Meta announced at its Quest Gaming Showcase today that Resident Evil 4 (2021), the official VR port which came to Quest 2 last year, is getting a surprise launch of ‘The Mercenaries’ DLC today.
Veteran developer Schell Games, behind well known VR titles like I Expect You to Die and Until You Fall, announced today it has signed with Meta to deliver three new Quest games in the next two years.
Meta today announced “major improvements” coming to Quest 2’s controllerless hand-tracking capability. The ‘re-architected computer vision and machine learning approach’ is said to specifically improve reliability for overlapping or fast moving hands and specific gestures. The SDK and OS update to enable these improved capabilities will begin rolling out today.
Little Cities is an upcoming city creation game for Quest that looks to bring much of the same city simulator flair to VR of prolific series such as Cities: Skylines and Sim City. Originally set to launch on April 21st, now the pint-sized city simulator has been delayed by about a month.
Purple Yonder and nDreams announced the delay of Little Cities, which pushes it to May 12th. Read the full statement below:
Together with Meta, we have decided to move the release of our upcoming VR game, Little Cities, to May 12. We feel that launching in this quieter week will give Little Cities the best chance to make the biggest impact.
These decisions are never easy, and we apologise to everyone who is eagerly awaiting our game. This is purely a scheduling decision; Little Cities is 100% complete. We cannot wait for you to get your hands on Purple Yonder’s charming, cozy city creator on May 12, and the husband-and-wife team is already hard at work on new, free post-launch updates. More info coming soon.
Little Cities is officially coming to Quest and Quest 2 on April 21st.The studio also threw out a new release date trailer which includes a bit more gameplay. In it, we get a look at some newly revealed island types, including volcanic islands which bring the risk of eruptions. This is offset somewhat by geothermal vents which can be used to power cities. We also see desert islands, which feature sandstorms that can be quelled with trees.
Purple Yonder also shows off Archipelagos which it says bring the challenge of building bridges to efficiently connect your different neighborhoods.
“Each island also features its own set of unique buildings that you will unlock as your city grows from a humble settlement to a bustling metropolis. These include a thermal spa and a water park on Volcano islands and an aquarium and a stadium on Tropical islands,” the studio says. Check out the new trailer, linked below.
In it, Purple Yonder says you’ll be able to build cities in the classic fashion, albeit by hand via Touch controllers; start by building simple roads and carefully zone your islands according to residential, commercial or industrial.
Keep citizens happy by giving them power, water and network connectivity. Making sure there’s adequate fire fighters, police, school, and hospital coverage will keep the population growing.
The game will be playable both seated and in room-scale mode, letting you move around like a veritable Godzilla as you manage your town from above.
Little Cities will be Purple Yonder’s second VR title following the release of Oculus Go zombie shooter Zed Shot (2016). There’s still plenty to learn about Little Cities in the coming months. The studio says it’s slated to arrive on the Quest platform sometime in Spring 2022.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual apps are performing across its VR storefronts, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the top 20 Oculus Quest games and apps as of April 2022.
There’s a few really great art apps for VR already, like Tilt Brush, Kingspray, and Gravity Sketch, but few focus solely on painting on virtual canvas. Now Painting VR, a painting simulator that lets you mix and use fresh paint while creating on realistic canvases, is officially out of is Early Access period on App Lab, coming to the Meta Quest Store for Quest and Steam for PC VR headsets.
Epic Games announced it’s doubled the amount of cash it raised last year to kick off its metaverse ambitions. Now the company, which owns Unreal Engine and popular battle royale shooter Fornite, says it’s secured $2 billion to further build out its future metaverse platforms.
Meta announced earlier this week it would eventually allow creators to sell items on its social VR platform, Horizon Worlds, adding that the company would take around 50% of revenue as its cut. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth now says however Horizon Worlds is also getting a web-based version at some point which will feature lower creator fees.
HTC announced this week it is making available an OpenXR public beta for the Vive Focus 3. OpenXR is designed to make it easier for developers to create a single app that’s cross-compatible with multiple OpenXR-supporting headsets.
Earlier this week Meta announced that it would begin testing tools to let creators sell things for real money in Horizon Worlds and would charge a fee of 47.5% of their earnings. The fee structure seemed at odds with prior comments from Meta which have criticized app store fees from the likes of Apple and Google. Now Apple is accusing the company of hypocrisy.
Rec Room, a social VR game which also supports non-VR devices like PC, console, and mobile phones, has reached an impressive 3 million monthly active VR users, which the company says is just a fraction of its total monthly active usership.
