Ironbelly Studios and TectonicVR are bringing a new built-for-VR open world title to the HTC Vive, set within the medieval era, and it’s looking mighty promising too.
Ever held a yearning to live in a time where life expectancy was in the low 30s, your days were filled gathering wood, murdering animals with sticks and making things out of molten metal? Well, Ironbelly Studios and TectonicVR have the perfect virtual reality experience for you. It’s called Yore VR and it promises an open world sandbox experience, on which has been built from the ground up for virtual reality and, it’s set during medieval times.
As to what you get to in that sandbox, the answer is: You get to build it. Players beginning their adventure in Yore VR will enter the environment with no home and the opportunity to build ‘Yore Town’ from the ground up. You’ll need to mine and gather ore and wood, build smelters and blacksmiths in order to progress your construction plans.
After you have your home town defined, from there you get to dive into the surrounding area, hunting deer using bows and crossbows, harvesting meat and generally trying to survive. How aggressively you hunt has an effect on how the wildlife you’re slaughtering responds to your presence in the world too – via the game’s reputation system. Although we’re unclear what other options virtual vegetarians have for food in the game.
“We have been working with indie developers for years to offer our services at affordable prices in order to level the playing field with larger studios” said Ryan Wiancko, Managing Director of Ironbelly Studios. “We aim to bring this efficiency as well as a long history of working with Unreal 4 and VR into the development process in order to help deliver the first open world sandbox game built from the ground for VR.”
On a visual note, Yore VR looks great. It presents a romantic, almost idyllic (and perhaps somewhat stereotypical) medieval ‘fantasy’ world all built with a keen eye on consistent art style and a dash of authenticity. The perfect escape from our modern, technology-dominated modern lives perhaps.
The game’s developers have spent a lot of time considering locomotion. Their “sick no more” system tweaks view-able FOV during movement for example, diminishing the likelihood of motion sickness on set for those who are particularly prone, as well as offering adjustment to walking speeds too. There’s also a keen desire to provide options to tweak the visuals to match your system’s capabilities, another marker of the care the developer is taking with user experience.
You get the sense from the teams various dev vlogs and blogs that they’re really passionate about the game and this is trickling down into a lot of care and attention to important details. The game is already available for HTC Vive via Steam Early Access for $14.99 with user feedback very positive thus far.