Insomniac Games’ Oculus Rift and Touch exclusive magic dueller just got a sizeable update which bringing welcome elements such as a new Chicago arena, misdirection oriented Dark Tag artifact and a brand new guardian by the name of Bridge Wraith.
One of the most important aspects fuelling any modern multiplayer title’s longevity is the ability for the developer to keep the player base engaged. One of the best ways to do that is to keep a steady drip feed of new content and gameplay aspects flowing to keep those players coming back. Seems Insomniac Games is managing this pretty well, with the latest ‘arcane update’ for their multiplayer online magic duelling title The Unspoken bringing a handful of new features alongside some background updates.
First up is a new artifact for magicians to cast. Described by Insomniac as an aide to player misdirection, the new Dark Tag artifact enables the obfuscation of your opponent’s view of the battlefield, giving you time to summon a guardian or position yourself at an advantage.
Next is the latest addition to your choice of guardians, in this case the ‘Bridge Wraith’, an enormous “interdimensional” being which will freeze your opponent on their pedestal, giving you the opportunity to blast them with a follow up attack.
Finally, players now have a new arena to battle in – again based in the game’s primary location of Chicago. The new ‘Lockport Bridge’ environment features scenery (ice columns specifically) which build over the course of a battle, leaving the players to adapt to new topography as it happens.
And on that note of keeping the player base engaged, Insomniac Games’ Studio Director Chad Dezern has promised more content to come in 2017 – with more updates along the lines of the above as well we new modes. We detailed a few of those upcoming changes in a piece last year.
Am 31. Januar wurde das erste Arcane Update für The Unspoken veröffentlicht. Zu finden ist der Patch für die Oculus Rift im Oculus Store. Es gibt es jede Menge neue Inhalte: Darunter eine Arena, ein neues Artefakt, dass Dark Tag, die Wächter-Beschwörung und grafische Aufbesserungen.
Das neue Spielfeld
Die neue Arena basiert auf der Lockport Bridge in Chicago. Das Besondere daran ist die sich ändernde Umgebung. Durch beeindruckende Effekte entsteht ein Eissturm, der für eine Transformation des Spielfelds sorgt. Die Eispartikel formen Säulen, welche neue strategische Möglichkeiten eröffnen.
Außerdem ist es möglich, aus den Tiefen des Flusses einen mächtigen Wächter – den Zorn der Brücke – zu beschwören. Dieser ist in der Lage euren Rivalen mit einem gezielten Blizzard anzugreifen. Der richtige Einsatz will geübt sein. Schließlich will man verhindern, dass sich der Gegner in Sicherheit teleportiert.
Das Artefakt des dunklen Zeichens
Mit dem neuen Artefakt könnt ihr eine Falle auf der Säule eures Gegners zeichnen. Das sieht nicht nur gut aus, sondern beeinträchtigt auch die Sicht des Feindes. Was euch wiederum einen Vorteil im Duell verschafft. Damit eröffnen sich völlig neue Kombinationsmöglichkeiten, z.B. zur Vorbereitung des finalen Schlags mit einem Offensivzauber oder um Zeit zu schinden, um eine Wächter-Beschwörung auszuführen.
Weitere Features
Neben diversen Bugfixes, der Möglichkeit Intros in Replays zu überspringen und kleineren Klassenanpassungen, wird ein Zuschauermodus eingeführt. In diesem ist ein Overlay mit allen wichtigen Informationen zu Leben und Artefaktladungen enthalten. Das ermöglicht den Spielern spannende Matches live mitzuverfolgen und dabei über alles informiert zu bleiben.
Und es gibt sogar noch eine weitere gute Nachricht für alle Fans. Das The Unspoken Arcane Update ist nur das Erste unter vielen im Jahr 2017. Die weiteren Updates sollen unter anderem neue Klassen, Arenen, Artefakte und Spielmodi bringen! Wir dürfen also gespannt sein was die Entwickler für uns geplant haben.
The Unspoken is one of the best multiplayer virtual reality gaming experiences you can have today. This modern day wizard brawler takes place in Chicago and pits your sorcery skills against other crafty spellcasters to decide who the best archmage really is.
The game released alongside Oculus Touch late last year but its developer, Insomniac (Ratchet and Clank) promised frequent updates soon after launch. Well it turns out our first piece of additional magic arrives tomorrow.
In a blog post, Insomniac announced two new pieces of Unspoken content. The first is Lockport Bridge, a brand new map to wage arcane war upon. According to the post:
Lockport Bridge is the most dynamic arena in the underground circuit. Freezing winds from across the lake form ice columns in the channel, changing the fundamental topology of this battleground. Pedestals with wide sight lines become sheltered coves, vulnerable from only a few opponent positions.
The shifting nature of Lockport Bridge will have a major impact on how combatants move and fight. Also effecting strategy on Lockport is the map’s summon: the Bridge Wraith.
As the storm intensifies, and after every column is formed, a Summon Orb manifests beneath the bridge. Breaking it unleashes the spirit of a hapless victim, drowned long ago. Impossibly thin ice freezes around his extremities to form the Bridge Wraith—a vengeful grotesque hell-bent on entombing its victim in an icy sheath. If you find yourself rooted, your time on this plane is drawing to a swift and bitter end. Better luck next time.
Just like the Unpsoken’s other summons, the Bridge Wraith will have the ability to dramatically turn the tide of battle. If you’re quick enough to win him to your side, you’ll have the advantage of a frozen opponent. And as any Unspoken player knows, if you can’t move you lose.
Finally, Insomniac is also releasing The Unspoken’s first new artifact. Artifacts are powerful totems that, with the right flicks and twists of your hands, can unleash devastating power. Dark Tag is the name of the new artifact and according to Insomniac: “This spellbound spray-paint…stencils mystic paint traps to obscure an opponent’s vision. A tagged spellcaster is exposed to deadly homing spells, unable to counter or dodge—the Dark Tag stacks well with every offensive spell.”
In a cryptic farewell, Insomniac teased what could be a new class by writing, “From across the lake, the wind changes. Electric lights flicker. Spellcasters of a new cloak will soon join the duel.”
Despite it’s engrossing atmosphere and engaging story, we didn’t really take to Carbon Studio’s Alice VR [Review: 4/10]. Preview builds suggested it could be great, but the final product was ultimately a little dated and too much to be desired.
The developer itself still holds promise, though, and we’re optimistic about its next game.
That game is The Wizards, and it sounds like Carbon is catching up a little with the current trends in VR while making it. Cast as a time-traveling young wizard, you’re tasked with protecting the Realm of Men, and you’ll use the Vive wands or Oculus Touch controllers to do so.
The Wizards is all about spell-casting. It’s a first-person game in which you can summon lightning, fireballs, and other elemental spells to take down enemies in horde-style levels. There’s no gameplay footage yet, but there are a handful of in-game screenshots and the CG video above, which look to offer a fantastical experience. Fans of The Unspoken that wished for a single-player game mode have something very promising to get excited about here.
Carbon came up with the idea for The Wizards during a game jam organized by Epic Games and Nvidia last October, around the time that Alice VR launched. The team devised a prototype in which a spell-casting hero held off waves of enemies. To that, Carbon is adding a Fate Cards system, which modifies the game’s difficulty in exchange for rewards, letting players customize their own experience. It’s being built with Epic’s Unreal Engine 4.
The game’s due for release on Vive and Rift later this year. A possible PlayStation VR version as not been mentioned; Alice VR didn’t make it over to the platform either, at least not yet.
It’s encouraging to see Carbon move up to motion controls, as Alice arrived as a gamepad-based exploration game at a time that Oculus owners were gearing up for Touch and Vive users had been enjoying room-scale tracking for a few months already. Hopefully The Wizards will show what this studio is really capable of.
The Unspoken is a multiplayer virtual reality video game that was released earlier this month as a launch title for the Oculus Touch platform. The game turns you into a modern, urban wizard tasked with battling others of your kind for arcane supremacy. In The Unspoken you can blast fireballs from your hand, hurl police cars at your foes, or summon fantastic creatures to do your bidding.
The Unspoken has been a huge boon for the Oculus Rift and VR gaming in general but, according to the studio that made the game, it was almost something completely different.
Ted Price is the founder, president and CEO of Insomniac Games — the creator of The Unspoken and other well known franchises such as Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet and Clank. The company has its roots in traditional console gaming and, according to Price, that was originally where The Unspoken was supposed to end up.
In an interview with UploadVR, Price revealed that The Unspoken was originally conceived by his team as an open world console game called Wizards of New York. This game would have maintained a similar aesthetic and plot to The Unspoken and would focus on an urban sorcerer combating a shadowy cabal of underground spell casters.
“That’s where the idea for The Unspoken originally came from,” Price said. “At Insomniac we come up with so many ideas that never get to see daylight but the team was really excited about this idea of modern wizards…The idea never made it very far past the idea stage, however. We just couldn’t figure out how to make the controls for that type of game fun on a 2D console.”
It wasn’t until Price’s longtime friend Jason Rubin, the founder of Naughty Dog and current head of content at Oculus, approached him about developing games for VR that Price and his team decided to revisit Wizards of New York.
“Throwing a fireball was really the light bulb moment for us,” Price explained. “As soon as we did that and saw how good it felt we knew this was something we had to make and that would be incredible in VR.”
Throughout the course of development, Insomniac eventually moved the game’s setting from New York to Chicago and retitled it “The Unspoken.” The vestiges of those New York wizards, however, still echo in the final game’s art style, storyline, and overall conceit.
Within virtual worlds, the Oculus Touch allows players to use their hands in a more realistic manner than a gamepad allows you to manipulate their environment and different tools or weapons. The hands of a mage are some of the most powerful weapons across many different works of fiction and The Unspoken by Insomniac Games puts you into that role as you learn the ways of spellcasting.
With their upcoming Arcane updates, Insomniac will be adding more magic to your arsenal throughout 2017 as announced on their website.
The Unspoken is a multiplayer driven action game where you choose your class, equip different artifacts, and brawl. The Arcane updates will be adding new artifacts, new classes, new modes, and even the option to change your mage’s cloaks. There are few details on the new additions all across the board, but we do know the new classes come with new gesture and primal spells to go along with a shift in play styles for each and the new artifacts are guaranteed to change the balance of battle in big ways. A few concept images for new cloaks are available on the post page and more info for all of these things including the new modes of play will likely be revealed as we get closer to their launch.
We reviewed The Unspoken here at UploadVR and the “addicting urban magic fight club” received one of our highest scores with a 9 out of 10. While it produces no true single player experience outside of a practice mode, we loved how effective it was as a showcase for the impressive Oculus Touch controllers, which we consider to be the best VR controllers available.
If you don’t own the game already, it can be purchased on the Oculus store for $29.99. If you do, you have a wealth of content for one of the best games on Oculus flowing in throughout next year.
Oculus Touch launches on Dec. 6, just one week away. The long-awaited peripheral is being ravenously anticipated by current Oculus Rift owners. The company has further stoked their appetites by creating a virtually unprecedented list of free launch titles. Five titles will be free to those that purchase Oculus Touch, but two of those games have a ticking clock on them. We reached out to Oculus to figure out exactly when the clock runs out and what will happen once it reaches zero.
The five titles included with a Touch pre-order are: The Unspoken, VR Sports Challenge, Dead & Buried, Quill and Oculus Medium. The latter three titles will be free on the platform in perpetuity, however the first two games have a half life. The Unspoken and VR Sports Challenge are only free to customers that pre-order a Rift. According to a representative for the company, “Dec 5th is the last day of the pre-order based on region. When the clock strikes ‘Dec 6,’ the pre-order is over.”
Once that pre-order window closes VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken will cost $29.99 apiece, Oculus confirms. The official, Oculus position on the other three titles is that:
“Our internally developed titles of Medium, Quill, and Dead & Buried are currently free for anyone who buys Touch. They’ll be added to your account when you go through the setup of your new Touch controllers.”
So there you have it. Make sure to get your pre-order in before Dec. 6 if you want to get the full five titles for free.
Oculus Touch is a hand-tracked controller platform compatible with the Oculus Rift VR headset. Touch will allow Rift users to bring their hands into immersive experiences and interact with objects in a more natural way. The controllers launch on Dec. 6th for $199 and will be available through Amazon, Best Buy and Oculus themselves.
The main selling point for any game that aims to be successful in the growing and profitable eSports scene is its competitive nature. Can people play this game, over and over, for hours, days, weeks, and months on end — at the exclusion of all other games — and continue to improve and discover new strategies and wrinkles throughout that time? Will people be able to actually improve their skill, as players, to differentiate their rank in the game, rather than just upgrading stats and unlocking new items?
Those are important questions to ask and, luckily, it seems like Insomniac has thought of answers for their upcoming Oculus Touch launch title, The Unspoken [Review: 9/10]. Not only will the game come packaged for free with all Touch pre-orders, but it also includes enough depth and competitive flair to be well worth the time investment. It’s also the third VR title from the veteran studio, following Edge of Nowhere [Review: 9/10] and Feral Rites [Review: 5/10].
Finding A Competitive Balance
“For us, developing The Unspoken started with making a really good and fun competitive game,” said Chad Dezern, Creative Director of The Unspoken at Insomniac, during a phone interview. “Once we started getting into competitive matches at the office and realized the game needed to be about magic duels with a solid beginning, middle, and end, it really helped us find the core of the experience.”
No matter who you are, you’ve likely fantasized or thought about throwing fireballs at some point in your life. When you put on a VR headset and transport yourself to fantastical worlds of fiction, there’s no more appropriate time to indulge in the fantasies that come from the technology. But beyond the content and setting, the real magic (pun intended) comes when you face off against someone else inside the immersive environment.
“It really started clicking for us when we were able to make a very naturally competitive game,” said Dezern. “And once the mechanics were established, we were starting to realize what the habits of really high level players were. We started there — with competition — because that is the core of it, but we did’t specifically set out to make an eSport game, it wasn’t a game design goal.”
Which is a huge point to pay attention to. eSports isn’t a genre of video games. Even if you try your hardest, you can’t force your game to be accepted and promoted in the eSports community. But instead, the smarter idea, is to craft an inherently fun, well-designed, and balanced game and encourage the community to support and build it up over time. And that’s what Insomniac is doing instead.
“We want to focus on making the individual player experience fun, more so than creating a team game,” said Dezern. “We made it a duel because we wanted to really focus on those dynamics.”
In this way, it’s actually different than most popular competitive gaming experiences. MOBAs like League of Legends,DOTA 2, Paragon, and Heroes of the Storm are all about team dynamics, Counter-Strike and Overwatch are team-based first-person shooters, and other than the fighting game community, most eSports — and physical sports in general — are all team-based. It’s a unique opportunity for a game like The Unspoken.
By focusing on individual players, the core skill-based gameplay is able to shine more clearly. Master your class, memorize the spells, and create strategies for moving around the maps, baiting opponents to open them up to your more powerful abilities, and more. The Unspoken, and other VR titles, become just as much about your physical endurance and coordination as they are your knowledge and ability as a gamer. VR eSports are getting closer to, well, actual sports. We’re approaching Tron-like levels of immersion and competition.
Identity Through Magic
“We have matchmaking features, you can invite friends to matches, and ranked matches,” said Dezern. “For single player content, you can go into a practice mode with all the classes and spells to get the hang of things, as well as battle a very challenging A.I. opponent. It’s great for learning how to play the game.”
There’s a story as well, but it’s just not the focus. “The narrative is there to setup the game, we want everyone to be intrigued, its just the tip of a very big narrative iceberg, said Dezern. “We didn’t go all in on everything because we wanted to do one thing very well instead of sprawling ourselves across several modes. For us, that one thing is competitive 1 vs. 1 multiplayer duels.”
Rather than a traditionally fantastical or mythical world of magical creatures and forbidden lore, like you might find in The Lord of the Rings, or something similar, The Unspoken features a much more grounded “What if?” scenario. This isn’t about a fictional world of witches and wizards, but instead asks a very Harry Potter-esque question: What if the world of magic was hiding just beneath our collective noses?
“Think about that feeling you have when you’re in a new city and you don’t know what’s going on just around the corner,” said Dezern. “How do we work that notion into a spell? We don’t have many straight up D&D spells, for example, except for maybe the Fireball, because come on, it’s a fireball.”
Time will tell whether games like The Unspoken, or even RIGS, are able to find footing in the competitive gaming scene as VR titles. In the meantime, developers should take a note from Insomniac’s book and focus on creating well-designed, fun, and balanced games that can stand on their own. If that’s done well enough, then an eSports scene will form organically.
The Unspoken releases on December 6th with the launch of the Oculus Touch controllers. What is your most anticipated Touch title next week?
If you’ve purchased an Oculus Rift and Touch, it is time to start getting excited.
An Oculus spokesperson confirmed to UploadVR the company plans to have 50 Touch titles available for the debut of Oculus Touch on Dec. 6. The titles likely represent a mishmash of content that had been originally released for Steam and the HTC Vive combined with original titles funded by Oculus as well as upgrades to gamepad-controlled VR games. Oculus said it plans to reveal the finalized list of content next week.
We’ve already reviewed three of these titles: Medium, The Unspoken and VR Sports Challenge. These experiences suggest the fully realized Rift and Touch system is off to a very good start when it comes to content, and adding some of the best of what’s available on HTC Vive would be a dream come true for Touch buyers. Back in October we got a look at 30+ titles coming to Oculus during its launch window.
If you own a Rift and are considering Touch, you might be running out of time to get yours before the holidays as new orders might ship Christmas week. Tune back into UploadVR in the coming weeks for detailed analysis of the new controllers and how they measure up to the HTC Vive.
One thing worth noting is Google has been reluctant to confirm whether its two killer apps,Tilt Brush and Earth VR, would be coming to Oculus. Their absence on Oculus Touch would be notable, and we aren’t holding our breath for a surprise reveal of these apps in the initial launch titles. Google’s Daydream platform just launched and features excellent Google apps also absent from the Oculus mobile Gear VR platform. It’s a bit unfair to expect Google to support Oculus immediately, but we hope that focusing on Daydream and Steam doesn’t mean they are keeping those apps from Oculus permanently. That said, it is an area we are watching closely as it would be a major bummer if larger competitive tension between Facebook and Google keeps excellent apps from Oculus.
