INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Two years ago, Oculus announced a radical departure in how they were funding virtual reality developers
Instead of partnering with a ton of upstart teams looking to explore the medium and help fund their low-budget pursuits, the company would
be pursuing fewer, more expensive projects with established studios
Their crown jewel would be a made-for-VR first-person-shooter coming in 2019 done in partnership with Titanfall developer Respawn
Entertainment.
After two years with no further details, today, at its Oculus Connect 6 developer conference, it was announced that Respawn
will be releasing a World War II shooter titled &Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond& on the Rift platform next year
That release is pushed back from the original 2019 timeline, Respawn wouldn''t nail down the release date any further than &2020.
The game
disappointingly will not be launching on Quest, the company all-in-one headset, but with the newly-announced Oculus Link software feature
launching November, it seems you&ll be able to play the title still, albeit in tethered mode.
It not at all clear how much Oculus invested
in this title, thought it was clear from the press event that the scope of the title development was extensive and expensive
Oculus has pumped hundreds of million getting developers to bring their products exclusively to their VR platform, though at this point
exclusivity is less of a concern as the company VR competitors have largely either folded, shifted to higher-end price points, or moved to
the enterprise market.
Onto the game itself, I had a chance to demo several levels of &Above and Beyond,& and it clear that the title will
be a hit among Rift and Rift S users
It very much seems to be a full-game with around a dozen hours of campaign in single-player as well as a robust multi-player mode which I
was not able to demo.
The mechanics are crafted for VR — every time you empty a clip you have to eject it from the gun you&re holding and
insert a new magazine into the gun then cock your weapon all with the Touch controllers.
So many of the games made for VR haven''t had
direct comparisons to console titles, but diving through bunkers shooting up nazis kind of showcased where Oculus pushes boundaries and
Interaction mechanisms are rich, immersive and where the Rift and Quest shine, but Oculus keeping the recommended PC system specs largely
the same since launch hasn''t aged well
The Rift just can''t push pixels with outdated PCs and &Above and Beyond& showcases the max capabilities of the recommended spec systems but
it seems like this generation is fully smashed against the glass wall which was the risk Oculus took when it launched the Rift S rather than
a fully upgraded class of hardware.
The game is tons of fun, and was clearly thought out to extreme lengths, but one wonders whether Oculus
would have invested so much energy into a PC-first title again had they known that two years later they would be pushing standalone
experiences with Quest publicly with such fervor.
