Attack on Titan is one of those IPs that people have long asked to see in VR… and now they’ll finally get their wish. Today it was announced that UNIVRS is developing the first official Attack on Titan VR game for home headsets, Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable.
Announced today during Upload VR’s 2022 Winter Showcase, Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable is in development and set for a release in Summer 2023 on Quest 2. Developer Univrs, the studio most recently behind Little Witch Academia: VR Broom Racing, released a teaser for the project which unfortunately doesn’t give us any clue at how the game will look or play.
Although the studio’s experience with Little Witch Academia VR might not seem like it would translate to the intense and gory nature of an Attack on Titan game, the studio prides itself on its “unique anti-motion sickness technology,” which it says makes broom racing in the prior game very comfortable in VR despite high speeds.
If you know Attack on Titan then you’ll know that characters in the universe use the so-called ‘omni-directional mobility gear’ to zip around and outmaneuver their massive foes. Surely no Attack on Titan game would be complete without it, and that’s where Univrs’ experience with high speed VR gameplay might actually come in very handy.
And while Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable is confirmed to launch on Quest 2 this coming Summer, it’s not clear whether the game will make it to SteamVR (as prior titles from the developer have).
Vertigo 2 has been on our radar thanks to its slick unique world and slick-looking weaponry. While we still have a little longer to wait before we’ll get to play it, today the studio announced an early 2023 release alongside a fresh look at gameplay.
Vertigo 2 has been anticipated ever since the original Vertigo (2016) and its refinement Vertigo Remastered (2020) brought rich physics-driven weapons and interactions to PC VR headsets. Developer Zach Tsiakalis-Brown has been giving glimpses of the sequel over the last two years, but only now has he set a release date for March 30th, 2023.
Vertigo 2 looks significantly more ambitious than its predecessor, with new weapons, enemies, and characters, all brought together with an even more refined and art direction than its predecessors. Here’s the pitch from the game’s Steam page:
Vertigo 2 is a single-player adventure built from the ground up as a game for high-end VR.
Deep underground in the reaches of Quantum Reactor VII, you awake to finish your journey home. No closer to your goal than when you first arrived, you must count on the help of the mysteriously familiar stranger who saved your life. On your way towards the center of the reactor, you will have to face bizarre alien flora and fauna leaking from other universes – and deadly android security forces whose job is to purge the Reactor of all life. As you try to determine who to trust, sinister forces lurk just out of sight.
With a branching story hinging on key decisions, there’s no telling what you’ll encounter in this absurd world. The only certainty is that there’s danger around every corner.
Vertigo 2 would look promising in its own right, but I’ve got to say I’m even more impressed considering this is purpotedly the sole work of developer Zach Tsiakalis-Brown. Can the game stand up to this tasty looking trailer? We’ll be looking forward to finding out out next year.
Hubris should be what we’ve all been waiting for, a visually well-realized VR native that transports you to otherworldly biomes, replete with shooting, jumping, climbing, swimming, and even some basic crafting mechanics. On paper it certainly checks many of the sci-fi shooting and adventuring blocks, but look past the flashy visuals and apparent feature set and you’re left with a fairly mediocre VR shooter that just isn’t clever enough out of the gate to be truly engaging.
Available On: Steam, coming to PSVR 2 & Quest 2 in 2023 Release Date: December 7th, 2022 Price: $40 Developer: Cyborn B.V. Reviewed On: Quest 2 via Link
Gameplay
You’re a recruit belonging to the Order of Objectivity—basically a space marine who happens to have crash-landed on a hostile world which is in the midst of being terraformed. Large terraforming towers loom in the distance above the rocky, desolate world. The only wildlife comprises of squids and a few giant bugs, and most of them aren’t friendly. You job is to kill everything, scrounge everything for weapon upgrades, and experience the majesty of probably one of the best-looking PC VR games currently available.
Exterminating the local fauna isn’t difficult—one shot and they splatter into goo. The same is almost always true for the corpo-baddies who repel from dropships to infest the inner bowels of the terraforming towers and fuel refineries. On medium difficulty, one or two well-placed shots can kill most dudes outright, save one rare tank type you meet in the final quarter of the game which may take two or three magazines from either the pistol or submachine gun.
Image courtesy Cyborn B.V.
For some reason these faceless goons don’t like the Order or its badass super soldier, Cyana, but then again, I can’t blame them. I’m a faceless goon too, albeit one with a gun and an inventory large enough to porter several junkheaps of metal scraps and other fiddly bits to a shredder which gives me the base unit of each found item: metal, fiber, plastic, and cyan: the game’s unobtainium.
Scrounging and crafting is a pretty satisfying experience, and the quick inventory system of reaching over your shoulder for either health or junk items works surprisingly well—right shoulder for health, left for junk. The flatscreen inventory, pulled up by tapping your wristwatch, is a little less effective in default mode since you can only grab one specific item at a time before it auto-closes and you have to reopen it again, but you can change that in the settings. Here’s a look at a juicer you’ll find at some point in the game which lets you craft health potions with fruit you collect:
Just plop in the required bit into any crafting machine, and you’ve got your potion, food, or gun overhaul at the ready.
The most important bit is undoubtedly how Hubris performs as a shooter, and it’s not great. Reloading and cycling through your three weapons (pistol, shotgun, submachine gun) is an intuitive and well thought out affair, although actually aiming and shooting the weapons is sadly lacking in refinement.
Both the pistol and submachine gun are very difficult to get a good sight picture, which forces you to shoot by intuition alone. You’ll typically need to correct your aim on the fly, which wouldn’t be so much of an issue if you had a few spare mags on hand. This ends up making you spray precious bullets when they might be better used with more accurate shots.
Granted, reloading is easy—just hold the empty weapon up to your head and wait the 10-15 seconds for the haptic buzz to stop. Ideally, this sort of intentionally slow reloading is supposed to force the user into a more tactical shooting stance since you can’t quickly reload, but at times this made me think too tactically. After all, if I can’t trust my own aim, I’m not going head-first into a firefight for fear of being set back to the last auto-save point in a jiff.
That 10-15 seconds in a firefight naturally forces you to make better use of cover, which is all well and good. But because there’s no incentive to rush into a firefight with less than each gun’s magazine can hold—variable on whether you have the pistol, shotgun, or machine gun—what tends to happen is this: you scoot back to a choke point and wait for the AI to stupidly file in one-by-one until a whole area is cleared of baddies. It’s efficient, but not very fun. If gun models were just a little more refined…
The array of enemies isn’t terrible once you get to the last quarter of the game, where things really pick up in difficulty and the diversity of all of the skills you learn finally come together. Still, the game’s AI is fairly dumb in how it moves about, but is strangely always accurate in its shots. Of the two types of soldiers, the one you’ll see 99 percent of the time is the standard idiot who vaporizes with one or two blasts.
There are some flying enemies too. There is one type of drone you’ll regularly come across, which requires about 10 bullets from the pistol or 24 from the submachine gun, and one type of magnetic mine that will follow you around until either you or it dies first.
All of them are bullet sponges with no discernible weak points, save the shielded mine which can either be disabled with a spare battery orb, or by shooting it from above or below. Maybe a headshot is enough to kill a soldier? I’m still not sure since aiming is basically constant guesswork. It’s shame, because if your GPU can chug at least as well as my aging Nvidia GTX 1080, the visual experience of the game is pretty impressive (more on that in Immersion).
There was some glitchiness, although we’ve been told by Cyborn that the final release version will fix some areas with notable framerate drops. In the six hours it took me to beat on medium difficulty I never experienced a game-breaking bug though, which is a big step up from what we saw in the demo that was available back in the summer.
Immersion
On one hand, you have visually poppy scenes that draw you in, and a world that practically feels alive; that’s no small feat. I simply don’t want to understate how good Hubris looks. However, extreme polish in this one specific aspect of the game seems to highlight other parts that seem intent on detracting from the overall experience.
My placid colleague, chipper as ever despite the rotting stench of death | Image courtesy Cyborn B.V.
One of my least favorite gaming tropes is on full display in Hubris: the helpful robot who tells you everything you need to know and where to go. In short, you can forget figuring anything out for yourself for most of the game, as you’re effectively robbed of nearly every instance of discovery in Hubris until you get to, again, the last quarter of the game. You’re led by the hand to each objective, and everything (everything) is summarized ad infinitum by one of the most unintentionally condescending characters.
Lucia-bot is always “helpful” | Image captured by Road to VR
The dreaded helper-bot in question is actually supposed to be piloted by my flesh and blood commander, Lucia, who delivers lines more akin to a kindergarten teacher gently chiding me into cleaning up my blocks before laying down for a nap than, say, a battle-hardened space marine. Across the board, voice acting doesn’t feel well-directed, resulting in it actively hurting the seriousness the game works to build. If there were only some explanation for her weirdly mismatched tone, like an emotion chip gone awry or maybe I’m just a dumb toddler grown in a vat who needs constant reassurance. Nope. It’s just a weird thing about Hubris I guess.
The narrative isn’t much more than your standard sci-fi fare, which is absolutely fine, but I can’t help but think how much better Hubris would be (middling gunplay included!) if I just had a second to look around and breathe in the atmosphere without constantly being annoyed to death.
Comfort
Hubris includes a number of locomotion situations beyond your standard single-plane shooter. It requires you to jump (using the ‘A’ button), climb, swim by moving both arms, run around and strafe, and drive around in a vehicle at some point too.
Most of this is done in such a way that it’s comfortable to the user, although there are a few standout scenes when I personally didn’t want to have eyes in my head, notably when dropships fly overhead and the camera shakes so much it gave me the wobbles. Getting in the way of another character during their scripted movement will also move you without your consent, which can be jarring the first time it happens.
As you’d imagine, you’ll need full range of motion for both arms to climb and swim, so make sure to either have an adequate chair to sit in or stand up for the entirety of the game.
‘Hubris’ Comfort Settings – December 7th, 2022
Turning
Artificial turning
Snap-turn
Quick-turn
Smooth-turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleport-move
Dash-move
Smooth-move
Blinders
Head-based
Controller-based
Swappable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Seated mode
Artificial crouch
Real crouch
Accessibility
Subtitles
Languages
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese
Meta hasn’t rolled out colocation services for the entire Quest platform yet—meaning a pair of Quest 2 headsets can’t automatically ‘see’ each other in the same physical playspace—although that’s not entirely true for its latest headset, Quest Pro.
Meta published a quick explainer video recently showing off how local multiplayer works between two Quest Pros. Here’s the gist, although you can catch the explanation in the video below as well:
To track the room and superimpose virtual imagery over your physical environment in mixed reality, Quest Pro generates point clouds which can be shared with other Quest Pros. Users can decide whether they share point cloud data, Meta says in the informational clip, although it’s notably done by using Meta’s servers as a middleman.
This is a fairly substantial change from how local multiplayer works on Quest 2—or doesn’t work—as games typically require some shared room marker that is used to calibrate the relative positions of players within a pre-defined space. This sort of ad hoc local multiplayer can provide variable results in terms of overall ‘avatar-to-person’ tracking fidelity, but by being able to sync up point clouds, you should (in practice) have the highest level of positional accuracy between two players.
Meta (vis-a-vis Facebook) has been talking about colocation on Quest for a while now. Starting in 2018, the company showed off an arena-scale multiplayer prototype based on VR shooter Dead & Buried, which we hoped would eventually lead to the company opening up colocation services for the Quest platform. Around one year later, the company published code in the Oculus Unity Integration pointing to a colocation API for Quest, although we still seem no closer to colocation on Quest 2.
It’s interesting to see the company is only allowing colocation on Quest Pro for now, its $1,500 mixed reality headset launched in late October. Meta still seems to be refining its value proposition of Quest Pro, and it seems colocation services are very much a ‘pro’ feature.
GigXR creates and hosts some of the most mind-blowing educational experiences in what spokespeople call “the mediverse.” Through partnerships with some of the world’s best educational institutions and the world’s most innovative technology companies, the company is helping to bring medical education into the 21st century.
Catching Up With GigXR
GigXR was founded three years ago specifically to take on XR projects from textbook publisher Pearson. By partnering with other creators to host a variety of content, the platform is still like a publishing house of sorts, but a bit more interesting. No offense, Pearson.
The last time ARPost caught up with GigXR was back in May when the company announced a partnership with ANIMA RES, a 3D medical animation company. The partnership added the Insight Series by ANIMA RES content to their library, which already hosted content from Pearson, Microsoft, and medical universities like Cambridge and the University of Michigan.
Insight works kind of like a product configurator, but instead of changing the color of a virtual car, you’re increasing the stroke volume of a holographic heart, or decreasing the respiratory rate of a holographic lung. Don’t worry, there’s a fresh update from the ANIMA RES series too, we’ll get to that. But first, let’s step back to a developing story from this summer.
“Empowering instructors with 360-degree preparation for clinical practice represents a milestone for GigXR that allows us to provide our customers with a library of applications that offers solutions for students from their first courses to continuing education,” company founder, David King Lassman, said in a release shared with ARPost.
The trainees must then not only diagnose the condition, but interact with holographic medical tools to stabilize their virtual patient.
“With HoloScenarios, we’re helping to evolve education from a mentorship-based model to one where students around the world can have equal access to top-flight expertise for mastering invention-based clinical skills,” Cambridge University Health Partnership Director of Postgraduate Education, Arun Gupta, said in the release.
In November, GigXR announced a massive availability expansion for the Insight Series, accessible through mixed reality headsets or Android or iOS mobile phones or tablets. The modules are now available to “medical schools, nursing schools, healthcare providers, and government and defense agencies worldwide,” according to a release shared with ARPost.
“Partnering with GigXR gives us the springboard to expand our geographic reach to match GigXR’s global footprint and get our market-leading content into the hands of educators and learners worldwide,” ANIMA RES CEO, Pablo Olmos, said in the release. “Together, we aim to give learners the best tools for success throughout training and clinical practice.”
Anatomy and Physiology Inside and Out
These announcements are both exciting, but become even more interesting discussed together. The ANIMA RES Insight Series help to get up-close and personal with the interior bodily conditions that can cause the external symptoms that trainees encounter and solve in the HoloScenarios. GigXR offers these and other modules in a tidy package.
