Microsoft’s AltspaceVR went offline on March 10 as users were ripped from their worlds.
You can watch the moment below and see what it was like as Microsoft pulled the plug to shut down the Altspace servers.
Microsoft bought the social VR startup in 2017 after it ran out of money, but the service found a small niche with some creators using its tools for meeting and presentation spaces. Austin “Cause” Caine and Christi Fenison, the duo behind a company called Cause & Christi, have used AltspaceVR for client projects over the years and found it “to be the most ‘professional’ out of the current choices.” The were present for the final moments of AltspaceVR and conveyed the experience in writing and video:
The servers were set to shut down at exactly 1pm ET so we gathered and waited to see exactly what would happen. As the final moment approached, the anticipation grew… and the countdown began. 10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… 0… -1… -2… -3… wait a minute… we were all still here? News began to spread that new users could no longer log on. We were essentially the last survivors of a sinking ship, the band that played valiantly until the very end.
For just over five minutes we all reveled in this realization, wondering exactly when the true ending would come, and did our best to enjoy these extra precious moments together. Around 1:07pm ET everyone’s conversations were abruptly cut short as the world froze around us in a Matrix-like fashion. Reports later indicate this was the same experience for everyone. Not long after an official message from the AltspaceVR team popped up, and that was that.
Altspace’s closure was announced in January as executives implemented a wave of cost cutting measures at a number of techcompanies. In advance of the shutdown, Microsoft enabled metadata downloads from Altspace worlds but didn’t enable full world downloads.
The closure note reads:
“This is sadly where we say goodbye. We leave you with one wish: take the light we’ve made together and share it with the world.”
Meta says it is taking steps to improve its Quest Store reviews system as developers express frustration.
A number of Quest developers are expressing frustration with several features of Meta’s public review system for VR games on its storefront for nearly 20 million VR headsets. In particular, there’s spam driving advertising into the reviews of games. Meta’s app referral program turns Quest owners into “advocates” who can target those likely to buy a game for a mutual reward. Terms for the program explain:
“Earn a $5.00 USD Meta Quest Store Credit for yourself and a 25% discount for your friends who purchase your referred app using your referral link!”
Posts listing store credit referral links seems to have overtaken the most visible areas of the reviews system on many Quest store pages. Meta “advocates” leave five-star reviews marked as “helpful “by others. The page system lists those reviews first and effectively turns those posts into discount ads on Meta’s own storefront.
“We are aware of user reviews being used to promote unrelated topics and are in the process of rolling out various solutions to address it,” a Meta spokesperson sent over email. “This week we began blocking new reviews with specific types of URLs in them. We are also working to address existing reviews.”
Hrafn Thorisson, the head of Waltz of the Wizard development studio Aldin, told UploadVR the system “degrades the value of reviews, making the motivation questionable whether the person wrote the review liked the title – or whether they just wrote it to profit from sharing the referral link. If this is here to stay, then my personal suggestion would be to just add a field for referral links when writing reviews that appears as a small tiny icon. That would at least make reviews appear less like spam.”
“There are a bunch of issues with user reviews that I think Meta should look into in addition to the referral spam,” Virtual Desktop developer Guy Godin told UploadVR. “Quite often, users will leave a 1 star review to request a refund because they didn’t read the requirements of the app for example (they don’t have a computer or they are using a ChromeOS laptop). It doesn’t seem like it’s easy for them to find where they can do this. I have to tell users to go to their purchase history in the Meta Quest app to request a refund. A simple link that brings them to the ‘request a refund page’ would alleviate that.”
Even outside the referral code spam many other top reviews marked “helpful” are simply pasted ASCII art.
More developerscommented publicly in threads on Twitter about the system as well.
Guardians Frontline takes inspiration from StarCraft and Halo to bring a new hybrid action and real-time strategy game to Quest 2. Here’s our full review of Guardians Frontline on Quest 2.
Guardians Frontline is the kind of Cinderella story that makes indie VR so exciting.
In March of 2021, a plucky hybrid action title called Guardians VR launched on App Lab. A little rough around the edges, Guardians VR had big ambitions and even bigger potential, aiming to combine the best elements of classic sci-fi shooters with their real-time strategy (RTS) counterparts.
Guardians Frontline Review – The Facts
Platforms: Quest 2, Quest Pro, (Review conducted on Quest 2) Release Date: Out now Developer: VirtualAge Games Price: $24.99
Undeterred by its place on App Lab, developers VirtualAge continued to update and iterate on their title, garnering a cult following within the VR community along the way. So much so that established VR developer Fast Travel Games took note and brought Guardians VR under its new publishing wing.
Supported by the gaming equivalent of a fairy godmother, VirtualAge continued development and now, almost two years later, is ready to debut the revamped, new-and-improved Guardians Frontlines on the official store. One big question remains: have the extra resources turned this plucky little indie title into the proverbial bell of the ball?
HaloCraft
At its heart, Guardians Frontline is a love letter to StarCraft and Halo.
By fusing visual inspiration from both games and mixing the core conceits of two widely different genres, VirtualAge has created something completely unique for the Quest library. Guardians Frontline plays primarily as a first-person shooter (FPS). However there’s also a wonderfully-implemented resource management and troop deployment component, including elements of base building and upgrade specialisations that reinforce the marriage between the genres. It’s this well-designed duality that sets Guardians Frontline apart from the plethora of space-themed shooters.
Graphically, Frontlines operates at a respectable level with a visual style clearly inspired by the aforementioned flatscreen touchstones. Gameplay takes place across three distinct worlds with different biomes, some of which work better than others. Some textures feel grainy and some landscapes sparse, but overall the worlds feel polished and well-realized.
Throughout the campaign players embody a ‘Guardian’, a galactic marine charged with protecting frontier mining operations against a bug-like race of Starship Troopers-esque aliens. While the range of enemy types is excellent, the visual design, models and animations fall slightly short of other titles in the genre, such as Crashland.
Frontline’s campaign will see players tackle fourteen missions across three distinct planets, with each mission taking fifteen to thirty minutes to complete on normal difficulty. Missions do have a level of narrative preamble that links the flow of combat from one mission to the next, but it is fairly rudimentary.
Frontline could hardly be considered a story-driven adventure. Instead, missions essentially serve as a rigorous training montage that teach the vital skills needed in order to progress to the game’s longer-term co-op and PvP multiplayer modes. There’s also a map editor and an interesting experiment in perpetual content called Galaxy Conquest, but more on that later.
Fusion Reactor
Guardians’ gameplay is an intuitive mix of FPS action and tactical RTS style command. For the majority of the game, players will occupy a first-person view, running and gunning through the action. There’s an impressive array of futuristic weaponry to wield and combat vehicles to pilot, with a not-so-subtle salute to the classic Halo franchise. Weapons are attached to five holster points around the body, so accessing them on the fly is easy and intuitive.
The gunplay is highly satisfying. Facing off against the swarms of insectoid enemies alone would have made Frontline a decent enough game in its own right, but there’s also an easy-to-use tactical deployment system that players can access without missing a beat. At any time, you can raise your inventory menu with your non-dominant hand, making it easily moved and non-obstructive during combat. Troops, buildings and defensive units are clearly laid out here, allowing you to select, group and control units with ease, even in the head of battle.
You can also innovatively switch from first-person ‘combat view’ to ‘tactical view’, which gives a top-down view of the battlefield. From this vantage, players can take on a more strategic role, tracking opponents and countering them by deploying and moving troops around the map. This seamless switching between the two views creates a unique and triumphant blend between fast-paced action and the most accessible elements of RTS games.
It’s the UI that makes this possible, offering a lot of options that balance deployment, command and combat without overwhelming the player. The intuitive system is one of the game’s great achievements and means you can move troops, place defences and keep the shells hitting the floor at a steady rate. The game also features top-notch sound design, with clear audio cues that cut through the chaos and good use of spatial audio that lets players broadly identify areas of conflict across the map.
The Only Good Bug Is A Dead Bug
There’s five main mission types in Frontline, playale in both single and multiplayer – Conquest, Domination, Survival, Protect and Defend. Each is enjoyable in their own right, but Conquest mode is the standout.
This mode sees players tasked with eliminating every enemy nest, which spread throughout the map as the battle rages, requiring players to take strategic locations and attack on various fronts. The battlefield in Conquest mode exists in a constant state of flux and victory hinges on a fluent command of every system that the game has to offer, weaving a balance of tactical strategy and first-person combat that is simply outstanding.
Guardians Frontline Review – Comfort
Guardians Frontline has a range of comfort options designed to make the game accessible for those with a sensitivity to motion sickness. There’s both teleport and artificial movement options, with snap/smooth turn and adjustable vignettes. Players can also traverse large areas of the map via teleportation waypoints, which will be a big help for those who struggle with artificial locomotion.
While VirtualAge try to balance engagement and accessibility, certain features (such as the jetpack) add a faster element to the gameplay and players will benefit most from being able to move freely in-game.
Final Frontier
Guardians Frontline also takes a somewhat risky move that relies on user-generated content to sustain long-term gameplay. Once the campaign is completed, the player has access to a range of multiplayer modes, including the map editor. This allows for detailed level creation, including support for collaborative multiplayer where players can meet up in-game to create maps and missions together.
The map editor is surprisingly robust and impressive, which is fortunate because the content generated in it forms the basis of VirtualAge’s ‘Galaxy Conquest’ game mode. Galaxy Conquest provides players with a range of disputed planets in conflict, each of which is made up of three user-generated missions. Players can browse solar systems and decide where to deploy their efforts, so eradication of enemy hordes becomes a collaborative achievement among players online and rewards upgrade points that affect your abilities across all modes.
Delivered well, this would offer an innovative system of perpetual content for players. In the hands of talented community members, the map editor could be used to great effect to sustain this game mode, but the reality is that the current community content doesn’t always live up to the standards set by the rest of the game. There are nonetheless some truly exciting community-made levels on display in Galaxy Conquest, but overall the game mode is currently better in concept than in execution. More time spent curating the quality of content on offer would probably go a long way to improving the experience.
Guardians Frontline Review – Final Verdict
Guardians Frontline is an ambitious attempt to combine the best elements of two disparate genres that succeeds in creating something truly original for the Quest platform. Through a mix of clever UI design and a focus on solid gaming fundamentals, VirtualAge manages to achieve something unique, intuitive and completely immersive. With a solid campaign, engaging multiplayer modes and the potential for a swathe of community-generated content, Guardians Frontline is easy to recommend as an experience unlike any other on the platform.
UploadVR focuses on a label system for reviews, rather than a numeric score. Our reviews fall into one of four categories: Essential, Recommended, Avoid and reviews that we leave unlabeled. You can read more about our review guidelines here.
Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game arrives on March 23 for Quest 2. Alongside a hands-on preview, we sat down with Lead Designer Christopher Smith to learn more.
Grand strategy games never caught my eye like platformers or RPGs do, so I admit the original Stellaris flew past me. However, I’m fully aware that it’s often considered one of the best modern strategy titles, which leaves Fast Travel Games with much to live up to. A VR roguelite isn’t the first spin-off I’d think of, but Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game is making the transition well.
We covered gameplay during our Ghost Signal preview, but the basics premise is that the game plays out through procedurally generated runs. Captaining a small ship called the Aurora, you’ll investigate the eponymous Ghost Signal, and paths split between different biomes with unique mission paths, eventually ending in a boss fight. You could choose a low-risk route with standard battles or tackle riskier options with special events, which offer better rewards like new ship parts. Every level takes place inside a diorama, keeping the action relatively contained.
Despite never playing the original Stellaris, Ghost Signal drew me in with its simplicity. Eventually, I beat the first boss, desperately trying to keep my ship alive before inevitably succumbing soon after. While I had some issues with text boxes appearing too close to me and accidentally being skipped, it was an otherwise enticing premise that looks pretty good on Quest 2. I’m intrigued to see what happens next.
Back in January, I visited Fast Travel’s office and spoke with Lead Designer Christopher Smith, who answered a few of my questions. His passion for Ghost Signal was immediately evident.
“I think this has been my dream project,” he told me. “It sounds like I’m just saying it, but I’ve had so much fun developing this. I think we’ve created something truly unique. I know nothing else in VR or flatscreen that does what we do, which makes me very happy. I’m very proud of the team and what we have accomplished.”
I believe any genre can work in VR with the right team, though strategy games arguably aren’t a natural fit like FPS games. With that in mind, I queried why Fast Travel chose Stellaris for a VR adaptation.
“We’ve made several collaborations with Paradox, like [Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife] and Cities: VR, so [Stellaris] was part of that discussion. But we knew it would be difficult to translate the original grand strategy game into VR; there’s so many manuals. Everything can be done, but we found a more interesting angle was to zoom into that massive, wonderful universe, and do our own story in a setting at the edge of the galaxy.”
Following this train of thought, I then asked why the team made Ghost Signal a roguelite action game. Smith responds by admitting he’s a fan of the genre and tells me it “just sort of happened,” saying they want to let players explore space while comparing progression to flatscreen roguelites. “In Hades, you try to reach the surface. In Slay The Spire, you’re trying to reach the top of the spire. Here, you will reach the end of the gap in the universe to find this mystery signal. It felt like a nice fit.”
With all these changes, was it hard creating a tale that fits both the gameplay and the wider Stellaris universe? “It’s been surprisingly easy; it felt like a natural fit…” He’s evidently thrilled at how everything came together.
“The good thing with Stellaris is that it has this fantastic world with a lot of technology and species and is quite open. Any adventure can happen within the existing Stellaris universe.” He also confirmed that Fast Travel has worked closely with Paradox’s story and content designers during development.
Unsurprisingly, Ghost Signal ties into the original game beyond sharing a universe, though Smith carefully avoids revealing any specifics. “There are strong links to certain events that happened in the original game, but it’s hard to elaborate on them without spoilers. There are quite a few twists and turns; there is more story than you can imagine.”
I then moved on to Ghost Signal’s hand-tracking support, which Fast Travel revealed last December. Turning your hands palm-up lets you access menus, dragging a closed fist allows you to move around your environment, while open-palm aiming will enable you to scan and pinch gestures to shoot. Smith explains that the team implemented support after conversations with Meta.
“They suggested incorporating hand-tracking into this game. It’s tricky with hand tracking because you can only do so much, which is why the ideal way of playing Ghost Signal will always be using the controllers. We have hand-tracking there for those who want to try it, you can judge for yourself, but it was a suggestion.”
Ghost Signal also includes asynchronous online features, like finding the abandoned ships of other players mid-run to give you a new power-up. However, I didn’t experience what Smith calls the “main feature” of this, the ‘Daily Journey.’
“You get a global leaderboard and local leaderboard for your friends. A new map is generated every day, which is the same for everybody,” Smith reveals. “We can challenge each other, you get scored depending on how far you get, and then you’ll rank on this leaderboard.”
On the topic of a PC VR or PSVR 2 port, Smith doesn’t dismiss the idea but confirms it isn’t a current priority. “We’re not closing any doors, but right now, we’re focusing on the Quest 2.”
Ghost Signal: A Stellaris Game arrives on March 23 for the Meta Quest platform.
Meta looks to be considering a new ‘Quest Pass’ subscription service for VR games.
Twitter user @ShinyQuagsire says he discovered a hidden page on the Quest app that suggests the service is under consideration and/or development at Meta. The screenshot suggests the service could include two games or apps per month that users can redeem for free and keep while subscribed.
On Twitter, @ShinyQuagsire wrote that a deep link redirected to the Quest Pass page on the Android Quest mobile app. We weren’t able to successfully load the same page using the link he posted, but there’s a fair chance Meta disabled the page after it was discovered.
The description in the screenshot reads as follows:
Get up to two new apps or games every month with [Project Apollo]. Log in each month to redeem your apps, and grow your library with the most exciting VR titles.
Enjoy new apps the day you subscribe
Get easy access to the best of VR
Redeem and install to play right away
Redeem your apps by the end of the month, and keep your apps as long as you are subscribed.
By the sound of that description, Quest Pass (or ‘Project Apollo’, as it’s described above) would operate similarly to something like PlayStation Plus, which includes a few games that can be redeemed per calendar month and played as long as you stay subscribed.
It’s unclear what else – if anything – a Quest Pass service would offer beyond the monthly games. PlayStation Plus is predominantly centered around providing access to online services required for multiplayer games. Excluding some free-to-play games, most multiplayer experiences on PlayStation require a PlayStation Plus subscription to be played online.
Currently, Quest owners do not require a subscription to access online multiplayer services for their games. From the description in the screenshot though, it looks like a hypothetical Quest Pass could focus on providing monthly games as the main offering of its service.
UploadVR sought comment from Meta regarding a potential Quest Pass service. We will update the article if we receive a response.
FusionPlay revealed its upcoming VR farming sim, Across the Valley, arrives on PSVR 2 and PC VR next month.
First revealed during the Upload VR Showcase Winter 2022, FusionPlay’s latest game is a big departure from its previous VR title, Konrad’s Kittens. Placing you inside a virtual farm, Across the Valley tasks you with picking fresh fruit and vegetables, keeping your livestock happy through mini-games and using your profits to expand the farm. Featuring a hand-drawn art style, you can watch the new release date trailer below:
“Our devoted team is proud to bring a fan-favorite genre to the most powerful VR hardware. The soil is a canvas and the farmers are the artists! Using their hands, they will raise adorable animals, nurture copious crops, and manage the farm of their dreams,” said Konrad Kuntze, CEO of FusionPlay, in a prepared statement. Here’s the official gameplay description:
Realize the dream of living off the land in a charming virtual reality homestead. Prepare to get those hands dirty watering fields, milking cows, raising adorable baby animals, and even taking the pigs out for a truffle-hunting adventure!
Marry seeds to soil and tend to them with the utmost love and care to yield a bountiful harvest at the end of the season. Sell crops at the market and reinvest profits into expanding the property or improving workflow. Establish an egg empire, develop a piggie province, or dabble in a little of everything before the sun sets on the horizon after a hard day’s work!
Across the Valley arrives on PSVR 2 and PC VR on April 6 for $19.99.
Former Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw revealed why Valve cancelled the Borealis VR game in a new interview.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Valve’s pre-Half-Life: Alyx plans in VR. Geoff Keighley’s Half-Life: Alyx – Final Hours detailed how Laidlaw looked into a new Half-Life VR game in 2015, codenamed Borealis. Named after the Aperture Science Research ship, Laidlaw’s outline would have seen players exploring the vessel as it travelled through time, showing events like the Seven Hour War. However, according to the former Valve employee in a new Rock Paper Shotgun interview, this idea came too soon:
It was too early to be building anything in VR. When people are struggling with the basic tools they need to rough out a concept, it’s hard to convey any sort of vision, and it all evaporated pretty quickly.
Continuing on, Laidlaw says Borealis would have tied together Half-Life and Portal but claims this wasn’t his idea. Stating “I didn’t want it to go there at all,” Laidlaw says he had to react “as gracefully as I could to the fact that it was going there without me” and elaborates on the consequences such a crossover would bring.
I felt like doing this made both universes smaller, but from a franchise branding perspective, that’s a good thing. I eventually did come up with a scenario in which we could connect Aperture and Black Mesa, and we had Borealis lying around from the earliest days of Half-Life 2, so I thought maybe we’d end up with some cool lore and backstory in the long run.
This isn’t the only interesting news to emerge from this interview. Regarding Half-Life’s future storyline, he calls his plan during Borealis’ development “vague and diffuse” before addressing the now infamous ‘Epistle 3,’ which detailed one potential storyline for the cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode Three. Claiming it was “deranged” and he had “nobody to talk me out of it,” Laidlaw evidently regrets releasing it and offers an explanation:
Eventually my mind would have calmed and I’d have come out the other side a lot less embarrassed. I think it caused trouble for my friends [at Valve], and made their lives harder. It also created the impression that if there had been an Episode 3, it would have been anything like my outline, whereas in fact all the real story development can only happen in the crucible of developing the game. So what people got wasn’t Episode 3 at all.
We’ll never see what Borealis could have offered, but if you’re after more Half-Life, the upcoming Episode 1 VR mod arrives on March 17 for free to all existing owners.
Fans of Echo VR brought the metaverse to Mark Zuckerberg this week.
A group called Fight For Echo put an ad above Meta to protest the forthcoming closure of its free-to-play VR esport Echo VR. The ad reads:
“Zuck, don’t kill VR esports”
Over the past month fans of the zero-g esport pooled money on gofundme to run the ad near Mark Zuckerberg’s social network. On Friday, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth confirmed he saw a picture of the plane and its message which circled over Meta HQ for hours. The successfully delivered ad impression, however, didn’t turn into a conversion for the desired action. On Friday, Bosworth said he stood by the decision to close the game’s service.
Assuming Meta’s top leadership continues as planned and shuts down the game, fans of Echo VR stand to lose their main reason for using Quest headsets. In the future, though, they can look forward to easy-to-use tools for sending ads in the metaverse. This single personalized ad cost more than $3,000, so when fans in the future plead with Meta to keep their worlds online there’s an opportunity for the platform company to offer better pricing and conversion rates.
“Imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on,” one Meta executive quoted by The Verge recently told employees. “Our ability to track conversions, which is where there has been a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent.”
Ads In The Skybox
Flightaware.com lists the flight path for an aircraft departing Livermore, California shortly after noon on Wednesday.
Its path circles the airport and then proceeds to Meta’s Menlo Park offices where it circles continuously until returning to land before 4 pm. The image above marks the Flysigns.com flight overlaid with Google Maps showing a tight circle for the banner its Cessna Skyhawk carried over Meta HQ.
On Thursday, the Meta Horizon Worlds team signed a message emailed to Quest owners reminding fans:
“We are reaching out to let you know that Echo VR servers will shut down on August 1st, 2023 – 10:30 AM Pacific. On this date, both Echo VR and Echo Combat will no longer be playable.”
I spoke on Friday by phone with Fight For Echo organizer Duncan Carroll about his initial reaction to the announcement that Meta and Ready At Dawn would shut down the game.
“I was just shocked, it was just so out of the blue, such a strange move and very unexpected,” he said. “It just seemed like the worst possible move for a company that’s wanting to build the metaverse.”
Previously, former Meta technical guide John Carmack issued a lengthy statement to UploadVR saying that “destroying that user value should be avoided if possible” while outlining several possible alternatives. Elsewhere, a fan petition calling on Meta to cancel this shutdown reached over 26,000 signatures at the time of writing.
You can also check out our Guest Editorial from long-time Echo VR player Sonya “hasko7” Haskins, who discussed the importance of Ready at Dawn’s popular game and impact on the wider community.
Schell Games released a new Among Us VR update, adding custom lobby settings and a new hat pack.
Previously announced in December’s Among Us VR 2023 roadmap, custom lobby settings are now live as part of the game’s fourth patch. Outlined in a new blog post, Schell claims this allows for “over 9 billion customization configurations,” letting you adjust pace, balancing, and the general rules. Complementing this is a new indicator that highlights gameplay balance between Impostors and Crewmates.
These options include: enabling/disabling specific tasks, distance of Crew and Impostor vision, number of emergency meetings and tasks, customizable discussion time, anonymous voting, plus sabotage and kill cooldowns, visible hands, number of imposters, emergency meetings and long tasks; and altering the kill cooldown length.
There’s still plenty more to come for Among Us VR. After reaching one million sales back in January, Schell Games gave us a first look at the new Polus map, which is currently in development and a public vote for its name remains open. Otherwise, further post-launch updates include presently unknown collaborations, improved accessibility and more hats.
Patch four also adds the Accidental Favorites Hat Pack for $4.99, adding five new cosmetics from Innersloth’s original Among Us game: Note 2 Self, MoRawk, Third Eye, Magical ‘Corn and Peeled. A free Pizza Time hat is also available upon updating the main game.
Among Us VR is available now on theMeta Questplatform and PC VR via Steam and Rift for $9.99. Cross-play is supported across all VR platforms, while an upcomingPSVR 2release is also planned.
