Two anticipated VR games, Behemoth and Alien: Rogue Incursion, showed their first glimpse of gameplay during PlayStation’s State of Play presentation today. Both are set to launch across all major VR platforms later this year.

Behemoth First Look at VR Gameplay

Kicking things off with Behemoth: this is the latest game from developer Skydance Interactive, the studio behind The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners series.

Behemoth is due out “Fall” 2024, and coming to PSVR 2, PC VR, and Quest 2, Quest Pro, & Quest 3.

Over at the PlayStation Blog, the developer shared a description of the gameplay. Here’s a few choice bits that caught our eye:

  • We designed this dark fantasy to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible inside a headset, creating a grim new world teeming with mystery and dangers great and small. When you enter the Forsaken Lands, one thing is clear: You are not welcome here. Everything and everyone wants to kill you. Are you bold enough to forge ahead?
  • The Forsaken Lands are your gauntlet and your hunting ground. Equipped with a grappling hook and unnatural grip strength, you’ll climb, zip, and reel to ascend or descend walls, towers, and cliffsides. Surmount barriers hindering your path, explore nooks and crannies to claim hard-to-reach items, or grasp onto unsuspecting foes and cast them into the abyss.
  • Building on our work on The Walking Dead games, we have continued to push our gore-tech and dismemberment systems in a way that players should find truly satisfying.
  • Your foes are not mindless zombies, they’re skilled, strategic warriors. Stay on your toes. Avail yourself of every weapon you can grasp. Block, parry, hack, and slash to wear their strength down. Then crack skulls, drive blades through hearts, sever limbs and cleave everything in between.

Alien: Rogue Incursion First Look at VR Gameplay

Next we’ve got Alien: Rogue Incursion, the first major VR game in several years from veteran VR studio Survios.

Alien: Rogue Incursion is planned for release “Holiday” 2024, and coming to PSVR 2, PC VR, and, Quest 3 exclusively (among Quest headsets).

The studio shared a few teases of the gameplay over at the PlayStation Blog.

Dynamically spawning and pathing with countless unique possibilities, even we couldn’t tell you exactly where and when each Xenomorph will strike, let alone what strategies it might use or if it’ll bring some friends.

While heart-pounding combat is the core of Alien: Rogue Incursion, grabbing your pulse rifle and blasting your way out of every situation is not always the best strategy. Constantly hunted by unpredictable and resourceful Xenomorphs, players will often find creativity and a level head to be their greatest weapons, especially when it comes to leveraging the environment to their advantage.

Which of these two are you most excited for?

Update (May 31st, 2024): Updated to indicate that Behemoth is confirmed to be coming to Quest 2 and later Quest headsets. A previous version of this article stated that Quest 2 support was unconfirmed.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • eadVrim

    It reminds me of Alien: Isolation
    nostalgic moment of VR with the DK2

    • Mike

      actually it doesn't remind me anything of alien isolation. this just looks like another corridor shooter with aliens being just a bullet sponge. sorry alien isolation was the opposite of this in many ways from the look of it. what i I want is alien isolation fleshed out with motion controls and some more vr polish. what i really want is alien isolation 2 but i know that's asking for way to much.

      • eadVrim

        Hmm this is frustrating

      • Gonzax

        10 seconds of gameplay without a single shot makes you think that?

        • Mike

          call it intuition based on what I'm seeing so far.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            You're basically both right: the teaser is definitely too short and lacking any discernible gameplay to tell if it will mostly be another shooter, just with aliens from a known franchise. But on the other hand the style of the trailer in no way hints at anything close to the claustrophobic hiding from an overwhelming entity that made Alien Isolation such a unique experience. Unless they utterly messed up the trailer, your intuition unfortunately seems like a well educated guess.

  • ViRGiN

    Nooooo fuck meta for ruining VR! Another Quest 3 exclusive!!!!1
    Oh wait…

  • Dragon Marble

    PSVR2 is dead. Sony has abandoned it. To release the new Astrobot game without VR support — or a single word about VR — the message couldn't have been clearer. This is the game that makes the most sense — and is the least costly — to support hybrid. That cute little bot you are looking at … it is the face of PSVR. It is now completely flat, and dead.

    Sure, we have Behemoth and Alien. But those two games have been in development for a long time, and it's basically too late for them to jump ship. I would've been really mad if I were Skydance or Survios. You have to realized what Sony has done: They are an airline caption who continues to welcome passengers onboard while fully aware that the airplane does not have enough fuel to reach the destination. It's criminal!

    • Leisure Suit Barry

      PSVR2 was dead the day Sony revealed the price.

      I was really looking forward to PSVR2 but as soon as the price was revealed I knew it would be a dead platform, so I didn't buy it.

      And this is coming from someone who has two PSVR1 and around 150 PSVR games.

      • Dragon Marble

        Yes, price was one of the problems. But at least it had AAA exclusives. Now I know no more is coming. If Astro Bot VR is not worth it for Sony, why should Capcom add VR support RE9, for example? It costs more to add VR to a first-person action game than a platformer, and it benefits a third party less.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Astro Bot not getting VR support probably has more to do with Sony including "Astro's Playroom" as a game to demonstrate the use of the new DualSense controller pre-installed on every PS5. It contains a lot of references to other Sony franchises and was highly praised as a platformer and for its control scheme perfectly demonstrating the PS5 controller's capabilities.

          They sort of (accidentally) created a cute platform mascot like Crash Bandicoot that a lot more people now know from outside VR, so continuing in that direction actually makes a lot of sense, even if it disappoints VR fans. Sony's PSVR2 hybrid strategy clearly aimed at AAA VR conversions that will gain a lot of immersion by being played in VR, so a cute platformer isn't a particularly good show case, even if in a former life Astro Bot Rescue Mission was one of the most beloved PSVR1 games.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        The price was a huge blunder, and there were indicators that PSVR2 was only released because Sony Japan's movie devision didn't allow SIE CEO Jim Ryan to kill it as he wanted. But it is still too early to call it dead.

        For one Sony still has a lot of options to reduce the price, and technically the HMD is only 15 months old. Their software strategy announced in August 2021 targeted AAA studios to release hybrid games, and most of those would still be in development by now. They switched the platform from a mostly "VR only titles" approach to a "cheap VR also titles" one that will take some time to show results, simply due to the very long AAA development cycles.

        Sony is still in VR, even if only due to strategic interests of parts of the management, and XR is now seeing a lot more interest from large companies. The few hybrid titles we got so far with RE4/8 and GT7 showed that their approach has a huge potential not easily realized by any other VR platform, so for now it's kind of "wait and see". IMHO it is still too early to give up on PSVR as a platform or declaring PSVR2 dead.

    • Cl

      Really should have been wireless. Would be awesome if ps5 pro had some module in it allowing wireless vr so you could play psvr games with quest

    • VR5

      They released the PSVR2 so they could get some sales of the same VR games that release for PC and Quest. Not to push VR but get a part of the pie.

      This isn't working very well for them, Meta has the best product at the best price (with PC, if you want PS5 level and above graphics).

      Hybrid Astrobot would get new customers sick. Not a good idea if you want to sell VR hardware.

      They should have a cheat code or something that enables VR support. Make it unofficial, walled from the mainstream audience. It would create crazy word of mouth.

      • NotMikeD

        VR mode would make new gamers sick, a cheat code to enable VR, WTF is this nonsense?

        If it's a hybrid title the flat-gamers won't be playing the VR version, they'll be playing in 2D as this was (apparently) designed! How is a separate VR mode making anyone sick outside of a headset??

        • VR5

          Obviously I meant it would make people playing in VR sick. You can’t sell people a $550 addon and advertise a game for it which they cannot play, that isn’t good business. But if they hide a VR mode behind a cheat code people who can play without getting sick get to do so and while the newbies are protected.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Both games are also coming out on other platforms, so I'll bet it won't have cost much to also add PSVR2 support.

      • Dragon Marble

        Still, I doubt that the current user base justifies the cost. We heard from at least one developer that it does not make economic sense to port to PSVR2. Some of them who are releasing on this platform must've believed that Sony sure will continue to push and grow the market. Now we know the truth.

        • Andrew Jakobs

          In the case of current multiplatform engines it is far from real costs to just 'port' to another VR platform if you already support the lowest platform. It is almost nothing more then setting a switch. Let's not forget broader platform releases also gives users a better feeling about the developer for not limiting itself to one or two platforms.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            "Almost nothing more than setting a switch" works for simple apps, but even porting an OpenXR Unity game from Quest 2 to the very similar Pico 4 will require a cost/benefit analysis. Each platform has slightly different approaches for e.g. achievements, so releasing the same Windows game on Steam, GOG or Epic store can lead to extra effort or a difference in features. And the more platform specific features like friend invites or Steam workshop get integrated, the higher the cost even if the game itself remains unchanged.

            Support also has to be considered. I don't remember the title, but there was some controversy after one developer announced dropping Linux support due to Linux users causing most support requests despite only very small sales. Linux users countered that their support request were dominantly about game bugs that also affected Windows, and that the Linux gamers simply more used to create helpful bug reports actually benefited everyone.

            In the end there are lots of pros and cons for multi-platform support. Many large studios stick to fixed performance consoles and delegate PC ports to others, simply because focusing on only one thing often leads to better results.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        This is very likely true for these games that already target Quest 2, meaning performance would never be an issue, and PCVR, meaning they needed a pipeline for higher quality graphics anyway, and were VR games to begin with, so no extra care needed for special design constraints. But this approach of course doesn't really utilize any of the PSVR2's strengths, it more adds to the complaint that most PSVR2 games are just ports.

        The whole concept of the PSVR2 hardware and software seems to have been targeted at allowing AAA studios to release their PS5 titles as hybrid games for which it wouldn't "cost much to also add PSVR2 support", which would have given Sony a huge advantage over both Quest lacking the performance and PCVR lacking the user number to get official VR conversions of AAA games. I'm still hoping this strategy will work in the long run, and that the main reason we haven't seen more hybrid games yet is simply that most PlayStation developers first heard about Sony's hybrid approach in 2021-08, with AAA development often taking more than the three years that have passed since then.

    • Nepenthe

      Sad, but, I believe, true.

  • BananaBreadBoy

    So happy to finally see Behemoth! It's always great seeing successful VR devs build off their previous works as this mediums growing. I trust Skydance's pedigree with Saints and Sinners.

    Seems like it's leaning toward "Blade and Sorcery, but with an actual campaign and AAA (for VR) production value."

  • Andrey

    My main questions about Behemoth are:
    – will steel swords and other weapons break after a couple – or a dozen – hits?
    – will I be able to fall during my climbing on a giant or anything else because my stamina can run out? Or maybe the rope of the grapling hook can tear during usage if you don't change it in time?
    and
    – can I get some kind of infection because of the bad food I find in the game world, get ill and die horribly so my save file will be erased for the most immersive and realistic experience?
    Because if any of it is [even partially] true, it's a very hard pass from me. Those "genius" gamedesign decisions in TWD series totally ruined everything as well as Skydance's image as a "good VR developer" in my eyes too.
    At the same time gameplay trailer looks pretty good to me and I would like to try it out at the very least.

    • RedcoatTrooper

      From what I can tell weapons will break as its shown in the cinematic trailer, I doubt it will be after so few hits.

      Most firearms in the Walking dead were held together with duct tape you are lucky to get the amount of shots that you get out of them, managing weapons is a perfectly legitimate part of a survival game.

      "- will I be able to fall during my climbing on a giant or anything else because my stamina can run out? Or maybe the rope of the grapling hook can tear during usage if you don't change it in time?""

      What is wrong with either of those things, stamina was very generous for climbing in Walking Dead but it added an element of danger otherwise you could wait all day on a ledge where walkers could not go.

      " – can I get some kind of infection because of the bad food I find in the game world, get ill and die horribly so my save file will be erased for the most immersive and realistic experience?" I am going to say no….

      The systems were done so that you are encouraged to scavenge to make your own food and weapons, after a bit of levelling up stamina is not an issue either as long as you play smart.

      Those game decisions were genius for TWD series and do you know why? because we saw what happens without stamina and without weapons degradation….The Walking Dead Onslaught had none of those things and the game became a slash fest with no danger.

  • NotMikeD

    Lack of VR support for Astro Bot is a heartbreaking apostasy and sends a clear message that Sony does not have a plan to support PSVR2.

    What folks are mourning here is this idea that Sony might’ve taken a serious shot to move VR forward for the mainstream and contribute, using its stable of core franchises to entice those who haven’t yet tried VR. But no, they’re content to swim in Meta’s wake and gobble up their leavings of whatever moderately upscaled standalone ports Meta deigns to let them have. Tough to imagine after the dominance Sony attained in the PS4 era that META of all companies would be absolutely dunking on them to move the gaming medium forward to the next level. We wanted a leader in Sony here, not a follower sleeping at the wheel. Crazy times.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Remember that so far Meta paid/lost about USD 50bn for that lead position in VR. And with everybody else now going for "spatial computing" and transitioning phone users with exiting mobile apps on XR HMDs, Meta isn't even guaranteed to gain a lot from its current pole position, as it lacks access to these apps.

      Sony's lack of engagement in VR is unfortunate, and most of it seems to be due to lack of support by SIE management, but just from a financial point of view, VR support never paid and user numbers remained so low that it was obvious it wouldn't pay anytime soon either.

      Hybrid game design was actually a pretty clever approach, as was limiting the PSVR2 resolution and adding effective ETFR to allow hybrid titles to run in both 4K and VR without needing a lot of extra optimization for VR. So instead of almost certainly losing money on VR projects, studios could add VR support with limited effort/cost/risk. It just might have come too late with SIE too obviously not actively pushing the platform to attract the needed developers.

  • Octogod

    Alien Rogue Isolation may be the worst VR trailer I've ever seen.

    First, you can count the frames. It's nowhere near 60 FPS and five months from launch.

    Second, it is pitch black, showing one room and one hallway. The material work looks terrible, as the alien is matte black.

    Third, it's like 20 seconds of "gameplay".

    The funny part of this is, they know their best bet is to show nothing, make a name close to Alien Isolation, and hope people buy it out of reverence for a cult classic. Turning the lights on or showing their low fidelity environment work won't sell the game, confusion will.

    • Nepenthe

      Also timed to coincide with the new Alien movie, cashing in.

      • DING!
        DING!
        *DING!*
        We have a winnahhhh!!

    • NL_VR

      The frames showing in a trailers and even on the "social screen" while playing the actual game is representative of the game in the headset.

      I wouldn't call it a trailer more if a "gameplay teaser". Think we still far away from release and the game will be delayed.

      • Octogod

        Good trailers don’t show low frame rate games. It’s just unprofessional.

        All of these scenes could have been replicated with mouse control or on a camera path in non-VR and rendered at 4k in an afternoon. If they don’t have the time to achieve this, they’re deep in crunch mode which doesn’t bode well for their Fall release.

  • Well, the teaser of Alien: Rogue Incursion doesn't show that much to be honest…

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Not showing any game mechanics and instead only trying to draw in fans with some iconic franchise items and a recognizable atmosphere is usually a bad sign. The blog post also doesn't add a lot, and this article already quoted the most important part stating that a) there will be multiple xenomorphs spawning unexpectedly, b) shooting them with retrievable weapons is the primary way to deal with them with, but c) sometimes the environment will make stealth/strategy the better option.

      So clearly not Alien Isolation, but also not a mostly splatter fest like Survios' "The Walking Dead Onslaught". They have a mostly good track record with VR games and say they are fans of the Alien franchise (but who isn't), so let's hope for the best.

  • Not thrilled by the A: RI inaccurate motiontracker ….
    Hope, PRAY, that that's not a bad omen ….