VR tactical shooter Onward (Steam page here) released an update this week re-adding three maps which were previously removed during a major graphics overhaul.
It also adds a new map, new map variants, and introduces some major optimizations.
Maps Are Back
In late May an update was released which overhauled the game’s visuals, particularly the lighting. The changes were however so fundamental that they had to be manually applied to each map. Given the time taken to do this per map, Downpour Interactive decided to temporarily remove three maps from the game: Jungle, Abandoned, and Snowpeak.
Jungle’s relatively thick vegetation and changes in elevation results in very low detection ranges, which brings up the heartrate of even the most experienced players.
Abandoned takes place in a more traditional western woodland valley setting, with an abandoned military base and plenty of open spaces.
Snowpeak also features an abandoned military base, but this time in the snowy Russian mountains with more verticality and less visibility.
New Map, New Map Variants
A brand new map has been added called Turbine. Turbine takes place on a hydroelectric dam, an interesting setting which should make for a good variety of engagement distances.
The update also adds night time variants of Abandoned and Snowpeak. Night time variants have a real effect on gameplay, forcing players to adapt to the lower visibility.
Major Optimizations for Onward
Over the past few months, Downpour has been gradually implementing significant optimizations to Onward to improve the framerate and reduce instances of stuttering. We’ve noticed these improvements while playing recently, which are especially important to reaching the higher refresh rate settings of the Valve Index headset.
This week’s update significantly lowers the loading time of the game and maps. It also significantly reduces RAM usage by several gigabytes according to Downpour Interactive.
Ubisoft, which has released five VR titles to date, confirmed that it’s building a large, 50 person team to develop an “unannounced AAA project” using one of the company’s well known IPs.
Ubisoft has confirmed to VRFocus that it’s spinning up a VR team of 50 people to work on an unannounced VR project that will be based on the company’s known IP, among which are Rainbow Six, Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Splinter Cell, and many more names well known to the gaming industry.
While 50 employees isn’t a big team for traditional AAA game development, it’s a significant number for the VR space, which generally sees smaller scoped projects to fit with the smaller addressable audience. Indeed, Ubisoft’s VR games to date have likely seen smaller teams, and none have dealt directly with any of the studio’s major IP.
VRFocus notes that a handful of VR-specific job postings can already been on Ubisoft’s career website, most of which seek employees at the company’s Dusseldorf, Germany headquarters; Ubisoft says that more job postings are coming.
Each listing notes, “we are creating a brand-new team to work on an unannounced AAA VR project. You will work on cutting-edge VR technology, on one of Ubisoft’s great IP’s, developed across multiple studios. Join us today to shape the future of VR!”
At current check there’s nine full-time VR-specific job openings:
Level Design Director – VR
Art Director – VR
Senior Level Artist – VR
Senior Game Designer – VR
Senior General Programmer (C#) – VR
Build & Release Engineer – VR
Senior Technical Artist – VR
Senior Game Designer (Progression) – VR
Lead Character Artist – VR
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While most major game development studios haven’t yet committed significant resources to making VR games, Ubisoft has done pioneering work in the VR space with five titles already released to in-home VR users:
Werewolves Within (2016)
Eagle Flight (2016)
Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017) [optional VR support]
Transference (2018) [optional VR support]
Space Junkies (2019)
Surprisingly, considering the studio’s pedigree, Ubisoft’s VR titles so far have largely fallen short of achieving ‘must-play’ status, and their focus on multiplayer has left many of the games to languish without a stable population of players. In fact, the company just announced the end of post-launch development for their most recent title, Space Junkies. Will their next project upend this trend?
In addition to their five in-home VR titles to date, the company’s Ubisoft Escape Games brand has also developed two out-of-home VR escape rooms, Beyond Medusa’s Gate and Escape the Lost Pyramid, both set in the Assassin’s Creed universe.
For those with both an Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest, ‘cross-buy’ games mean that you can buy a game once and play it on both headsets. Because the Oculus store doesn’t explicitly label which games are cross-buy and which games aren’t, finding them can be challenging. Luckily there’s a place you can go to get an updated list all in one place.
When we reached out to Oculus to ask how customers can tell which apps support cross-buy, the company told us that while developers are free to write this in the app’s description, there’s no consistent indicator on the app’s store page to show whether or not cross-buy is offered.
Beyond cross-buy, knowing which apps support network saves (allowing you to seamlessly retain game progress between headsets) and which support cross-platform multiplayer doesn’t appear very easy to come by without investigating each app specifically. We’ve reached out to Oculus to confirm if there’s a clearer way to find which apps offer these features.
Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Monday that the company is acquiring Insomniac Games, a storied game studio and one of the most experienced in VR development anywhere in the world. The studio has developed three Oculus exclusive titles, with its fourth and largest yet, Stormland, still due to launch in 2019.
Founded in 1994, Insomniac Games was best known for the creation of the Spyro and Ratchet & Clank franchises which have collectively spanned more than a dozen titles, many exclusively on PlayStation consoles. In recent years the studio has been well known in the VR space, having developed three exclusive titles for Oculus Studios: Edge of Nowhere (2016), The Unspoken (2016), and Feral Rights (2016), not to mention the non-VR hit Marvel’s Spider-Man (2018) which was a PlayStation exclusive.
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
Sony’s primary reason for buying Insomniac is surely the quality and success (13M+ units) of Spider-Man (alongside the studio’s decades of experience developing for PlayStation consoles). Sony will bring the studio under its SIE Worldwide Studios group, which has churned out some of the company’s most lauded exclusive games (VR and otherwise).
While Sony will surely focus in the near-term on leveraging Insomniac’s talents for more AAA non-VR titles, the acquisition is a strategic boon for PlayStation’s VR ambitions, and a blow to Oculus. Sony has effectively sniped one of the world’s most experienced VR development studios after Oculus spent several years investing in the studio’s VR expertise.
In addition to the three Oculus exclusive titles the studio had already released, Insomniac is still developing its forth and largest title for Oculus Studios, Stormland, which is due out in 2019. The acquisition will surely not impact the release of the title, but it very likely will impact its future.
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
If Stormland turned out to be a hit for Oculus, and if Insomniac had remained independent, Oculus would likely ask the studio to start working on additional content and possibly a sequel. But now that the studio is owned by a direct competitor in the VR space, it’s unlikely that Insomniac would take on that work.
This of course all depends on who owns the Stormland IP. If Oculus holds the rights to the game, the company would have to search for a different studio to pick up where Insomniac left off (though the friction of switching teams on such a big project would be substantial); if it turns out that Insomniac retained the rights to the game, Oculus could be totally barred from continuing it unless they want to pay Sony to license the IP.
It’s likely that the Stormland deal between Oculus and Insomniac specifies a certain period of ‘post-launch content and support’ which the studio will be obligated to fill regardless of the acquisition.
However, generally a studio like Insomniac would want to do good work on post-launch content so that the publisher (Oculus Studios in this case) would be encouraged to pay for the development of even more content. But given that no additional deal is likely to be made following whatever was originally negotiated (considering the acquisition), Incomiac doesn’t have much incentive to put its heart and soul behind additional Stormland content.
In that sense, this was a pretty good move for Sony on the VR front. Not only are they benefiting from years of Insomniac’s VR talent—that Oculus paid for—but they’ve also put some major hurdles in place for Stormland’s future and deprived Oculus Studios from one of its core collaborators; VR game design is so new compared to non-VR game design that it’s not like Oculus can just go out shopping for another studio with the same level of VR expertise as Insomniac, and that means Oculus Studios has less access to great VR development talent moving forward.
Oculus Studios has consistently worked with a small number of independent game development studios over the years to deliver exclusive games to its platform. Oculus may now be taking a close look at the likes of Ready at Dawn, Twisted Pixel, Sanzaru Games, 4A Games, and others, to ensure they don’t get snatched up, especially considering that Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios has also been on a studio-buying spree.
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
While it won’t be the studio’s top priority, the odds seem good that Sony will have part of Insomniac Games work on a PSVR exclusive title; at least half of Sony’s current Worldwide Studios teams have worked on PSVR games. If this comes to pass, it seems likely that the studio would begin working on a launch title for PSVR 2, which Sony has all but confirmed at this point.
We’ll finally get a full reveal of Respawn’s upcoming Oculus exclusive VR title at Oculus Connect at the end of September, including the first opportunity to actually play the game.
Next to Valve’s still unannounced but confirmed-for-2019 VR game, Respawn’s upcoming ‘AAA VR shooter’ is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated VR game reveal, not just because so little has been shared about it thus far, but because of the serious pedigree of the studio building it, the same studio behind Titanfall 1 & 2, Apex Legends, and the upcoming Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
First, a quick recap. The still unnamed Respawn VR game was first announced way back in 2017. The game is being developed by Respawn and published by Oculus Studios, which means it’ll be exclusive to the Oculus platform. As far as we know, the game is confirmed for Rift, but it isn’t clear if it will also come to Quest. The only real information that’s been given about the game thus far is this teaser video and what we’ve been able to glean from Respawn’s job listings, which have characterized it as a “AAA VR shooter.”
Beyond that, almost nothing is known about the game, not even whether it will be single player or multiplayer. But we’ll finally get some real details at Oculus’ sixth annual developer event, Oculus Connect 6, at the end of September—almost two years since the game’s preliminary announcement.
While the initial announcement said that game was set for a 2019 launch, we’re already more than half way through the year; with the reveal not coming until just three months before the end of the year, Oculus will either be cramming a lot of marketing into the following months for a holiday launch, or the game might get delayed into 2020, as we saw recently with Lone Echo II. We’ll likely find out one way or another at Oculus Connect.
Back in 2016, director Jon Favreau, in association with immersive studio Wevr, released the Gnomes & Goblins preview, a demo of an (at the time) ambitious VR film project. While it was well received, it lay nearly forgotten as the years passed with no sign of a full release. Hope has been reignited thanks to a recently revamped website teasing that project is “coming soon.”
A testament to how quickly VR is moving; back in 2016, the idea that Jon Favreau (the director behind The Jungle Book (2016), Iron Man 1 (2008) & Iron Man 2 (2010), among others) was working on a VR film was pretty big news. An original story complete with immersive interactivity, Gnomes & Goblins seemed quite promising in its five minute preview which was released on Steam. Unfortunately the project’s intrigue slowly faded from memory as years passed with no indication that it was headed for a full release.
That all changed in the last week when Wevr, the immersive studio producing the project along with MWM, offered up a sly tweet to the project’s official website which has been completely revamped, now prominently featuring “coming soon” text at the top.
It’s likely no coincidence that this would happen now—shortly after the release of Favreau’s latest directorial project, The Lion King (2019), which used a purportedly groundbreaking virtual reality production process which Favreau himself likened to a “multiplayer filmmaking game” in a recent interview. And with the excitement surrounding new headsets like Quest, Rift S, and Index, it seems like an opportune time to revive the project.
While we still don’t know when it will launch, the revamped Gnomes & Goblins website now seems to have a firmer idea of what the VR film will actually be. While the original version of the site waxed about the experimental nature of the project—and rightly so, as the merger of cinematic narrative and interactivity in VR was still just barely being probed in 2016—the new version of the site quite concisely describes the experience as a “story driven game set in an enchanted world of gnomes and goblins with you as the protagonist” [our emphasis].
Indeed, since the debut of the Gnomes & Goblins preview in 2016, a handful of successful examples blending strong narrative with interactivity in VR have come to fruition with projects like The Invisible Hours (2017),The Great C (2018), and Star Wars: Vader Immortal (2019). Granted, with a clearer picture of the language of VR storytelling, Favreau and his collaborators are now faced with modern expectations; to what extent Gnomes & Goblins has or hasn’t been reworked to fit in today’s VR landscape won’t be clear until its launch, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
LOW-FI is an upcoming VR game from the veteran indie VR developer behind TECHNOLUST (2016). The game presents a dark but plausible future where most of the population lives in a VR simulation, while at the same time the city’s poor inhabitants live unseen on the streets of the real-world. They are the ‘low-fi’.
It’s not entirely clear what’s so strangely alluring about the gritty cyberpunk aesthetic, but Blair Renaud, the developer behind the early VR title Technolust, certainly knows how to wield it to form an instant emotional setting.
Described as a spiritual successor to Technolust, Low-Fitaps into that moody cyberpunk feel even on a flat screen, as seen in the game’s new teaser:
Set in a far-future Toronto, Low-Fi presents a dark but plausible future where most of the population lives in a VR simulation after the AI singularity. But there’s still a society a society living in the real world, comprised of the destitute and unfortunate. They are the ‘low-fi’. As a setting, it’s an interesting exploration of wealth and class—the low-fi could be thought of as the homeless of today, except in this dystopian future, the dark reality of their world is completely invisible from most of the population—out of sight, out of mind.
In the game, you’re a police officer assigned to city-block 303, and while teaser footage released so far doesn’t explore the gameplay in much depth, the developer says that players will “patrol the streets (and the skies above them) solving mysteries, fighting crime, or giving in to corruption.”
It’s not clear at this point to what extent Low-Fi will really explore its intriguing cyberpunk setting—or simply use it as a ‘this is just the way things are’ sort of backdrop to contextualize a more discrete story and associated gameplay—though we certainly hope to find out as we move toward the game’s expect 2020 release date.
The stealth launch of Apex Legends from developer Respawn Entertainment has given way to a battle royale craze rivaling Fortnite. The game’s breakout success has far exceeded all expectations, reaching 50 million players in just four weeks. But what might that mean for the studio’s upcoming VR game?
To call Apex Legends a mere hit would be to undersell just how quickly it has reached orbit in the gamingsphere. With no prior announcement, the game was launched directly out of stealth development in February and in four weeks had been played by 50 million players. Its reach is still significantly smaller than battle royale heavyweight Fortnite, but its speed out of the gate has greatly outpaced it.
Image courtesy Roundhill Investments
Apex Legends has also seized a significant portion of the game streaming audience, presently the 5th most watched game on Twitch in the last 30 days, according to TwitchMetrics.
So what does the unprecedented success of Apex Legends mean for a studio which has other projects on its plate, like an upcoming VR game which is surely exciting but decidedly less important in the grand scheme than its new breakout hit?
Respawn’s upcoming VR game is still very much a mystery. Despite being announced one and a half years ago, the studio still refers to it as their “super secret VR game.” All that’s really know about it right now is that it’ll be published by Oculus Studios as an exclusive and has been described by Respawn as a “AAA VR shooter game” and is confirmed to not involve Titanfall or Star Wars IP (which the studio works on separately). Oculus still hasn’t event confirmed which of its headsets the game will run on, and Respawn hasn’t even give the game a name.
Because the studio is talking so little about the project at this point, we’re largely limited to inference with regard to the impact of Apex on the VR game, but I’ve spoken to a number of games industry vets about the situation to understand what they consider plausible outcomes.
The first, it seems, is the very real possibility that Respawn has had to call ‘all hands on deck’, and diverted all available resources to supporting the sudden success of Apex with a broader scope of support, updates, marketing, etc than was initially forecast. This would be a temporary realignment of the company’s resources while they also attempt to grow to balance the ship.
On the surface at least, this looks to be supported by the studio’s current open job positions, 56% of which are for Apex roles while only 17% are for the VR project.
Image courtesy EA, Respawn Entertainment
This shifting of focus could draw attention away from the studio’s VR game for a time—at least for those roles that had the flexibility to divert some time away from the VR project and toward Apex.
But of course the studio still has a deliverable to Oculus; the project must get done. If a portion of Respawn’s non-Apex resources did get focused on Apex for a time, eventually they will refocus on the VR project. How much the VR project actually gets disrupted depends on how cohesive the team was that was working on it in the first place, and to what extent that cohesiveness was jostled during the Apex frenzy.
But it isn’t exactly doom and gloom for the VR project; the breakout success of Apex could have some positive knock-on effects. For one, it could mean the studio is more successful and capable, which could mean a greater abundance of resources that can be directed toward the VR project in the long term compared to fewer if Apex had never happened. There’s plenty of positions at game studios which work across projects (especially on the engine/engineering side), and investments (in technology and talent) made to support and grow Apex could have positive, tangential impacts on Respawn’s VR game.
The success of Apex Legends could also give Respawn serious extra clout when it comes to interactions with parent company EA, which acquired Respawn a year and a half ago, shortly after the VR project was announced. EA is a very big company which owns a handful of major game studios. With Respawn hitting a grand slam on their first game release after the acquisition, it seems very likely that EA leadership will be more trusting of the decisions made by Respawn’s leaders. That gives the company some additional leverage to achieve its goals within the broader EA corporation.
For Oculus’ part, the company says that while it’s publishing the game, it’s hands-off on the VR project and happy to let Respawn do its own thing. In a wide-ranging interview with Facebook’s Jason Rubin at GDC 2019 last month, we asked whether or not the company was actively guiding the development of Respawn’s VR game.
“You do not partner with Respawn and then get involved in designing games for Respawn. Respawn is a fantastically talented company—as far many of the others that we work with: Insomniac, Sanzaru…—we let them design the product they want,” Rubin said. “So, absolutely, a Respawn product is a Respawn product.”
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There’s no way we’ll know what impact Apex Legends will or won’t have on Respawn’s VR game until the company is actually ready to start talking about the game. When might we hear more? Our best guess is that we’ll see a proper announcement around or during the annual Oculus Connect event, which is typically held at the end of September.
Sniper Elite is coming to VR. The gritty sniper-focused shooter developed by Rebellion Developments is known for its brutal depictions of long range sniper combat and stealthy action. Now the studio says it’s working on a standalone made-for-VR title for the series in partnership with developer Just Add Water.
The Sniper Elite franchise kicked off in 2005 and now spans eight titles, with the latest, Sniper Elite 4, released in 2017. Today developer and publisher Rebellion Developments announced that four new Sniper Elite projects are in the works including, for the first time, a made-for-VR game.
The studio confirmed development on Sniper Elite V2 Remastered, Sniper Elite 3 Ultimate Edition for Switch, and the “next major title in the Sniper Elite series,” as well as “a new, standalone Sniper Elite game for VR devices.”
Details are thin on the ground, but Rebellon says that the Sniper Elite VR game is being developed in partnership with studio Just Add Water, known for their work on Gravity Crash (2009) and the Oddworld series.
Rebellion promises “a full reveal” of the new Sniper Elite VR game later this year, but hasn’t said when the game might launch or what platforms it will be on. With significant PlayStation experience under the belts of both studios, PSVR seems like a likely bet, but with Just Add Water’s expertise in mobile development for PlayStation Vita, Oculus Quest could be a smart play too. There’s a good chance the game will reach PC VR headsets too, as Rebellion’s other VR projects have all made their way to PC VR platforms.
‘Sniper Elite’ games often toe the line between long range precision shooting and stealthy up-close action. | ‘Sniper Elite 3 (2014)’, Image courtesy Rebellion Developments
Rebellion released the fully VR compatible hover-tank shooter Battlezone as a launch title on PSVR back in 2016, and brought the title to PC VR headsets in 2017. The studio also launched Arca’s Path (2018), a VR third-person platformer-puzzler for PSVR, PC VR, and Oculus mobile headsets.
Sniper Elite however is a totally different beast from the cockpit-based Battlezone and third-person Arca’s Path. The game title will need to take a completely new approach to VR game design, now incorporating motion input, first person embodiment/movement, and item interactions.
The Sniper Elite series is well known for its signature slow motion depictions of bullets blasting through the skulls of bad guys, often slinging the camera hundreds of meters across the landscape to see the action up close.
Exactly how (or if) this kind of visualization mechanic makes it into the Sniper Elite VR game is unclear, but if they can figure it out, the immersiveness of VR would surely make it a sight to behold.
Virtual reality has an identity crisis. Whether talking about games or movies, the medium can’t seem to escape the shadows of the past. But, three years on, the template for what makes VR tick may finally be starting to emerge.
It was the recent surprise announcement of Groundhog Day VR that got me thinking about this. Sony Pictures’ decision to continue the original’s story not on the screen but inside a headset is an intriguing one. It made me question which other films should get VR sequels. I even started to wonder if we had got it all wrong. Instead of trying to trace Fortnite and Skyrim into VR, should we instead look at iterating on the big screen experience? Is that where VR’s true power lies?
Then I realized the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Just as VR game makers could learn a lot from film, so too could filmmakers take a page from developers. A hybrid of these two approaches may be where VR finally stakes its claim.
Gamifying VR can make it strange. Character stats and progression systems are excellent barometers to judge a traditional game by, but VR feels different. Simply put, these factors aren’t, y’know, real. Why do I need to level up my strength to swing a sword? How am I surviving being riddled with bullets? The very tenants of a lot of game design are at odds with the core of VR’s immersion.
Some of the best VR games out there right now are deliberately unconcerned with such metrics. Superhot doesn’t work because it’s got a leveling system, it works because it dials down on the experience. One hit kills both you and your enemies. Your every movement is like a play on a chess board. Your control over time often delivers cinematic satisfaction. Do you really remember Skyrim VR for the progression you made as a character? Or is it the moment your head was on a chopping block and a dragon landed at your feet?
The list goes on. From a design viewpoint, Farpoint is a very basic first-person shooter (FPS); it’s the unbeatable feeling of becoming a space marine that makes it a must-see. Astro Bot is also a simplistic platformer in its own right, but the exploration of space, scale and bond is unlike anything else out there. More and more we’re finding that VR game’s most memorable components aren’t about the nuts and bolts of game making.
At the same time, telling a VR story in which the user isn’t a direct participant or, at the very least, a known quantity, seems like it’s missing the point. Baobab’s Invasion is a joyous bit of Pixar-aping. But, for all its cutesy glory, the moment I remember most is being used as a human shield when the protagonist cowers behind you. It made me feel strong, brave and responsible. Those aren’t emotions you can easily conjure when watching something on a flatscreen.
The more I think about my favorite VR moments over the past three years, the more I realize how they involve one medium borrowing from another. Fated: The Silent Oath‘s traditional gameplay was enjoyable, but it really lept out when it stripped away the mechanics and doubled down on the relationship between characters. Accounting’s highway shootout isn’t memorable for refined gunplay but instead the sheer bizarreness of the world and cast around you. Spheres was a fascinating documentary in its own right, but it was viewer participation that gave the experience a personal edge. VR’s magic starts at the meeting between storytelling and interactivity. A Fisherman’s Tale could have been an enjoyable story-free puzzle game or a memorable short-film, but it was the integration of place, plot and experience that made it really stand out.
But this is not an easy ask. It’s far simpler to make, say, a wave shooter, than it is a world where the player’s every action holds a tangible consequence. Developers capture lightning in a bottle every so often but there’s still so much work to be done in this area. For now, though, I’ll settle for the well-constructed moments of shock, awe, connection and participation. They’re proof that we’re on the right track and I hope Groundhog Day VR capitalizes on them.
I’ve often cited a quote from Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima as a touchstone for my reporting in VR. He said that game developers “see VR as an extension of traditional games, but I think it is not.” While I’ve always agreed with that sentiment, I’ve also longed to know what he thinks VR is. And maybe it’s this; maybe it’s not an extension but a splicing of both games and film, something that takes their core attributes and builds on top of them to deliver media that is genuinely new.
That’s what I want to start seeing as VR enters its fourth year on the market. I want to see us move away from the obsession with trite topics like longevity and comfort modes and start searching for what really separates VR from the rest of the pack. I have a feeling that’s something we’re only just beginning to grasp.
