First Look at ‘Star Wars Battlefront X-Wing VR Mission’ Gameplay on PSVR

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Dec 2, 2016

The Rogue One themed Star Wars Battlefront X-Wing VR Mission, is tantalizingly close for PlayStation VR owners, launching next week on December 6th, and now we’ve seen the first glimpse of gameplay from a developer livestream revealing the latest Star Wars Battlefront DLC.

Today Star Wars Battlefront did a length livestream reveal of their new ‘Scarif’ DLC, alongside which will launch the Battlefront X-Wing VR Mission for PlayStation VR, which will be free to players who own Battlefront on PS4.

At the tail end of the 2+ hour livestream, Kieran Crimmins, Art Director on the X-Wing VR Mission, took to the set to walk to host through a demo version of the game. In the video heading this article you can see the demo gameplay unfold (if the video doesn’t automatically begin at 2:39:30, be sure to skip ahead to see the X-Wing VR Mission).

As the host remarked on the level of detail present in the experience, Crimmins touted the power of EA DICE’s Frostbite engine as responsible for the high end graphics. We recently suggested that the adaptation of Frostbite for VR meant more EA VR content is likely on the way; Crimmins noted the extent of the company’s Frostbite VR R&D saying, “We had a bunch of people from a bunch of different studios all collaborate to make the best rendering pipeline we could for virtual reality, and I really think we’ve got a powerhouse in Frostbite now for virtual reality.”

VR-capable Frostbite Engine Suggests More AAA VR to Come from EA

Though Crimmins said there were no announcements to make at the moment regarding future Star Wars Battlefront VR content, he said that EA’s studio behind the X-Wing VR Experience, Criterion, would love to do more.

DiGiCT Ltd

After seeing this video I am pretty sure never to step into PSVR.
Just look ar how many times that anoying popup comes that the player is leaving the player area messgae.
Seriously what the heck lol, the dude just stand behind a desk , how he could leave the area ?
This clearly shows in what bad shape the PSVR tracking actually is.
They better make it on PC, pretty sure this popup would not appear.
So sad to see a starwars VR content perform like that.
The other part is in the beginning where the guy thinks his game crashed, as he see a blackscreen for nealry 10 seconds, it loads like a turtle.

Thank you guys for showing this result, as it shows clearly how the system is.
- Marc
  
  Please dont listen to this retard. He is clearly an idiot. PSVR is amazing and should be considered at all costs for VR. If you have a PC with a rift already then sure get it for PC. (Unless its ONLY on PS4, then its worth getting on PS4).
  
  The tracking on PSVR is pretty amazing for what it is and I have no issue at all unless for occlusion. You can avoid that by being properly setup.
  
  I have Oculus and PSVR and I have no issues saying PSVR tracking is spot on for almost anything you will play. If you want full room scale and sub mm accuracy, get Oculus Touch (Dont waste your money on Vive, its dead now that Oculus Touch is out)
  - Walter Sharrow
    
    I’ve had the PSVR jump around a little, but so does my VIVE. When the PSVR jumps, a little movement pops it right back. I have to wait for my VIVE hand to slowly float back to me, like a lost little puppy.
- Andrew Jakobs
  
  oh please.. Maybe the lights and the reflective desktop was the problem, it’s not like Vive’s Lighthouse or Oculus’s constellation tracking is perfect in all conditions.. And yes, the 10 second black screen is really a nono, still don’t understand why developers can’t implement such simple stuff as a splashscreen (with a progressbar or some animation)..
  - DiGiCT Ltd
    
    It does not matter, the results shown are very bad.
    How you can present something like this to the masses, even for Sony and StarWars franchise , this is really a semi finished end result, letting more people believe VR is not ready yet.
    Although that is not true, there is good stuff, just not much yet.
    Those guys set themselves on a AAA company level and this result is just a bummer.
    They should be ashamed of themselves.
    - Andrew Jakobs
      
      Except for the missing loading screen, and the occasional leaving playground message there wasn’t really anything not looking good about it. You propably have a different taste for (VR)games.
      - StygianAgenda
        
        Not that I’m defending anyone else’s opinions here, but I can personally relate to the angst against missing load screens. I have a few titles so far that have extensive load time coupled with no loading screen, and I must say, it’s pretty jarring… more so, it’s really hard on the optic nerves and causes eye strain to build up pretty quickly. Space Rift VR, if I’m remembering correctly at the moment (I’m at work, thinking back to last weekend) had no real load screen, just a pale blackness that leaves enough of a screendoor effect there that it makes my eyes start struggling to maintain some sort of semblance of focus. At one point, it felt like my eyes moved independently of each other, which was very uncomfortable. The load time on that game was close to 60 seconds, and by about 20 to 30 seconds into it, the loss of a focal point becomes slightly painful, especially if you try to play through the entire game in one sitting. So far, I’ve had to break that one up into at least 2 to 4 sessions to give my eyes a break.
        
        But all things considered, I don’t have many complaints about PSVR. For what I paid, I feel that I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of the hardware, and I know that this is just the beginning, that a ton more games are on the way over the next few years –and so any light-and-loose experiences we see over the coming 6 months to a year should really be chalked up as R&D lessons. In a lot of ways, all of this reminds me of 1995/1996, when the PS1/PSX was first taking off. At the time, no developers had access to hardware with such powerful dedicated geometry capabilities, and no one knew what to do with it. For the next 2 to 3 years, we saw a lot of goofy ideas turn into games, and some did well, while others… not so much. But by the 4th to 5th year, the games were some of the best the world had ever seen, the developers really knew the toolkits by that point, and we started seeing hit after hit after hit. I think VR is in that same sort of stage in its development at this point, and I think that within 2 to 3 years, we’ll begin seeing the killer-app level games appearing first on VR that used to be the flagship games of traditional medium. I don’t think that traditional medium will be left entirely behind though… Nintendo has to fit in, somewhere, right? :)
        
        Anyway, the load-screens are something that can be easily fixed via a patch, even if it’s something as low-end as the spinning doll head in “Rush Of Blood” –although the doll’s head is a low res image that looks like an animated gif, it gives your eyes a focal point during loading, which reduces eye strain from your eyes going in and out of focus between game-areas. The “leaving playground” messages… that requires a larger play area setup by the user. While I can sympathize, I keep in mind that this is the tracking choice that Sony went with, for whatever reason. While it can be debated all day as to whether it was an effective choice, it’s something that can be refined via software overtime to become more high-performance by simply requiring less data to be gathered in any individually interpreted frame captured by the cam –sort of like how the Kinect Cam recognizes the hands of the user as endpoints on the body and tracks them as balls of light…oddly similar to what Sony did, using actual lights. Now that I think about it, that choice seems more born out of an interest of selling both the PSVR and the PS4-Cam than from producing a highly accurate motion tracker -which, inarguably would have raised the costs of the unit up to another $100 beyond what it was released at. But still, I’ll commend them for what they’ve achieved, because they’ve delivered an effective first gen VR solution that’s fun to use. In the end, I think that will matter more than the little mistakes made here and there while the industry finds it’s footing in this new territory.
      - Andrew Jakobs
        
        I’m agree on the loading screen (that’s why I said ‘except for the loading screen’) is a big mis. I think a splashscreen/loadingscreen is a necessity if loading content/application takes more than even a second or two (and on PC (including Mac) always keep in mind people have slower computers than you might have). Dirty Bomb did have their loading screen coming up after the anticheat was loaded, but that took in most situation more than 20 seconds before even the anticheat started loading (which by itself takes a couple of seconds to load), so you saw a lot of people complain about their game not starting (propably on a lowend machine).. So I did complain about the loadingscreen needing to come up right before loading anything. These days they have their loadingscreen up a lot sooner (but IMHO still too late)..
        So I do agree with you loadingscreens are really a necessity, and as you state with VR it seems to be even more needed.
        The ‘leaving playground’ could also be because they maybe didn’t have setup the camera properly, just enough so it could be shown.. But the rest of the game looks excellent to me..
    - dorkgeniuz21
      
      Everything is completely different when your actually inside the damn headset.All doubt completely leaves once your brain is tricked into believing you are in a different world.Even the games with the cheapest graphics look good in Vr because it seems real.So with games that utilize high end graphics Your placed that much more in reality.I Was playing the Resident evil vr demo today and was literraly scared foreals because I believed I was actually in the house ..i can only imagine what a game like outlast would be like.
      
      Vr is ready and it’s here , the Psvr just need even more quality content and it will come.You needn’t look any further than all the games that are currently on oculus rift or htc vive including the pc games that were patched by either devs or modders to enable none Vr games to be Vr etc.There are hundreds of games already and reaction vids from people of all ages experiencing Vr for the first time and not one of them hates the experience..If I know Sony, they wil eventually entice some indie devs to bring their games over too..
      - StygianAgenda
        
        This is something that’s become apparent to me too.
        Games in VR are still actually quite effective even when they look more simplistic, because of the 3D effect of being in VR where everything takes on a whole new level of presence.
        
        Believe me, at first, I had doubts too. Even at the last moment, right as I was about to buy mine, I nearly backed out because of the price and the fact that the technology has yet to really mature. But after getting it home and setting up (which took me about an hour… because I’m a perfectionist and wanted everything integrated into the room perfectly before sitting down with it for the first time), I was immediately blown away and totally convinced that it was money-well-spent. Even some of the tamest demos that came with the included demo disc were impressive.
        
        My one complaint so far has to do not so much with the games, or the developers, but rather is due to the players. Because of the fact that VR is rather new technology in terms of mass-market exposure, there are a ton of people experiencing VR for the first time, and the greater majority of new-to-VR players are not properly acclimated to this level of 3D immersion –and so it’s causing large numbers of people to report motion-sickness. In turn, because of the elevated numbers of reported illness, this has lead the developers to do things to make their games easier to play by large numbers of people… and in the process of doing this, it’s caused a few games to have movement systems that seem to belong more in the early experiments of the 32bit era, some 20+ years ago. Now, myself… I first played VR games back in 1994, back when the technology was just barely usable at all, and was driven mainly by games running on MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 95. In the years since, I’ve hungered to have that level of immersion again. Now that it’s here, and I’ve been reading these reports of motion-sickness or VR-sickness, I’m realizing that it’s purely a matter of conditioning.
        
        The first day I had my PSVR, I bought EVE:Valkyrie, and spent the majority of the evening playing that one game, after spending a few hours with all of the other demos on the included demo disc. The first time I came out of VR for a break, I did feel a bit dizzy, like I had just stepped off of a boat, back onto dry land. But as the night wore on, and I kept doing more and more sessions, the dizziness wore off for the most part, and now the effect is no more heavy than one would get from looking out the Window of a car while riding as a passenger. The sensations are there, but completely tolerable, and to be honest.. are part of the fun. It’s really hard to describe the feeling of a high-speed turn-and-burn in EVE:Valkyrie, or the feeling of turning your head to focus in on your next target and your sliding a several ton hover-tank around… the closest thing I could compare it to is the ’tilt-a-whirl’ ride at the state-fair… it really screws with your perception –but really, that’s what VR is all about… tricking your senses, allowing for a much greater level of immersion than traditional gaming.
    - Ken Wallace
      
      Played this and it was amazing. Great graphics and a total immersive experience. It rocked, and it was a free download.
- TheRetroGamingBlog
  
  I picked up PSVR, and was skeptical, hand on heart it’s an amazing experience and worthy of a place next to Vive.
  
  I’ve had no issues with mine at all, so no idea if this is limited to their setup.
  
  VR is a thing. Really. No gimmick, just pure experience and that’s great for bringing something new to gaming.
  
  Your comment does come across a bit bitter!
  - StygianAgenda
    
    My experience pretty much mirrors your own. I’ve had no issues to speak of, at least none that couldn’t be corrected by simply adjusting my cam and room-lighting, and the feeling of VR games is in-itself, worth every penny I’ve spent on my hardware.
    
    One thing I’ve kept in mind this whole way is that VR is still a young product in terms of time in the market to develop into something solid. Because of this, we can expect to see a few years worth of developers trying all kinds of different ideas while they try to find interesting new things that can be done in VR that can’t be done on traditional gaming platforms.
    
    Battlezone is very cool, and I’ve really enjoyed the feeling of EVE:Valkyrie & Space Rift. I’m extremely excited to see what new games come out that use the new Playstation Aim controller that’s due to launch alongside Farpoint toward year’s end –hopefully, we’ll see either a patch or an alternate release of Doom VR to take advantage of it, and push sales a bit, which in turn should encourage other developers to utilize that controller.
    
    One thing I’m noticing about VR so far is that it really seems optimized for simulators –which makes me *very* happy, because realistic simulators are some of my fave games, especially when they’re done in a way that keeps them fun, rather than purely a technical experience. Battlezone pulls this off really well –especially at the very beginning of the game, before you enter the arena, where you still have time to stand up and look out through the canopy of the tank to see the outside of the craft and can lean forward to see the outside. Ace Combat 7, I think, is going to be absolutely amazing on this platform, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
    
    If I had my wishlist though:
    1. A sequel to “Descent 3”
    2. Battlezone 3 (sequel to Battlezone II – Combat Commander [PC])
    3. Wipeout VR (a proper Wipeout sequel with cockpit perspective/simulator-like experience; feeling like you’re actually piloting a hover-sled at over 500MPH).
    
    Luckily, there *are* some Wipeout games on the way, according the the news over this past weekend –due toward summer 2017.
yag

Just a boring arcade game like Eve Walkyrie.
Please LucasArt or Disney, give us X-Wing VR…
dorkgeniuz21

You just have to position the camera the right distance which ofcoarse they didn’t do.Where the hell was a PlayStation rep when you need one..I love my Psvr.For those who haven’t yet tried it and hate on it, I erge you to try it first before you knock it.If there’s one game that I know can sway opinions almost immediately it’s Batman Arkham Vr cause it takes being Batman one step further and the graphics are on point.You can stand or sit while playing and things are utilized in a smart way.Story is pretty short but the experience was so solid that it was still work the money to me and I still play it over and over…
Kasif

Zerooooooo issues. PSVR is amazing. Crown the King!!!
- JustNiz
  
  You have obviously never tried an HTC Vive.
  - Kasif
    
    $800 ViVe + $700 to $2000 PC? Fuck that. You call that a fair comparison? Lets compare the ViVe to the fucking Planetarium, see where that shit stands. Got my PSVR, PS Pro and a Racing Wheel. Fuck a (Making my room hot as fuck) PC. Crown the King!!
StygianAgenda

I’ll definitely check out Windlands, then. I’d been eyeing that one for a few weeks now, wondering how good it is.

I checked out the RE7 demo, and loved it. Can’t wait to buy the full version on launch.

Driveclub: Man, I totally agree. I played the demo of that one and absolutely loved the feel of it. I didn’t get nauseous at all playing it, and got first place each time I ran through it (3x in all). That one’s definitely high on my ‘to buy soon list’.

The demo for ‘Here they lie’ grabbed me from the first second. While the movement-system is a bit odd to get used to, I loved the graphics and the suspense it all generates. That game has hellacious atmosphere!

I’ve been thinking about Robinson, as well. That one looks really cool. I saw a review on it right after it launched, and the review was high on negatives… but… I tend to take all reviews with a grain of salt, so to speak, because I have a very developed taste in games with a 35+ year history of gaming. That said, I find that I tend to like games that sometimes don’t get the highest of reviews, or any reviews at all. One of the things that stuck out to me about Robinson is the climbing, which appears to be somewhat inspired by the climbing technique from ‘Grow Home’ & ‘Grow up’ (both, excellent games). While the reviewer didn’t seem to like how it was implemented, I could see it being a really tripped out experience, dealing with climbing and depth of scene being much more of a factor than in 2D/3D/non-VR games.
- TheRetroGamingBlog
  
  Just purchased the full RE7 game on the back off the demo. VR makes it such a visceral play. I love it!
Davala

truly my best gaming experience I’ve ever had. the sense of immersion in this game is completely full. apparently my wife was screaming at me but i couldn’t hear her while i was playing, i was pretty sure i was in a galaxy far far away. i couldn’t wipe the grin off my face the first few times playing it. hey, does anyone know if Alan Tudyk did the voice for K2SO in the game?
beweekly

PSVR gives you a sense of being there or immersed in the xwing vr battles. But I can’t understand why the graphics is so “fuzzy” and unclear. it is very poor. the game is beautiful to play, but the whole adventure is not 720p or even close. why? All of the PSVR games are like that. Even the Call of Duty vr demo is “fuzzy” That needs to improve.
StygianAgenda

Driveclub VR is one of my favorites, along with RE7.
While I’ll agree that Driveclub VR’s graphics are *slightly* lower definition in VR, it doesn’t look *bad* at all, and it plays beautifully…. so much so that I’ve been seriously considering buying a high end steering wheel controller for this game, as well as for Dirt Rally VR, and some of the upcoming racing games set to release over the next few years.

Resident Evil 7 is probably my favorite VR enabled game at the moment. I absolutely love the atmosphere that game creates, particularly because Capcom went with a first person perspective… I’ve believed for quite a while that most FPS games could easily make the jump to VR, and this one proves it –I think. I prefer to play with all of the VR-sickness-protections turned off, though when I’ve put someone else on my profile to let them give it a spin, it made them sick as a dog in mere minutes –myself, I played straight through over a series of a few evenings after work, and didn’t experience any nausea, but there were many times that caused my heart to race like mad from the adrenaline surge! :)

I also recently picked up Robinson:The Journey, Mervils: A VR Adventure, Thumper, and Psychonauts:In the Rhombus of Ruin.

Robinson turned out to be better than I’d anticipated… I’m currently stuck at the crashed ship, where I have to retrieve 3 batteries to engage the power systems, and meanwhile I’m being stalked by a pack of raptors… nasty bunch, they are. The climbing in this game reminds me of ‘Grow Home’ to a degree, and the encounters with different creatures is pretty eerie at times, scary as hell at others, and sometimes simply beautiful.

Mervils is a bizarre little Action RPG that looks a little bit like Super Mario 64, and plays like a somewhat primitive hack-and-slash RPG. The gameplay could be tightened up some, but overall, it’s a decently fun game and very much unique among the other PSVR offerings. For the price, it’s worth checking out.

Thumper… I was reluctant to pick this one up, but my wife got into the demo version of it, so I bought her a copy of the full version this last Friday. When it downloaded and I checked it out, I couldn’t put it down for the next 2 hours and played through until I got stuck –I got myself unstuck last night, and passed to Level 3-1, so I’ll probably pick back up on this one tonight… if I can get my wife to give up some time on the system… she’s pretty addicted to it. :)

Psychonauts – In The Rhombus of Ruin: This game… is one I’d probably advise skipping *unless* you’re a die-hard fan of the original game (Psychonauts). It’s played first-person-perspective, and you can possess others within view to see and manipulate the world through their eyes, but overall this breaks down into being nothing much more than a simple point-and-click adventure game at about 30-to-60 minutes playtime to complete it. I have high hopes for Psychonauts 2, but Rhombus of Ruin isn’t much of a game… it’s cute… but lacks substance. I picked up my copy as a prepay, so I got a free copy of the original Psychonauts (PS2-on-PS4; stretched full screen), so from that angle it was worth it because my other copy I already had was for the PC and several years old. It’s been fun to revisit the original, but even that really didn’t satisfy my cravings that day, so after playing this one for a while, I went shopping for something else.

I also mentioned ‘Dirt Rally VR’ above. I’ve been playing that one too, although I’ll have to say that it plays radically different from Driveclub VR. They’re two very different games. DCVR is purely played on tracks and roads, usually against either AI controlled or human controlled competitors (depending on mode). DRVR, on the other hand, is a purely offroad / rally type of racer in which you will find yourself on a course with a co-driver calling out upcoming turns, while you try to navigate down a mountain course as quickly as possible. So far, all of the races I’ve been in where time-attack type stages where I would be the only racer on the course at that moment, going for the best time for completion. This is a very well done game. I especially like how the game handles things like ‘going off the road on a corner’ or splashing through a creek that crosses the race-course. When I ran up on a corner entirely too fast, I went over an embankment and into the woods and slammed into a tree… realistically, and when I splashed through a creek that was crossing the course, it realistically reacted with randomly trickling droplets of muddy water that my windshield wipers responded to as if it were real muddy water. The physics effects of this game are totally on point, and other than lacking around $20000 worth of hardware to make up for the feeling of vehicle motion, this game felt as real as it gets.

Aside from those, I also recently picked up Motoracer 4 –which has VR support… but it’s VR support is really lacking (at least it was the last time I played it, but I’ve read that there’s a patch on the way to expand the VR modes). The problem was that it only gave access to the time-attack mode in VR, and didn’t allow for playing the main tournament mode that way. To me, games like this get it backwards… we don’t want time attacks, we want full-on racing, otherwise we wouldn’t buy these games at all. Now, all of that said, outside of VR, it’s still a solid racing title. But with the VR mode being so limited, I don’t recommend this one unless you’re a diehard fan of the series, or if you’re just so bored that you don’t mind buying something that costs more than it’s worth in replay value. I’d give it a 3 out of 5 stars… not horrible, not great.