Ready at Dawn, the Meta-owned studio behind Lone Echo affirmed today that it has largely moved on from its prior PC titles and has begun work on “new, exciting projects”.

Ready at Dawn is the studio behind one of PC VR’s most immersive games: Lone Echo (2017), and its popular multiplayer spinoff, Echo VR. Following the release of those two titles, the studio was eventually acquired by Meta in 2020, and then finally launched Lone Echo II on PC in late 2021.

Between those two points, Ready at Dawn brought its multiplayer spinoff, Echo VR, to Quest, where it has remained a popular social game on the platform and the clear focus of the studio.

But not all of Echo VR made it to Quest in the first place. On PC the game is compromise of two modes, ‘Echo Arena’ (a game of zero-G ultimate frisbee) and ‘Echo Combat’ (a zero-G team shooter). Only ‘Echo Arena’ ever made it to Quest.

Image courtesy Ready at Dawn

Today the studio affirmed it will not be bringing ‘Echo Combat’ to Quest, nor does it plan any future content updates for the mode.

Echo Combat was built specifically for the Rift using PC spec and PC engine specific features as our guidelines for building maps and systems. Moving this game mode over to Quest / Quest 2 would not be possible without major changes to the game itself. Therefore, we want to reiterate that we will not be bringing Echo Combat to Meta Quest. Combat is still available for play [on PC VR].

[…]

Our team loves this community and the work that we’ve put into Combat, but it isn’t feasible for us to continue to maintain. Echo Combat will remain available for play and our servers will continue to operate for our players. Thank you so much to our community that continue to highlight Combat, showcase some top tier gameplay, and always bring a smile to our faces.

And while we had some hope that Ready at Dawn’s silence meant it was busy at work bringing the singleplayer Lone Echo and/or Lone Echo II to Quest, it appears the studio is also ready to leave those projects behind, saying the team has shifted to other projects.

[Regarding Lone Echo II] we are aware some players have reported issues on specific PC set ups, we unfortunately haven’t been able to identify a specific root cause for the crashes reported. Due to this and the fact that the team have shifted over to work on other projects, we have no plans for additional patches or updates to Lone Echo II in the future. This includes bug fixes and localization. We understand this news can be upsetting and apologize for any frustration it may cause.

To that end, the studio has little to share on what’s next, but did confirm that it’s “in the early stages of working on new, exciting projects and can’t wait to share more information about them in the future.”

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It isn’t clear at this point whether those projects will be based on Lone Echo or new IP, nor do we know if they will even be VR titles (but our fingers are surely crossed).

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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."
  • Torsten Balle Koefoed

    Here’s a plan for them: What they should do is to fix all the gremlins and the appalling lack of optimization in the graphics engine of Lone Echo 2. I’m using a brand new PC with i7 12700K CPU, 32GB 3600GHz RAM, and a RTX3070ti, and it runs like shit and looks like shit. And I can see from the reviews that this is common – even with beefier systems.

    • MeowMix

      RTX 3080 here. Runs great, looks great.

      • T2814

        Game could have definitely used some more optimization work but it was not broken. I was able to play LE2 on a laptop with a 1070. Had to dial the graphics and effects back but I was able to play thru the whole game twice without any crashes. Some textures took a while to load in but it was hardly anything game breaking. LE2 had a great ending that really wrapped up Jack and Liv’s adventure so I’m fine with the story ending there.

      • Hymen Cholo

        Yeah, Part 2 ran great on my lowly 3060ti and Ryzen 3100 and Quest 2, and never once crashed on me. At 72hz over link cable I was able to run it at high settings. Great game and series.

    • Apparently this is the norm with tentpole Meta PCVR games.
      Look at “MEDAL OF HONOR: Above & Beyond”, for example.
      These HUGE games that have suffered delay after delay,
      with still a ton of optimazation left to do, yet they’re still pushed out
      the door anyway because they already already so far behind schedule.
      You see this first-hand with that surprise delay of LE2 on Christmas 2020.

  • Guest

    All the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not put that Humpty Dumpty assed C++ back together again (haven’t been able to identify a specific root cause for the crashes).

    • Jonathan Winters III

      Yea, certainly does seem like a weak copout, but perhaps their profits are not big enough to continue support.

    • sfmike

      LOL!

  • Guest

    PC specific features AKA Steaming crock of code that will never get ported to mobile for the masses!

    • Jistuce

      Most multi-platform engines offer features that are only available to specific targets, and generally offer many features only when compiling for Windows(as it is the platform with access to the newest and most powerful hardware). It is hardly unique to this game, or any sort of indication of bad coding. It means nothing more than “Ready at Dawn was not targeting hardware that didn’t exist when they were writing their game”.

  • pablito

    <u>

  • “We don’t even know if they’ll be VR titles ….” lolololol
    OF COURSE they’re VR titles: they’re a VR developer working for a VR company, ffs.
    But man does it suck that LE, LE2 & EC aren’t coming to Quest 2.
    MOHAB shows us that Quest 2 is capable of MIRACLES.

    • I was really hoping for echo combat on quest 2. Now I’m just hoping that they keep the servers up.

  • MeowMix

    ya, I wish they’d just make a Quest2 version of Combat. I’m guessing the maps are too long/big and the 6GB of system ram on the Quest2 [4 GB on the Quest1 !!] isn’t enough, so the maps would need to be redesigned.
    I don’t think most ppl care if it’s crossplatform play with PC; I would think it could be done but it’d be exclusive to QUest2 players.

  • Andrew Jakobs

    Good for them to do something else.

  • Sven Viking

    On PC the game is compromise of two modes

    Comprised?

    • David

      The author definitely meant to say “comprised”, but “comprised of” is also still not recommended. They should say “On PC the game comprises two modes”

      • Sven Viking

        Or “is composed of”. Interesting.

      • VROverLord

        Eh this is par for the course for most online content these days. Editors? PHH what are those? We don’t need no one to check for spelling and grammar errors.

  • Charles

    I had never seen Echo Combat, but that screenshot at the top immediately made me think of Ender’s Game. Looked it up and other people had drawn the same parallel. Interesting.

    • Sven Viking

      They definitely seem to draw some inspiration from Ender’s Game. You can even stack up on other players and push off them etc. Making the enemy gate “down” would be pretty hard on the neck though.

      • Charles

        Nice, that’s pretty cool. Haha I don’t think it would be – I think looking down in a VR headset is more comfortable than other directions, since it takes the pressure from gravity off your face.

  • Jistuce

    Star Citizen released years ago, no matter what the developer says. You can’t say you don’t have a product available when you’re pulling in eighty million a year in sales of said product.

    • huh

      Currently Pre release Alpha full of bugs.
      Only feature fully completed is the “Jpeg Ship Sales Feature”
      Some of these $1000+ ships might be delivered in 2050, if they hurry up :)

  • Ben Moore

    Not feasible? More like they see the climbing lopsided sales numbers the smaller indie developers have seen for the locked down console that is the Quest mobile VR platform, and will focus their efforts on that platform with PC as an afterthought to get a few additional sales. This reminds me all too much of the standard console vs PC problem. PC has potential for powerful setups if people spend enough money on it to be 50% or more powerful than consoles, even on release day, but all that power is wasted when it has to run locked down console ports without any mod support to make them look more like actual PC titles. On top of that, apologizing while giving PC gamers no way to fix their broken code because Lone Echo 1 and 2 (and Echo Combat) are not moddable is inexcusable, but such is the behavior/mentality of Oculus and now Meta owned developers, “We know the games are broken, we’re sorry about that, and we are not going to give you the tools to fix our broken game we’re sorry about that too but we will not let you have the SDK to fix our broken game, please follow us along to our next game series which we will tell you nothing about. By the way preorders are open!”.

    What the game industry has become really disgusts me and we are really in need of a wake up call in the form of a video game crash with how bad the monetization, dlc, pay to win, pay for advantage and faster/easier progression (like Genshin Impact or Diablo Immortal and I don’t even care for that series but what Blizzard has done is predatory) has become.

    Its even worse when the code is so bad it performs badly on more powerful PC hardware. People say, well the console will make the publishers/developers money and then they will make a better game that uses current PC hardware features “next time” . Yeah, right. Many people use the ranged speculative thinking, “give it 2-3 years”, more like wait until the next console releases to actually see old video card features that went ignored because consoles didn’t support it, actually made use of and hyped beyond belief like its some amazing thing many years later. Sigh. No I am not going to bother with sources, just look at the console hardware and compare it to the same year PC hardware features for every release since the x86-64 consoles from 2013 until now. There are likely features in video cards now that will not be utilized until the Xbox Series X2 and PS5 Pro/Premium consoles release with even more powerful hardware. The goalpost will keep moving as the years pass of course, as the PC hardware manufacturers keep adding features that are not used in any games unless it is a rich publisher who can fund a proper PC version and a proper console version and not just a lazy port.

    Even with mod support, you are still relying on other people having to then spend their time not playing the game but making it look better or perform better for you and everyone else, not thinking of how much time it takes to deal with sometimes very messy code or any other problems that happen during mod development like new bugs, crashes to desktop, debugging etc; I would know I spent a lot of time modding games when games actually shipped with SDKs/modkits because nowadays publishers see what skilled people can do to prolong the life of old games and they hate it, because they want to sell you a new game of course, not have you be happy with modding their old game into a fresh new experience. So they lock everything down, encrypt everything like cowards and then run away and abandon it like Ready at Dawn is doing here.

    Not to mention how much developers/publishers in the past have lied about PC versions, saying during preorder time, “PC is our lead platform” to then change once they have your money on release day to “Console A or Console B or Console C (Nintendo console usually) was the actual lead platform because sales numbers, But the PC port is still good enough, well it launches, haven’t tested it yet. We’ll make a better PC game next time.” And then they don’t and the bitter cycle repeats. Sometimes modders like myself can fix things but that is becoming more and more difficult and annoying as the years go on.

  • bluetoothbday

    Ready at dawn has to be the most under productive studio in the world, they shipped all their games years ago with years of delay they have not worked on new content for existing content AND they just started working new content.

    • Okyle Radiston Okage

      RAD was aquired by Meta. Meta is a social engineering company. EchoVR has serious social potential, and due to that, serious social problems.

      I think RAD is trying to clean up the toxic infection, stemming from neglected children, poorly developed men, and the Discord community.

  • ApocalypseShadow

    That doesn’t bode well for a developer to not fix their previous work that has problems, has an immense amount of financial support, yet will not go back and fix it or seek help in fixing it. But are expecting the gaming community to support their next endeavors. Sorry, if you can’t be bothered to try and make things right with your games, don’t expect gamers to buy your future products. I know I wouldn’t.

    I liked The Order 1886 even if a short game on PS4. I wouldn’t be bothered to buy any of their future games with that attitude towards gamers that did buy Lone Echo games but have bugs and issues if I had a Quest headset or Rift. What kind of copout is that? They just lost more respect points. And Facebook is fine with that too while pumping out more music micro transactions for Beat Saber? Totally ridiculous. That’s not a good look for both.

  • Jistuce

    It’s what the developer claims, anyways.

  • ViRGiN

    dude, check out arpara kickstarter. those pcvr elitists shat on us as always, but as always, once again, we were absolutly correct.

  • ViRGiN

    i’m honestly not excited about ‘avalanche’, because it’s not the accesibility that is the problem, it’s the software itself. it will open some doors for some people, but ultimatetly, it’s nothing really awesome with current library.

  • xyzs

    Why do meta buy companies who have success because they do A, to then tell them to do B once acquired? That’s so freaking stupid.

  • VROverLord

    So Lone Echo Part 2 was nothing more than a quick cash grab. It barely continued the story and was shorter than the first one by ALOT. I suspect they got mad at all the push back from most users complaining about it and decided to pull a zuckerborg and thumb their noses at everyone.