Does VR finally have its first must-play triple-A game?
2016 is the year virtual reality ceases to be a part of a hazy futurist’s dream and finally becomes, well, a reality. Oculus, HTC and Sony are all readying for the release of the first home-use displays, commercially available (and more importantly, affordable) hardware that threatens to be one of the most transformative and important pieces of technology humanity has seen in decades. But there isn’t an architectural, medical, or even educational drive behind the emerging technology; it’s videogames taking charge of this incredible innovation.
Virtual reality can offer the same escapism that’s been so dangerously peddled by sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll over centuries – metaphysically sweeping the user away to a mindaltered state, regardless of time, place or age. This emerging tech might offer that same transformative opportunity, only it does it without the same side effects. It can turn us into adventurers or artists, or even – as EVE: Valkyrie has so successfully demonstrated – astronauts. Virtual reality’s first triple-A blockbuster isn’t just warping towards a new horizon for interactive entertainment, it’s shooting for the stars too.
CHALLENGING YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS
“A lot of the time, we put people in VR and they won’t move,” chuckles EVE: Valkyrie’s lead designer Andrew Willans, acutely aware of how much of a shock to the system virtual reality can truly be. “You put this amazing headset on and you’ve got this whole world all around you. You can look to see where the enemy is in a three-dimensional space and target them, [but] people won’t. Everyone just sits there facing forward… it’s really hard to shake that mentality, to teach people that they can look around and do all of this fun stuff.”
We are among the first in the world to get our hands on a near content-complete version of Valkyrie, as well as our eyes inside the consumer build of Oculus Rift. Faced with the prospect of spending a few hours – as opposed to minutes, which was the case with most VR demos we’ve experienced over the years – inside a virtual world summons a little terror interlaced with unbridled excitement in the pit of our stomach. Can VR really sustain a full gaming session or would the tech be revealed as the clever parlour trick we’ve always suspected it could be?
As with most VR related queries, all questions are answered with an Xbox One controller in the hands and a plastic box strapped to the face. The first step to understanding the power and potential of VR is to understand that it is, intrinsically, not a type of gaming experience that flourishes by the user “facing forward”. And yet Willans knows better than anyone how difficult it can be to challenge instinctual and preconceived gaming habits.
Our first moments with Valkyrie had us sat in a glistening hanger bay; behemoth ships could be seen through a window to the right, a gorgeous star system off to the left. “Look behind you,” he urges. We take a sheepish glance over our shoulder and see the hanger is clearly part of a much larger, sprawling ship. “No, seriously,”Willans begins to plead, “look behind you.” Almost leaning out of our chair we finally see what he means. There’s a bar, the Crow’s Nest, hiding there and neontinged walkways that look like they’ve been ripped straight out a next generation System Shock. That’s when we really begin to look around, feverishly absorbing the sights and sounds of CCP’s incredible creation. It’s awe-inspiring, and we haven’t even clambered into a cockpit yet. All we want to do is get up and explore, it’s a space worth exploring but we can’t; there’s an intergalactic war to be fought against the five pilots jacked into the game sat just across the way from us.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
It is very difficult to believe, or even understand, the appeal of a game like Valkyrie without experiencing it for yourself. The promise of VR gaming has always been incredible, if not slightly unbelievable. You sit down and strap on a pair of goggles, move nowhere, and yet you're transported anywhere. Getting your head around the 360-degree space, and understanding that what surrounds you isn't just set dressing but an integral part of the game experience is one of the biggest hurdles facing any adopter. A big part of the wonder and thrill comes from not only being surrounded by the chaos, but being completely, almost overwhelming part of it, and Valkyrie does a great job of making it feel like you’re there. Not in a swivel chair looking like a deranged lunatic to bystanders, but off in the far reaches of space; participating in a battle that itself feels like it’s been ripped straight from an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Studios such as Quantic Dream and Naughty Dog may have broken new ground in terms of cinematic flair and emotional resonance, but neither has ever truly transported you to a different world entirely. And for all that we can wax lyrical about it, it’s still incredibly difficult to convey this in any tangible sense. It is an experience unlike any other we’ve had.
Still, CCP persists in pinning this down: “From day one, the goal was always to make you feel like a badass space pirate. Think Tom Cruise in Top Gun, but in space.” That’s an irresistible sales pitch from Willans. It’s also a design decision that has led the development of Valkyrie over the years. But is it enough to sell virtual reality to the doubters and tech-enthusiast general public?
Oculus thinks it is. So much so that the company has thrown its faith and full support behind the title. “EVE: Valkyrie is one of the most anticipated virtual reality games, and one of the first true VR games to go into development,” says Palmer Luckey, founder of the (now Facebook-owned) Oculus. “It perfectly captures the promise of immersive gaming, shooting you into a sci-fi adventure as you pilot a spaceship in search of combat. Battling your friends (and enemies) in multiplayer space dogfights is the ultimate VR thrill, and we’re excited to partner with CCP to bring this experience to Rift owners everywhere.”
Every pre-order of Oculus Rift will include a copy EVE: Valkyrie. It’s being positioned as the first VR system seller – the equivalent of Sega bundling Alex Kidd in with the Master System, or the Game Boy with Tetris – and that’s because Valkyrie has come on leaps and bounds since it was first revealed three years ago. From tech demo to triple-A package: Valkyrie is the first game to really show what VR can really do. Willans says “it’s an honour” for Oculus to put so much trust and responsibility in the studio - but that honour also brings a great deal of pressure.
“I’m glad they think highly enough of us that we are part of that [launch program],” beamsWillans. “It feels awesome; we are buzzing about it. It’s a tremendous achievement, and I’m really proud. We’ve had a great relationship with Oculus all throughout development, they’ve been very supportive given us all of the right tech at all the right times,” he continues. "But it's a responsibility as well We need to be polished way above and beyond what’s expected. We need it to be like, 'Oh my god, this is the number one killer VR game'.”
AN UNLIKELY SUCCESS
For all intents and purposes, Valkyrie shouldn’t be the game that’s pitched to sell VR. A product selling itself on the success of Star Wars, Battlestar, Star Trek or, you know, any piece of story-based entertainment set in the stars, has immediate and obvious appeal beyond hardcore gamers. A multiplayer-focused, player-versusplayer VR dogfighting game does not. It’s a niche within a niche, stuffed inside another niche that nobody quite understands yet. But unlike Capcom’s nightmare-inducing The Kitchen or Crytek’s mountaineering-experience The Climb, Valkyrie is no mere tech demo. It’s a fully-fledged game with a big budget; it looks gorgeous, and all it takes is one adventure into the galaxy to be sold on the concept.
Sat at the helm of a beautifully detailed ship, you can look all around the cockpit. Looking down you’ll see a body and notice that it moves in tandem with your own – tracked in real-time by the Oculus 3D Positional Tracking Camera – and your character’s fingers twitch as you control the direction of your vessel with a gamepad. Look directly above and off in the distance you’ll notice the red trails of enemy ships closing in on your position. When Willans explained that Valkyrie is “very visceral, [as] we’re putting you in the pilot’s seat… we are able to deliver the Holy Grail of immersion.” Ahead of our session, we have to admit we had our doubts, but that changed incredibly quickly.
“It’s interesting because I think it’s going to be awe-inspiring for everyone,” Willans admits, though he is quick to say that the appeal of Valkyrie will be different dependent to your relationship with gaming. “As a gamer, you’re kind of aware of what a shooter is, you know what a space shooter is; you know, you have certain baggage that you will bring to that event, and I still don’t think that destroys that sense of wonder when you put on a headset. And I think you’ll get a different kind of wonder from someone who isn’t a gamer.”
A lot of this is a result of CCP’s commitment to tailoring the experience to any sort of consumer that might be interested in picking up Oculus Rift and Valkyrie when it launches in March 2016. After our hands-on session we are convinced that fans of space games, aerial dogfighting and FPS fans will fall in love with Valkyrie’s easy-to-understand gameplay mechanics and familiar language. But this needs to appeal to a wider audience than CCP is traditionally used to catering to – and Willans has been on-hand to ensure that a non-gamer can get just as much joy out of the experience as we might.
“Player comfort is in the hands of the developers. It’s a responsibility that we have; we are just trying to make sure that Valkyrie is as polished and as [player] friendly as it can be for when we ship. It’s so that I can give the headset to my dad and he can just play, that’s the goal,” considers Willians, before regaling us with tales of his family finally understanding what the veteran triple-A developer has been doing for a living for so many years. “And that’s not just a bullshit story, he did the other week. To get him in – you know, he took me to see Star Wars when I was a kid – and now I could be like ‘Dad, let me show you what I do for a living’. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there and looking around, totally in awe of it... And it was a great ‘Holy shit’ moment to get a text from him at two in the morning going ‘the more I think about it the more it was just awesome…’ and that was awesome [for me]. It’s going to hit people in waves, different people have different reactions.”
SO, IS IT VR’S FIRST BLOCKBUSTER?
We’re confident in claiming that there’s nothing more immediately impressive than Valkyrie in the VR pipeline right now, but CCP has clearly had to work hard to ensure Valkyrie is as enjoyable to play as it is to immerse yourself in. That said, the studio has cut a lot of chaff from the experience to ensure it’s as easy to get involved in the real fun as possible. A casualty of this mindset – and realities with the budget and production costs – is the traditional single-player campaign. Valkyrie will not feature a story mode, though it will have light PvE elements essentially designed to let you show the game off to friends and family.
Recall mode lets you dive into DNA fragments recovered from dead pilots so that you can relive their memories and get a better sense of the wider EVE universe; Survival sees you battling against waves of A.I. enemies; Scout gives you an opportunity to explore CCP’s gorgeous areas without fear of being mercilessly gunned down. If none of these PvE modes sound particularly exciting, it’s because they aren’t. They are but gateways into the real core of Valkyrie: the online, five versus five competitive multiplayer.
In many respects, you should throw out any misconceptions you have about dogfighting games immediately, if you have any. The very nature of VR has ironed out many of the problems and annoyances that would usually accompany this type of genre game – enemy tracking and navigation are the two big ones. CCP has spent years refining the controls, ensuring action is as intuitive as possible. While you’ll be able to use Flight Sticks at launch – as well as Oculus Touch when it eventually launches later in 2016 - CCP has seemingly designed Valkyrie around the included Xbox One gamepad.
“When you’re in VR, we need everything to be as immediate and intuitive as possible, so we aren’t going to ask you to do twenty different controls just to use your weapons; a lot of them use the same inputs,” considers Willans. “We spent a lot of time refining the game controls and the feeling of being in a space ship, so that it’s got that immediate pick up and play vibe to it. Our goal was always to make you a competent pilot in minutes, but to have a mastery of the controls over a period of months.”
And how does this translate in-game? In a word: fantastically. While the game modes might be familiar to FPS fans – with Valkyrie offering Team Deathmatch, CFT and Domination variants as its PvP modes – the gameplay is anything but familiar. It all comes back to what Willans was so desperate for us to do at the start of our session: looking around. Once you understand that you can use the whole space in front of you, Valkyrie transforms from an interesting idea to an experience that just isn’t available from any other developer or platform. The complete field of vision allows you to track multiple targets in real time in all directions. “This is what led to the development of the look-to-lock system,” says Willans. “What you do is you hold the Left Trigger down, and it brings up a different reticule – it looks like a revolver on a pistol, you’ll see missiles loading into this revolver – and once that’s loaded you need to look for an enemy, it’ll soft snap and then you need to try and maintain that lock [with your eyes], follow the enemy to release your salvo of lock on missiles.”
If an enemy speeds past you, there’s no need to try and follow; you could physically stand up – in real life - turn around as if to peer through the back window of your ship and continue to work to nail the lock on while speeding full throttle through space. Or, if you’d rather, you can pull your ship to a fierce halt and force it around on a pivot before unleashing a barrage of mini-gun fire at your aggressor. In spite of the simple controls, you have tremendous command over your spaceship; deftly piloting one of the three ship types through debris, gunfire and around asteroids and disengaged space stations produces an adrenaline rush the likes of which we’ve never experienced before.
IS IT THE SYSTEM SELLER IT NEEDS TO BE?
It’s all about acclimatising to the tech. While Valkyrie is incredibly impressive, it’s all about the little moments that really sell it as a legitimate step forward for gaming. It’s the way your skin crawls as the pitter-patter of enemy fire washes over your ship’s hull. The way you squeeze through a narrow gap in a debris field to try and shake off an enemy, before using a barrel roll to reverse your positions and fortune. It’s when you realise you’re gritting your teeth, waving your head and body around desperately as you try and out-manoeuvre and out-gun three enemy ships approaching from all angles.
As CCP looks to wrap up development and get Valkyrie enveloping players in its insane action, it has two major elements to focus on. The first is centred around communication. After spending a few hours with the game we didn’t encounter any moments of motion sickness, but we did feel physically and mentally exhausted by the entire experience. We hate to keep harping on about immersion, but it really does make you believe you are in another place entirely, and that’s draining. CCP has a responsibility to communicate restraint to its players, though the studio admits it is largely out of their hands.
“In terms of the motion sickness, there’s absolutely none of that. If you were to barrel roll continually, you’ll get dizzy; but guess what, if you stand here on the spot and spin three times you are going to get dizzy – that’s not VR, that’s just life. Nobody gets ill, nobody gets sick, there’s no [limitation] saying you can only do it for this long,” affirms Willans. “It’s really up to the user to manage their game time, just like anything else. It isn’t something that’s exclusive to VR, let’s put it that way.”
That’s less a problem on CCP’s end, and a reality of new technology that we will all need to figure out as we move forward. The other responsibility for CCP at this stage is to ensure it can guide players into the VR world and keep them there. From what we’ve played so far, we’re impressed with Valkyrie’s accessibility – not to mention the way in which it combines that with a genuine sense of fun and awe.
This will be the first VR game many people play when they pick up Oculus Rift this year, and it’s already showing that it has the quality and depth to prove that the tech is well worth indulging in. It takes triple-A production values and conquers gaming’s final frontier – not only letting you experience a phenomenal game world, but actually putting you inside of it. Valkyrie is a fast and furious PvP multiplayer game the likes of which we haven’t played before. Whether that furious entertainment can persist past the first handful of hours is anyone’s guess, but it’s likely that your first jaunt into enemy-occupied space will be a gaming memory you hold onto for the rest of your life.