Category: warpfrog

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VR’s Top Combat Sandbox Releases Massive 1.0 Update Today Featuring 7+ Hour Campaign

Blade & Sorcery, arguably VR’s top physics-based combat sandbox, is leaving Early Access today on Steam, which comes alongside the long-awaited 1.0 update that brings its final major content drop: the ‘Crystal Hunt’ campaign.

Update (June 17th, 2024): Blade & Sorcery is complete, at least according to developer WarpFrog which is turning on its campaign mode today in what promises to bring 7+ hours of dungeoning carnage.

We’re still deep in review, although thus far Crystal Hunt marks a notabe departure from the game’s sandbox-focused arenas by tossing you into a number of linked maps that are underpinned by an honest to goodness narrative and a progression upgrade system all about collecting crystals scattered throughout the game.

Tune back in soon for our full review, which is coming as soon as possible as we fight through this thick slice of new content. The original article announcing Crystal Hunt’s release date follows below:

Original Article (June 11th, 2024): For many, Blade & Sorcery was everything they ever wanted in VR: a place to beat the ever-living crap out of whoever, wherever, and with whatever. Beyond its massive assortment of melee weapons and AI enemies ripe for the ganking, you can also mod it to be basically anything you want.

For some though, the fighting sandbox had all of the right bones, but lacked the story, progression, worldbuilding—the adventures only your imagination could create in their absence.

Now, a little over five years since its Early Access release on PC, Blade & Sorcery’s massive 1.0 drop is looking to change that, which is coming to the SteamVR version of the game on June 17th as a free update. Check out the trailer below:

Developer WarpFrog says the game’s ‘Crystal Hunt’ campaign is bringing along with it a progression mode, tons of new weapons and skills, lore, and a definitive ending to the story.

Here’s how the studio describes the action:

Deep in the mountains of Eraden, entrances to long lost Dalgarian ruins have Inexplicably revealed themselves, triggering what folk have begun referring to as The Crystal Hunt. Within weeks of the first entrance discovery, major factions across Eraden mobilized to compete in finding these ruins and securing the valuables within.

Taking up temporary residence in abandoned Outposts dotted all around Eraden, the factions race to map out the surrounding wildlands and discover new Dalgarian entrances. This is where Player come in; also motivated to find Dalgarian ruins, Player will visit these faction occupied Outposts to gather intel on potential ruin locations.

The Outposts are as you know them in Sandbox and will be occupied by one of four factions, each presenting different challenges and difficulty levels. Outposts will have loot scaled on that difficulty, from gold and valuables which the player can use to purchase new weapons and armour in the shop, to Crystal Shards, which are minor magical crystals that can be used to unlock new skills on the skill tree.

Blade & Sorcery: Nomad (2021), a pared-down version for Quest 2/3/Pro, is also getting the big 1.0 update at some point, however there’s no release date on the books yet. As one of the most popular games on Quest, we’re really hoping for sooner rather than later, although it may take time, the studio says.

“Once PCVR is released and stable, the team can switch to the Nomad update porting process, which will for sure take months as it is a mountain of work. However, take solace in the knowledge that it is our goal to attempt a full port of the PCVR update to Nomad,” the studio says in a Steam news update.

“In the decision to release Nomad as standalone and not merge both versions into one game, we essentially doubled our work because it meant we had two separate developments to support. However this was the only way to make sure PCVR development was not limited by the Quest 2 hardware, so this is why Nomad is a completely separated “made for Quest” sister-title,” the studio explains.

Notably, as it leaves Early Access on Steam on June 17th, there’s set to be a price bump from $20 to $30, marking what WarpFrog calls “our final major content update” outside of further patches for bugfixing, stabilization and QOL things. If you manage to grab it before then, you’ll of course get the big 1.0 update for free when it drops next week.

The post VR’s Top Combat Sandbox Releases Massive 1.0 Update Today Featuring 7+ Hour Campaign appeared first on Road to VR.

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‘Blade & Sorcery: Nomad’ Review – Fun Physics-based Combat Slimmed Down for Quest 2

Blade & Sorcery: Nomad almost feels like a work of digital wizardry, as it brings a standalone version of the hit physics-based combat sandbox exclusively to Quest 2 for the first time. Although it doesn’t feel as visually visceral as its bigger brother for PC VR headsets, which is notably still in Early Access, it serves up mostly the same physics-based carnage that will very likely bust some TVs in the process.

Blade & Sorcery: Nomad Details:

Available On: Oculus Quest 2
Release Date: November 4th, 2021
Price: $20
Developer: Warpfrog

Gameplay

Like the separate PC VR title, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad is all about making your own fun by challenging yourself against baddies clad in various armors and wielding all of the weapons provided within the game. This single-player title offers no story, and no progression system to speak of, which I always thought was a bit of shame considering how much fun the game’s physics-based engine offers. As it is, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad does exactly what it says on the tin: it provides a multitude of interesting places to engage in medieval-style combat against waves of enemies. Full stop.

As the name suggests, you’ll be able to equip yourself with basically any edged weapon in existence, and also three magic spells to choose from on the fly. The game’s physics-based melee and range weapons are pretty self-explanatory; each of them is weighted differently to simulate the items individual heft.

Magic, on the other hand, can be used directly as an offensive measure, allowing you to shoot fireballs, expel energy arcs from your hands to electrocute, and summon gravity wells that throw everything into the air. Alternatively, you can also enchant your weapons with each spell by rubbing your hands over it.

The most important bit though undoubtedly is the game’s ‘bullet time’ function, which lets you temporarily slow down time and dispatch multiple foes with the sort of cinematic style you’ve probably seen in gifs and YouTube videos over the past few years.

The clip below is only a taste of the bloody and gruesome ways you can kill an enemy. For me, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad still feels very much in the realm of cartoon violence though, and the game’s enemies act more like dummies with scripted movements than human beings imbued with all of the qualities of a sentient person.

Enemies topple over at the slightest push and don’t really put up a formidable fight, however I can understand if some may think it too far afield on the spectrum of hyperviolence to truly get into.

Just like zombies though, a gang of the scripted dummies (they do feel quite dumb) can overwhelm you and end your run, be it it one of the wave-based arenas or procedurally-generated areas that you can warp to from the safety of your home base.

Image captured by Road to VR

Immersion

For me, all purely physics-based VR games have a difficult time eliminating all wonky collision-type behaviors, and Blade & Sorcery: Nomad is no exception. It simply comes part and parcel with having objects that have variable weights, colliders enabled, and follow the laws of physics. While the various range of hard and soft materials react more or less like you’d expect, there is still some unavoidable jank that you may have to ignore so you can have those cinematic moments everyone in VR has likely seen before.

That said, I’m not an avid player of the PC VR version of Blade & Sorcery—I haven’t modded it or played for more than a few hours—but I can still confidently say its amazing how much of the PC game the developers were able to get onto Quest 2’s humble Snapdragon XR2 chipset. Blade & Sorcery: Nomad performs reliably enough to feel almost like playing the vanilla, unmodded version on PC back when it first launched on Steam Early Access in 2018. It lacks a level of visual acuity (dynamic lighting, higher-res textures, etc), although that’s pretty forgivable considering the circumstances.

Image captured by Road to VR

Nomad is also supposed to allow mods at some point too, which I expect will make things suitably gruesome, weird, and provide all sorts of opportunities for differing flavors of carnage.

The amount of options available for the standard game on Quest 2 is pretty mind-boggling as is. It offers a load of the standard cheats like invincibly, and toggle various options that will allow you to do things like tone down violence by turning off dismemberment, blood sprays, blood on characters, or blood on weapons.

Image captured by Road to VR

Procedurally-generated environments seem to offer just enough content variation to keep you coming back, although I honestly got bored of the sandbox-style one-track killing after a few hours of playing. The game’s Dungeons update which came to the PC VR game in October is mostly here for Nomad, although the object-based ‘crystal hunt’ gameplay mode is said to arrive sometime in 2022.

Comfort

There are a host of options to keep you feeling mostly comfortable, although there are a few things to watch out for. Virtual jumping in VR has always been a bit stomach-turning for many, although activating the slow-mo button helps mitigate this, as it makes take-offs and landings much less abrupt.

You may also easily fall into the habit of playing it like a flatscreen shooter by over relying on strafing to dodge attacks. Forcing yourself to play standing and intentionally using your full room-scale area can help.

Check out the full swath of comfort options below to get a good idea of what toggles to expect.

‘Blade & Sorcery: Nomad’ Comfort Settings – November 4th, 2021

Turning
Artificial turning ✔
Smooth-turn ✔
Adjustable speed ✔
Snap-turn ✔
Adjustable increments ✔

Movement
Artificial movement ✔
Smooth-move ✔
Adjustable speed n/a
Teleport-move ✖
Blinders ✖
Adjustable strength n/a
Head-based ✔
Controller-based ✔
Swappable movement hand ✔

Posture
Standing mode ✔
Seated mode ✔
Artificial crouch n/a
Real crouch ✔

Accessibility
Subtitles ✖
Languages English
Alternate audio ✖
Languages n/a
Adjustable difficulty ✔
Two hands required ✔
Real crouch required ✖
Hearing required ✖
Adjustable player height ✔

The post ‘Blade & Sorcery: Nomad’ Review – Fun Physics-based Combat Slimmed Down for Quest 2 appeared first on Road to VR.

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Blade & Sorcery’s big June Update Will be Magical

Blade & Sorcery

WarpFrog’s Blade & Sorcery has been in Early Access for 18 months now, garnering a strong player base thanks to its physics-driven combat system. But like the title suggests the gameplay should involve blades and a magical element, the latter of which has been lacking. That’s going to change next week with the launch of The Sorcery Update.

Blade & Sorcery

As you’d expect the update is all about unlocking that magical component so you can master the elements, throw fireballs and imbue your weapons for enhanced effects. There will be a new spell wheel to access these magical forces and the UI, in general, will see a makeover.

The Sorcery Update will add a new map called The Citadel plus there will be a new model for the bow, arrows and quiver. A long requested feature to imbue the arrows with fire, lightning etc will finally be added.

Armour physics are another important part of the update with three tiers of armour; cloth, leather and plate available, all of which are modular. This adds an extra level of strategy to Blade & Sorcery as: “a slash with a blade across some leather might do nothing, while a rapier thrust may penetrate the same leather,” the developer explains. This goes even further when magic is involved as blades imbued with fire can cut through metal while magical blunt weapons can do twice the damage.

Blade & Sorcery

On the visual front the developer has also noted that: “The enemy, armour, map, textures, weapon models are all new and custom, making it essentially a different game from the original EA launch.”

This should make Blade & Sorcery a more rounded, complete VR experience when the update arrives on 4th June via Steam and Oculus Store, supporting PC headsets like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index.

Check out the new trailer below or take a look at these other sword-based VR titles. As further updates for Blade & Sorcery are released, VRFocus will keep you updated.

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Blade & Sorcery Gets Massive Magic Overhaul On June 4th With ‘The Sorcery Update’

The new trailer for Update 8, the massive “Sorcery Update” for Blade & Sorcery just dropped yesterday with the reveal that it will hit both Steam and Oculus Home for Rift platforms on June 4th.

One of the recurring jokes about this game is that ever since it debuted in Early Access the title has been half a lie. It’s called Blade & Sorcery, but it’s really just focused on blades and other melee weapons with almost every single update. Now that’s finally changing.

In the trailer above you can see tons of new spells, like a Gravity spell that lets you levitate enemies and even push the air like a Jedi Force Push power. There are flaming swords, lightning staves, and so much more. It’s a lot to process, not to mention the brand new, massive, Citadel map.

One specific new feature I want to highlight is armor penetration. Now, enemies will wear three different tiers of armor (cloth, leather, and plate) and it’s all modular. A slash across leather armor probably won’t do anything, but a stab with something like a rapier could. And plated enemies require you to target the expose portions of their body like in the cracks of limbs and their neck/face. Here is a quick clip showing that off a bit more:

We mentioned the news earlier this month, but the new trailer really puts the cherry on top of just how massive of an update this truly is. Blade & Sorcery is one of my personal favorite VR games, even if it’s barely a game and is actually just an immensely fun wave combat sandbox experience. There is no story, no structured content like quests, not even a procedural dungeon to explore. You literally go to a map, spawn enemies, spawn weapons, and fight. But because of how intricate the physics engine is and how satisfying it all feels, I can get lost in this kind of blood bath for hours.

I’m honestly at a loss for additional words here after watching that trailer. It’s epic and full of amazing feats of creative violence. I’m extremely eager to dive back into this game and deep down I long for the day this sort of combat system can find its way into a larger, more proper adventure like The Elder Scrolls or Asgard’s Wrath.

The post Blade & Sorcery Gets Massive Magic Overhaul On June 4th With ‘The Sorcery Update’ appeared first on UploadVR.

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‘Blade & Sorcery’ Gets Major ‘U8’ Update, Bringing More Magic to the Table

Blade and Sorcery, the physics-based combat sandbox, isn’t out of Early Access on PC VR just yet, however developers WarpFrog are taking a big step in the right direction today by releasing a major update that includes a new map, weapons, armor, and magical effects—finally a little more sorcery to add to its many, many blades.

Update (June 4th, 2020): After an uncertain wait today, the new U8 update is now live on Steam. The Oculus Store update is slated to follow at some point.

Community manager and YouTuber ‘The Baron’ released a full walkthrough of what’s in store, which goes much deeper than the original U8 trailer. If you have a few minutes to spare, check out The Baron’s video below:

Original Article (May 6th, 2020): The ‘U8’ update is slated to arrive near the end of May, the studio says in a recent Steam update.

WarpFrog shared some work-in-progress video from the upcoming update, first showing off the game’s new bow and arrow effects to the backdrop of a new map, ‘The Citadel’.

In U8, you’ll be able to ‘imbue’ arrows when you draw the bow, infusing it with a number of effects. This also comes alongside a new model for the bow, arrows, and quiver.

Additionally, the update will bring modular armor, which includes three tiers: cloth, leather and plate. Since different tiers of armor have different penetration resistance levels, you’ll have to mix and match techniques to slaying the game’s endless AI foes.

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'Blade & Sorcery' Early Access Review – Bloody Sandbox Battles Aplenty

Arrows aren’t the only things that can be imbued with magical effects; swords can also be magically set alight, which allows it to “sear through metal like a hot knife through butter,” the teams says. You’ll also be able to imbue other melee weapons too, such as blunt weaponry “for twice the smashing fun.”

WarpFrog says that all of what is seen in the clips above has been newly created, and isn’t ported over from the original EA launch, which includes new enemies, armor, map, textures, and weapon models.

Check out Blade & Sorcery on Steam here and on the Oculus Store here, which is priced at $20. Through Steam, the game supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows VR, and Valve Index.

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‘Blade & Sorcery’ Early Access Review – Bloody Sandbox Battles Aplenty

A story line can be useful for its ability to frame the action; it gives you a reason to fight and fuels your hunger to reign victorious over the hordes of NPC baddies. But if you’re easily urked by mediocre stabs at the hero’s journey monomyth and just want to cut to the bloody chase, then Blade & Sorcery might scratch that itch thanks to its combat-centric sandbox and stab-happy rag doll enemies.

Blade & Sorcery Early Access Details:

Official Site

Developer: Warp Frog
Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift, Windows VR)
Reviewed On: Rift, Vive
Release Date: December 11th, 2018

Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game only at its current Early Access state and will not receive a numerical score.

Gameplay

As a sandbox combat game, Blades & Sorcery doesn’t feature scores, leaderboards, and it contains no story; it’s a single-player game that puts you in the midst of successive waves of baddies that span classes such as lighting mages, archers, and a number of melee grunts that try to take you down.

There’s plenty of weaponry lying around to make whatever fighting style you’re keen to enact a reality. But before I get into that, there’s the sordid details of what it feels like to stab a dude in the face. You’ve probably seen a variation of the gif below, but here’s a great one from VR YouTuber The Baron for your viewing pleasure.

 

Baddies seem to be cartoonish enough to make the game’s hyperviolence less of a turn off than I initially thought would be the case. They’re more on the ‘zombie’ end of things, so pushing a dagger into a skull in slow-mo, or driving a Roman gladius right through the heart didn’t really present any of the moral quandaries I’m sure I’ll be forced to revisit when VR games have a greater degree of photorealism. For now, these are just virtual crash test dummies, so I let myself don the mantle of Beef Supreme and enter the arena unfazed by the horrible acts yet to come.

When Blade & Sorcery works just right, and you can pull off an epic chain of god-like hits and full-body stabs on several enemies, it really makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something awesome. In the two or so hours of playing, I was able to replicate some of these dashing moves seen above, although they certainly don’t come completely natural at first. You have to concentrate on making sure you remember your four holster points—two behind each shoulder and two on each hip—move through the fray, activate the temporary slow-mo at decidedly cinematic moments, and make sure to not flail around with your melee weapons. That’s a good amount to remember when you’re in the thick of it, but as they say, practice makes perfect.

Image courtesy WarpFrog

Users are given a choice between various swords (both single and two-handed), a bow and requisite quiver of arrows, and various gear that you can either throw (or levitate) at you squishy enemies. That’s right, you can telepathically move objects including large rocks, weapons, and traps like a low-hanging chandelier that can cut down anything in its path. A single magic ability is currently available, a lighting spell, although the in-game menu has open spots for three more spells.

You can practice all of this either in the arenas before you order up a wave of baddies, or in your home which has a full selection of weapons.

 

As a physics-based game your weapons have a virtual heft to them, letting you finally clank your swords together for that gladiator-style cinematic moment, or stab straight through the belly of your enemy. You shouldn’t rely on your natural instinct to strike quickly though because your physical hands will go out of sync with your virtual counterparts. This, in my opinion, is an awesome way of making sure the player doesn’t waggle the sword, or treat it like it’s a weightless object with impossibly fast strikes. Frankly, physics-based melee combat is something I wish more games used, making Blades & Sorcery one of the exemplar titles to accomplish it with such apparent ease.

The game doesn’t go without some personal niggles though, which you’ll find in the Immersion and Comfort sections below.

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Immersion

Although Blade & Sorcery is clearly a sandbox game, I still can’t help but wish there was something behind the combat, some reason to finish off a wave and move forward outside of virtual bloodlust and the primal urge to gank dudes 300-style.

The environments are well constructed and could ideally play as a backdrop to a much larger game. As it is now, the game is pretty bare bones; there isn’t a progression system, unlockable areas, unlockable weapons, arena bosses—there’s just you and the waves of bad guys that your order up to slay at will. That said, Blade & Sorcery isn’t biting off more than it can chew, and that’s probably for the best.

Image courtesy Warp Frog

Each of the three arenas has a pedestal with a book-style menu where you can select your difficulty and wave number, the latter determining the number of baddies that can spawn at the edges of the maps. Having to deal with baddies in the here and now always has its way of physically immersing you, but the book menu isn’t really the most graceful way of tossing you into the action. This is an early access title, so there’s plenty of community-driven improvements likely yet to come, but dropping you into an arena and making you choose one of four arbitrary difficulty settings with no real knowledge of what they really entails makes it feel more like a tech demo than a game as such.

If I had to change just one thing about Blood & Sorcery, it would be this: Instead of three random arenas (castle keep, medieval town square, and Roman arena) that you can select at will, I would love to see some sort of progression system that lets you unlock each successive arena after winning, eventually ending up in the hardest area at the hardest difficulty.

Image courtesy WarpFrog

Stepping back from ‘ifs and buts’, once you’re in the thick of the action, the immersion factor ramps up nicely. In terms of locating baddies when on the move, the most noticeable class by far is the archer, which makes a twiney stretching noise when they draw their bow. Otherwise detecting baddies is mostly visual, as you can quickly find for or five armored brutes sneaking up behind you with little else than a few spoken lines to tip you off.

Controls aren’t overly complicated, but like I said, they do take some practice to master. Knocking an arrow is less ‘automatic’ than more archery focused games, although aiming and shooting is mostly an easy experience. There are no visual stats HUD or HP counters, only an increasing level of blood-red in your vision to tip you off that death is imminent.

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Comfort

Comfort options are fairly thin at the moment. Two artificial turning options exist at this stage in development: smooth turning and snap-turning, the latter of which is actually just a very quick smooth turn. You can also choose to turn off both if you happen to have a room-scale sensor setup.

While I have no problem with smooth forward motion, which is dictated by either head-relative or hand-relative direction, the snap-turn left me feeling a bit unbalanced after a solid 30 minutes of playing. I think a hypothetical blink-style snap-turn would have let me play for longer, albeit less visually immersive amounts of time.

If you’re prone to nausea due to artificial locomotion, you may want to adjust your play style accordingly. There is a jump button, which personally made me feel a bit wonky with too much use. I never really found a need to jump though, so you can ignore it, or even turn it off the menu settings.

Conclusion

Blade & Sorcery strongly demonstrates that physics-based melee can work in the right conditions. It’s not clear at this point whether it will stay on the tech demo side of things instead of a more fleshed-out game though. Early adopters of the game GORN don’t seem to have a problem with that in the slightest, so hopefully those impressive slow-mo combat gifs will keep on coming.

Note: This game is in Early Access which means the developers have deemed it incomplete and likely to see changes over time. This review is an assessment of the game’s current state, and will not receive a numerical score.

The post ‘Blade & Sorcery’ Early Access Review – Bloody Sandbox Battles Aplenty appeared first on Road to VR.

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VR Combat Sandbox ‘Blade & Sorcery’ Heads to Early Access Tomorrow, New Trailer Here

Blade and Sorcery is a medieval fantasy sandbox from indie developer WarpFrog which is aiming to bring realism to VR combat. Including a physics-driven interaction and combat system, players can expect to master melee, ranged, and magic-based combat against plenty of squishy, stab-friendly NPCs.

Update (December 10th, 2018): Blade & Sorcery is set launch on Steam Early Access tomorrow, December 11th, and with it comes a new trailer showing off more of the bloody melee combat. We’ve linked the trailer above and at the bottom of the article.

Original Article (October 29th, 2018): Blade and Sorcery is slated to launch on Steam Early Access sometime in December (see update), targeting Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows VR headsets.

At launch of Early Access, the game is said to include:

  • 3 Maps (Home, Arena and Ruins)
  • 8 Weapons (swords, dagger, shield, axes, spear, bow)
  • 3 spells (Slowing time, Telekinesis and Lightning)
  • 3 enemy archetype (fighters, rangers and mages)
  • 2 enemy styles (Gladiator and Cult)
  • Avatar customization
  • Jumping, kicking, running
  • Free locomotion
  • Modding game data (player/weapon/npc stats, AI, NPC look, waves logic, etc.)”

The studio says Blade and Sorcery pushes for a more realistic combat style by giving objects weight that follow the laws of physics, dictating collisions via “fine” hitboxes, by giving creatures full body physics, and by giving blades the ability to penetrate soft materials or deflect magic.

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WarpFrog says that through Steam Early Access, the studio hopes to eventually evolve the game from a combat sandbox “into something with more depth.” The game is said to launch with some moddable features, but they plan to add support for custom maps, new weapons and even the possibility for modders to add new game modes.

The studio maintains that Early Access could last between six months to two years depending of the success of the game, which will impact the scope.

The post VR Combat Sandbox ‘Blade & Sorcery’ Heads to Early Access Tomorrow, New Trailer Here appeared first on Road to VR.