Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang and writer Scott Hayden attended the Oculus Game Days 2016 event on Sunday and joined me for a roundtable discussion about their launch title highlights, some analysis about the event, the future of Touch as well as their reflections on the 3 new touch games, price, and comfort ratings. There were 30 launch titles, 6 touch games, and 5 other experiences that will be released either in April or Spring 2017.
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The 3 new touch titles including Dead & Buried, VR Sports, and Rock Band VR. There were not any launch dates or price announced for Touch yet because a lot of the focus was put onto the 30 launch titles that will be released on March 28th.
Some of the most visceral reactions that Ben and Scott had were to the social multiplayer games including Dead & Buried, VR Tennis Online, and Eagle Flight. We also talked about the adventure game Chronos, the polish of Eve Valkyrie, the locomotion innovations of the FPS Damaged Core, the visceral fun of VR Sports, and initial reactions to Rock Band VR and Eagle Flight. The time stamps for the related discussions are down below.
- 00:00 Oculus Game Days
- 02:32 Dead & Buried
- 07:59 Chronos
- 12:41 Eve Valkyrie
- 14:52 VR Sports
- 21:53 Damaged Core
- 24:03 Touch updates
- 32:44 VR Tennis Online
- 33:47 Rockband VR
- 39:41 Eagle Flight
- 42:11 Price
- 44:31 Comfort Ratings
Here’s the full list of games and prices, and here’s a photo of all of the Oculus Game Days launch titles and upcoming releases:
Here's the 30 launch titles & 41 games shown at @Oculus Game Days at #GDC2016 with their prices and comfort ratings. pic.twitter.com/i6Qs4Kv67y
— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) March 16, 2016
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.116] Scott Hayden: I'm Scott Hayden. I'm a writer at Road to VR.
[00:00:15.898] Ben Lang: I am Ben Lang. I'm the co-founder and executive editor of Road to VR.
[00:00:21.261] Kent Bye: Great. So tell me about the Oculus game preview day that you just got back from today, where you got to see a whole bunch of the Oculus release titles and all sorts of information about the launch.
[00:00:32.924] Ben Lang: Yeah, so we saw a number of new titles there today. This was an Oculus kind of invite-only press event, and they wanted to highlight many games that are going to be launch titles for the Rift. And they're saying, like, you know, these are not demos. These are full games. And it's definitely true for some of them. When they say full game, it's maybe not a full game you might think about when you think about a $60 console game, but granted, I think everything there was unique and really interesting in one way or another, and we saw and played some really fun games. And that's something that I've been looking forward to for a really long time, this entire journey, right, of going from no VR to where we're finally about to get hardware that is ready for consumers, and actually get to start playing and having fun with games that have, like, significant depth that developers have spent a lot of time to create, rather than, you know, here's a neat concept, which we've been, you know, doing demos and prototypes on dev kits for years now. And so it's, like, really exciting to see what's coming down the line, and, like, we're right about to be able to play it as the Rift is shipping here starting at the end of this month.
[00:01:45.568] Scott Hayden: I think what's really interesting is that Ben touched upon it about the maturity of a lot of these experiences and games that we tried today. Half of them, more or less, were on touch. And, you know, as we know that these games really aren't ready yet, but we did see a lot of maturity in the touch games that really show that they are pushing forward with it in really unique and interesting ways, too. Like, we saw Dead and Buried, that's one of the bigger experiences that I think that we walked out of saying, wow, you know, I can't wait to get this in my home now.
[00:02:16.900] Kent Bye: Maybe you could describe, like, what was that experience?
[00:02:19.562] Scott Hayden: First of all, let's get back to how it was set up. We were in this round robin. We had eight 30-minute blocks of games. We got a chance to really play the game, talk with the dev, very much like how Valve did it, you know, most recently. So, dead and buried, we were pitted against two other people, and we, of course, linked multiplayer online. And it was a saloon, and it was old-timey West. We had our revolvers and our shotguns and TNT. and we were shooting across this as if it were a gallery. And what really remarkable about it is it was fast-paced, and it gave me the sense that there was something at stake, which isn't always normal in a first-person shooter. I found myself hiding behind boxes, really cowering and jumping and playing, you know, and that's not something that you always do.
[00:03:12.615] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it sounds like there was about, what, like 41 different experiences there?
[00:03:17.138] Scott Hayden: It was a full 41. We had gotten in depth with our scheduled eight, but we did have a chance to dive into, you know, a good number of them.
[00:03:27.111] Ben Lang: Yeah, well, so to be clear, Scott, you mentioned half of them were Touch. Half of the ones that we tried, which was like, you know, like 8 or 10, were Touch. But actually, of the 41 games that were being shown there, only a small portion of them, I think like 5 or so, were Touch titles. And this is of course because Touch, you know, the Rift is shipping at the end of this month, and Touch is not coming for until the second half of the year. And so Oculus made this commitment early on when they set the Rift shipping date that it's gonna come with a game pad with an Xbox One controller. And so, you know, they made that commitment to their developers, you know, you guys, we're not shipping Touch yet, you need to target this input. And so I think there's probably more cool Touch stuff in the works, but they couldn't really put the spotlight on that too hard because it would kind of disparage all the work, you know, that all these developers had done to create these launch titles, many of which are pretty awesome. to work with the gamepad. The nice part about touch though, of course, is that because of the buttons and sticks and triggers that are on there, most of these titles should be forwards compatible. You know, you'll be able to use touch. And if you're playing a game that supports it, you've got it. And then if you play a game that doesn't support it, you can probably just still use the sticks and buttons and triggers to to play it right on there, which is great. And some of the games, they want to get it out there because, like, it's fun, but they, you know, it kind of seems like, oh, well, they could definitely get touch in here, too, and it would probably make it even better. But yeah, I think I was overall pretty impressed with the quality of the touch games that we saw. So Den Buried was one that was really stand out for us. I think it was fun particularly because it was multiplayer, and I think anytime that you're in another VR space with somebody, it's just more fun and more immersive. But so to kind of get an understanding of what this was, it was a first-person shooter, kind of arcade-y feel, and it was this, like, they have this interesting mix of, like, supernatural western, like, mashing those genres together. And so, like, you look at your guns, and they're, like, demon, like, guns, like, from hell or whatever, you know, they're stylized like that, and... the characters that you can pick are like these you know really stylized like cowboys and super badass and so you you pick your character and it was 2v2 and you're standing there you know with the they have the mat around you on your feet so you kind of know the area that that you should largely stay in you have your touch controllers you grab your pistols from your hips and you're just firing You know, it was really fun. So like when you die, you respawn somewhere else and you have like a little bit of cover near you. And like every time, as soon as I died and spawned, I like immediately whipped out my pistols and, you know, went for that cowboy quick draw and was like right on the next guy, bearing down on him, just like firing as fast as I could. And then they have this really fun reload mechanism, which a couple of different shooting games have done this way with a revolver, where you whip it to the side to flip out the chamber and it goes. And then you flick it back and then you're you know, reload it again Just really fun fast-paced and they had different weapons you could use there was no locomotion the game actually except for you Moving so like that meant getting physically down on the ground like on your knees like ducking your head down Like hiding behind a pillar and because it was 2v2 you could get into a situation where like I don't have an angle on that enemy but Scott who's over in the other corner of the room does I'm like Scott this like this guy is like a He's got me pinned down like you can get like suppressed in that game with somebody firing you cuz like you kind of have like a read slowly regenerating health, but you don't like there's no bar It's just like a feel kind of thing like your vision starts to go red and you're like, oh crap Like if I get shot one more time, I'm gonna die So you're like you're in that state where the guys got you pinned down because if you peek up to try to shoot him You're done for and then you're like, you know Scott Scott help me with this guy He's down low on the right like you got the angle and I'm pinned down and And it just, yeah, it was really fun, and exactly what Scott said. I realized, you know, it's late tonight, and I was like, wow, that game was fun, I can't wait to play that when the Rift launches at the end of this month. And I was like, wait, it's on Touch, and we're not gonna get Touch until the second half of the year, and I was very upset. But there were some other pretty darn awesome, exciting, non-touch, you know, gamepad, Rift, games to play that are gonna be launch titles. Like, games I'm genuinely looking forward to getting to play and dig into and not just be like, okay, this was a neat 20-minute VR experience and now I'm gonna show it to my friends, you know, and that's kind of the fun of it. Like, games that have significant depth.
[00:07:53.384] Kent Bye: What were some of the other titles that you played today that really stuck out as, you know, being interesting or fun?
[00:07:59.707] Scott Hayden: I think Ben can talk a lot about Kronos. I think you really very much like Kronos, especially with the fact how in-depth it's going to be, because we really walked away with the sense that there's going to be a good 12-hour block of just constant discovery out of that game.
[00:08:15.264] Ben Lang: on Kronos, actually. We had played a small portion of it, I think, back at Kinect or one of these other shows, and at the time I was like, all right, you know, this is interesting, but it was, it seemed a lot further along and a lot more exciting this time around. And they're saying, yeah, they're saying this is gonna be like a 10 to 12 hour game and like when you hear that today I think a lot of people are like alright 10 to 12 hours you know it's gonna be like procedurally generated and there's gonna be all these like tasks for you to do and it's gonna be kind of a lot of like repetitive churn content but like the guys developing Kronos really feel like they're just making a really awesome adventure game that they want to play and you know I ended up taking our entire demo session time and didn't let Scott play and Because it's like you get in there and you like feel like there's gonna be a very broad game So I didn't want to play like 10 minutes of a potentially 12-hour game I wanted to get as much Into it as I could even in the small amount of time that I had But I did walk away with the sense that these guys are not doing this like, you know We'll put out like an early access ish thing and then we'll like load it up with DLC with this like obvious progression of like monetization with in-app purchases or whatever and It was just like, it feels like an adventure created for VR, and I should talk a little bit about what the game is actually like, and that is, it is a third-person adventure game where you are controlling your character who has, you know, a sword and a shield, and you're exploring this world, and the amount of art in that game which they said they've only been developing for about a year, just absolutely blew my mind. There are some incredible, beautiful vistas in that space that had me looking just all around. And, you know, it's one of these, like, Resident Evil-style games, where when you go from one room to the next, your vantage point is kind of up in the corner. But they are directing these spaces so nicely, where, like, they're setting up these really gorgeous views, and the environment is really detailed, and it's stylized, but the graphics are very impressive. In the early part of the game I was walking along this island where it was like raining and there was a storm going on and I had turned up the volume quite a bit because it was loud in there and I wanted to get like pretty immersed and like they had this lightning and thunder effect going on that like when it flashed like in the corner of my eye and I heard that thunder come like rumbling like I actually jumped I was like whoosh like you know That was thunder. It actually had the visual stimulus and the sound to make me jump like that. I don't think I've ever had lightning in any other game do that to me. I was like, wow, they hit these effects really well. Yeah, just these really memorable visuals. There was this place where I was in a just a gigantic forest where I'm looking up and the tree is, you know, 20, 40 feet wide and just looking up and it almost seems like it doesn't end before it gets up there and just like really richly detailed and got me extremely excited to dig into this game because it really does feel like a deep adventure. that pushes back against, I think, a lot of the short, let's make a game where a player can have fun in 10 minutes at a time, and just, like, bite-sized bits. Like, you could tell just by the checkpoint system alone that they have, where, like, I started at this one checkpoint, and I probably played for 5 or 10 minutes straight, and then I, like, walked off an edge and died. And, like, I just went straight back to the checkpoint. It's like any other game I feel like wouldn't have pushed me that far back, at least many modern games. And I was happy to see that because I'm the kind of person that wants an adventure that has consequences like that, where I made a foolish mistake and I got kicked back. And what they said was that this is not a game that holds your hand. And it seems like it has a lot of potential. I don't want to judge it too much based on the short period of time. But what I saw was very beautiful. It played very well in VR. And I am excited to explore more and hopefully have an adventure in that world.
[00:12:18.825] Kent Bye: Yeah, and this is by the same developers, Gunfire Games, that did the Spirit Peerbound, which they've done a series of different games for the Gear VR that I just played through and just really loved it. So that third-person perspective, I think, is really compelling to be able to minimize any sort of locomotion sickness to be able to have that full adventure. So, yeah. And what other games did you play that also kind of stick out?
[00:12:42.484] Scott Hayden: Well, I had a good chance to play Yves Valkyrie, and I know that's, you know, we've touched upon that a lot, especially, you know, I'm sure your listeners are really, really familiar with it, because it's been around for a long time. But they really are getting to the stage that it's definitely out of Alpha. I mean, we've dropped Alpha already. And when you see it on CB1, you realize what their vision is for it, because it really is this crisp and ready and finalized game that I personally played for hours on end during the Alpha. and I can see myself continuously playing it, because it may not hold everyone's attention, because not everyone is going to be... Number one, if you're into space sims, then you're probably not going to be into arcade space sims, but the dogfighting definitely drives me personally, so that's one of the games that I know, and it's obvious why they've decided to go with it as a launch title, as the bundled launch title among everything.
[00:13:37.865] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a chance to play it at a VRX and was struck by their radar system, which was a kind of a fully 3D radar system where I didn't quite understand how to read that yet, but I could imagine people who can read that and be able to, the more they play it, they can actually bump up their skill levels and I'd imagine that. They've designed it such that they can have these competitions and these dogfights so that the people who are really good at it can consistently win against other people who are not as good and as experienced with it. That's the impression I get at least.
[00:14:09.478] Scott Hayden: I was speaking with one of the developers and he was telling me about how their decision to not include any squadrons or any friends list really wasn't anything out of necessity. But someone had created a mumble server and they had gotten together and created this big group of like, it was like a flight school, they had said. Like they were really focusing in on the sort of tactics that you might learn if you were flying a jet. And obviously, you know, this is still a very arcade game, but there is still some tactical stuff involved. And if you don't know it, you're definitely going to be at a disadvantage. So, you know, I think even outside of that sort of skill level, the real world really does enter into it.
[00:14:52.584] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you know there's a mix of games that we've heard of and new games and so what were some of the new games that you saw that you hadn't heard of before?
[00:15:01.542] Ben Lang: Sure, so there was a Touch game called VR Sports or Sports VR. It was a simple name, but it was executed far better than I would have expected. It was fun. So what they showed us was you're using Touch. They showed us a three-point shooting competition, a slam-dunk competition, and then a football game where you are kind of the quarterback and the receiver. And yeah, it was executed very surprisingly well. I think it is a very different game than a lot of what we see shooters and fantasy games. And I think it could be really appealing to a different kind of demographic. So the three-point shooting contest is, you know, literally you're standing there on a court and it's just like any other three-point shooting contest where you have a rack of basketballs next to you and you you pick one up with your touch controller and you support it with the other hand and you you pop it with your hand and give it that little spin just that right arc and when you hit it right like you can very much feel when you get the rhythm and muscle memory just right you're like yeah that one's gonna land it and you just land it and it's very satisfying because you did it right it's not like you throw it and then there's a percentage chance that's gonna go in and out it's like if you get the right criteria to get that ball out there. That's not to say it's 100% physics driven, but there is definitely a sense of if you master that kind of repetition of how you can toss the ball just right, then you will master getting the ball. And that is really cool. And that is what they're trying to do with the other stuff as well. The football experience in particular was deeper than I thought it would be. It's like you're actually like earning yardage. So like you start as the quarterback and you pick your play by looking at your arm and there's a little playbook there. point of play that you want, you pull the triggers to have the ball snap to you, and you actually have to catch it. It comes flying right at you if you don't catch it, you know, you mess up that play. So you have to catch it, and then you have to look to your receivers and find ones that are, like, they get highlighted in green when they're available, and then you have to throw it, you know, you have to lead them appropriately to throw that ball. If you throw it closely enough to them, you go into this other mode where you actually quickly flip into the body of the receiver, and now you see this slow-motion, semi-slow-motion ball coming at you, and you have to reach out and grab it. And if you grab it just right, you get it, and you get yardage based on how far you actually just threw it as the quarterback. If you don't grab it quite right, you can actually tip the ball, and it'll fly up in the air, and then you can, like, lean, you know, way over to the side to try to recover it, and it's pretty fun. And so, you know, if you mess up your throws, you're actually making progress toward the goal, which is really cool. Then there was the slam dunk competition, which was a little more arcadey, but just as fun, I think. So in this one, your view is underneath the basket, actually, and you see a basketball player, which is actually you. And when you hit the start button, you see him like run up and make the approach from third person. But then you pop into that view. It's in slow motion and you can like put the ball behind your back. You can like throw it and bounce it off the backboard and then catch it and then slam it in. And the first time that I did it, I tried to slam dunk it and didn't put it in quite right and just got like, you know, the rim just totally rejected me. And I like I felt so dumb. I felt like some NBA star going up for the big dunk and just totally flopping it. It was really funny. I was like, damn it. and then you know then you start to get a sense for how to do it and it's satisfying and it's fun to be that was a little more creative in the way they were doing it but it seems like they have other sports based experiences coming down the line and yeah i think starting with the prompt of like let's do like a football thing in vr like i don't think i would have thought of a way to do it with this sort of fun and like authenticity in a way, at least like conceptually, and it's fun. I didn't really expect it to be anything particularly special. It's just like sports VR. I don't know, maybe it was the name that was not super exciting that got me, but I enjoyed it. It had a bit of a challenge. I hope it has some good depth to it, especially when they show the other sports things that they haven't revealed yet, the other sports activities.
[00:19:02.492] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a chance to play selfie tennis at Unity Vision Summit, and there's a couple of interesting things. One was that once you get the hang of it, it actually is compellingly fun to do these physics-based interactions, because a lot of sports involve physics. But the other thing I noticed is that because I'm a tennis player, there's just certain parts of that that my tennis skills were kind of a detriment to what was being modeled in the VR. Like, I actually had to kind of play it in a way that, you know, like in the Wii games with tennis, you kind of eventually learn to just flick your wrist. It's sort of similar where, you know, in real tennis, you're doing a full step and in, you know, and I imagine in basketball, you actually, you need to like actually use your legs and jump and do all these follow through motions that I would imagine would be hard to still replicate. So, Some of these games I think in the beginning are gonna be designed for people to be fun as a game But even if you're not like a action sports, you know athlete hero, you know You're gonna be actually still be able to do it and have fun But I imagine over time that we'll start to get VR simulations that are closer and closer to like the actual sport
[00:20:03.256] Ben Lang: Yeah, well, so I actually when I was in there doing the football one, you know, I haven't ever really been a quarterback before. I've only ever seen it from that top down football field view. And so being down kind of in the trenches there where you see this massive body is running around and you have to find your guy, see him, see if he's open and lead it. Honestly, I think if you just wanted an easy way for a real quarterback just to train their playbook, just to know where they're going to look, where their guys are going to be on the field when they run that play. Like, I think even that game as it is, as long as they put in the actual plays could be an effective tool for doing that, which is like really strange, but you can understand why this is an appealing thing that companies are trying to do. when you can put yourself there, simulate all those people without having to practice, you know, it's so much easier to practice because you don't have to get those real people there doing it, just for that muscle memory of, okay, it's this play, I'm gonna go to this guy first, if he is covered, you know, I know, I've practiced it a thousand times in VR, I know exactly where I'm gonna look for my next guys, and, you know, you can crank up the difficulty, make it harder to, currently they have it as very arcade based, so like, the head of your receiver kind of glows like red if they're too covered to catch it and then it's green when they're ready but you know you can just turn that off and have it be up to the judgment of the player and that's like that's so exciting just to the translation of skills from the like it's not gonna teach you how to throw the football but it's gonna teach you what the play is like so you know like the back of your hand and exactly where you're looking and you know how to respond in different situations and that is an incredible, I think, function of VR that goes beyond gaming.
[00:21:43.533] Kent Bye: Yeah, and actually there's a company that's already been doing that and they're called Stryver and they do a 360 video. So I think VR sports training is totally going to be a thing I think across all the industries. But yeah, just getting back to the actual games that were there, I think you had mentioned there's another game that you said that you felt like that had some really interesting game playing that was really compelling.
[00:22:03.787] Scott Hayden: Damaged Core, absolutely. Damaged core was really surprising because the thing that I'm always looking for because I've played first-person shooters since I was you know a really young teenager I've always wanted to know how it's going to work in VR and if it's going to work in VR and You know clearly we saw today with with dead and buried that you can have a first-person shooter and have very much fun Especially if you have touch But Damaged Core doesn't have touch. It's based on the Xbox controller. But what really interested me about it was that the locomotion that they're using, teleportation, is really very well woven into their story. They give you a reason to want to teleport and to need to teleport. And not in a very, you know, hacky way in the sense that you might just project a ghost of yourself and teleport there because you need to The way that they're doing it essentially is it's a post singularity world where an artificial superintelligence has gone awry and it's your job to hack into their army of robots that are coming at you and and you have to make the decision in real time who to hack, where to go, what robot to use. Maybe you want to use the robot that has the shotgun and this is ability and you want to do it behind the other robots that you can blast them and quickly jump into your third-person camera because there's also cameras around the battlefield so you can always get a good view of where you are. You have so many different places to jump into that at a certain point, I didn't feel really like I was missing out on the WASD, or missing out with your left stick on the Xbox controller. And it was just something that I haven't seen before, and I'm really interested to play it at length, because it was very, very comfortable. Because as soon as you get there, we know with teleportation, as soon as you get there, you're there. And you can engage with the game without having to think about anything else. So it was something that we really need to look a lot more into.
[00:24:04.032] Kent Bye: And since we have been talking about these touch gains on the cusp of the consumer release, but they're not going to be available until later in the year, did they give any specifics about either the price or the launch date of the Oculus Touch?
[00:24:16.455] Ben Lang: Yeah, so this was one thing that I was actually, I put out a piece about what my predictions were for Touch and, well, for kind of all the big three companies. But my thought was for Touch was, like I said a little bit earlier, they can't put the highlight too much on it because they made this commitment to these developers early who have, you know, Oculus in many situations has committed money to these developers. to create game pad based games for launch. And so my thought was they're not going to tell us anything more specific about the price and the launch date because they would risk at that point over kind of putting a wet blanket on these launch titles and game pads because Touch is really cool, but it's definitely not the only way for VR. I mean, I think Kronos makes that completely clear. even when Touch is out, I think Kronos is probably played best without motion controls. You know, maybe they could get them in there, but the way that it works third-person style, it just works very well with a gamepad. And so, you know, they spent, a lot of these developers spent a lot of time doing this. And so this turned out to be the case as far as, you know, unless they make some announcement later, but it seems unlikely. So no additional information other than, you know, what they've stuck to, which is second half of 2016, and no information about pricing. And I think that is largely a combination of the fact that they, want this initial launch of the gamepad. I mean, they're saying, like, this is serious. Like, these games are great games. You know, they sound super proud about their launch library, and they're all gamepad-based. And they're saying, like, gamepad VR games can be good VR games. And I think in several instances, they have shown that to be the case. here. So they want to not overrun that with getting excited about touch too early. So I think that's why they kept kind of only a couple of touch games there rather than having everything be touch. And then getting consumers excited for something that they can't actually have until later in the year when they can get the headset earlier, but it's not going to be all those touch games. Right.
[00:26:15.232] Kent Bye: I wanted to point that out just because in this podcast, we're talking about some of those because it is, you get a lot of presence with Touch, but yet, I think there are a lot of compelling games, like you said.
[00:26:23.855] Scott Hayden: I think the fun thing that we took away from it is when we walked into VR Sports, we were like, well, there's a little box. There's a little black box. And it was the box they'd given the developers. And it looks very much like the Touch box, very much like the one that's going to be with the Rift. magnetic latches, very much a ready solution. So, I mean, they were giving it to everyone, and it was on every table in there. So, I mean, they're very much chumming the waters for the get-go.
[00:26:54.412] Ben Lang: Yeah, so I talked with Jason Rubin there, who is head of Oculus Studios, and I'll have a fuller interview with him, but we did talk about Touch a little bit, and one of the things he said was like, you know, for the Rift launch here, like, we didn't want to launch the Rift until we had a content library that we are confident in. That when people bought this, they have games to play that are going to be satisfying and exciting and really justify their purchase. And he, you know, made the same argument for Touch. You know, we're not going to put it out until that library is there. And, you know, it was kind of unclear whether or not he was suggesting that, like, Touch is pretty much ready, but they're just waiting for the content, or I'm sure there's some parallel development going on there, but I hope and think it's a smart idea for them to, you know, if they can get the same number and quality of titles as they have for the Rift launch, for Touch launch, I think that would be potentially a big win for them. they do have to worry about the you know the vive timeline which is you know the clock is already ticking vive already has motion controllers people will be getting that soon and if that touch experience is kind of seen as the the really compelling thing right now for most people then they might just say well i can get it you know here at vive quickly so We'll see. I think the sooner they can get it out, the better. And there's experiences, as I said, I'm very excited to be able to actually play Dead and Buried with Scott at some point over the internet. He lives in Italy, and I'm in Philadelphia. And we're going to be able to feel like we're there ducking and hiding and covering each other and doing teamwork and fighting other real players, and I'm like just really excited to be able to do that. One little random anecdote of that of, you know, he's in Italy, I'm in Philly, but we feel, you know, we're close via VR. Today when we were playing, the locations you can be in Dead and Buried are like, they're kind of node-based, so they're kind of placed around the environment, and you don't really have a choice. You just kind of appear and you shoot there until you die. You can duck and hide and whatever, but...
[00:28:57.869] Scott Hayden: and they still haven't really decided on how that's gonna work. That's the way they did it now, because it's the quickest and easiest way.
[00:29:05.235] Ben Lang: They told us they're still working on how they might give options for locomotion, but basically Scott had spawned next to me, and there was a gun that I could have walked over potentially to go grab, but I would have bumped into him. And so, like, in my mind, I was like, I can't do that because if I walk to my right, like physically in real life, in the tracking volume, then I will bump into Scott because he's standing right next to me. But actually in real life, he was in, you know, the next cubicle down, he wasn't actually standing next to me. And yet, with the action going on and the immersion happening, my brain was like, don't walk over there, especially with the positional audio, because this demo had voice through the headsets and with the positional audio, so I hear him coming out of my right ear, like he's standing right where his character is, like two or three feet to my right, and I can't run over there, I'll just bump into him, so I'll need to leave that gun be, but I'll get it another time, and it just occurred to me, I was like, I just had this innate sense, human sense, that our brain is just constantly mapping the environment around us and it informs a lot of It's held there, even though we're not looking at it. We have a sense of where things are, not like a sixth sense, but that we've seen it. Our brain kind of keeps it in our head because it's useful information for later. And that was like I had mapped from all of the cues, the fact that he was in the corner of my eye, the fact that it sounded like he was right next to me, and the fact that we were both engaged in doing something that was impacting the environment. I had mapped the fact that he existed three feet to my right when it was completely false. And it just felt to me like his person was there and that I would bump in. It wasn't even like, should I? No, I shouldn't. It was just such an automatic function of, I'm not even going to do that because of that feeling of him right over there. And even though I'm not looking at him, I would crash into him. There was nothing but air there in real life. It was a really interesting moment.
[00:30:54.325] Scott Hayden: which is where like the danger comes in because you have that very visceral sense that you exist and the other person across the room is shooting at you and although you know the bullets had this sort of very slow arc to them and you could very much look down the barrel of your gun and look at the sort of ghostly laser that was coming out of it so that you could line it up you still very much felt like like at one moment I threw a dynamite stick and I didn't throw it right because I'm a little bit nerdy and I'm not very good at throwing I was worried about it, and I threw it wrong, and it bounced back behind me, and I just... I have to scramble to get it, and I blew up, and I was worried. I think I might have screamed a couple times, and when I got out of it, people might have been looking at me. But it was an experience that you immediately hook into because there's danger, because there's people around you that are helping you. There's so many factors involved that that's what immersed us.
[00:31:51.366] Ben Lang: I think there was definitely a sense of when someone is shooting you and you're pinned down, like you're really pinned down. Like I need to get my body physically behind this table. And if that means like kneeling down on my knee and just like ducking my head like really low and actually getting physically moving around like quite a bit if I have to do that that's what I have to do because I'm gonna die if I don't get behind that cover so like when you spawn in a vulnerable space like some of the spawns just put you in the middle pretty much of everything and there wasn't a lot of cover and it felt so vulnerable like oh crap there is no cover for me to get behind right now and Those were some of the moments where your only defense was offense. You'd whip your pistols out and just try to suppress that person enough that they won't be able to be a threat for a little bit. But I totally felt that sense of when there was not good cover of being in danger and wanting to hide behind something so that I didn't get shot and die.
[00:32:45.126] Kent Bye: I'm just wondering if you had any other experiences that you thought are worth a small mention or games that you didn't get a chance to play that you wish you could have.
[00:32:55.277] Ben Lang: Yeah, so two that I'll mention real quick. One was, I think it was just called VR Tennis Online, and this was a game by a Japanese studio, kind of still in development, but it was pretty much like Mario Tennis, just done in VR. And Scott and I played that against each other, and We kind of both agreed the game probably could exist without VR. It could just be Mario Tennis. But the fact that it was a VR game that we were playing together just made it so much more fun. I think some of the most fun that we had today were experiences that were other real people that we were playing with, which was Denbury, the tennis game, Eagle Flight. where like we knew that the other characters in the world were real people and that almost makes the world more real and important and the game more fun so the tennis game was just fun because it was because it was you you know what i mean and we were having fun together then the other one i'll talk about is rock band vr so this was the first time that they had showed that after revealing it a couple months ago and there is a little adapter basically that you put on the back of the head of a rock band guitar controller and then you basically slide the touch controller in there which does your tracking for you and it tracks fairly well. It made the guitar a little heavy on the head end but it didn't ultimately affect anything. And what they were showing was, they called it legacy gameplay. And really, you know, they're just, they're still early in development. And so they kind of just had you looking down at the ground where the little, where the notes were coming by and it was like kind of at your feet. And so there's this like crowd in front of you and you're in this pretty cool area that feels like you're in a, you know, you're in a rock band there and everybody's rocking out, but then like, you're stuck kind of looking at your feet to watch the notes go. So they're saying that around E3 time, they're going to be revealing how they're going to actually really integrate it, so you can pay more attention to the audience and feel like you were there. Because it's a shame. I'm looking at my feet, and I see up in my peripheral that there's this excited crowd, and I want to get into it, but I have to look down at the notes there. So it was kind of a little... I'm excited to see where they take it so that you can actually be more involved in kind of like performing there as a guitar player. And I was a little unfortunately disappointed to hear that they don't really have plans to bring any other instruments, not even bass guitar, but definitely not, you know, drums keyboard. At this point they don't have any expectation to bring those to Rock Band VR, which for me, kind of defeats the purpose, because we just talked about how some of the most fun we have is the social stuff, where we are either on a team together or, you know, playing against each other. Think about the rock band experiences, like how much more fun it would be to have, you know, your friend is actually the drummer there, your other friend is actually the bassist over there, and, you know, they're not really planning on doing that right now. So I hope it gets there, you know, I hope it's successful enough in kind of a single-player form that they realize that sharing those experiences with your friends where you all feel like you're immersed is even more immersive.
[00:35:52.069] Scott Hayden: It's interesting because I don't know how they would do that with the peripherals, because like you said, there was this holster, essentially, that they had created that they stuck on the back of this PS3 guitar, you know, for Rock Band. While that worked very, very well for the guitar, yeah, I don't really physically know how they would do that and create it well for the others. I mean, that's something they've got to figure out.
[00:36:13.340] Ben Lang: So the only other instruments would be drums, which would definitely be the challenging one. Because even if you could kind of somehow stick sticks on the end of them or use virtual sticks or whatever, you need that feedback of the stick hitting the drum and bouncing back. The only other instrument, as far as I know, is the keyboard. And you should be able to just slap touch on the end of that just in the same way. It has this little peripheral. It's almost like you can use it as a keytar. So it has kind of an end to it. So you could put it on there, too. And then that worked pretty well, because your fingers Ah, you'd probably need to track your fingers, unless... Yeah, okay, that would be hard. Yeah, unless... Although, you know, granted, your fingers aren't tracked on the guitar peripheral.
[00:36:55.708] Scott Hayden: But you don't look down at your fingers when you play the guitar. Because you have that tactile sense of the buttons anyway, and you're busy looking and strumming, right?
[00:37:03.573] Ben Lang: Do you think a good piano player looks down at their fingers when they do? Or do they just see it coming and they have that feeling?
[00:37:10.457] Scott Hayden: Are you a good piano player? We're about to start a fight on a podcast. I don't want to start a fight on a podcast.
[00:37:16.320] Kent Bye: Just a meta note there. I think that eventually we're gonna start to see like augmented reality Games that you sit down an actual keyboard and it's gonna teach you how to play, you know I'm as we're talking here and imagining like how great would it be to be able to take a MIDI keyboard? Plug it in and to be able to somehow do some Low-level tracking of where the keys are and then just to be able to learn how to play the actual piano I think we're gonna start to see that probably within the next year and that's the type of stuff that I would love to see but we're talking about things that are you know things that in reality that are actually really difficult to do and They're turning them to a game. So they're doing some sort of like abstract generalization to make it kind of a simpler mechanism for people who are not professional musicians to be able to go in and have an experience as if they were so and That's where they're, when I see where it's at, and I think we'll get there with these different peripherals. The demand will be there for people to play all the different instruments. It's just a matter of how successful it is to kind of have like a, a karaoke type of experience where there's just a single or person doing it rather than the whole band.
[00:38:18.497] Ben Lang: Yeah, actually, we didn't really talk about the singing aspect, too. That's another instrument that would be easy to translate into VR, because at that point, you're just holding the touch controllers. And then you can pull the mic off the top of the stand and wave the stand around, whatever kind of crazy rocker thing. Yeah, like I said, I hope that they can bring in more of that rock band group element, as opposed to just having the guitar. So hopefully, it will be successful as a standalone thing. There will be demand to make it that broader thing. As far as Rock Band goes, I think the whole dream of that game is a neat way to interact with music that you love, like kind of a more interactive way of listening to music, as opposed to, I think some people mischaracterize it as being like, it's not even like you're really playing the guitar. It's like, that's not the point. It's not supposed to be like I'm really playing the guitar. It's supposed to be like I'm... in the same way that I might whistle or hum or tap my foot to a song, I'm participating a little bit in it and getting a sense of it and being part of it. And I think that VR only makes that better. So I think it's a really nice fit of feeling like you're really in the venue there, then you're really the rocker. So hopefully they drive that kind of performance element of it where you're encouraged to rock out and go crazy as opposed to just sitting there very statically, just like click, click, click, click, click, playing the song.
[00:39:33.729] Kent Bye: Did you have any other final thoughts?
[00:39:35.312] Scott Hayden: Well, final thoughts. We did see a lot today. We saw a lot today and I'm especially jet-lagged. We saw Eagle Flight, which has gone through several stages. Of course, it's not finished at all in the sense that they haven't announced any dates. It is looking a lot more shaping up to be a full game. That's what they're really billing it as. They've refined their dogfighting elements. They have maybe two or three more gameplay styles that they're trying to really squeeze into it. And it's fun. I think that's also an important note. I did have fun playing Eagle Flight. It was one of those games where they touched upon the social aspect of it very well. And I would have liked to have seen that a little bit more, actually, because we didn't have any voice chat. And although it makes sense, you know, from a technical standpoint, not to offer it in a room with four people that are sitting next to you, I would have liked to have been able to know, you know, who's on my team, Where are we flying for? Are we going to create formations? That can be very useful for Eagle Flight. And I think that if they continue developing for it and they make greater strides in the maps, again, we saw, you know, anyone who's played Eagle Flight or seen a previous prototype, it's, you know, a repurposed set of assets from Assassin's Creed. It's Paris with no one in it. If they continue forward with that and create more spaces for it I can see that there because the locomotion is quite refined It's quite comfortable for what it is Considering it's a gazed based input so
[00:41:05.535] Kent Bye: Awesome. And any other thoughts, Ben? And just to wrap things up, any thoughts about price or anything else that just is left unsaid that you feel like you want to say as we wrap things up?
[00:41:15.178] Ben Lang: I'm just excited to actually start playing these games and especially these social ones. I think anybody out there developing right now who is not thinking of a way to do something like co-op or multiplayer, is probably selling their game short unless they have a very honed single-player adventure like Chronos, for instance. I think it shouldn't be underestimated how much immersion can be added to a game merely by having another player in the space with you doing things with you. Even though, you know, your hardware is all the same, your tracking is all the same, that element of Well, I feel like that person is a real person and they're interacting with this world So by extension this world almost feels more real. I think that's really Important the the games that like if I could pick a couple of games out of the lineup that we saw today That I just would get to take with me today. I think it would be all of the multiplayer ones I think those would all be at the top of my list in terms of just the fun that I had and what I would like to play again and
[00:42:12.765] Scott Hayden: It's interesting, we haven't gone into price yet, and I think that's a big discussion. It's a pretty wide set, a lot of the Gear VR ports are going from 5 bucks to 15 bucks. You know, really, what you might consider very reasonable, you know, for even on Gear VR, it's not that much more on Rift as it is on Gear VR. Those big multiplayer games, you know, I'm just looking right now, like Chronos is, you know, $49.99. That's a 12-hour game that may very well justify the price. I'm not going to go too deep into it because that might even be the discussion for another product.
[00:42:42.819] Ben Lang: We don't really know yet, but I think if there's one game on that list that feels like at this time it might justify that price, it would probably be that game. I think traditionally we've seen shorter games, so I think the price is kind of all over the place. What are some of the other ones that are on the high end of pricing there?
[00:42:58.541] Scott Hayden: Let's see, we have here the Climb, that's a $49.99 price point. It goes only higher than that on one game on our list, and that is Elite Dangerous Deluxe Edition. That's $59.99.
[00:43:15.016] Ben Lang: That is the standard pricing of the desktop version, right?
[00:43:19.200] Scott Hayden: I'm unclear on what the Deluxe Edition entails.
[00:43:23.401] Ben Lang: Yeah, I think we will have to, based on this list alone, it'll be interesting to run the numbers and to see what the average is, but I think that we'll have to slowly reach a consensus about what is a VR game, first of all. Is it a thing that is fun for an hour or two hours, or is it like Chronos, where it could be, you know, 10? And how are these games going to be priced? I think it's kind of, To me, I see just kind of a smattering of prices and there doesn't seem to be a super consistent pattern of like, oh, all the multiplayer games are more expensive or whatever. It seems kind of like people are just like, not really sure. And I think consumers aren't going to be really sure. And over time, we will get to a point where we In the same sense that we have an idea like, what should a console game cost, what should a PC game cost, versus what should a mobile game cost, I think we'll need to slowly get that sense of what it will cost. And it'll just take time for some people to say, oh, that game's way too expensive, or that game's a steal, you know? And we'll get there. It'll be interesting to see, though. I mean, none of the games on this list exceed $50, is that right? Yeah.
[00:44:28.812] Scott Hayden: EVE Valkyrie Founders Pack is $59.99. So maybe one last thing we could cover is the comfort rating. And this has been a part of their Gear VR store. And right now, I see they're going from intense, moderate, to comfortable. Never do they touch upon uncomfortable. What is intense? This is something that they're defining as well. And what meter they're using to come up with that is also going to be something that they need to communicate directly to the consumer.
[00:44:58.053] Ben Lang: Yeah, and one developer that we spoke with was saying, you know, it's not exactly clear what criteria they're using for that. So it may be largely a subjective thing. This was very tough to judge, too, because, you know, we know for a fact that some things make some people sick and other thing and the same thing might not make someone sick and vice versa. In many cases, it's like really hard to tell exactly who and how many people get sick. I think that developers though, I mean, I think Oculus essentially is not going to allow the most extremely poorly adapted, you know, VR games, even if it's a great game, if the discomfort is just too much. That being said, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was shown in here in VR, and this is just like a straight-up At least there were other control options. I don't know if they have blinking or anything, but the way that I played it today was straight up, you know, stick control. Just walking forward where you're sliding like any old FPS and turning with your stick, which is, you know, essentially a huge, only do this if you want to make your customers feel crappy. And I was feeling that while I was in there. You're changing elevation, you're just sliding around and your body doesn't like that, like some of these other systems that people are devising. So, you know, it's unclear if you'll be able to make a game that's highly uncomfortable and get it approved, or who gets to make that call. If you're a big game like Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you know, you can still slide in there even though it might be kind of uncomfortable. Granted, I didn't have enough time to see if there were other options that actually cut that out. I think they might have had the, like, blink turning, but I don't know about actual blink movement, but yeah, maybe too early to say on that, so. I just, the way that you can set it up to play it, at minimum, can be uncomfortable, I suppose I should say.
[00:46:44.778] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a chance to talk to Sam Watts outside of Radiology, and that was the game that was rated intense. And I'd imagine because of the different sensitivities that people have to VR locomotion, there's a number of triggers that we know of, some of them, but, you know, I think over time they may be able to dial it in into specific things that are triggers. I know that y'all rotation by the stick is a huge trigger for me. And I just know that when I start to see it, I just feel like, okay, this is going to make me sick. You stop. People will start to adapt that, but there may be more sophisticated ways of dialing in to the specific things that make it intense. But it may be just a judgment where they're giving it to the sensitive people, and if it makes the sensitive people uncomfortable, then that may be part of their reasoning for rating it intense. So yeah, I think we covered it here. Very intense day. Thank you guys for coming by and to give us your debriefing on some of this. And this will be going out first thing on Wednesday morning. And yeah, I'm super excited to be able to check out some of the stuff myself. And yeah, getting ready for the rest of the week here at GDC. So thanks for coming by.
[00:47:50.227] Ben Lang: Great. Thanks very much, Kent. Yeah, thanks, Kent. It was a lot of fun.
[00:47:53.420] Kent Bye: And thank you for listening! If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voicesofvr.
