White Lotus Interactive have announced that their VR-enabled adventure title XING: The Land beyond is now coming to the HTC Vive with full motion control support. Here’s a new trailer showing it off as well as some insights from the developers as to why and how they did it.
XING: The Land beyond is a made-for-VR adventure title from White Lotus Interactive which was one of the earliest VR titles born from a successful Kickstarter campaign back in March 2013. We’ve followed the title, created by the then 3 strong development team White Lotus Interactive, ever since. VR support (the game can be played with or without) was pledged for the Oculus Rift (then in DK1 form only) and even after all this time, it’s still one of the most anticipated indie VR titles.
Fast forward over 3 years, multiple Oculus Rift prototypes and 2 consumer VR headset launches, and the developers are still hard at work refining their labour of love, a VR adventure puzzler in a similar vein as the PC classic Myst (a title which received a spiritual successor recently), but in this case set in the after life. Other inspirations cited by the developer include The Legend of Zelda and Portal – all worthy muses indeed. You can see some of those influences at work in the new Vive reveal trailer below.
Up until now, the development of XING has focused on Oculus Rift support, but today the team have revealed that they’ve been working on reworking the title for the HTC Vive and SteamVR motion controllers. Retro fitting tracked controllers to a pre-existing title is no mean feat, as their latest blog update illustrates: “Bringing XING to Vive has been challenging, but also insanely fun. Supporting both VR and non-VR styles of playing has offered an interesting design dilemma.”
As ever, to deal with the introduction of HTC Vive’s room-scale brings with it locomotion challenges, so the team have integrated two methods from which to choose. ‘Free Movement’, which the team state are “analogous to the FPS (first person shooter) controls used for PC” and Teleportation, the now familiar locomotion technique seen in many early Vive titles.
[gfycat data_id=”UnlawfulAnotherHousefly”]
As to when we can finally expect to see the title up for sale, no specific word as yet, although the team do sound like they’re closing in on a launch soon, with time spent “working on marketing” an optimistic sign.
