To celebrate the one year anniversary of the release of Quest and Rift S, Oculus is hosting a sale on heap of games for both headsets, including some Quest bundles with top titles.
Oculus has kicked off its anniversary sale which runs through May 25th, 11:59 PM PT (your local time here).
Image courtesy Oculus
On the Quest side, the company is offering three bundles, a rotating daily deal, and discounts on 15 individual titles. Here’s the bundle breakdown and today’s daily deal (see everything on sale here):
Bundle prices are automatically adjusted to account for games that you already own.
Image courtesy Oculus
On the Rift side, the anniversary sale has brought discounts on 166 titles (and there may be more to come throughout the sale). Check out all the Rift games on sale; here’s a handful that caught our eye:
Ghost League is one of the latest and most promising new games to hit Oculus Quest via sideloading on SideQuest. It’s a multiplayer sports game that mixes flinging, swinging, jet packs, and more for high-flying fun.
The Ghost League free pre-alpha demo available on SideQuest right now is a single player experience with two levels and a practice lobby to show off the features and gameplay basics in the racing focused game mode. When it fully launches it will be a multiplayer experience and will also include a battle royale mode.
Gameplay looks a lot like Sprint Vector with the insane speed, mixed with a bit of Spider-Man and parkour for good measure. The HUD does a good job of grounding you with overlays and near-field objects that should ideally alleviate motion sickness. But if you have a weak stomach, we’d advise you tread carefully here.
This isn’t a wholly original game, but there isn’t anything quite like this on Quest at the moment. Even as a solo practice course it’s fun to try and get better times so I can only imagine how much more intense it would be with other players to compete against.
Since Ghost League is not on the official Quest store, the only way to access it is via sideloading on SideQuest. Using SideQuest is very easy though, you can reference our guide if it’s your first time using the app.
For more details on Ghost League you can visit the official website, SideQuest page, Discord channel, and subreddit. The developers plan to eventually launch a Kickstarter campaign as well to help fund development. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Bethesda announced The Elder Scrolls: Blades back at E3 2018, promising that the free-to-play title would support VR headsets all the way from standalone to high-end PC. It’s been nearly two years since that announcement, but Bethesda has “no update” on the VR version of the game.
Relative to other major gaming studios, Bethesda has actually embraced VR quite substantially. The studio has already released two VR ports, Skyrim VR (2017) & Fallout 4 VR (2017), two original VR titles, Doom VFR (2017) & Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot (2019), and a VR DLC, Prey: Typhon Hunter (2018).
Since those titles, the only other Bethesda game officially in the works with VR support was The Elder Scrolls: Blades, which was purportedly being developed as a mobile-first game that would eventually expand to a range of platforms including console, PC, mobile VR and PC VR, with cross-play between them.
Elder Scrolls: Blades saw a beta release on iOS and Android in March 2019, and then a full release in May 2019. Bethesda has kinda-sorta been referring to the game as being in ‘Early Access’ though doesn’t note that in any of the app store descriptions or in the game’s latest marketing.
It’s been nearly two years since the initial announcement of Blades and its eventual VR support; we reached out to Bethesda to ask if they would offer a status update on Blades VR. A spokesperson told us “we don’t have any updates to share.”
It’s unclear if VR support for the game has been cancelled outright or if it’s just taking far longer than expected.
Last month, Bethesda announced that Blades is coming to Nintendo Switch this Spring, noting that the game would “take advantage of the [Switch’s motion controllers] for an immersive new way to play.” It’s possible that this is the first glimpse of the motion-based mechanics that would eventually be expanded upon in VR, but it could just as well be the scraps of development from a canned VR version of the game.
Exactly how Blades’ mechanics would translate to VR in a meaningful way has been unclear from the start. The free-to-play title is built around micro-transactions and time-gated content with lots of menu-driven management—not the sort of thing we’ve seen successfully executed in VR to date.
Just a few months after the acquisition of Beat Saber studio Beat Games, Facebook today announced the acquisition of Sanzaru Games, the studio behind the Oculus-exclusive Asgard’s Wrath and a handful of other VR titles. Sanzaru will join Facebook’s VR game division, Oculus Studios, but continue to be run as an “independently operated studio.”
As far as VR studios go, Sanzaru Games is one of the most veteran you’ll find. The studio began working with Facebook’s Oculus before the company even shipped its first consumer headset. Sanzaru’s first VR title was Ripcoil (2016), built as an Oculus Rift launch title back before the headset was bundled with its ‘Touch’ motion controllers.
Sanzaru continued to build Oculus-exclusive titles published by Oculus Studios; there was VR Sports Challenge (2016), a Touch launch title, followed by Sanzaru’s first major production, Marvel Powers United VR (2018). The studio’s crowning achievement, so far, is Asgard’s Wrath (2019), a VR RPG which received wide acclaim, including our 2019 Game of the Year Award.
Over the years, and thanks in large part to development deals from Oculus Studios, Sanzaru Games has honed its talents as a VR developer, one of only a handful of independent studios which has proven it can successfully deliver a project with the scope of Asgard’s Wrath. With few studios equipped to work in VR at this scale, Sanzaru is a valuable asset for any company wanting to ensure the best VR content comes to their platform.
And that’s likely the primary reason behind Facebook’s acquisition of Sanzaru Games; after years of investing in large projects which have honed the studio’s VR chops, Oculus Studios doesn’t want to risk a competitor coming in and snatching up all that talent for their own platform-exclusive content (much like what happened with Stormland developer Insomniac Games, which was acquired by Sony last year).
Before VR, Sanzaru has worked on a handful of non-VR games dating back to 2008. Going forward, the plan is to be fully focused on VR. Facebook didn’t announce the terms of the acquisition, but says that “Sanzaru is joining Facebook to help us pursue a future of rich, immersive, and original VR game content,” and maintains that the studio will be operated “independently” out of its existing offices.
Facebook says it isn’t ready to talk about what projects are next on the docket for Sanzaru, nor whether they will focus on Quest, Rift, or both, but it seems certain from here on out that future VR games from Sanzaru will continue to be Oculus-exclusive.
Are there more VR studio acquisitions to come? Facebook won’t say for now, but teases, “we’re exploring many ways to accelerate VR, and 2020 is going to be an incredible year for VR game launches and announcements. We are thrilled to have Sanzaru joining our team. This is just one of the many amazing VR announcements we have in store this year.”
For today’s livestream we’re trying out the upcoming 1v1 multiplayer VR melee dueling game from E McNeill, Ironlights! If you’re curious about how we livestream the way we do then look no further than this handy guide for general tips and this guide specific to our Oculus Quest setup.
I’ve been eager to get my hands on Ironlights in its pre-release state, the latest VR game from industry veteran E McNeill ever since it was first announced. We’ve already published some early hands-on impressions, complete with versus gameplay footage, but I haven’t tried it out until today for myself.
Essentially the premise here is that it’s a 1v1 VR dueling game. There are some NPC enemies to fight and train against, but the core of the experience is the competitive multiplayer. What makes things feel especially clever is that, to balance and maintain intensity, combat is split between attacking and defending in slow-motion. It’s pretty rad. After a successful Kickstarter the game is due to release on Quest and PC VR headsets later this year.
The stream is planned to start at about 1:30PM PT and will last for about an hour or so. We’ll be hitting just our YouTubeand I’ll be facing off against Ian Hamilton live. Harry might join us as well via Discord to help out with chat. You can see the full stream embedded via YouTube right here down below once it’s up:
Embedded livestream coming soon
You can see lots of our past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist and various other gameplay highlights. There’s lots of good stuff there so make sure and subscribe to us on YouTube to stay up-to-date on gameplay videos, video reviews, interviews, and more original content!
And please let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next! We have lots of VR games in the queue that we would love to show off more completely.
Never in a million years would I have wagered The Walking Dead would make for a great VR game. This is a brand, nay, an entire genre, that’s steadily slowed to a creative crawl, with seemingly every possible tie-in and conceptual angle hacked away at, sparing neither life nor limb. And yet, somehow, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is a gory delight.
Skydance Interactive doesn’t owe its unexpected success to a piling body count or tough story-telling, but instead the rules its vicious world establishes early on. Moreover, it is the finely-tuned level of user interaction that rewards you for adhering to them.
Like a growing number of VR titles, the Saints & Sinner’s experience is designed with physics and interaction at its very core. Need to stab a zombie in the head? You’ll have to properly thrust your blade into their brain with a disturbing degree of intention, not just waggle a stick in their direction. Nasty cut need healing? Grab a bandage and physically wrap it around your arm to patch yourself up. It turns a traditionally trite mechanic into an entirely new experience, one that seamlessly splices its way into the pressured world of survival horror inventory management like never before. It proves to be far more compelling than it has any right to be.
Ten minutes of holding off the hordes, and it is tough to go back to the feather-touch feel of older VR games. Dual-wielding pistols don’t carry the same sense of heft, and can be aimed and fired like they’re balloons. Axes and swords phase through enemies as if they were made from thin air. Perhaps most damning, monsters and foes can grab hold of you, but you feel powerless to properly shove them away. But here, you have a physical presence, one that demands a higher degree of real-life imitation than has been asked of us in the past.
This isn’t a new concept, of course, but it is evolving. Free Lives’ Gorn, RUST LTD’s H3VR, and WarpFrog’s Blade & Sorcery arguably started us down this path. Gorn, for example, earned scores of sales for its slapstick, uncompromising violence and Blade & Sorcery did the same by delivering the most satisfying melee action yet seen in VR (or, to face the uncomfortable but more telling truth, providing the most realistic stabbing you’ll find in VR). Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades (H3VR), meanwhile, avoids the violence issue by making its enemies hot dogs while growing a significant audience by continually refining and expanding what ends up being an enormous physics-laden playground. But it is 2019’s Boneworks that serves as the real poster child for this new style of play; a game obsessed with the minutiae of reloading a gun. In this physics funhouse every enemy must be grappled with and, most impressively, every puzzle solved with a genuine injection of player invention.
Crucially, though, this fledgling approach to VR design is anchored around one of the core tenants that makes this technology so special; it makes you someone.
In Boneworks, it transforms you into a sort of gun-slinging Superman; enemies are mere toys to be ruthlessly experimented on. For Blade & Sorcery, you become the brutal, elitist gladiator front and center of a summer blockbuster poster. In The Walking Dead, it makes you the idiot you laugh at in zombie movies, the one making all the mistakes you swear you’d never make. It is the true embodiment of, well, embodying someone else.
Hurdles remain, of course, all of which are equally important to somehow pull yourself over. The Walking Dead and Boneworks offer compelling evolutions over Gorn and Blade & Sorcery, but neither is perfect, often content with letting sandbox-style carnage fill in for a lack of more decisive campaign design. Boneworks in particular never fully escapes the shackles of the hugely promising technical demonstrations it started life as.
We’ve got our tracked fingers crossed that Half-Life: Alyx serves up the next step in this journey. Valve’s Source engine broke ground with its physics-driven breakthroughs, but more importantly, its creators gave these inventions context. It took its stunning foundations and made them a living, breathing feature inside an otherwise excellent shooter.
Even Alyx, though, isn’t coming to the most important VR headset on the market: Oculus Quest (at least not natively, it isn’t). The games we’re talking about here push the processing power of PC VR gaming to the max with their complex systems. Quest, by comparison, is running smartphone-class processors and that means the jury is still out on whether Facebook’s standalone system will be able to handle these significant innovations; the upcoming port of Saints & Sinners and the spin-off Boneworks game will likely be the judge of that, but translating the satisfaction unlocked by these PC VR games to standalone VR will be vital to keeping that content library fresh in the years to come.
There is, of course, the matter of what happens when this devilish level of violent detail reaches the masses, though that’s perhaps a topic best saved for another time.
But it is here where you see VR gaming that’s truly native to headset and headset alone. True, you could play Saints & Sinners with a pair of Move controllers on a PS4, but I’d guarantee the loss of depth perception and enemy proximity would make for a painful translation. Without a VR headset, it would be virtually impossible to negotiate your way through most of Boneworks’ minute interactions.
VR headsets might not have moved onto a true ‘next generation’ of products yet but, remarkably, VR software seems to be getting there without the leaps in fidelity and control we’ve come to expect from successive hardware. That suggests that, by the time PSVR 2, Rift 2, Index 2 and others are ready for the limelight, we’ll finally have a gaming ecosystem that’s figured itself out. Quite an exciting thought, that.
In celebration of the upcoming launch of Half-Life: Alyx, the studio’s first full VR title, Valve is making all games in the Half-Life series free to play until Alyx’s release in March.
Half-Life is the cornerstone franchise that established Valve as one of the game industry’s most lauded developers. From the first Half-Life in 1998, the series has spanned seven titles, leaving the world with a doozy of a cliff hanger in 2007 with the release Half-Life 2: Episode 2.
And though it isn’t the infamously anticipated Half-Life 3, the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx is set to be Valve’s return to the franchise after more than 12 years, and the first full fledged VR title to be release by the studio.
For many, it’s been a minute since they played the iconic series; for many others, Half-Life may have simply been before their time. To refamiliarize (or newly introduce) Half-Life to the world, Valve has made all seven titles free to play until the release of Half-Life: Alyx this March.
Although Alyx is set before the events of Half-Life 2 (2004), Valve has said that players will be better off having played the Half-Life 2 series before Alyx, for reasons that will become apparent in the game.
“The Half-Life: Alyx team believes that the best way to enjoy the new game is to play through the old ones, especially Half-Life 2 and the episodes, so we want to make that as easy as possible,” the company said about making the franchise free to play.
Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” has apparently been spending time with Valve’s new Index headset and the recently released Boneworks. Now he’s flirting with the idea of starting up a new VR game studio to revisit some game development ideas.
Recent tweets from Persson tell us that he’s been playing Boneworks with Valve’s new Index headset and having quite a bit of fun with it. Across a handful of tweets, he’s called the game “incredible” and “super immersive.”
An emergent moment born of the game’s dedication to physical simulation—where he nearly fell but used a hook-shaped tool to cling to a ledge at the last moment—led him call it “the greatest game of all time;” a bit of hyperbole, I’m sure, though it’s clear how much the interactivity in the game has wowed him.
“Boneworks is what really sold me on VR again. It was the first time I played through a game in VR like I do when I get really absorbed by a game,” he wrote in another tweet.
The experience has got Persson once again flirting with the idea of making his own VR games.
“All the things I want to try to make in VR keeps gravitating towards a game quite similar to what I was planning with 0x10c,” he tweeted on Monday. “[…] I’m going to need someone driven to help me start up a studio, but I’m afraid to ask anyone I know. So now my plan is to get hunted by dream.”
Whether or not Persson actually goes for it remains to be seen, but this is far from his first foray into VR.
0x10c was an ambitious sci-fi space and survival sandbox game project that Persson had been working on back in 2012, and after a demo of an early Oculus Rift prototype, he said he was “100% impressed and will make 0x10c compatible with it.” Unfortunately the game never came to fruition.
Even beyond 0x10c, Persson has been curious about VR since its inception. He supported the Oculus Kickstarter way back when to the tune of $10,000, and though he had some choice words when the company was sold to Facebook, he eventually claimed he was “officially over being upset” about the acquisition not long after. He even made a key introduction between Oculus and Minecraft studio Mojang (after he had sold the studio) which led to VR support being to Minecraft.
From his recent musings, it seems like its been a while since he took a good hard look at the state of VR, but his renewed interest could be the motivation that brings him back into the fold.
VR gamers running NVIDIA’s newest RTX graphics cards will be able to take advantage of a new ‘Variable Rate Supersampling’ (VRSS) feature designed to increase the sharpness of VR games without reducing performance. The feature uses a foveated rendering approach which focuses sharpness toward the center of the lens without wasting extra processing power toward the edges where the image will be blurred by the lens anyway.
Taking advantage of the Variable Rate Shading capability of the ‘Turing’ architecture in Nvidia’s RTX GPUs, the company today announced and released a new feature called Variable Rate Supersampling (VRSS). The feature allows games to be supersampled for added sharpness and clarity, but only toward the center of the lens. This allows GPU rendering power to be spent where it matters most.
For VR enthusiasts, supersampling is a well known technique for increasing clarity when there’s GPU horsepower to spare. Traditional supersampling techniques render the entire image at a higher resolution than the target display, which can make a surprising difference to the clarity of fine details in today’s VR headsets. But traditional supersampling is computationally expensive, and if you crank the knobs too high, you’ll start missing frames (which leads to an uncomfortable experience in a VR headset).
VRSS is designed to be a more efficient supersampling method that’s specific to VR. It takes advantage of the fact that the lenses of most VR headsets have a narrow ‘sweet spot’—a small region where lens clarity is the greatest—while the image gets blurrier toward the edges of the lenses. The human eye itself also only sees in high detail in a small sweet spot in the center (called the fovea). It therefore doesn’t make much sense to spend extra processing power sharpening the blurry parts of the image, which is exactly the premise of VRSS.
Image courtesy NVIDIA
VRSS uses Variable Rate Shading, a feature baked into RTX cards, to create a ‘foveated’ supersampling region at the center of the image while leaving the rest of the image alone. This means that GPU processing power can be more efficiently used to sharpen the center of the view. Nvidia says VRSS allows for more sharpness in the foveal region with less processing power.
NVIDIA test system specs: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, Intel Core i7-6700K, 32GB, Windows 10, HTC Vive Pro | Image courtesy NVIDIA
Running on an Nvidia test system, the company claims that VRSS achieves 4x supersampling in Boneworks while maintaining a 120 FPS average, compared to roughly 75 FPS when using a traditional 4x supersample.
The feature is also designed to dynamically enable and scale according to available GPU power. If there’s extra processing power not being used, VRSS will supersample up to 8x, or disable itself entirely if necessary.
VRSS is available with the newest Nvidia drivers released today (you can download and install them through the GeForce Experience application). You’ll need to enable the feature in the Nvidia Control Panel; Nvidia recommends setting VRSS to ‘Adaptive’, and warns that using the ‘Always On’ feature may result in framerates dropping below the headset’s native rate.
Image courtesy NVIDIA
Unlikes previous foveated supersampling techniques from NVIDIA, like Lens Matched Shading, VRSS luckily doesn’t require specific integration with Nvidia GameWorks tools. However, there are some technical requirements: games must be based on DX11 or use forward renderers and support MSAA to work with VRSS.
Currently Nvidia is only enabling the feature for games which it has specifically tested, which is 26 at present:
Action-physics adventure game Boneworks released earlier this month to a strong reception despite little formal marketing. The title surpassed 100,000 players in its first week, reeling in an impressive $3 million in revenue despite being available on just one of several key VR platforms.
Now Boneworks, the action-physics adventure from veteran VR developer Stress Level Zero reached an impressive milestone for an indie VR release, selling more than 100K units for $3 million in revenue in its first week, the studio confirmed. Even more impressively, the game reached this milestone despite being available only on Steam at launch.
Boneworks’ launch was so successful relative to other VR games on Steam that the title ranked in the highest tier of Steam’s ‘Best of 2019 Virtual Reality‘ ranking (which ranks by gross revenue for the entire year), despite Boneworks having launched just two weeks before the list was published. That means the game earned enough in two weeks to be comparable to the sales of games that have been earning revenue for the entirety of 2019, like Beat Saber, Gorn, Superhot VR, Pavlov, Blade & Sorcery, and Skyrim VR.
Content Marketing Success
Beyond pushing the envelope in physical simulation for VR interactions, Boneworks‘ launch success appears to have been driven largely by non-traditional content marketing.
Stress Level Zero founder Brandon Laatsch was formerly part of the major YouTube channels ‘Freddiew’ and ‘Node’, and leveraged his significant experience and connections in online filmmaking to expose Boneworks to an audience far beyond the core VR community.
Since April 2018, 10 videos showing off Boneworks at various stages in development were published on Node or Laatsch’s own YouTube channel, garnering more than 21 million collective views. The most successful of the videos (‘Boneworks – Next Gen VR Gameplay!‘) was released in April 2019 and has pulled in 6.7 million views alone.
The videos, which demonstrated compelling physics-based VR interactions, also spawned countless GIFs which were shared both within and beyond the VR community.
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Boneworks is only available on Steam at present. While it isn’t clear if the game will eventually come to Oculus’ PC platform, the studio has confirmed that a game ‘in the Boneworks universe’ is in development for Oculus Quest (though details are still scarce). Considering the game’s computationally-demanding physics simulations and limited comfort options, it’s doubtful that Boneworks will ever launch on PSVR due to the system’s limited processing power and Sony’s more stringent comfort standards. That said, the ‘Boneworks universe’ Quest-focused game could be perfectly suited for PSVR as well.
