Ubisoft have announced the release dates for it’s first three dedicated VR games, ‘Star Trek: Bridge Crew‘, ‘Eagle Flight‘ and ‘Werewolves Within‘.
Ubisoft are one of the first triple-A games studio to throw their weight behind virtual reality in gaming in a concerted way and over the last 12 – 18 months have announced a string of titles build specifically for VR headsets.
Flying at a fast clip around the historical sites in the 7th arrondissement in a human-free gay Paris sounds fun, ma oui? But swooping under bridges, weaving through the trees, alleyways and buildings can be a tricky thing if you don’t approach it right from a locomotion standpoint. Eagle Flight sounds like the sort of game that on paper would make you want to tear off a headset and drink a half-pint of Dramamine, but in practice it’s really one of the most comfortable high-speed games out there.
Next up, we’ll be seeing Star Trek: Bridge Crew, another will get a simultaneous release on all VR platforms on November 29. Another multiplayer title, the game sees different players assuming different crew roles on the bridge of an Enterprise starship. You can see some footage of our time with the game above.
Trackmania Turbo too, a title which is already released for PlayStation 4, will receive a patch to enable support for PlayStation VR support on November 8th.
Matthew Magee gets active and takes a swing at the new futuristic VR sports featuring heavy classic arcade influences for the HTC Vive, Racket: Nx.
I’ve always felt that there’s an innate satisfaction in hitting things with other things, as much as it makes me sound like a caveman. Like our distant cave-dwelling ancestors, we have a built-in survival instinct to hit things with other things. Problem: that person has some food you need. Solution: hit that person with something and take food. Problem: your favourite review publication gave 8/10 to a thing that you KNOW was worth 9/10. Solution: hit them with a DDoS attack. So it was, so it shall ever be. Hitting things with other things is satisfying and fun. FACT.
It was in this Cro-Magnon vein that I approached the demo for Racket: Nx, which will be available on Steam from the 17th of August for the HTC Vive. It is, fundamentally, a game about hitting things with other things and not since Wii Tennis have I felt so excited about such a simple premise.
Racket: Nx is the perfect example of a simple concept executed very well. It has crisp, effective visuals married to a fluid interface. It has vibrant positional audio cues that, combined with the neon visuals, really sell you on the faux-Tron aesthetic. It has a racket, attached as you would expect at the end of the single controller required to play, and a floating futuristic ball that you will hit toward the hemisphere of hexagonal bricks as they light up around you. Said ball will then dance around the arena with a satisfying series of thunks and pings, and you will dance around your play space in a series of pivots and dashes that we should all fervently hope never get caught on video and uploaded to YouTube.
From the main menu you’ll be able to experience the training mode only. Tantalisingly there are multiplayer and arcade options greyed out. The training mode tasks you with hitting designated points on the arena wall to push back a timer that is represented on the floor by an orange region that inexorably shrinks toward you at the centre of the play area as you repeatedly miss the shot you were going for. I curse you, orange floor, you foul terminator of high score runs!
Much like real life racket-play, getting the damned ball to go where you want is a real challenge. Importantly, even when things aren’t going your way, it still feels good to play on a mechanical level. If you need to line up a shot, a quick tug on the trigger magnetises the ball toward you allowing you to setup the angle you need to make the shot. There are areas of the arena that will charge up your ball. Again: all very simple and very effective. The high score table at the end lets you inscribe your three initials, securing your place in the household hall of fame.
It’s worth stating the obvious here: the more space you have to play the better. Those with low ceilings and/or things that encroach into the play area should approach with caution. While I never found the chaperone boundaries problematic, it’s very easy to get slightly over-excited making a shot and have your hand (and controller) leave the play area at high speed. It was only the thought of explaining how I’d managed to destroy some expensive household items that saw me rein in my excesses at the last moment. Also in this game, more than most, I found the trailing cables to be annoying. This is a by-product of playing at speed and needing to reposition in a 360 degree play field. If you’re a more natural player than I, this may never manifest as an issue.
There’s a great foundation here that I’m hoping the developers, One Hamsa, build up in interesting ways when it arrives on Early Access later this year. It has been a while since a game has had me so interested in getting up out of the chair and really putting myself through my paces.
If this all sounds in any way appealing, you should check out the demo, available today via Steam for HTC Vive – you can download it here right now.
This is how to No Man’s Sky running on your Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset using the VR injection driver VorpX. Be warned though, you’ll need to have an iron constitution before setting out.
No Man’s Sky is a game screaming for VR support, with its design goals on sci-fi immersion and an entire universe for you to explore the more I play it, the more I long to be ‘inside’ that world. Unfortunately, despite persistent rumours the game may one day receive native VR headset support, it was not to be – at least not for launch.
However, as with many things in things in the PC gaming community, someone somewhere was working on fixing this. Enter the VR injection driver VorpX and intrepid VR gamer and budding YouTuber Hoopermation VR (aka /u/hoopera on Reddit), who’s posted instructions on how to get the game running on the HTC Vive, although these instructions should apply to Oculus Rift users too and do let you experience the title in Stereoscopic 3D.
Once you have it downloaded and installed, open VorpX Config and go to “Cloud Profiles”
I recommend using the DOOM profile made by SorryAboutYourCats. This one should probably work for most OpenGL games.
Add NMS.exe from steamapps\common\No Man’s Sky\Binaries to the profile under the “local profiles” tab in VorpX Config.
If you’re using the Vive, pause the VorpX Watcher and start SteamVR, then unpause the watcher.
Make sure Steam Overlay and “Use Desktop Theatre” is disabled in the game properties
Start No Man’s Sky through Steam.
Press the delete key, make sure the 3D Reconstruction is set to “Geometry”, and set the Separation value to 0.01. If you crank it higher you can make the world tiny around you, which is…strange but cool.
Fair warning though, as you may well be aware, No Man’s Sky‘s PC release has seen many complaining about performance problems, with inconsistent frame rates and other issues which will almost certainly result in comfort issues when playing with a VR headset.
Let us know how you get on in the comments below and feel free to share any tips and tweaks to help with No Man’s Sky performance and VorpX immersion
Doom VR Executive Producer Marty Stratton sheds light on Doom VR, how Bethesda are approaching the project, what VR hardware they’re targeting and whether it’ll ever see a full release.
After thrusting a glimpse of a modern VR technology into the public realm 4 years ago at E3 2012 there’s a certain irony in Bethesda’s flurry of VR activity at this year’s show. 4 years ago, John Carmack exhibited a modified Doom 3 BFG running on a prototype headset that would eventually evolve to become the Oculus Rift. At E3 2016 however, after what felt like a 4 year embargo on anything VR, Bethesda brought it’s big guns to the show to convince everyone they were “all in” on virtual reality.
Ignoring any alleged legal strife between Carmack (now Oculus CTO) and his former employers, it was good to see not only a VR version of seminal shooter Doom front and centre, but Fallout 4 too! It was clear that both virtual reality experiences were very early prototypes, but as E3 2016 closed, it wasn’t entirely clear where id was going with Doom VR. Was it a PR exercise? Would the demo be released? Will there ever be a full virtual reality version of Doom we can buy?
John Carmack at E3 2012, now Oculus VR CTO
In an interview with Shacknews, speaking at Quakecon 2016, Game Director and Executive Producer at id Software Marty Stratton has shed a little light on some of these questions and more.
When questioned about fellow stablemates Bethesda and whether the Doom VR and Fallout 4 VR teams ever shared ideas on the projects, Stratton replies “Absolutely, there is a ton of collaboration. I can’t really go into the specifics of it, but it definitely is and has been a Bethesda initiative for a while now,” and finally “A lot of collaboration between the teams with the Fallout stuff and the Doom stuff. It’s been really nice.”
On the question of whether Doom VR would ever see the light of day as a fully-fledged product, Stratton is open about the project’s current status: “It is a kind of a public R&D project for us to an extent. To have VR, to take it to shows, show people the possibilities and the capabilities and get feedback to understand how they’re reacting to it. We made a lot of changes in what we did just between E3 and this,” clearly the development teams are iterating rapidly on the project – which is certainly a good sign.
As to whether that iteration would eventually lead to a final, purchasable product, Stratton was optimistic yet non-committal: “There is, I’m sure, a Doom product in there and we are kind of molding the clay right now as to what that becomes. I think the important thing is that we just don’t think of it as a Doom port to VR. That’s not the right way to go about it. It is about creating a Doom experience within VR that is made for VR.”
Finally, as both Doom VR and Fallout 4 VR were shown exclusively on the HTC Vive, what is id’s stance on VR platforms right now? “The way the technology is set up, we are fairly (platform) agnostic. We’ve been using the HTC Vive headsets for E3 and here, but we’re not really tied to anything in particular and I’m sure we will continue to look at all the possibilities as we move forward.”
I think it’s quite positive that Bethesda are finally publicly demonstrating their commitment to VR as a platform, but even better that, both the Doom and Fallout teams are seemingly approaching the R&D process collaboratively and openly gathering feedback wherever they can.
Guerilla Cambridge developed arena shooter Rigs: Mechanized Combat League will be available at the PlayStation VR’s launch and this new trailer reminds us why it’s one of our most anticipated titles for the platform.
Rigs: Mechanized Combat League is somewhat of an anomaly amongst first generation virtual reality titles in that it resolutely targets hardcore gamers, not just in terms of its chosen genres—a team-based arena shooter—but in terms of its accompanying game mechanics.
Whereas most titles appearing for the PSVR alongside Sony’s console-powered virtual reality platform’s launch have sensibly opted for safe locomotion techniques to ensure those sensitive to traditional joypad induced sickness in VR are well catered for, Rigs opts instead to challenge you to “just deal with it”.
Rigs is a multiplayer mech combat game that pits you and two other teammates against a rival faction. The aim of the game? To destroy your opponents, collect dropped orbs of energy and score points by dropping through a central ‘goal’.
Excellent anti-aliasing, high geometry scenery and mechs really give Rigs the feeling of a triple-A experience. It’s a welcome change from the more simplistic target stylings of the majority of early Morpheus titles. It’s also rendered smoothly, with low persistence of vision allowing the screen to melt away becoming a window on the action instead. This is early code of course, and there were a couple of occasions where frame-rate faltered, but for the most part it was near flawless.
Gameplay too is a cut above, with action reminiscent of titles like Titanfall – especially in its reach for verticality. Boosting into the air before unleashing two rockets and watching them hit home against an unsuspecting enemy as you descend was wonderfully and familiarly satisfying.
Rigs looks to have the multiplayer first person shooter space largely to itself right now, so it’ll be interesting to see how well those hardcore locomotion controls are received by VR newbies.
Either way, The new 30 second trailer conveys the action well, and we’re now looking forward to its arrival on October 13 even more.
This footage of a physics-driven, motion-controlled robot brawler not only looks amazing, but also features an extremely clever VR control mechanic we’d love to get our hands on.
Of all the sub genres I’d ever considered as “things I’d love to play in VR”, one-on-one robot brawling games wasn’t one of them. But a developer on twitter, snowskin (@snowdehiski), has released footage of a prototype VR experience for the HTC Vive which puts your in direct motion control of your own giant mech and asked you to punch the hell out of a giant mech-monster. It reminds us in more than a few ways of Pacific Rim (2013).
The reason why this looks so promising though is not just that it features big robots (although, clearly it’s off to a head start there), but because of fusion of physics and a neat decoupled motion control system. By that I mean your in-game hands, as represented the Vive’s controllers, do not directly map to the robot’s arms; rather, you operate virtual controls which do that instead.
This means that there’s comfortable visual parity with your own hand movements and in game controllers whilst allowing the robot’s arms not to follow 1:1 to your movements. This helps with in-game clipping and in general, as your arms are punching thin air in both the virtual and physical world, there should (in theory) be less immersion breaking. It also allows much more believable animated contact between the in-game robots as they’re not slavishly following your every action. There’s also opportunity for a sense of momentum as the robot’s arms can trace a slower path than your own, alluding to their weight without making the user themselves feel sluggish within the virtual world.
This issue of in-game motion not matching physical feedback is one of the trickier faced by VR game designers, with the HTC Vive featuring 1:1 tracked controllers out of the box and Oculus’ Touch controllers on their way soon. One game which demonstrated an interesting way to deal with this issue at E3 this year was Oculus Rift and Touch title, Wilson’s Heart. As you can see from the trailer below, segments of the game which require motion control interaction with virtual scenery or props allow a level of ‘drift’ between your in-game hands and the relative position of your real hands – represented in the game as a ghost version.
At any rate, the tweets above garnered quite a bit of attention, not least from well known virtual reality enthusiast and Adventure Time creator @buenothebear (aka Pendleton Ward) who, seemingly impressed, simply commented:
There’s no indication if this impressive looking experiment, which appears to be under the working name Big Robot, will see the light of day as anything other than a prototype. If not, we can but hope @snowdehiski considers releasing the WIP version, as I really want to try it out.
These are the PlayStation VR games making their way to Gamescom 2016 in Cologne next week.
Gamescom, Europe’s biggest games conference, gets underway in Cologne, Germany next week and as one of the last major gaming events before Sony’s PS4 powered virtual reality platform launches on October 13, it should be a good chance to get a feel for how strong Sony’s VR software line up is looking.
To that end, Sony have revealed the titles which will be either playable or at least present on the show floor. Here they are:
Most of the above we’ve covered before, but one of the newer titles from a franchise which will be familiar to PlayStation gamers is Super Stardust Ultra VR. The retro-styled, Asteroids inspired twin-stick shooter is a favourite of mine, and it’s great seeing it being brought up to date in VR. If you’re curious as to what it looks like, Sony recently released screenshots (see below) for the title along with a blog post from the Associate Producer at Sony’s XDev Studio Europe, Pedro Sousa who said of the title “Adopting a whole new perspective of gameplay, you will jump into to the cockpit thanks to Super Stardust Ultra VR’s first person perspective and blast countless waves of enemies as they attack from every angle, in a frenetic fight that puts you right in the centre of the action.”
Road to VR will be at Gamescom 2016 next week to bring you the latest in VR from the show floor.
The former Vive game bundle, which until now had remained the same since the launch of the headset, included Job Simulator and Fantastic Contraption alongside the returning Tilt Brush.
Frank He rediscovers his childhood and finds a new talent for improvisational performance as he goes hands on with Mindshow, a new virtual reality application that lets you create and act in your own interactive movies.
A childhood experience some of us might fondly remember is the acting out of fantasies based on our favorite stories, all before having to get back to the real world. Those memories and feelings are exactly at the core of Mindshow, an application by Visionary VR that lets you quickly stage, record, and experience stories in VR. Visionary VR is a company formed by many of the same people who organize VRLA, and over the weekend at their very own expo, they debuted the app. I was able to try it myself and talk with Gil Baron, CEO and Co-Founder of Visionary VR, as well as Jonnie Ross, CCO and Co-Founder. Here’s what I experienced and learned of their promising new application.
The demo experience walked me through a limited slice of what could be done, but basically it was a tutorial for recording a short interaction. I would embody one character as my avatar, act using my voice and body movements, almost as if puppeteering, and have that sequence recorded. Then I would play that back, fill in the role of the other character, and record that performance, completing the interaction. In the demo, it let me control an alien character and a spaceship commander, both of whom can be seen in the trailer. It took place on a colorful desert location, the same one where the commander says he “crash landed on an alien planet.” I took some time just to admire the nice views in VR.
It started with animations and voice acting already filled in for the commander, so that I could get a quick idea of the typical role playing part of the experience when I would play the alien. Because the commander was reacting to something and cowering in fear, it was only natural that I decided to act menacingly when possessing the alien. When I played the recording back though, I was surprised at first to hear that the voice from the alien was not mine exactly. It was actually processed and filtered to sound higher pitched and more throaty – a nice little touch. But then the demo erased the pre-acted sequence of the commander, and let me fill it in myself after I recorded the alien performance.
Now here’s where things get interesting, and where this application shows real potential. When I hit the record button, I didn’t quite know how I should be acting as the commander. The alien as per my previous recording was acting like an evil zombie, and the commander in the preset recording was originally cowering in fear, so was I supposed to just mimic that? Or could it be that, with this new found freedom, maybe I should do something a little bit more fun and creative? I went into it without really being prepared, but when it came time for my performance, I actually found myself wanting to oppose the alien version of me. It was high time that I stopped being subject to the shackled notions of my past self, or at least that’s what I felt. In that brief moment, a rebellious side of me not often seen had surfaced, and for a second, I forgot I was an adult. Then I heard laughing from the real life crowd beyond the headphones, and I began laughing myself as I became aware of what I just did, and perhaps how I looked doing it.
In any case, from this experience, it seems that the application is not only great for creating stories you already have in mind, but also for improvisation, which you can do by yourself, but also with other people. For example, I could have done my skit and then handed the headset off to someone else, and they could have done something interesting to change or advance the story. It could also have been done without passing the headset, but just the recording itself, so that another Mindshow user in another physical location could modify the story.
This is what reminded me of those games that you play as children, where you would make up stuff as you go. Something like the 3 word game. Or perhaps when you would just play pretend with whatever you could find for props. The pencil would be your sword, the laundry basket would be your ship, and your friends would be your brave allies on a harrowing adventure. You’d make stuff up as you go along, but it’d always be fun as long as you were willing to do something with your imagination. Now it’s like those old games and fantasies are literally coming to life.
That’s my own take on it, but luckily enough it’s also the kind of feeling Visionary VR wanted for Mindshow from the start. Ross describes their mission as such: “We didn’t care when we were younger. We didn’t think about it. We didn’t censor ourselves. There was no judgment to it. It was just playing, trying to make each other laugh. When we get older for some reason, for lots of different reasons, we get further and further removed from that, different people to different degrees. This thing that we lose touch with when we’re younger, this sense of creative capability… It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, especially when we have VR now… That you feel creatively capable, that’s the thing we want to give back to people. That’s what’s motivating us.”
The demo was a powerful reminder to me of exactly what they described. In addition, the freedom you have to interact with the world and with the characters is just something insanely fun to mess around with. The characters’ bodies and all the props have physics to them. I could do funny interactions with my hands like slap them against myself, and they’d bend appropriately, or in weird ways, when the skeletal animation messes up. I could even properly interlock my fingers to a degree, with minimal clipping or glitches.
All of those features, including the ones seen in the trailer, are what enable the feeling of freedom and creativity in Mindshow right now. The Early Access release “coming soon” will have them. But it’s a long way from the kind of freedom you might have in something like Garry’s Mod, which has an insane amount of features and ability to customize. What I saw felt like a glimpse of something immersive that could potentially reach that level of engagement in terms of all the fun stories that Gmod spawned.
For instance, in the demo, and in the first Early Access release, there probably won’t be any networked multiplayer, there probably won’t be the ability to import and customize, and there probably won’t be Oculus Touch support, but Ross and Baron assured me that those three features specifically, as well as others, would come in the future, it’s just a matter of time and resources, which is a reason why they decided on Early Access. It’ll help them to prioritize, and Ross says as much: “We’ll grow this product in a way that listens to the desires of the storytellers and creative people that engage with it.”
Visionary VR plans to take this project on for the long term. Ross says that “yes, we’re just getting started” and Baron adds that “the plan is to support all VR platforms” and “on building [Mindshow] for a very long time”. They want to support better and better hardware as well and take advantage of the growing industry, as that will give Mindshow users more power to interact with VR, e.g. with feet tracking when that comes out. We don’t know how long it’ll take for stuff like that to happen exactly, but in the case of feet tracking, it could happen sooner rather than later, as Valve is opening their tracking system to third parties, and others such as Oculus will follow suit in the future. Visionary VR also wants to support a wide range of viewing formats. Apparently you’ll be able to share this out in 2D video, in stereo 360, and in their app rendered in real time, where you also have the ability to move around in the scene, and if you want, modify it.
Minecraft developer Mojang has confirmed that the popular sandbox game is finally coming to the Oculus Rift next week, and further that the game would get support for Oculus’ Touch VR controllers later this year.
During an official Xbox stream, members of the Minecraft development team played the game entirely in virtual reality mode with the Oculus Rift and confirmed that the update (Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition v0.15.6) would launch next week and bring with it support for the Rift headset. During the stream it was confirmed that Minecraft would support Oculus Touch later this year, reports Reddit user Heaney555.
Minecraft for Gear VR sells for $6.99, and unless Microsoft decides to charge a premium for the version with Rift support, we should be seeing it launch next week for the current $9.99 price. If you’ve purchased the prior PC version of Minecraft, you can get the Windows 10 Edition (and it’s forthcoming Rift support) for free.
While official VR support for the game is likely to remain an Oculus exclusive for some time, HTC Vive owners can play Minecraft already thanks to the impressive (and free) Vivecraft mod which also supports the system’s motion controllers.
