyond its contemporaries. In the game, just about every object, enemy, and weapon is physically interactive, leading to moments where novel ideas—like, say, using a coffee mug as a melee weapon—actually work. While the heavy emphasis on physics can be frustrating and wonky at times, it’s hard not to feel a sense of added embodiment when your ideas about what’s possible in the game world are satisfied in a realistic fashion.
For its part, Boneworks is a flag in the ground which represents perhaps the most interactive physics sandbox seen in VR to date, and a proof point that glimpses the immersive benefits which come from more realistic virtual interactions—something we expect to see developers expand on into 2020 and beyond.
Star Wars: Vader Immortal Successfully Brings Big IP Into VR
Image courtesy ILMxLAB
While the number of great VR games is steadily growing, only a small handful of titles so far have been based on major franchises, and of those that are, even fewer still have actually been made from the ground-up for VR.
Star Wars: Vader Immortal is shining example of bringing a massively popular intellectual property into VR in a way that feels authentic and enjoyable. It’s key to have major franchises jumping into the VR landscape to pique the interest of mainstream consumers who may not be interested in VR as a technology unto itself; it’s even more important that the execution of big IP in VR is done well so that new users don’t get a bad taste from their first experience.
On that note, Vader Immortal—which was released in three parts over the course of 2019—hits all the right notes. It’s engaging and easy to play, thanks to a focus on narrative and immersion, rather than raw gameplay, making it a great first-time VR experience; it’s also one of the most visually impressive games available on Quest. So it’s no wonder why we gave the game our 2019 Game of the Year Award for Quest.
While only a small handful of indie VR studios so far have found this sort of ongoing success, Superhot VR shows that, for projects of the right scope, there’s considerable (and growing) developer opportunity in VR.
Peering Into 2020
So, 2019 was a big year for VR in many ways, but what does 2020 hold? Here’s a few reason why we think 2020 will be VR’s biggest year yet.
Oculus Quest 2
Image courtesy Oculus
There’s no doubt that Facebook has been happy with the traction of its latest standalone VR headset, Oculus Quest. The company is moving quickly to build out the headset’s software features—like adding hand-tracking and PC support with Oculus Link—and it’s all but certain that Quest 2 is already in the works. The big question is when.
While Oculus’ history with the Rift would suggest that it would be several years from one headset to the next, VR as a market is much more defined today than it was back in 2016 when the first headsets hit the market. With the resources Facebook is pouring into Quest, we doubt there will be a similar three year span (like with Rift to Rift S) until the next Quest headset.
There’s reason to believe that Quest 2 will be announced in 2020. The biggest, perhaps, is that the current headset is based on a fairly old Snapdragon 835 processor which puts a pretty hard limit on what can be done with the headset by both Facebook and third-party developers. Moving to a more advanced hardware platform like, say, Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon XR2, would open the door to substantial improvements. Of course, that’ll only happen if the price is right; Quest’s reasonable $400 price point is a big part of its appeal.
And then there’s Oculus Rift 2. Facebook launched its second PC headset, Rift S in early 2019, but it was a bit of a side-grade and cost-down to the original Rift rather than a true successor. In 2019 Facebook showed some very impressive prototype VR headsets with major advances in optics and form-factor, but has yet to announce Rift 2.
The prototype tech seems like it will form the foundation of Rift 2, but there’s a bigger question on our mind: will Quest 2 and Rift 2 be the same headset? This would be an ambitious move, but there’s already some hints that it’s the direction Facebook is headed.
Along with cross-buy between many Quest and Rift apps, Facebook is trying to unify its VR userbase to make a broader audience for developers. If every customer that owned an Oculus headset could play both standalone Quest content and PC-powered Rift content, that’s a huge win for the ecosystem.
Alternatively, rather than combining Quest 2 and Rift 2, Oculus could keep Quest as its lower-end product line while positioning Rift 2 as a piercer but higher-fidelity headset to compete for against Valve’s Index in the VR enthusiast space.
All Eyes on Half-Life: Alyx
Image courtesy Valve
There’s no doubt that the Half-Life: Alyx, the upcoming made-for-VR game from legendary developer Valve, is the most anticipated VR title of 2020. And it will have ramifications beyond the existing VR market; many mainstream gaming and tech publications which rarely (or effectively never) cover VR will be picking up the requisite headsets and hardware to take a good close look at the game when it launches. Half-Life: Alyx will be the biggest opportunity to date for VR to show mainstream gamers why it’s worthy of their attention.
Big Oculus Games on the Horizon
Image courtesy Ready at Dawn
After a string of not-so-great titles from Oculus Studios, Facebook’s first-party VR publisher, between 2017 and mid-2019, Asgard’s Wrath and Stormland ended the year as wins for the Oculus content library.
Oculus Studios also has placed big bets on several highly anticipated games set to launch in 2020: Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, Lone Echo II, and Phantom: Covert Ops. It remains to be seen whether these games will become key additions to the Oculus content lineup or go down in history as flops, but the outcome is important because Facebook is effectively the only company in town that’s funding big VR titles from third-party studios.
Beyond games, Facebook is also set to launch its brand new social VR platform, Facebook Horizon in 2020. Despite being one of the world’s leading social media companies, Facebook’s social VR strategy has been chaotic at best, but it looks like the company is finally trying to consolidate its efforts into a platform that’s more universally available across its biggest headsets in 2020.
Facebook Horizon | Image courtesy Facebook
Facebook Horizon will be the only first-party social VR application of its kind, and it has the potential to seriously shake up the social VR space which is currently dominated by third-party VR apps.
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What were your personal ‘most important moments’ in VR for 2019 and what are you looking forward to most in 2020? Drop us a line below!
We knew Superhot VR (2017) was doing extremely well when Superhot Team announced the VR adaptation had generated more revenue than the original PC game back in April. Now the studio has set one of the most impressive benchmarks of success for the medium, as over the past week Superhot VR garnered a cool $2 million in gross revenue across all VR platforms.
Callum Underwood, an industry consultant and talent scout, announced the news on the studio’s behalf:
SUPERHOT VR has grossed over 2 million dollars on all platforms in the past 7 days alone. Thank you players!! pic.twitter.com/jkTINcGH4f
Underwood also notes that numbers on the PlayStation platform aren’t precise, as Sony will furnish the exact sales numbers next year.
He couldn’t specify the breakdown of which platform made the most money for the studio (supported headsets include Oculus Quest, PSVR, and SteamVR headsets), although Superhot VR is a pretty reliable watermark of success of the VR medium in whole.
For comparison’s sake, the breakout hit parody sim Job Simulator (2016) passed the thee million dollar mark after around eight months after launching on Steam. It also rolled out slowly to other stores, including a day-one launch on PSVR in October 2016 and on the Oculus Store in December of that year for Oculus Touch’s launch—the absolute ideal launch plan for any VR game at the time when consumer VR first took off.
We have no way of knowing the specifics surrounding Superhot VR’s success, but it’s at very least clear that a bunch of new headsets have been bought as gifts this holiday season. Oculus Quest, the $400 standalone headset launched by Facebook earlier this year, has been out of stock all over the Internet this holiday season.
Intuition points to Quest making the biggest effect on Superhot VR’s sales numbers. The headset, although capable of playing PC VR games via Oculus Link, has a comparatively smaller native library of games than Oculus, Steam and the PlayStation Store, which might have created a bottleneck for new users looking for their first game.
And it’s a pretty excellent choice too; it’s both a highly-rated game by users, and also one of the few with brand name cachet for non-VR gamers too, as the original version saw viral success when it released on PCs back in 2016.
So you’ve got your greasy mitts on a Meta Quest 2, and you’re wondering what to buy after you’ve exhausted all of the best free games and experiences available on the standalone headset. Whether you’re into active games, puzzles, or just want to slice or shoot the ever-living crap out of something, we’re here to help you settle into your new headset with a few games that should keep you playing for hundreds of hours yet to come.
Note: This list includes only native Quest games. Don’t forget that you can also play PC games with either Oculus Link or Air Link and a VR-ready PC. Find out if your PC is ready for Link.
This list below is a great starting point if you’re looking to burn pretty close to a single Benjamin, although you should definitely check out our list of the best and most rated Meta Quest games now available, which also includes prices to help you whittle away your hard-earned cash.
Each genre section breaks down pretty close to $100 bucks, which includes games to get your heart pumping, shooter fans, puzzle nerds, fantasy swordplay geeks, and much more.
Multiplayer Shooting Madness
After the Fall – $40
After the Fall is basically Valve’s Left 4 Dead in VR. This four-player co-op shooter pits you against hordes of zombies across a handful of linear levels, all of which are characteristically dotted with safehouses. Zombies aren’t very intimidating as individuals, but when the masses start streaming in from every corner, you’ll be glad you have a good team to back you up and the gun you grinded for with the points you picked up from—you guessed it—shooting zombies.
Population One is VR’s very own battle royale, letting you team up in 24-player matches so you can climb, glide, run, and scrounge your way to victory. You’ll be battling against teams of hardcore players in this heavily populated, cross-platform shooter, so make sure to pick your squad wisely.
The Quest version of Onward was widely maligned for bringing down the PC VR experience when it went cross-platform, but it’s still one of the best mil-sims on Quest. This online mil-sim shooter is filled with hardcore users thanks to its realism, which means you’ll need to use all of the sort of military tactics to win against the other team. Communicate clearly, make sure you’re not running ahead of the pack Leroy Jenkins-style, and get good at shooting.
It’s Black Friday today, and Facebook is finally putting a large number of Quest games on sale – though mostly still through bundles.
Since the release of the Oculus Quest back in May, games in its app store haven’t gone on sale. In fact, even when a game was on sale on Steam or a non-cross-buy game was on sale on the Rift store, it wasn’t on sale in the Quest store.
On Wednesday Facebook finally launched a discounted Thanksgiving Collection, but this isn’t much of a deal if you only wanted a few games from it.
But Black Friday is the day of sales, and Facebook is finally offering a range of 6 bundles, as well as 8 Quest games on sale individually.
The bundles are sorted by price, with the most expensive (Black) being $200 and the most affordable (Bronze) being $45.
All of the offers end midnight tonight in the Pacific Standard Time Zone.
Black Collection ($200) [21% Off]
The Black Collection is priced at $200, which saves $55 off the price of buying all of these games separately. It includes:
OUR TAKE: None of these discounts are significant, but if you’re a fan of the Rocky franchise you’ll want to pick up Creed while it’s on sale. And if you want to use your PC from your Quest, there’s no better way than Virtual Desktop.
The PSVR Summer Sale (or Sales) is on, and there are some incredible deals going.
Summer’s heatwave might not be the best time to jump into VR. It’s way too hot for Beat Saber and your headset’s going to get all sweaty and smelly. But some of these prices will make you want to block out the sun and bathe in the rays of a screen meer millimeters away from your eyes instead. I’m sure that gives you just as many vitamins and whatnot, right? No?
Anyway, both the US and EU PlayStation Store territories are hosting hefty discounts.
The US side offers some hearty deals on the likes of Borderlands 2 VR, Arizona Sunshine and more. There isn’t much that’s truly show-stealing, but it’s a good opportunity to pick up some of the better titles you might have missed over the past few years.
To be honest, though, the EU summer sale puts the US to shame. Recent hits like Blood And Truth have already had their prices slashed by a good margin. Meanwhile, some of VR’s core staples like Superhot VR are down to some of the lowest prices we’ve seen them go. We’ve rounded up our list of top picks below, but be sure to get a good look through your respective store too. If you’ve got a PS Plus account then make sure to look out for some extra discounts too.
Just remember to keep a cold glass of water near you’re if you’re about to start putting in Firewall all-nighters. Maybe invest in a fan, too.
VR could make gaming more accessible than it’s ever been before.
But, in the industry’s nascent stage, it is fair to say accessibility isn’t always the top priority for some developers. Most games, for example, require two hands to play, when many could be just as easily played with one if they added some control shortcuts.
So we thought it was about time we rounded up some of the best VR experiences you can play with one hand. For the most part, these are games that simply don’t require two handed interactions rather than apps that were specifically built for one hand. Where necessary, we’ve also outlined the limitations of playing with one hand, but overall we still think these are worth a go.
Superhot – Rift/Vive/Index/Quest/PSVR
Superhot is probably about as close to a VR classic as it currently gets. Fortunately, it’s also one of the easiest VR games to play with one hand. In this first-person action game, time moves only when you do. So not only can you wield a variety of pistols, knives and projectiles with one hand, the game will also move at a pace that suits you. In fact, we wouldn’t even say this made the game any harder.
Batman: Arkham VR – Rift/Vive/Index/PSVR
The Dark Knight’s debut VR adventure remains one of the most polished and immersive VR experiences you can have nearly three years on from launch. In Arkham VR you put on the cowl and detective your way through a narrative-driven adventure. The game is much more interested in puzzles and scene-setting, with light interactions that won’t feel too unnatural if you rely on one hand. It’s about as friction-free as one-handed VR gaming gets.
Beat Saber – Rift/Vive/Index/Quest/PSVR (Not all songs/Expert only)
VR’s most popular game includes the welcome addition of a one-handed mode. You can ditch the color-coded gameplay and start swiping away at every beat in front of you. There are two drawbacks here, though. Firstly lots of the songs released since Beat Saber’s initial launch don’t support one-handed mode. More importantly, though, you can only play songs on Expert. That’s a pretty steep learning curve if you’re jumping into the game for the first time, but you can use no fail modes to help you practice.
Star Wars: Vader Immortal Episode 1 (Lightsaber Dojo Only)
Sadly Vader Immortal’s story mode requires two hands at specific points to progress. But the game’s robust wave-based combat mode can thankfully be played with one hand. 40 waves of combat await you here and, believe us, it’s no slouch. To conquer the laser-firing, sword-swinging droids you’ll need to keep your wits about you and learn how to block and retaliate with force. This is one of the most enjoyable one-handed VR experiences you can have, though you can’t remove the appearance of the second hand.
A Fisherman’s Tale – Rift/Vive/Index/PSVR
InnerspaceVR’s wonderful little puzzler is an accessible and thoughtfully paced adventure. You solve some truly mind-bending challenges by interacting with yourself in a sort of weird Russian doll VR simulator. This offers some of VR’s most amazing sights and trippy challenges, all of which can be enjoyed using one hand.
We spoke with the developers of Superhot VR about porting the game to the Oculus Quest and opening up its potential to a platform without wires.
The game has changed: no longer do I have to stand there and wait for these crimson, crystalline enemies to come to me. I carefully walk using my actual legs right up to them and deck ‘em in their featureless faces. They shatter, and the screen fades to white and I find myself standing in the center of a new action scene.
“Superhot was built with mouse and keyboard in mind, but as soon as you’ve played it in VR, you instantly understood the next level of Superhot. And then you played it on Quest, things we didn’t design—it’s implicit in the game. You can hide under the table now. Or you can go around the corner,” Callum Underwood, producer of Superhot VR for Quest, says to UploadVR.
As many have already seen, Superhot VR (read our original Rift version review here) feels different on Oculus Quest. You are untethered, free to move through the balletic action game. The Superhot team worked a lot to make it happen—more on that shortly—but they are still working.
Just recently, a patch for the Quest version went live. Besides your typical bug-fixing, the patch added a new BIOS option screen to the game. It is accessible when you start up the game by holding the A and X buttons during the OS boot up. These screens allow you to modify the visuals a bit by dimming whites, to reduce the flickering at the edges that some people are sensitive to.
It also changes how the game behaves after you start it. The patch now allows three save files, giving players the ability to have different game states for different people. The team added this as they saw how the Quest version of Superhot VR was being played differently than past iterations.
“People are taking it to their friends and showing them Superhot. We added a Guest mode floppy, which you had to find. We expected people to Google it and find out how to do it,” Underwood says. “But now we added this fake BIOS setting screen, where you can choose which save file you are using, or launch directly into guest mode. Besides the bug we fixed, feedback was, ‘How do we make this better to show our friends?’ It’s nice to be one of those games that people want to show others.”
This new mode of play, bringing a VR headset to a friend’s house and showing it off, meant players wanted to show off the game from the beginning, not just jump them into the middle. And it wasn’t very intuitive how to do that originally. And once you did get friends inside, the Return pyramid that brought them back to the level select was present for these new players. It was confusing. That has been alleviated since players may now select a new save file and just start fresh.
But as mentioned earlier, this patch is only the latest set of changes the team had to make to get it optimized for Quest. When they began the task of porting the game over to the standalone VR headset about a year before launch, they realized that they had to throw out most of the code.
“The codebase we were working on was old as f**k,” Underwood says. “There’s bits of code in there from 2014. There was a ramping up of getting people used to the codebase. And it was never built with a mobile platform in mind. The tethered versus tether-less stuff was not a challenge at all. The tech challenge came from the fact that it was a mobile chipset.”
The team had to rewrite 98% of the graphical shaders. They had to rewrite almost every part of the game itself: how the bullets worked, how collision worked, how the enemies were built, and how the enemies moved.
“You’re talking about something that is a couple of orders of magnitude less powerful. Even from going from PlayStation VR to Quest is a huge jump. It’s a huge drop in overall compute power and GPU power. You have to think about things differently. The whole way the hardware works is different. There are huge differences between mobile GPUs and desktop GPUs. We just couldn’t use the existing stuff. They were designed for a completely different architecture. It takes this complete shift in perspective,” says Luke Thompson, lead programmer on Superhot VR for Quest.
The elegance of the resulting game may be a testament to the focus of the team and what they do.
“For me, and the rest of the team, it was just a fantastic challenge. It’s really hard. You are going down 100 times in power, but you are doing it for something that is really cool. You can’t really rely on the way of thinking you had before, especially with this new hardware,” Thompson says. “You have to start with baby steps: is this going to work? Yes or no? Is this going to work? Well, kind of, but we are going to have to redo some of it. The whole thing becomes an entirely new code base.”
“The success of Superhot as a company, and as a product across all different platforms, is largely due to the perfectionist attitude people here have,” Underwood says. “There is a lot of fine tuning. No one in a million years is going to notice any difference, but they have to be just right. We spent a long time fine tuning the color of the bloom in the new BIOS.”
To make the Quest launch, the team had to work closely with all involved. Things like animation weren’t even finished until just before launch. That assistance for the game helped. Underwood pointed to the Oculus engineers listed in the credits.
“This was all with Oculus,” Thompson says. “All the things we end up hitting, they were like, ‘That’s a new thing for us. That’s a new bug or that’s a new optimization that we’ve not done before.’ We were finding out what their hardware was doing at the same time as them. Toward the end, we had Unity make a custom version of Unity for us to get around a particular bug. That would never happen under any other circumstances. Oculus talking to Unity. Unity talking to Oculus. We’re talking to them both. It was this whole interconnected spaghetti mess of everyone figuring out how this new hardware works.”
The team was keen on getting Superhot ready for the Quest launch because there is cache to being a launch title, with extra marketing help to go along with the technical assistance. Not to mention, all the attention.
“Everyone’s eyeballs are on you when they check out what’s on the store,” Underwood says. “It means the platform is going to care about the fact that you’re there on day one, not only in terms of marketing, but also helping you get to that. Being there day one came down to how do we reach as many people at once, but we know, that being a launch title means you get special attention.”
And the team added some important design changes to this version for Quest. When they had a demo at OC5 last year, when Quest was officially announced, there was a demo sequence where players actually walked down a corridor to their room in the game. When the next sequence would load up, the player would sometimes be facing a wall. The team realized they had to make a change.
In the old versions of Superhot, there were pyramids placed in the center of the play space that would put players back in the center where they need to be and facing the correct way to be right in the middle of the action for the next sequence. And considering these were headsets that worked with front-facing experiences directly before cameras or sensors, such as Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, it was easy to calibrate the next level for players.
Not so with Quest. Walking and moving meant the old system would result in players looking at a wall. So they added two systems. The game automatically rotates to ensure that when the next scene begins, players are facing the correct way so they can just spring into action. The game also automatically centers the next level to where the player is standing, so they are in the correct place at the start—usually within grabbing distance of a weapon.
“The auto-rotation is because we don’t have a wire, we don’t have the constrained play space, we don’t have to care if the user is facing forward,” Thompson says. “So whatever way you are facing, the next level loads up facing you. We know where the center is because of this absolute positioning, because the Quest has mapped out the room you are in. So we didn’t really care if you were in the middle of the room or if you were facing the right way. It’s just a much more seamless experience.”
These changes made to the Quest version of Superhot VR, including the new BIOS, aren’t going to remain on just on Quest. The team has plans to move these quality of life improvements to other platforms. They also just pushed Valve Index and Knuckles support to the PC version of the game.
With Superhot now being played in a 360-degree space, will more games make that leap away from tethered VR design?
“I’m interested to see if VR games in general stop being front-facing. Out of the big 3 [VR platforms], 2 of them are front-facing. Vive is more 360 than others, but it still has a big-ass cable attached to it. So you still want some kind of grounding to the front. If it’s generally going to be 360, that might be interesting,” Underwood says. “I worry a little about that, because Superhot makes you feel like a superhero. Are you going to feel like a superhero if you have to move so much in real life and you’re spinning constantly around that you are basically doing the actions of the superhero? The game feeds you enemies in the way that you can do this ballet or dance. That’s going to be harder if you build the game from the ground up with 360.
“I’ve seen Beat Saber start to play around with 360, because there is already so much happening front on. Is it going to be improving the experience to be turning around? I genuinely don’t know. It might provide some more immersion, but that’s the last thing I’m thinking when I’m playing Beat Saber. I’m just trying to hit the box.”
So adapting Superhot even more to fit the large play area of Quest does not seem to be in the cards. But that doesn’t mean the team isn’t already working on the future.
“We would like to do—if you look at my tweets looking for developers, I’ve asked for people with experience with modding tools and level editors. I don’t want to talk too much about that, but we have plans that need people with that experience. And then, who knows about sequels? [Big smirk.] We can talk more about that when we know what’s happening,” Underwood says.
But any user-created options and/or sequel lies in the future, after the team has hired more Unity developers to support their next vision. They are focused on Quest right now. There will be another bug patch coming to Quest in a few weeks. For the team, support for the Quest platform has become integral to virtual reality.
“The launch of quest has been the first time that I’ve seen Games Industry friends, who have been naysayers of VR, want to buy a Quest,” Underwood says. “People have been tired of VR evangelists saying, ‘VR is here and it’s amazing.’ Where actually, it’s been good, but it’s been happening in steps. I don’t think there’s been enough tempering of expectations. There’s more that we can do, but I feel like it is moving along.”
And the Quest’s portability and the practice of people lugging it to another’s house means more than convenience.
“Sharing is going to be really important to this ‘generation’ of VR, if that’s the right term,” Thompson says. “It’s the first era where Word of Mouth will be more important than inorganic marketing. Up until now, it’s really been enthusiast stuff. As for the mass market, it feels like you need to have that Word of Mouth to get beyond the enthusiast VR market. I think the Quest is fantastic for that. And I think that’s going to be really important, not just for the Quest, but for VR in general.”
