ESL, the world’s largest esports organizer, and Oculus announced that season three of the VR League will kickoff on March 24th. A prize pool, which is touted as the league’s largest yet, tallies a total of $250,000.
VR League is bringing two new games to the competition this season: Ready At Dawn’s Echo Combat and Ubisoft’s Space Junkies. Last year’s mainstays Echo Arena and Downpour Interactive’s Onward are also returning, making for four total games featured at this season’s tournaments.
Survios’ Sprint Vector and Insomniac Games’ The Unspoken have booth been retired from competition this year.
VR League: Season 3 will have weekly cups in both Europe and North America, and terminate in an offline Grand Finals event at Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, UK. Check out the full season three schedule here.
“2019 will be a huge year for VR gaming with the launch of Oculus Quest and Season 3 & 4 of the VR League,” said Christopher K. McKelvy, head of esports at Oculus. “This year will be Oculus’ biggest investment in esports yet. We’re adding new games, more broadcasts and a bigger prize pool.”
The opening showmatch took place yesterday between last season’s finalists, hosted at Intel Extreme Masters Katowice. You can check out the full showmatch below:
With help from corporate sponsors including HP and HTC’s eSports team, a new VR arcade-focused eSports initiative has kicked off its pilot season. Co-hosted by Virtual Athletics League (VAL), arcade management platform SpingboardVR, and mixed reality streaming software LIV, the VR eSports initiative will bring competitions to VR arcades across the globe, featuring games such as Space Pirate Trainer and Arizona Sunshine.
The Virtual Athletics League started two years ago as a concept created by Salt Lake City-based VR arcade Virtualities. The company aims to further tap into the VR eSports phenomenon, which it says has seen customer return rates rocket from 20% to over 50% for attendees of their first VR eSports tournaments.
After holding a few regional cross-arcade tournaments and a national one for Blaster of the Universe, the company headed a national Beat Saber Arcade tournament, which took place at a 168 locations across the globe.
VR games including Space Pirate Trainer, Arizona Sunshine, Island 359, QuiVR, Archangel: Hellfire, Skyfront, and After-H are among the titles currently planned for competitive tournaments, with more titles planned for later.
Arcade tournaments are open to all VR arcades, although the company says it’s building a “more exclusive core league,” which will encourage arcades to organize teams replete with jerseys, professional casters and a Twitch fanbase.
While the company makes mention of prizes, there’s no definite amount yet, although we expect that to change in the future as regional teams organize around their local arcades.
VR Arcades interesting in joining the initiative can register at VAL’s website for more information.
Oculus has confirmed that a number of VR eSports tournament finals are officially headed to Oculus Connect 5, the company’s annual developer conference.
Competing for a total cash prize pool of $120,000, tournament hopefuls will descend upon San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center on September 26th – 27th.
Live coverage of the tournament finals will begin at 11:30 am PT (local time here) both days of OC5 on VR League’s Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube channels.
The best bit: could get a shot at the prize money too. For more information on how to compete in each game’s ‘Last Chance Qualifier’, head over to the Oculus blogpost for relevant sign-up links.
The Virtual Reality League is an ESL Gaming organization partnered with Oculus that oversees eSports tournaments for online VR multiplayer games including Echo Arena, The Unspoken, and Sprint Vector. While ESL cancelled the competition a few days ago, something that was done after competitors engaged in seven weeks of bracketed 1v1 battles, the company now says it’s reverting back to the original plan to send the top four players to compete at Oculus Connect 5 after all.
Update (July 7th, 2018): An ESL spokesperson took to Reddit, and announced the company has worked with Oculus to reinstate its plans to run ‘The Unspoken’ tournament finals at Oculus Connect 5. Here’s the relevant bits:
“While The Unspoken has seen a decline in signups, we were wrong to believe this warranted a lack of interest in the Grand Final. We’re thrilled to see the passionate community surrounding The Unspoken so eager to prove themselves in front of an audience at Oculus Connect 5—both Oculus and ESL are happy to oblige. After discussing with Oculus, we will keep the original plan: the top four players from The Unspoken will be invited to Oculus Connect 5, provided travel, and will compete for a share of the overall VR League prize pool.
We are still fine tuning the plans for Oculus Connect 5 and more information will be released in the coming weeks—stay tuned.”
The original article detailing the cancellation follows below:
Original article (July 5th, 2018): Starting back in May, VR League hopefuls began competing in The Unspoken tournaments with the promise of getting a chance to shine at OC5. For many, this represented not only the opportunity to win the bulk of a $220,000 prize pool for claiming victory at the tourney, but also get a chance to travel to San Jose, California for Oculus’ biggest event of the year, the Connect 5 developer conference.
The finals however have been cancelled mid-tournament, and won’t be appearing alongside Echo Arena’s league finals at the dev conference (see update above).
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
The official reasoning behind it, Community Manager Hung Lai (‘Gravity’) says in a the company’s Discord channel, is due to shrinking player numbers. The decision, he said yesterday, was decided “less than 48 hours ago,” and that The Unspoken is being entirely dropped from the VR League as a competitive eSport.
Image captured by Road to VR
Players invited to Oculus Connect are offered comped travel, hotel, and no entry fee to the conference—a valuable prize in and of itself for many competitors looking to rub elbows with VR devs and enthusiasts from all over the world. With two months of battles behind them, participants are rightly dismayed to find out they’ve been wasting their time, and investing their hopes in something that just doesn’t exist anymore.
Only a day after the competition started, Insomniac Games Senior Community Developer Tim Salvitti had this to say on the game’s Discord channel:
“We are excited for VR League Season Two and can’t wait to check out the action online. However, at this point in time we have no new updates planned for the game. We have been listening since the last update and certainly know some of the wish lists everyone has. We would love to see as many of you as possible playing in VR League and hope we can push to make The Unspoken one of the games Oculus brings to OC5! As always, we will continue to watch and listen, and we thank each and every one of you for playing and helping make the game what it is.”
The company also previously stated on the competition’s website that from the onset, Unspoken league competitors could “earn points to qualify for the Wold Qualifier bracket for OC5.” That statement has since been removed from the league website.
Where a list of upcoming cups once was now stands a blank sheet.
Last year’s Unspoken finals winner ‘Charizard’ told us a little more about how he feels after having the rug pulled out from under him:
“I think that it’s important to understand that players who are passionate about this game are going to be upset about it being cancelled. That’s not the core of the issue though. ESL has held a 7 week tournament on the assumption that this prize was going to be paid out. Players have spent time and money preparing for this, and ESL has gained attention and marketing by holding this on the assumption of those prizes being followed through. So yes, none of the passionate players of this game want to see it go, but beyond that, they have been lied to in what they can expect by investing in this game on a competitive level. It’s beyond just disappointing, it’s downright criminal.”
While The Unspoken playerbase is dwarfed in comparison to other traditional eSports, at the end of the day what matters most is the players, many of whom invested countless hours in learning how to play the game at a professional level. With real prize money on the line, it’s clear ESL hasn’t done right by its community (see update above).
We’ve reached out to ESL for a statement, but haven’t received any word yet regarding a more detailed reason behind this. We’ll make sure to update as new information comes out.
A special thanks goes out to Shaun Lane for pointing us in the right direction.
Intel have announced a partnership with ESL and Oculus to launch an eSports league dedicated to VR gaming, featuring Oculus Rift titles The Unspoken and Lone Echo‘s multiplayer counterpart Echo Arena.
It’s official, sitting around watching other people play games is a big deal among hardcore gamers these days and while, right now, the vast majority of those games are played competitively using a monitor, mouse and keyboard, Intel, ESL and Oculus want to accelerate the progression of immersive eSports with their latest initiative, the “VR Challenger League”.
The new event, offering a prize pool of over $200,000, will comprise two VR titles that were both conceived with competitive play in mind. The first is Insomniac’s excellent magical dueller The Unspoken. The game is focused on 1v1 magical duelling and has the player use the Oculus Touch motion controllers to perform magical gestures to create and throw projectiles and cast special attacks.
Next up is Echo Arena, the multiplayer counterpart to the forthcoming Oculus Rift exclusive Lone Echo set in space, featuring some impressive contextual animation and zero-G locomotion which opens the door to some unique tactile gameplay opportunities. Road to VR’s Frank He went hands on with the multiplayer mode at last year’s Oculus Connect 3 event. Here’s a snippet of what he had to say of his experience:
We would move around in zero gravity either with thrusters, or by grabbing, pulling, or pushing ourselves on our way with the help of walls or floating geometry (or even teammates or enemy characters). We’d be vying for a glowing disc in the middle of the Ender’s Game Battle Room-style arena (though it wasn’t nearly as big). Then we’d have to grab the disc and throw it into the holographic goal at the end of other team’s side.
A final piece of the puzzle was a punch you could do only to opponents’ heads to briefly stun them, preventing them from being able to move and hold the disc. You could also grab and climb onto bodies, so a common maneuver would be to grab onto a limb, clamber up, punch them in the face, and snatch the disk right from their hands, then give yourself a shove off of their stunned body to head toward the goal.
You’ll be able to qualify for the offline events by taking part in the online competitions which are set to start on July 12th on ESL Play. As well as the VR Challenger League qualifiers, you’ll also be able to “challenge yourself in our weekly ESL Play cups”, where you can compete for weekly points and prize money.
If you’re interested in taking part, head over to ESL to create an ESL Play account so you’re primed and ready to take part when the league kicks off next month.
At PAX West, Reload Studios made a strong push for cultivating World War Toons as a VR eSports title. They were livestreaming a couple of shoutcasters announcing a four-on-four player capture the flag game of World War Toons, which is a free-to-play, VR first-person shooter. This was all preparation for Twitchcon this past weekend where they were on the expo floor with the same configuration, except with PlayStation VR headsets instead of Oculus Rifts.
I had a chance to catch up with Reload Studios CEO James Chung at PAX West where we talk about motion sickness with VR first-person shooters with different VR comfort options, their integrations with the Virtuix Omni, their free-to-play business model, and VR eSports as well as the future of streaming in VR.
Stephanie Harvey (aka “missharvey”) is a professional eSports gamer playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with the Counter Logic Gaming Red team. I had a chance to catch up with her at PAX West to talk about the future of eSports in VR, the ecosystem of announcers and observers that makes games more entertaining for spectators, her training schedule, core competencies for maintaining a competitive edge, and all of the various ingredients that have to emerge in order to have a viable VR eSports ecosystem.
