racket sports

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New Video Explores How ‘Racket Club’ is Reimagining Tennis for VR

Resolution Games, the studio behind Demeo (2021), Blaston (2020), and Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs (2019), shared more info on how it’s engineering a new sport for its upcoming game Racket Club.

The studio released a new behind-the-scenes video that goes into detail about how Racket Club is played, where it came from, and what sets it apart from other racket sport experiences in VR.

In the video, chief creative officer Mathieu Castelli explains how Racket Club was built with realism in mind, offering up a sort of gameplay that could easily translate to real courts.

Castelli says that a big step in the project was modeling the “right feeling of impact” of when the ball hits the racket, something that is fairly mathematically complex. Another was defining the space so users could play naturally at home, and not need in-game locomotion stuff like teleportation. In the end, it comes down to body positioning and swing accuracy, something that is a 1:1 translation from physical racket sports.

While the basic physicality of Racket Club could translate to a real-world court, there’s a few things that VR simply does better, Castelli explains. As players gain expertise, the glass enclosures lower, increasing the chance of knocking the ball out of the court. Impressively long rallies, or the classic back and forth shots between players, can also give you more points, which can turn around a match in one go.

Racket Club is set to release on the Quest platform and PC VR headsets sometime in 2023. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam and the Meta Quest Store.

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‘Racket Club’ Looks Like a VR Cross Between Pickleball and Squash, Trailer Here

Resolution Games, the studio behind hit VR titles Demeo and Blaston, released a torrent of news at their first-annual Games Showcase today, including the revelation that it’s developing a new VR sports game called Racket Club.

Racket Club is still being kept behind closed doors, although Resolution threw out its announce trailer today during its big showcase, showing off the studio’s upcoming multiplayer title.

“Racket Club reinvents the idea of pickup sports by connecting players from all over the world to have fun together in an all-new sport designed from the ground-up for VR play,” the studio says in a press statement.

We saw a prototype during a trip to the studio’s Stockholm offices, although we can’t talk about the experience beyond what’s shown in the trailer.

In the meantime, the trailer shows off 2v2 gameplay in an enclosed glass case, and by the looks of it, the description ‘pickleball meets squash’ seems pretty apt here. The space between opponents is fairly short, which feels like it will have an important social component, something akin to how gameplay works in Ping-Pong. More info on Racket Club is said to arrive in 2023, so we’ll be sure to share some of our experiences at a later date.

Resolution Games is now over 200 people strong, making it one of the largest XR studios out there. Headed by Tommy Palm of Candy Crush fame, the studio is now actively developing for a growing list of multiplayer VR titles, including content for past titles Demeo, Blaston, Ultimechs, and Bait!, and also its recently released VR arena-style multiplayer shooter Spatial Ops, which is now in beta on SideQuest.

Racket Club appears to be another shot at type of game that could potentially become an eSport, provided everything goes well and a community grows around it. We’ll be watching for news updates in the coming year for more info on the studio’s next title.


Disclosure: Resolution Games assisted with travel & lodging expenses to an event where information for this article was gathered.

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