Raptor Lab, the creators of War Dust and Stand Out: VR Battle Royale are back again with another in-progress big-battle PC VR game titled GangV Civil Battle Royale, but this time it takes place in a modern city setting similar to Grand Theft Auto. GangV will also support non-VR players.
GangV, other than being a VR battle royale game (50 total players, plus NPCs on a large 64 square kilometers map) with tons of vehicles and weapons to choose from across a sprawling open city, is actually pretty unique. The clever concept here is that you’re not battling other players on an open, empty map. Instead, the city is bustling and full of NPCs just like in Grand Theft Auto.
Your objective is to be the last player standing, but the game itself plays out like a big gang war across a metropolis. The footage provided on the Steam page mentions that some viable tactics include trying to blend into traffic while driving to “hide” yourself and reaching out the window to shoot at people chasing you while a friend drives the car.
There is a law enforcement system built into the game as well. So if you rob a gas station looking for cash to try and get better gear, the cops might get called on you. But if you rob a police station or military base, prepare for SWAT or the actual military itself to try and hunt you down.
GangV sounds and looks really ambitious and impressive, so I’m eager to see how it pans out. Their two most popular previous games, Stand Out and War Dust, really did a good job of nailing the sense of scale for big-battle games despite feeling a bit janky, but maybe adding non-VR support to GangV means they can hit a wider audience and get more revenue to keep working on the game for longer and making it even better.
Check out the Steam page for more details. GangV Civil Battle Royale doesn’t have a release date, but it’s currently in alpha testing for PC VR with support for Rift, Vive, Index, and Windows MR. Early Access should start soon on Steam, where it will stay for “2-3 years” according to the developers. Within two months after Early Access launch, they’re planning to add deep modding support as well.
Virtual reality (VR) developer CyberDream launched its battle royale title Virtual Battlegrounds earlier this year, offering PC VR headset owners a taste of a genre still sweeping the videogame industry. Today, the studio has launched ‘Season 2’, a major update adding a new area, weather system, weapons and more.
CyberDream has added a location called the Warehouse District which it says: “is the largest area of the map to date.” Players will be able to run and gun through shipping containers, hide in warehouses and zipline across the battlefield. To make deadly use of the map’s more confined areas players will have to locate the new pump shotgun with bullet spray, pumpable rounds, and loadable shells.
Giving the environment an even more realistic feel, there’s a new weather system adding five variations. Alongside the original Virtual Battlegrounds look, when a match begins either overcast, thunderstorm, moonlight, sunny day or red sun will be randomly chosen.
Being the massive 24 player battle royale it is, Virtual Battlegrounds‘ lobby system needed some work and that’s exactly what the studio has done. It has now been reworked so players should find it easier to find others and jump into a match. Additionally, the Kill Room has been improved so players can join the red or blue side rather than being forced to wait inside.
The last part of the season 2 update is for the shooting range. Previously a single-player element for a bit of practice, now it’s a multiplayer gun range. “By default Virtual Battlegrounds is always multiplayer now outside of private games and your private room. As soon as you step into the gun range expect to test your skills against friends or strangers!” says CyberDream in a statement.
Currently, in Steam Early Access, Virtual Battlegrounds supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Valve Index and Windows Mixed Reality headsets (plus Oculus Quest via the Link cable). As CyberDream continues to add more gameplay modes, weapons and features during Early Access, VRFocuswill keep you updated.
Update: Season 2 of Virtual Battlegrounds is now live.
Original (12/14/20): The second season of VR battle royale game, Virtual Battlegrounds, is nearing release and brings with it some big updates.
Developer Cyber Dreams is adding new features and providing more polish in the new season, which launches on December 17th. Check out the trailer below for the rundown.
Virtual Battlegrounds Season Two Trailer
For starters, season two introduces a new Warehouse District to the game’s map, with buildings and shipping containers to weave between and clamber over. There’s also a new pump-action shotgun and the team has even implemented randomized weather effects into the map.
Fans of the game will also be happy to hear there are some visual tweaks to the game, too. The developer has overhauled vegetation and certain assets to give the game a bit of a visual boost. The initial release of Virtual Battlegrounds was a little rough around the edges, so it’s great to see it get a bit of a tune-up.
Rounding the season two update out is a new lobby complete with a kill room to kill time (and your enemies) in. It should help you shape up on your skills before entering a bigger match.
Virtual Battlegrounds offers a more grounded take on the battle royale genre for VR than the new kid on the block, Population: One. If you’re looking for something a little closer to, say, Onward for your VR BR fix, it might just be for you. It’s available on SteamVR.
Will you be checking our Virtual Battlegrounds Season Two? Let us know in the comments below!
A new Winter event to celebrate the holiday season is coming to Population: One, starting on December 3.
The event is called 12 Days of Chaos and will add new bonuses in-game and change the map to a Winter-themed setting.
Developers BigBox VR shared some early details of the event with us, which it says will be Population: One’s biggest event yet with double the rewards. Players will be able to collect 100 snowflakes spread around the map and also boost points and gain rewards faster when playing with friends.
The event begins on December 3 and will run until December 14.
We also received a new screenshot showcasing some holiday season skins, pictured below, which will presumably be available to purchase through microtransactions in the game’s store.
Population: One released early last month and we labeled it the new king of VR battle royale games. It’s available on PC VR and the Quest platform with cross-play support, along with cross-buy support between Rift and Quest on the Oculus Store.
You play in teams of three players (there’s no solo mode, only squads) in a stock-standard battle royale format that follows almost all conventions of the genre. However, Population: One’s key distinctive feature is the ability to climb any structure in a Breath of the Wild-esque manner, which leads to some interesting encounters and interactions.
BigBox VR says more content is coming in December, including “continuous map updates, and additional character and gun skins.”
A new Winter event to celebrate the holiday season is coming to Population: One, starting on December 3.
The event is called 12 Days of Chaos and will add new bonuses in-game and change the map to a Winter-themed setting.
Developers BigBox VR shared some early details of the event with us, which it says will be Population: One’s biggest event yet with double the rewards. Players will be able to collect 100 snowflakes spread around the map and also boost points and gain rewards faster when playing with friends.
The event begins on December 3 and will run until December 14.
We also received a new screenshot showcasing some holiday season skins, pictured below, which will presumably be available to purchase through microtransactions in the game’s store.
Population: One released early last month and we labeled it the new king of VR battle royale games. It’s available on PC VR and the Quest platform with cross-play support, along with cross-buy support between Rift and Quest on the Oculus Store.
You play in teams of three players (there’s no solo mode, only squads) in a stock-standard battle royale format that follows almost all conventions of the genre. However, Population: One’s key distinctive feature is the ability to climb any structure in a Breath of the Wild-esque manner, which leads to some interesting encounters and interactions.
BigBox VR says more content is coming in December, including “continuous map updates, and additional character and gun skins.”
After spending plenty of time with the multiplayer-only VR battle royale shooter, here is our full Population: One review. We played on Oculus Quest 2, but it’s crossplay between Quest 1, Quest 2, and PC VR headsets with cross-buy on Rift and Quest.
Out of every game that released in the 2010s, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds probably ranks in the top 5 for me in terms of hours spent. I played a lot of that game when it first debuted in Early Access on PC with a single map and plenty of jankiness to go around. It’s grown a lot in the years since, expanded to consoles, Stadia streaming, and even mobile and is a very different game now. Those first couple of years it was a huge part of my gaming rotation.
In Population: One the setups is extremely familiar. You and your team of two others are dropped down into a map tasked with battling it out until there is only one person (or one team) left standing. Despite what the name would imply, there is no solos game mode — it’s trios only here with just six teams total.
The scope is a far cry from the 150-player lobbies of Call of Duty Warzone, but given the scale of the map and how differently things are perceived in VR, it’s okay. There is a damaging field that closes in, slowly shrinking the map, and you need to quickly search for guns and loot while trying your best to stay alive.
Matches are pretty quick and since you’re able to move so quickly and cover great distances in a matter of seconds with the wingsuit the play area feels smaller than it is without sacrificing map diversity.
More so than any other VR battle royale I’ve played, they’ve done a good job here of making each region of the map feel particularly unique. The graveyard, for example, is littered with tombstones and has plenty of cover points. It’s also the most reliable place to get good loot, in my opinion. The giant tower in the middle of the map can be seen from anywhere and the outcroppings of cities an other regions all have a personality of their own.
I just wish things were a bit more dynamic. There is only the one map and after enough matches you’ve really seen it all. Each game is always different thanks to the variability of where you land and where everyone else lands, but the map is very static. Some events that could pop up and change the layout or create hot zones to draw people in would be great, if not full-on map alterations of some kind. We’ve been told those sorts of things are planned but there are no details right now.
As expected, there are microtransactions in Population: One, just like basically every other battle royale game, but it’s all optional and you can earn everything by just playing the game too. This is all in the form of cosmetics like costumes and skins. They will keep adding more stuff over time and are planning seasonal-style events.
I don’t think I’ll ever spend near as many hours in Population: One as I did PUBG, but it’s got a similar appeal. Just like PUBG, it wasn’t the first battle royale game for its platform — H1Z1 and others preceded PUBG some people forget — but it definitely put the format on the map for the general public. I think Population: One has that kind of staying power for VR.
The main reason is how polished and smooth gameplay feels and just how effective its new twists on the format are at delivering fresh, exciting moments consistently. It’s able to maintain a breezy pace thanks to three key features: you can climb anything, you can glide through the air, and you can build walls and cover on the fly.
Obviously the “building” mechanic is lifted straight out of Fortnite and the “climbing” mechanic has been in several other VR shooters, such as Zero Caliber and Virtual Battlegrounds. But when you combine them together, alongside gliding, it creates a frantic playground of verticality and constant movement that makes everything feel more dynamic and unpredictable.
Population: One Review – Comfort
Comfort options are about what you’d expect in a fast-paced shooter like Population: One. This is a smooth-movement only multiplayer-focused VR game. You can pick snap turning and turn on an FOV dimming vignette, but even then it can still feel intense compared to other games due to the gliding and climbing. Ian Hamilton from UploadVR got very motion sick even with all the comfort options turned on. I personally turned everything off and felt fine, but this sort of thing affects everyone differently. I’d consider this one of the least “accessible” VR games out there in terms of comfort, so if you struggle with VR sickness you might want to approach with severe caution.
You’ve got your usual assortment of weapons like SMGs, Assault Rifles, Shotguns, Snipers, and so on. There isn’t a lot of variation within each gun type though, other than rarity levels denoted by color. But I didn’t notice a major difference between the tiers while playing. On top of that there’s also shield power-ups, bananas and soda cans for health, and grenades.
Combat has enough options for now, but hopefully they continue adding new gear regularly. Reloading is sort of a hybrid between something realistic like in Onward and a more arcade-style system since you only need to mime the actual gun manipulations and exact accuracy with hand placement isn’t needed.
Population: One Review Final Verdict
If you’re looking for a new, addictive VR shooter to sink your teeth into then you can’t go wrong with Population: One. The verticality and freedom of movement is unrivaled and the smooth, snappy gameplay feels fantastic even on the lower-powered Oculus Quest. My only significant gripe is that I wish there was a bit more diversity in content available, but they’ve got an amazing foundation to grow from here. Population: One is definitely the best VR battle royale shooter on the market and will hopefully find a strong audience for quite some time.
A screenshot of Population One posted yesterday to r/OculusQuest pointed out the presence of microtransactions, which angered some commenters. Many users seem to feel that microtransactions have no place in a game that costs $30 to begin with.
Population: One Microtransactions Explained
Lots of online multiplayer games, especially in the battle royale genre, are free-to-play with optional microtransaction cosmetics or a paid ‘battle pass’ system that gives you rewards across a season of play. This has the benefit of keeping the game’s online population healthy with free-to-play users, while also maintaining a stream of revenue for the developers throughout the title’s life cycle.
Instead, Population: One has opted to go for another route – a paid battle royale experience in VR, which also has microtransactions. Population: One developers Big Box put out a FAQ yesterday to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the topic and confirmed that microtransaction purchases give you no competitive advantage in-game, and are purely cosmetic. There won’t be any pay-to-win features in the game, in other words.
We’re seeing some confusion about POP1’s in-game store and microtransactions. We’ve put together some quick answers for you. 🍌🍌 pic.twitter.com/FkUKHumAbG
“The only microtransactions we have planned are character skins and gun skins. We will not be charging for guns, maps or other functionality that will separate the player-base.” The $30 price for the base game gives you access to the entire game, including progression systems that grant you free cosmetics. Big Box also noted that the ‘free-to-play with microtransactions’ model was not viable for Population: One, as they “need to be able to support the cost of on-going development, servers, coders, artists, etc.”
The microtransaction store is not finished yet, hence why it was missing from some preview builds, and will not be available at launch. Microtransactions will be available launch with the first in-game event after launch, which will also be available to players who choose not to make any in-game purchases.
Population: One is fast-approaching launch on October 22nd and will be coming to both the Oculus Quest platform and PC VR headsets at the same time with full crossplay. But as it turns out, Big Box VR isn’t stopping their plans there. You can also read my latest hands-on preview right here.
In a recent interview about Population: One with the company’s CEO, Chia Chin Lee, and CTO, Gabe Brown, we discussed the past two years of development time, what it’s like to finally be building toward a firm launch date, and post-launch support.
You may not remember or know this but Population: One was originally a PC VR-only game. In fact, I played it way back at CES 2019 at the Vive Press Conference and really enjoyed it. This industry moves fast though and that version I saw back then never released.
Porting Population: One VR Battle Royale
“We basically rebuilt the entire engine over again, says Lee. “We built every single asset in-engine and wanted that to be delivered to any headset that became available. So it wasn’t even about Quest 1 or Quest 2, it was more about, ‘Can this work in a mobile device?’ Once that mobile device gets better and better, we want to extend that support.”
Brown continues: “On PC we had 24 players and on Quest now we have 18 currently. A lot of that had to do with rewriting a big chunk of Unity. The physics engine, PhysX, was too slow to run and it was running on the main threads. We had three cores so we needed to spread the work across all those cores and most game engines like Unreal and Unity don’t quite support that. So we had to rewrite a brand new, multithreaded, asynchronous physics engine, particle system, our own rendering engine, our networking layers runs asynchronously. So we had to write this new system that leverages quite a bit of super computing techniques for the mobile phone in order to make this possible…it was a big undertaking but overall we feel like this was the right investment because of the Quest, the Quest 2, and what the future of VR is going to be. We needed to be inclusive of all platforms.”
During the interview, following this description about inclusivity for devices with Population: One I asked about the potential for a PSVR version. Fortunately, it sounds like that’s already part of the plan.
“Definitely,” says Lee. “We want to be on every platform. But we have to first nail the Quest platform, then PC VR, and then we definitely have plans for PSVR.”
Population: One releases on October 22nd for Quest and PC VR. Let us know if you plan on playing down in the comments below!
Virtual Battlegrounds is slowly starting to add more and more of the features that you’d expect out of a modern battle royale shooter, including unlockable cosmetic skins which were revealed today in the latest trailer that debuted during the UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition 2020.
In the trailer, embedded above, you can see a collection of gameplay highlights with plenty of news tidbits sprinkled throughout. For starters, Season One will officially be kicking off this week on June 18th.
With the update comes a handful of additions, most prominent of which is the introduction of an unlockable cosmetics system. Unlocking new character skins and clothing is a crucial part of most battle royale games, such as Fortnite, Call of Duty Warzone, and PUBG. Other than Rec Room, which has a limited battle royale-style mode, the other battle royale offerings don’t offer anything comparable that I’m aware of. Although, from what we’ve seen, it looks like the unlockables are just color swaps and different designs for clothing.
In addition to the unlockable cosmetics system, Virtual Battlegrounds is also getting air drops now that will bring loot into the map mid-match for everyone to see and go after, creating flashpoints of combat. There is also a tournament format, but we don’t have many details on that yet.
After getting delayed around a full year, plus a massive overhaul, battle royale VR shooter Virtual Battlegrounds is now finally out in Steam Early Access for $19.99, plus a 15% launch discount.
Virtual Battlegrounds is a VR battle royale first-person shooter that drops players into a large map full of loot, weapons, buildings, vehicles, and more and tasks you with battling it out to be the last person (or team) standing in the middle of an ever-shrinking circle. There are up to 24 people per match. Stylistically it looks very similar to Stand Out and seems to be going for a very heavy PUBG vibe, as noted when the game was first revealed.
One of the main things that Virtual Battlegrounds really hangs its hat on is the physicality of its gameplay. Everything like the guns and ammo magazines appear to be actual physics objects, you can climb structures and objects in the environment to get a better vantage point for fire fights, and even use your arms to physically swim.
Back in 2018 we visited the CyberDream studio to film a short video about their vision for the game, so even though the footage is all outdated, the ideas and philosophy from the interview still carries through. We haven’t played the live version of the game yet, but something like this is going to live and die entirely by how large the playerbase is. So far it’s having a strong showing for launch day, debuting as the #2 best-selling VR-only game on all of Steam, just behind Half-Life: Alyx and just ahead of Beat Saber.
Let us know what you think of the game down in the comments below and keep an eye out for our impressions soon!
