Sanzaru Games and Oculus Studios showed off a new demo for their upcoming melee adventure Asgard’s Wrath at this year’s E3. We got a chance to not only jump in to see more of the game’s questing, but also get a feel for the scope of the world ahead.
HTC launched Viveport, their VR game marketplace, back in August 2016 to relatively little fanfare. It didn’t boast any compelling exclusives or big draws when it came to content deals, and was notorious for being a buggy, unstable mess. It essentially left Vive users scratching their collective heads as to why anyone would ever want to use it over Steam. Now that three years have passed, and the platform has opened up support to Oculus Rift and Windows VR headsets, you’re probably wondering if Viveport is still to be avoided, or if you should give it another chance.
With the release of Oculus Quest, more and more players are jumping into Beat Saber. And while it’s easy enough to cut cubes to the beat, there’s a trick to achieving the highest score. Here’s how scoring works in Beat Saber.
Virtuix, the company behind the VR treadmill Virtuix Omni, debuted their previously announced VR eSports attraction ‘Omniverse VR Arena’ at the Dave & Buster’s location in Austin, Texas this past week.
Job Simulator (2016), the popular simulator parody game from Owlchemy Labs, served up a sequel on PC VR headsets back in April—its more laid-back cousin Vacation Simulator (2019). Starting today, users on PSVR can get into fun too, and just in time for the summer vacation season.
A year ago, in response to Sony consistently delivering high-quality exclusives for PS4, Microsoft made a commitment to rejuvenating its first-party game development efforts and went on a shopping spree, acquiring a handful of respected studios to bolster its first-party game development talent under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Whether purposeful or not, almost half of the studios now belonging to Xbox Game Studios have had a hand in VR development.
After the Fall is an upcoming co-op VR zombie shooter that promises to let groups of up to four players battle for survival within a zombie infested landscape. Revealed last week at E3 2019, the game’s first demo offered visual polish underscored by bland gameplay that isn’t playing to VR’s strengths.
Survios just released its music-making platform Electronauts (2018) on Quest, letting you build, drop, and remix tracks using the DJ app’s clever VR-native controls. What’s more, if you already own Electronauts on Rift (purchased through the Oculus Store), you’ll be able to jam for free on Quest.
Developer Beat Games last week revealed a new ‘360 mode’ for their VR hit Beat Saber. Notes can now come from all around the player instead of just straight ahead. While it feels like a fun new way to play, it makes beat mapping considerably more complex. It’ll take innovative and creative mapping to really make 360 mode great, and for that, Beat Games should turn to its community.
Backed by Oculus Studios, Sanzaru Games’ next big title for Rift, Asgard’s Wrath, doesn’t have a release date yet, although at E3 this week I got a chance to try out the latest demo, which reveals more of the game’s story, dungeon crawling, light puzzles, and magical beast companions.
Against Gravity, the studio behind the popular social VR game Rec Room, has raised an addition $24 million in venture capital across two investment rounds.
The developer of Virtual Desktop, a Quest app which allows users to stream their PC desktop to the headset for use in VR, says that after the recent addition of a feature which allowed SteamVR games to be played on Quest, Oculus is forcing him to remove the feature.
This week at E3 2019, Oculus is showing their first ever demo of Lone Echo II, the anticipated followup to 2017’s Lone Echo. While the first game was an achievement in VR locomotion, interaction, and storytelling, Lone Echo II aims to up the ante with more dynamic gameplay, which starts with a new enemy that’s a more dynamic threat than anything seen in the original game.
Neat Corporation, the studio behind stealth VR game Budget Cuts (2018), unveiled a new VR project late last month called Garden of the Sea. The game, which puts you on a magical island where you tend to your garden, gather resources, and raise local fauna, is out now in Early Access.
LOW-FI is an upcoming VR game from the veteran indie VR developer behind TECHNOLUST (2016). The game presents a dark but plausible future where most of the population lives in a VR simulation, while at the same time the city’s poor inhabitants live unseen on the streets of the real-world. They are the ‘low-fi’.
