Skyfront VR, the upcoming multiplayer arena first-person shooter from Levity Play, is coming to Steam Early Access on November 10th, including support for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. Setting it apart from more ‘traditional’ VR shooters, Skyfront VR boasts a unique locomotion style that supposedly offers a fast-pace, nausea-free experience.
Set in 2700 CE, when humanity has mastered the laws of physics, players battle in zero-gravity arenas made from the cities of old in a remembrance of a past civilization-ending war that took place 400 years earlier. In the case of the trailer, it looks like one of the first maps has you shooting it out among architecture lifted from a typical Greek island like Santorini or Mykonos.
From what we’ve seen, Skyfront VR’s locomotion scheme appears to have much more in common with arcade flight sims like EVE: Valkyrie (2016) than more ‘traditional style’ VR shooters like Onward (2016). The Superman-style flight mechanic is done by moving your hands, “translating to 1:1 movement in this virtual, zero-gravity space.” This, according to Levity Play, forces players to consciously guide their in-game movements with their physical body, which helps eliminate the sensory conflict that often occurs when movement is dictated by a joystick.
At Early Access launch, two arenas will be available including Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch gametypes, five different weapons, five special abilities, and a ‘Bot Shootout’ practice mode.
Full Game Features:
5 game modes including Single Deathmatch
3v3Elimination and Capture The Flag
5-6 visually stunning maps in different geographical settings
20+ destructive weapons and special abilities to choose from
An engaging progression system
Customizable character & weapon assets
Play against advanced AI opponents
No pricing information is available currently. You can keep an eye on Skyfront VR by signing up for updates via the Steam Early Access page.
Onward, the mil-sim tactical multiplayer shooter, has garnered a hardcore playerbase since it released on Steam Early Access a year ago, and if you want to know what all the hubbub is about surrounding what many are hailing as the end-all VR shooter, you’ll be able to get a taste from September 14-17 during the game’s free access weekend.
Onward isn’t your typical shooter. As a project developed by a single core dev, the mil-sim multiplayer has a character of its own, focusing on a brand of realism that emphasizes coordination, communication, and marksmanship skill. This is a strictly ‘no cross hairs and no HUDs’ experience, and the better you know your way around a firearm and the better you can communicate, the more effective you’ll be on the battlefield.
Onward, which currently sells for $25 on Steam, supports HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. The 360 nature of the game though makes a third Oculus sensor a much better choice to eliminate occlusion of the Touch controllers.
Be ready for plenty of stiff competition too, because many long-time players have upgraded their controllers to include a physical stock, giving them a clear leg up as they can steady their shots more easily. The level of competition is so high, that some players have formed an unofficial Onward Championship League.
Its sole developer, Dante Buckley, is a new game designer at 20 years old, while the game is still a work-in-progress, it’s amazing what he’s done with pure determination in such a short time. UploadVR’sDavid Jagneaux details Buckley’s story of dropping out of college to teach himself game designing from scratch. Buckley told UploadVR that he works “continuous 14+ hour work days. It’s been worth it though.”
In the post announcing the free weekend, Buckley says there will be new content coming out in September and October, including new maps “and more”.
Sony’s new VR peripheral, the PSVR Aim, launches today alongside Farpoint, a sci-fi VR FPS that was specially made with the controller in mind. Those who have been PlayStation fans for many years will remember that this isn’t the first time the company has made a gun peripheral, and those prior attempts didn’t see much success. Can Farpoint and PSVR Aim avoid repeating history? Read on to find out.
Developer: Impulse Gear Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment Available On:PlayStation Store (PlayStation VR ) Reviewed On: PlayStation VR + Aim on PS4 Pro Release Date: May, 16 2017
Gameplay
Farpoint opens by introducing players to two astronaut scientists around which the game’s story will revolve. Meanwhile the player inhabits a male character who does a lot more shooting than talking. The opening sequence sets up the mission of the astronauts: study a strange space anomaly.
And we all know what happens with strange space anomalies…. In this case it’s a destabilization of the anomaly which becomes a wormhole and sucks our two astronaut friends inside, along with the player who is piloting a shuttle that was on its way to pick them up. Oh, and the big space station they were stationed on gets pulled in too, presumably with all the crew on board. It all sounds pretty cliche (and it is), but actually it’s relatively well produced and the novelty of VR made it a pretty cool starting point for Farpoint.
After getting sucked inside you’ll find yourself plummeting toward a planet of unknown origin, the alien life of which you’ll soon get to know pretty well. Ejecting in an escape pod let’s you survive the landing on the planet’s surface—which resembles a more rocky mars with some active volcanoes—and you’ll set off on foot to search for those missing astronauts, and any other survivors who might have been inside. Thank the person who decided to make sure the escape pods come equipped with an assault rifle—you’re gonna need it.
As you wander forward looking for signs of wreckage and hopefully survivors, you’ll quickly come to find a holographic beacon of sorts which you can scan to reveal a short holographic recording. Such holographic recordings act as breadcrumbs of the game’s story to keep you trodding along.
There will be lots of trodding; the vast majority of the game will involve you walking from one place to the next and battling enemies along the way. This continuous stick-based locomotion is a departure from most VR games today which use teleportation or another method (like being designed for no movement at all, like Job Simulator). The game doesn’t offer other methods for getting around, but the movement has been carefully designed to maintain comfort, and I was very surprised to find that it didn’t make me nauseous, even for play sessions of an hour or more. I talk more about the locomotion in the ‘Comfort’ section of the review below.
Anyway… now that you’re walking along… you’ll find that the planet’s inhabitants are instantly hostile, you can tell by the way they like to scream as they fling themselves at your face; the first foes you met are nasty little spider monsters which will be very familiar to anyone who has fought Half-Life’s ‘headcrabs’, and though the face-sucker enemy is a well worn sci-fi trope, I can promise you that you will be afraid to see a writhing, screaming, basketball-sized spider-monster flying at your face. What I mean to say is that VR makes these enemies frightening at an instinctual level.
Luckily your assault rifle (which has infinite ammo but can overheat) is up to the task. A holographic scope on top has a convincing look to it where the reticle will fade out if you aren’t looking straight down it. And look straight down it you will: there’s not a lot of hip-shooting in this game and you’ll be encouraged to make your shots count.
Thankfully, wielding a two-handed gun like the assault rifle feels very natural with PSVR Aim. All the guns in the game are designed to make sure your virtual hands are placed roughly where they should be on the aim controller, offering a convincing sense of holding the weapons within the game world. This is backed up by the subtle detail of clicky-clacky sound effects when you move the gun around, as well as the faint creaking of your thick space suit.
Photo by Road to VR
Although I was worried about the lack of a shoulder-rest on the Aim controller (meaning you need to hold the gun out in front of you with no support) I ultimately found the game very playable with its design, which seems to have been especially made to make it easy to get your head down to look through the weapons’ scopes without bumping the headset on the controller. This was achieved quite effectively as I don’t recall bumping my headset on the gun even once, and peering down the scope of each gun was easy.
The weapon mechanics are well made. Weapons feel functional and utilitarian without being simple laser pointers of destruction. You can only hold two guns at a time; a gesture whereby you raise your weapon to the side of your head is a quick and immersive way to change between your two guns. You’ll find a standard set at first: assault rifle, shotgun, long rifle, and a few more interesting ones later in the game (though you’ll likely have at least one of the initial three because they are quite flexible). The assault rifle and shotgun each have secondary fire modes which shoot explosives (rocket for the assault rifle, grenade for the shotgun) which bumps up their utility. Since the guns feel so physical, I would have liked to find some upgrades here or there to improve them over time (maybe a better scope that I get to physically attach, or a larger clip, etc), alas the weapons remain static throughout the game.
Opposite your weapons are a number of different different aliens. Early on it’s bug-type creatures you’re fighting which range in size from the little basketball-sized headcrabs I described earlier all the way to truck-sized chargers (and occasionally beyond). Each enemy attacks differently and is best dispatched using different weapons and different tactics.
That means that if you’re battling say, a field full of headcrabs, you’ll want your shotgun handy. If it’s a field full of headcrabs and the mortar-style yellow-back beasts which lob giant projectiles at you, you’ll want your assault rifle to be able to shoot the incoming mortars and get range on their origin while also dispatching headcrabs. With several enemies types at play in one battle, you’ll need to be on the lookout for danger coming from the sky, ground, and sometimes even underground.
Later in the game there’s a shift in the type of enemies you fight and things change fast. I don’t want to spoil much, but I can say that you will come to favor a different set of weapons and your foes will have significantly different tactics.
Ultimately Farpoint has a well made combat sandbox of weapons and enemies; it’s fun to shoot and kill things, and often times fun (or more accurately, frightening) to be shot at. More than once I found myself involuntarily physically bracing for impact as I saw a mortar coming down on my head. And I’m telling you, the spider creatures flying at your face are as scary as they are satisfying to blow away with a shotgun as the last moment.
The weapons are functional, but they always seem to leave the player feeling just a little bit underpowered compared to the threats at hand; this is reinforced by the sound design on the weapons that makes them feel further like they don’t pack that much punch. Occasionally you’ll briefly feel like you have the right tool for the job, but then the enemies will change things up and you’ll be right back to feeling like you’re just able to scrape by with what you got. That makes sense thematically for the game, but I think it would have improved the game to have occasional moments of significant firepower where you get to feel like for once you have the upper hand.
So it’s a lot of relatively satisfying run-and-gun. Sadly there’s essentially no environmental interaction; you won’t push any buttons or pull any levels, or cause the environment to react in any significant way. In fact, there’s no reason to shoot at anything except for enemies, and the PSVR Aim exclusively takes the form of a gun.
Intertwined with the gunplay is both the holographic recordings and more significant cutscenes involving the two astronauts from earlier who we find are alive but standed on the planet. Most of the game involves tracking the path of Eva, the female astronaut, to try to catch up to her so that you can regroup and form a survival and escape plan.
Fairpoint’s single player campaign took me a little over five hours to complete. And while in the traditional world of gaming that’s on the shorter end of things, for VR it’s quite substantial. It’s tremendously refreshing to come to a climactic moment, which would easily be the end of some other VR game—many of which last for only one or two hours—and have the game actually keep going and the story continue to develop.
The solid production values of Farpoint, along with its quality combat sandbox, and enough of a story to keep things moving along, make the game feel like one of the most complete single-player VR experiences on any platform to date, and surely a must-play for PSVR fans, so long as you’re into FPS gameplay.
Immersion
It seems almost silly, but simply holding a tracked-prop that roughly matches the objects you’re holding in VR can be a serious immersion booster. That’s exactly what the Aim controller does, and it also rumbles to offer some nice additional feedback.
Wielding the game’s weapons feels very natural thanks to the Aim controller, and you’d be smart to keep those weapons held tight to the chest.
Farpoint is downright challenging, and occasionally unforgiving. Every enemy in the game is potentially deadly, even the headcrabs (especially when you don’t thin their numbers sufficiently). Which leads to a constant sense of danger which immerses you deeply in the game.
The game uses sound as a crucial signal to alert the player to enemies, and the positional audio feels very accurate. Because of the deadliness of the enemies, you’ll be on edge throughout; every creak and groan of the environment will perk your ears and make you swing in that direction with your weapon at the ready.
Details large and small make Farpoint a very immersive game, though the strings of immersion are unfortunately regularly broken due to the tracking limitations of PSVR. The game is pushing the system’s tracking capabilities to its limits, and you will occasionally see those limits broken (more on this in the Comfort section).
Impressive graphics and detailed sound design help to build a world around you, and so too do interesting and aggressive enemies. At one point in the game you’ll meet an enemy that shoots a high-powered instant-kill laser at you and you may find yourself recoiling in fear as it nearly skims your head.
When it comes to small details, at one moment in the game I was confronted by a character at gunpoint who asked me a question. Although shaking your head yes or no was not a mechanic introduced anywhere in the game, I instinctively nodded to answer. It was ultimately a trivial moment, but I was delighted to find that it actually worked, and it definitely reinforced my belief in the world that I was standing in.
Unfortunately, beyond a pretty environment and strong visual and audio details, the planet and its inhabitants felt somewhat hollow despite their deadliness. Sure, the enemies are fun to fight, but you never learn anything about them, or about the planet you’re on. The enemies are just… enemies. And the planet is just ground and obstacles for you to fight through.
And while there’s some serviceable character development, the character you actually interact with is someone who you know little about (making it especially hard to infer their motivations), which makes the choice to spend so much time developing the other characters quite odd.
Comfort
I’ll come out of the gate and say that I am surprised to report that (for me) Farpoint was comfortable from start to finish. I say I’m surprised because continous stick-based locomotion is generally regarded as a bad design choice for moving players through virtual environments. The key, it seems, is relatively slow movement and no artificial turning.
It’s abundantly clear that the game was made for comfort from the ground up. Throughout the game you’ll cover a lot of ground, but the entire world is designed such that you’re almost only ever walking directly forward or at 45± degrees off-center from forward.
The direction you walk is thoughtfully determined by the direction of your controller rather than your head, which I liked immensely because it meant I could look off to the sides to admire the world (or scan for enemies) while walking in a different direction; the more technical among you will know this as ‘decoupled’ movement.
By default, any artificial turning is disabled which might seem like an odd choice, but for the most part you can navigate the game entirely without artificial turning (and I would say this is actually recommended so that your forward position stays where the developers intended it). Turning around completely was clearly not meant to be part of the game, as the turning options just make for clumsy navigation; the only time you’ll feel the need to do so is when you’re occasionally falling back for cover or trying to kill an enemy that got behind you.
The enemies are pretty clearly designed to come at you from the front and kindly wait until you are looking at them to attack you, which helps eliminate the need to turn around. I actually found it so awkward to turn around artificially that I preferred to simply walk backwards or physically turn at an extreme angle to walk backwards in most cases. And although it happens rarely, it’s still frustrating and discomforting to need to make large movements backwards in the game, not only because you don’t know exactly what’s behind you, but it’s just awkward to need to retreat at a diagonal (to your forward position) but be largely required to stay facing forward.
The game isn’t very instructive as to how it expects players to stand or orient themselves to best play the game. I happen to understand the way the tracking works so I think I utilized the system mostly as intended, but not every player might understand how they are supposed to interact with the game, potentially leading to occlusions and frustration.
Sony has made a big deal in its marketing of the PSVR Aim controller about the “precision,” but the irony is that, while the shape of the device offers a good platform for a VR weapon, it doesn’t feel any more precise than the Move controllers. And that makes sense as it’s fundamentally based on the same tracking tech. And while I’d venture to guess that there’s some improved IMUs inside the Aim controller compared to the 7 year old Move controller, it doesn’t seem to be helping.
I’d say the Aim works reasonably well about 90% of the time. 8% of the time the virtual gun will drift several degrees in horizontal rotation compared to the real controller. The result is that the barrel of the virtual gun and the real controller are misaligned, which leads to the player needing to hold the gun at slightly awkward angles to compensate for the drift in the midst of combat. The remaining 2% of the time is prone to extreme drift where the gun rapidly drifts out of place and doesn’t stop:
You’re supposed to be able to calibrate things by holding the Options button, but this didn’t seem to work for me and only ever resulted in a quick flash of a view showing the virtual PS camera and its bounds. It seemed at times like shaking or swinging your gun around could fix the drift, but other times didn’t seem to help at all. There were times when I wanted to quit and restart the game because of how much the drift was impacting my aiming.
I will say that developer Impulse Gear has done an excellent job of designing a VR FPS around the limitations of PSVR’s tracking system, but even the very best content design can’t fix the underlying imprecision that feels only just good enough for serious VR gameplay.
Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017 is here, and Oculus is showing off a bevy of exclusive games that are due out sometime later this year. Among them was an entirely new level of ARTIKA.1, a sci-fi shooter from 4A Games‘ Malta-based studio that aims to get gun freaks excited as you plug away at human raiders and horrific creatures alike with an arsenal of customizeable futuristic weapons.
The demo begun in the passenger seat of a military vehicle, sitting beside my companion Viktoria and driving through the icy desert wasteland. Approaching our Russian outpost, we pass several guards. They seem friendly for badass gun-totting sentries and joke with Viktoria as we move closer into the protected confines of the huge base, a place I later learned would be my new home and consequently house the entirety of the game’s action.
image courtesy 4A Games
Snow is pouring down and the windshield wipers are sluffing off melted snow, a detail that steals my attention away from the massive downed military airplanes to my right, a relic from earlier times before the world went topsy turvy. I roll my window down with my outstretched finger to give the final guard Viktoria’s ID from the glove box. It’s windy outside and the vehicle’s engine is purring loudly. It’s a harsh place and I instinctively roll the window back up to return my attention to the quietness of the car and my guide’s explanation of the world around me. The demo hasn’t even really started and I’m already blown away at the little things, the level of care that 4A Games has taken in getting you acquainted with the world while listening to what could have been a boring monologue in a conventional flat screen game’s opening cutscene.
image courtesy 4A Games
Once inside the base, we slip into a vehicle bay and get out, my first taste of the new level’s locomotion scheme. A ghostly outline of a man appears standing in front of a circuit breaker a few meters from me. I zap to the pre-determined spot, pull down a lever to get the bay’s electricity going and similarly zap over to the elevator for my weapon’s training. All of this interaction happens while I remain front-facing, something required by the Rift’s two-sensor setup.
image courtesy 4A Games
Next I’m put through my paces with the guns, something we got a crack the first time we saw ARTIKA.1 at Oculus Connect 3. I toss red dot scopes onto a powerful blaster rifle, paint it a white camo color and grab another gun that charges up to release a powerful laser bolt and throw on a thermal sight. The developers say you’ll be able to scavenge these parts throughout the game and even build an entire weapon from scratch, something that promises to be ‘particularly impressive.’
Shooting is easy, pull the trigger and reload by lowering your gun to your side—but I was more interested in was how the game’s locomotion system informed level design. Moving around the starting level, an ancient military transport plane from earlier, I noticed a few ghostly outlines to choose from. A blue outline appears on a teleport node that has adequate cover and a yellow outline indicates no cover. It’s your choice really which one to search for, so you can go in guns a-blazing or stick back and line up your targets for a more efficient take down. But there aren’t infinite teleport options, only a few you’re presented during fire fights, and ones clearly created to move you forward through the level (in front of doors, code panels, displays, etc).
image courtesy 4A Games
There are a few puzzles to solve as well, although I didn’t encounter any that were especially hard. In one instance a key code was written on the wall behind me, the number 18Ɛ. I foolishly plugged in 183 to the code panel which resulted in an error message. Realizing the 3 was actually backwards, I then typed in the correct code of 381 to open the door I needed.
I’m tempted to call it a wave shooter based on the fact that most areas have at least 2 waves of enemies, but I don’t really feel comfortable reducing it to that due to its constant forward movement. The teleportation mechanic, although limiting somewhat for immersion, creates interesting bottlenecks that you have to navigate and helps keep the game’s pacing consistent. Some may call teleportation an outright minus to the game immersion-wise, but I found it refreshing, almost creating a gameplay style similar to the Halo franchise’s campaign mode.
And while it won’t have the same reach as Halo, ARKTIKA.1 is undoubtedly playing in the same ballpark, and we can’t wait to get our hands on the full game, planned to launch exclusive to Oculus Touch in Q3 2017.
Shooting a gun in VR is a pretty powerful experience, and the feeling of being able to look down the sights and blast away the baddies with a well-aimed shot is pretty cathartic to say the least. With games like Space Pirate Trainer (2016)and Raw Data (2016) at the forefront of the HTC Vive’s commercial release though, the ‘shoot the robot’ trope is pretty well-trodden territory by now, so what does VR’s newest wave shooter ROM: Extraction do that other games don’t? The answer: exploding grenades and tactical ‘bullet time’.
ROM: Extraction Details:
Official Website Developer: First Contact Entertainment Available On: HTC Vive (SteamVR), Oculus Touch (SteamVR) Reviewed on: HTC Vive, Oculus Touch Release Date: December 7th, 2016
Gameplay
In the near future, humanity has started mining the Moon for resources. To our surprise, we find a cache of mysterious orbs containing a highly volatile energy source that—in true human fashion—we instantly want to weaponize. Continuing our mining operations throughout the solar system, we happen upon a sort of security system made up of hostile robotic drones. Perfect targets for our bouncy balls of death.
This is where the game’s explosive orb grenades take the center stage, offering a standard explosive variety (infinite) and a number of limited use power-ups that can lock-on to enemies, or cover increasingly large areas of effect.
The game offers three game modes: Normal and Hard modes, which last 3 minutes long, and an endless Survival mode—all of which have online leaderboards. Online multiplayer, although shown in the main menu as an option, is currently not yet available. First Contact has told us that ROM “has a bunch of content in store for 2017 with multiplayer being a big part it.”
Combined with the game’s bullet time function, which recharges periodically and can be activated by holding the grip button on either Vive controller or Touch, you’re effectively able to toss orbs into the air and detonate them above a group of alien drones by shooting the orb directly in slowmo—something that takes practice (and a little luck) to achieve, but is really satisfying when you do. If you think you can toss orbs wildly at normal speeds and get a good result, you’re almost guaranteed to fail, so precision is important.
Tossing orbs isn’t always easy or consistent though, because throwing things in VR doesn’t give you the same physical feedback cues like in real life. Releasing a controller trigger while whipping an orb into any given direction isn’t as straight forward as looking down the sights of a pistol and firing, so you’ll definitely need practice to get the sort of results you’d expect to have throwing a real world ball.
For better or for worse, ROM: Extraction is missing some variety you might find in other, more gun-centric wave shooters. While there are several classes of orbs to chuck around, only one semi-automatic pistol is available in the game and only one enemy type. Again, if you’re not great at tossing the game’s orbs, you’re pretty much screwed, because a drone requires multiple headshots to take down, making the pistol pretty useless by itself.
As for ROM: Extraction’s sci-fi backdrop, I’m honestly conflicted whether brush-off or actually admonishthe game for its lack of multiple environments, as you’ll only be able to shoot down robot aliens in a single sci-fi spaceship area. I keep telling myself that Space Pirate Trainer (SPT), arguably the most popular VR wave shooter, only has a single gameplay environment too, but then again, SPT hasn’t attempted to weave a story around its shooting gallery either.
My point is this: ROM is dripping with style, has a cool premise, competent voice overs, a well-polished environment and real heart-pumping action—what I’d consider the beginnings of a multi-hour AAA shooting odyssey. I can’t help but shake the feeling that the scope of the game was drastically reduced somewhere along the way though, and what we ended up with amounts to an extremely good-looking, albeit single-level wave shooter. To its credit, it’s currently on sale for $16.99 on Steam.
Immersion
The game’s spaceship environment gets high marks for style and execution, and really feels like it’s been ripped from Battlestar Galactica (2004) or Avatar (2009).
To get the most out of ROM’s highly detailed environment, super sampling is strongly suggested, which thankfully can be torqued all the way up to 2× in the game’s settings menu. Some farther away enemies, like those in the upper gallery, aren’t nearly as clear as I’d like, but it’s likely more of a limitation of the headset’s display than the game’s graphics.
The game gives you two arms but no body to speak of. For now though, this is one of the best solutions I’ve seen for the sake of immersion simply because you don’t have to deal with any of the inverse kinematic weirdness that usually comes with full-body avatars. When joints bend the wrong way, and your legs and body aren’t in natural positions, it really can damage the feeling of being immersed.
Robotic baddies also don’t invade your play space, staying well outside of the barricades surrounding you. This is both good and bad. Good, because it means you won’t accidentally clip through bad guys that come too close, a phenomenon that tends to crap all over immersion. Bad, because they end up waiting patiently to be murdered when they could easily jump over the knee-high barricade and shoot you in the face, which really dials down the urgency of eliminating enemies.
When too many robots surround you though, you’re sure to notice it, as your vision slowly turns a deeper shade of red.
Comfort
As a room-scale game that has no virtual locomotion, and relies solely on your own two feet (and trust me, you’ll be shuffling and dodging around), ROM: Extraction is by virtue an extremely comfortable game.
Some discomfort could come from the end stage elevator in Normal and Hard modes, which drops you out of the level after the obligatory 3 minutes, but it’s quick and smooth enough for a majority of people not to notice.
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Futuremark have now released the full version of their long awaited, dedicated virtual reality benchmark, VRMark. And, after months of research and development, the company has found itself having to redefine its own views on how the difficult subject of VR performance testing should be tackled.
Futuremark are developers of some of the world’s best known and most widely used performance testing software. In enthusiast PC gaming circles, their visually impressive proprietary synthetic gaming benchmark series 3DMark has been the basis for many a GPU fanboy debate over the years with every new version bringing with it a glimpse at what the forthcoming generation of PC gaming visuals might deliver and PC hardware fanatics can aspire to achieve.
Therefore, it was inevitable that once virtual reality reached the consumer phase, the company would take an active part in VRs renaissance, in fact with immersive gaming came lofty initial hardware requirements and a necessary obsession with low latency visuals and minimum frame rates of 90FPS. So surely a new Futuremark product, one focused purely on the needs of VR users, would be a slam dunk for the company. VRMark is the company’s first foray into the world of consumer VR performance testing and recently launched in full via Steam, offering up a selection of pure performance and experiential ‘benchmarks’, the latter viewable inside a VR headset.
However, as anyone who has experienced enough virtual reality across different platforms will tell you, putting a number on how ‘good’ a VR system performs is anything but simple. With dedicated VR headsets come complex proprietary rendering techniques and specialist dedicated display technology a lot of which simply hadn’t been done at a consumer level before. The biggest challenge however, the biggest set of variables Futuremark had to account for, was human physiology and the full gamut of possible human responses to a VR system.
Futuremark initially approached the issue from a pure, analytical perspective, as you might expect. You may remember that we went hands on with a very early version of the software last year which at the time came complete with some pretty expensive additional hardware. Futuremark’s aim at that time (at least in part), to measure the much coveted ‘motion to photons’ value – the time it takes for an image to reach the human eye, from render time to display. However, you’ll notice that if you’ve popped onto Steam to purchase the newly released VRMark, it does not list ‘USB oscilloscope’ or ‘photo-sensitive sensor’ as requirements. Why is that?
We asked Futuremark’s James Gallagher to enlighten us.
“After many months of testing, we’ve seen that there are more significant factors that affect the user’s experience,” he says, “Simply put, measuring the latency of popular headsets does not provide meaningful insight into the actual VR experience. What’s more, we’ve seen that it can be misleading to infer anything about VR performance based on latency figures alone.” Gallagher continues, “We’ve also found that the concept of ‘VR-ready’ is more subtle than a simple pass or fail. VR headsets use many clever techniques to compensate for latency and missed frames. Techniques like Asynchronous Timewarp, frame reprojection, motion prediction, and image warping are surprisingly effective.”
Gallagher is of course referring to techniques that almost all current consumer VR hardware vendors now employ to help deal with the rigours of hitting those required frame rates and the unpredictable nature of PC (and console in the case of PSVR) performance. All these techniques (Oculus has Asynchronous Timewarp and now Spacewarp, Valve’s SteamVR recently introduced Asynchronous Reprojection) work along similar lines to achieve a similar goal, to ensure that the motions you think you’re making in VR (say, when you turn your head) matches with what your eyes see inside the VR headset. The upshot is minimised judder and stuttering, two effects very likely to induce nausea in VR users.
“With VRMark, you can judge the effectiveness of these techniques for yourself,” says Gallagher, “This lets you judge the quality of the VR experience with your own eyes. You can see for yourself if you notice any latency, stuttering, or dropped frames.” And Gallagher shares something surprising about their research, “In our own tests, most people could not identify the under-performing system, even when the frame rate was consistently below the target. You may find that you can get a comfortable VR experience on relatively inexpensive hardware.”
To describe Futuremark’s VR benchmarking methodology for consumers in more detail, here’s James Gallagher explaining it in his own words.
[Futuremark are] recommending a combination of objective benchmark testing and subjective “see for yourself” testing. We think this is the best way to get the whole picture, especially for systems below the recommended spec for the Rift and the Vive.
The reason is that the concept of “VR-ready” is more subtle than a simple pass or fail.
On the one hand, a literal definition would say that to be truly VR-ready a system must be able to achieve a consistent frame rate of 90 FPS on the headset without dropping a single frame. In this case, every frame you see comes from the game or app. You are getting exactly the experience the developer wanted you to have. You would use VRMark benchmarks to test this case.
On the other hand, when a system is unable to maintain 90 FPS on the headset the VR SDK will try to compensate by using Asynchronous Time Warp or frame reprojection or other techniques. In this case, only some of the frames you see on the headset are the real frames from the game. The others are created by the SDK to fill in the gaps caused by missed frames. Now, if the SDK does such a good job of hiding the dropped frames that you cannot tell the difference between it and the pure 90 FPS experience, then you could perhaps say that this second system is VR-ready as well. You can use VRMark experience mode to test this case.
Here’s an example to illustrate:
System A:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 6500
Average frame rate: 140 FPS
System B:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 5000
Average frame rate: 109 FPS
System C:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 3500
Average frame rate: 75 FPS
System D:
VRMark Orange Room benchmark score: 2000
Average frame rate: 40 FPS
The benchmark results show that system A and System B are both VR-ready for the Rift and the Vive in the pure sense. Both have enough performance to render every frame at 90 FPS when connected to a VR headset. But the difference in scores and average frame rate tells you that system A has more headroom for using higher settings or for running more demanding VR games and apps.
System C and system D did not achieve the target frame rate. So the question now is whether the VR SDKs can compensate for the missed frames? For that, you would use VRMark Orange Room experience mode with a connected headset.
You might find that you cannot tell the difference between system C and system B when using experience mode. Even though system C is regularly dropping frames, the SDK is able to compensate and hide the effects from the user. The VR experience is as good as a true VR-ready system.
With system D you might find that there are noticeable problems with the VR experience. The SDK is not able to compensate for the low frame rate. You might notice stuttering or other distracting effects.
From this, you would conclude:
System A is VR-ready with room to grow for more demanding experiences.
System B is VR-ready for games designed for the recommended performance requirements of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.
System C is technically not VR-ready but is still able to provide a good VR experience thanks to VR software techniques.
System D is not VR-ready and cannot provide a good VR experience.
I think many gamers will want to know that the system they are considering will be truly VR-ready in the technical and pure sense. You can only get that insight from a benchmark. You also need a benchmark test that runs on your monitor to see how far beyond 90 FPS a system can go. The VRMark Blue Room benchmark is a more demanding test that is ideal for comparing hardware that outperforms the Rift and Vive recommended spec.
At the other end of the scale, price-conscious gamers might be perfectly happy with a cheaper system that can appear to be VR-ready through technical tricks, for example, the new Oculus Rift minimum spec announced at Oculus Connect in October. These systems can be evaluated with the benchmark (how much will the VR SDK have to compensate) and with experience mode (how well does the SDK compensate).
With all of that laid out, I asked Gallagher to explain why, if Futuremark are now recommending people adopt a ‘see for yourselves’ methodology for VR benchmarking, why does he believe VRMark is needed at all? In theory any single VR application or game could be chosen to be used in the above methodology. Why should people invest in VRMark?
“I think the value of VRMark is that it gives you an easy way to make both these objective and subjective assessments using common content in one app,” he says, “The benchmark tests provide a convenient, easily repeated VR workload. They give you a pure test for VR-readiness. Experience mode gives you a way to judge the quality of the user experience on systems that don’t meet the pure definition.”
The latest VRMark is now on sale via Steam for use with the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and OSVR compatible headsets. Current feedback on the title is mixed, with some criticising the lack of more extensive ‘pure’ benchmark functionality. Purely as a showcase for VR, the price (£14.99 / $19.99) seem perhaps a tad steep right now, especially considering a chunk of that pretty showcase (‘The Orange Room’) is available in the free demo version. That said, VRMark is a sight to behold in VR and along with the methodology above, there are many who many find the money worthwhile.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on Futuremark’s recommended methodologies your experiences with VRMark and thoughts on how VR behcmkarking may evolve over time in the comments below.
Out now on Steam Early Access, Overkill VR is a First-Person Shooter available for the HTC Vive. Developed by Starloop Studios and published by Game Troopers, it offers a large arsenal of upgradeable weapons, plenty of levels and varied boss battles.
Overkill VR’s opening area is a strange one. Beginning in a large armoury with a vast collection of weapons on the wall, the game immediately thwarts any notion of interacting in this inviting space. You’re prevented from moving beyond your physical play space, and none of the objects are interactive. Instead, you’re simply there to point at a large display on the wall, which functions as the main menu – pretty uninspiring for a VR game. In fact, it isn’t a VR interface at all; it comes directly from the touchscreen menu of Overkill 3, a game developed for mobile platforms in early 2015 on which Overkill VR is based. The UI has barely changed, with a Vive controller acting as your pointer. It works well enough, but it’s not an encouraging start.
Overkill 3 was designed as a third-person, cover-based shooter, but Overkill VR’s action takes place in first person, and thankfully, it’s a reasonably satisfying result. It’s a testament to the quality of the original level design by Craneballs Studios that a mobile game can not only survive the transition to VR, but also make the move to first person without major problems in terms of object and environment scale. While it is impressive that a mobile game can hold up at all, these are poor graphics for a PC game in 2016. The visuals are functional at best, and the environment detail is very limited. There’s no escaping the fact that the original assets had mobile rendering in mind; the poor quality of the obstacles used for cover is particularly noticeable, as they can be inches from your head. Extremely low detail geometry combined with some misaligned textures (that were never expected to be scrutinised up close) is disappointing. Enemy animation is quite stiff, and appears to be running at a lower framerate than the rest of the scene. The saving grace is that the game isn’t demanding on hardware, so if you’re hitting minimum spec for VR it should run perfectly. There are no graphics options to adjust, although the developers say they are considering adding a higher quality mode. I’d appreciate the option to remove the lens flare, which doesn’t feel right in VR.
If there is a highlight to the visuals, it’s the weapons. Real-world guns are all represented with a decent amount of detail, and are upgradeable in an impressive number of ways. The original mobile game was designed as a free-to-play title, hence the focus on weapon upgrades, promoting in-app purchasing. As a paid title for VR, the in-app purchasing has thankfully been entirely removed, with upgrades accessible through credits earned during gameplay.
With strong similarities to the Time Crisis series, the gameplay largely involves eliminating a number of enemies from a predetermined cover position before moving on. Those with fond memories of light gun ‘rail’ shooters will likely have a good time here. You have to eliminate everyone before moving to the next predetermined spot via an instant ‘teleport’. Often there is more than one position to choose from, some offering a greater difficulty (due to less effective cover) but potentially higher scores. Random drone targets appear during the action, which you can shoot to regain ammo, health and other power-ups, and there are various enemy types with different strengths, making it important to prioritise certain targets. It’s unfortunate that the weapons don’t feel or sound quite as good as they look. The audio in general is passable, but the enemy voices quickly become repetitive and they don’t seem particularly high quality. The Duke Nukem-like voice of your character crops up when you’re performing well, and on completion of each level. Some may be amused by the ‘oh yeah’, ‘hell yeah’, and ‘that’s how we roll’ dialogue, but I found it became irritating pretty quickly, so an option to silence your character audio would be a bonus.
As with most VR shooters that use tracked controllers, there is minimal (if any) aim assistance, as the main appeal here is the inherent accuracy of the controllers. It’s essential to have a steady hand, and to aim down the sights. Closing one eye to actually line up a headshot is always an impressive demonstration of VR technology in any shooter, but it can become tiring to constantly have one eye closed. Holding the gun further away, at arm’s length, it’s possible to aim fairly accurately with both eyes open, but fighting the stereoscopic split can result in eye fatigue after a while. I found myself switching between the two techniques and between my left and right eye regularly.
By moving your other hand forward of the trigger, it will snap to the weapon to simulate holding it with both hands, which can give you greater accuracy, as it appears to steady the aim and reduce recoil. But holding both arms up separately, as if they’re gripping a single object doesn’t really make much sense – what you really need is a gun-like peripheral that actually locks both controllers together so they can support each other. I much preferred to physically support my dominant hand with the other (as you would with a pistol) for all the weapons, in order to steady my aim and to reduce arm fatigue. Indeed aside from this supporting role, the non-dominant controller seems rather wasted. There is no dual-welding of single-handed weapons, and there is no motion-based reload mechanic, that has proved so satisfying in games like Raw Data. One positive trait it shares with Raw Data is the importance of cover; physically crouching behind virtual walls for protection is an immediate immersion-enhancer, which makes it all the more disappointing that the reload is just done with a single press of the grip button.
Unfortunately, the non-VR, mobile heritage of this game are obvious, from the low-detail geometry to the unlock-with-stars level progression. Despite this, the game can be fun, as wielding weapons correctly and physically crouching for cover is all down to player skill, and that invariably feels satisfying in VR. As the game is expected to leave Early Access in March 2017, there is some time to improve the presentation. Along with updating the game with new content, the developers have acknowledged the most-requested feature is a manual reload system, and that is now a priority. This single addition to the game would make a huge difference to the experience, so that is certainly something to look forward to.
Arktika.1 is the VR debut for 4A Games, the developers bind teh Metro series of first person shooters. The title is built from the ground up for Oculus Touch, here’s 17 minutes of the Oculus Connect 3 demo where the title made it’s debut.
Oculus Connect felt like another milestone marking the maturity of content for virtual reality. VR is beginning to gain support from mainstream, triple-A developers and the games which have been in gestation are now beginning to filter out, with a step change in production design and polish, which the traditional games market takes for granted.
One such title revealed at the event was Arktika.1 from developers 4A Games. You may know them from the hugely popular (and technically excellent) Metro series of first person shooter games. Their Malta studio has been dedicated to building a new made-for-VR title which was unveiled for the first time at Oculus Connect 3. It’s a first person shooter designed around motion controls, specifically Oculus’ forthcoming Touch devices. It’s a first person shooter game set in an icy, futuristic wastelend:
The feel of the weapons as they shot, the strong haptics induced in the Touch controllers, and the quality of the sounds, were all satisfying, not to mention the look of the projectiles and the trails in the air left by them. All of this contributed to the high quality AAA feel of the game. Out of the assortment, I picked what looked like a revolver that shot a scattering of bullets made of pure energy, and a handgun that also scattered but with what seemed to be green projectiles leaving light distorting streaks in the air.
The gameplay seen here was shot ‘off screen’ so there’s no in game audio unfortunately, but it’s well worth a watch to get a handle on how 4A Games have approached gunplay and VR locomotion in the game, which promises a lengthy campaign mode to play through when it releases in 2017. Arktika.1 is exclusive to the Oculus Rift and Touch and is published by Oculus Studios.
One of the flagship announcements at last week’s Oculus Connect developer conference, Epic Games’ Robo Recall is a slick, polished first person shooter built for Oculus’ forthcoming VR motion controllers Touch. Here’s 12 minutes of raw gameplay from the Connect 3 demo to give you some idea of what to expect when the game lands early next year (see embedded video at the top of this article).
Road to VR‘s Ben Lang described Robo Recall as “satisfying action-packed fun” after spending time with the game at this year’s Oculus Connect 3 conference. The game, which evolved from the extremely well received tech demo for Touch, Bullet Train, retains a lot of the same core mechanics as it’s predecessor but polishes and hones them.
Now however, the premise is that you, the protagonist, are out to ‘recall’ hordes of malfunctioning, beweaponed mechanoids with brute force – i.e. your fists and a selection of guns. Ben had this to say about the title in his recent hands on article:
The sum of the experience is satisfying action-packed fun. Grab a robot, rip the gun out of its hand, then blow its head off and use the corpse as a shield.
The game isn’t just fun, also impressively beautiful. That’s the norm for pretty much anything Epic has set their minds (and their impressive Unreal Engine) to, but Robo Recall in particular uses some new tech from Epic to look extra sharp in VR.
The title will be made available for free for Oculus Touch owners with three environments each sporting three missions each. The title will appear some time in Q1 2017.
Today at Oculus Connect 3, 4A Games publicly debuted their first VR FPS title for Oculus Touch, titled Arktika.1. Previously, they had teased the game leading up to the reveal and was met with anticipation, as the high quality assets, as well as their elevated pedigree with the Metro series, were evidence enough. Today we finally know what that title is, and I’ve had the opportunity to give the demo a shot. Needless to say, it was an impressively rendered experience with high quality art rarely seen in current VR games, but let’s dive into what buttons it really pushed (and those it might not have).
First of all, this game will cater to those who crave high-tech firearms. The best thing I can say about the whole experience is that I wanted nothing but to Touch and experience the tactility of my guns, pun intended. This is credited to the studio’s extremely high attention to detail in the art assets, and the physicality that they provide in VR.
image courtesy 4A Games
Unlike most other experiences I’ve tried, this one really made me want to toy with all the knobs, switches, and other tiny mechanisms seen on the weapons you wield. That may also have to do with how they let you customize your loadout.
In the demo, I was given the ability to choose two different guns to take with me on a mission, from a selection before me, but beyond that, I could change what color I wanted the guns to be, and what attachments I wanted to put on them, like flashlights and digital scopes. I took a good amount of time investigating each and every gun, seeing what they looked like and how they operated, but sadly had to move on.
image courtesy 4A Games
Of course, that was also the part where I got to test out the guns on a shooting range in-game. The feel of the weapons as they shot, the strong haptics induced in the Touch controllers, and the quality of the sounds, were all satisfying, not to mention the look of the projectiles and the trails in the air left by them. All of this contributed to the high quality AAA feel of the game. Out of the assortment, I picked what looked like a revolver that shot a scattering of bullets made of pure energy, and a handgun that also scattered but with what seemed to be green projectiles leaving light distorting streaks in the air.
The essential gun mechanics and handling were pretty simple however. After choosing which two guns I wanted to bring, I could holster them beside my waist. With the revolver, I only had to flick my wrist lightly and I could reload, similar to the double barreled shotgun in Hover Junkers. With the other handgun, I simply had to tap it to on my holster to reload. This kind of system would prove fitting for the fast FPS action in the mission to unfold. In addition, in the middle of the demo, I got access to a gun which had curving projectiles that could seek enemies behind corners, which added a twist on the gameplay. We could probably expect more interesting mechanics like that in the full game, as they’re planning for a wide array of weapons and customizations. In addition, they plan for a lengthy campaign, on par with what can be expected from most of their other games.
image courtesy 4A Games
However, while it did feel smooth, some the action was not terribly novel. The plans for a lengthy campaign, driven by traveling through different levels, like in one of their Metro titles, might be one of the rarer occurrences in VR specific games. But a common occurrence in many of today’s VR first person shooters is teleportation on fixed points, and that’s the system of locomotion this game uses. They chose this system to prevent motion sickness in all users, and while it does work, some people dislike how sudden teleportation feels, even if there is a reason provided by the game about why you’re able to teleport, which this one seems to do in some way (it’s provided by futuristic technology). Otherwise, the gameplay was solid, encouraging physically squatting with your own body to duck behind cover, or teleporting somewhere to flank the enemy, while also leaning to fire from cover. It felt similar to Dead & Buried, except you’re able to teleport to different points whenever you want.
Overall, even if there are some potential caveats or limitations, Arktika.1 is shaping up to be a gem in the early days of VR gaming, bringing AAA production values to the table. But this is only one of the impressive new VR FPS reveals at Oculus Connect 3, standing beside Lone Echo by Ready at Dawn, and Robo Recall by Epic Games. We’ll continue covering the event and bringing the latest on all that’s new.
