Six months ago, EVE Online developer CCP Games pulled out of the virtual reality market. The move came as a shock, given how well-suited and devoted CCP seemed to be to the tech, with international studios in the US and UK working on VR titles, and a tech-savvy EVE player base who were more likely to adopt VR early in its development cycle. As recently as last year's EVE Fanfest, CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson had been bullish about the technology and the company's investment in its VR teams, so last week, at this year's Fanfest, we asked him what had changed and what went wrong.
In short, hardly anyone was playing.
]]>CCP, creators of one of our favourite VR games, EVE Valkyrie, are ceasing all VR development, according to a report on Icelandic business site mbl.is. The Reykjavík-based studio is best-known for its fantastically complex MMO EVE Online but has invested heavily in VR games. Sci-fi dogfighting sim Valkyrie is its flagship goggle-game, but one-on-one ball-lobbing sport Sparc (currently PSVR only) is a bit of a cracker as well. I see this as a blow to the viability of VR as a major gaming platform not only because Valkyrie is one of the few games that makes the tech tempting to me, despite being available in non-VR form as well, but also because CCP have sounded so bullish about the field in the past.
]]>If you fancied hopping into the cockpit of a spacefighter and shooting spaceships while Starbucks off the telly bosses you around but you didn't own the cybergoggles necessary to play EVE: Valkyrie, good news: VR is now optional in the EVE Online spin-off. Developers CCP last night launched EVE: Valkyrie - Warzone [official site], a rebranding and update which gave the first-person dogfighter support for regular screens and whacked in new maps and modes too.
]]>After almost a year strapped to the foreheads of cybergoggleers, EVE: Valkyrie [official site] is coming to regular screens too. The dogfighting spin-off from spacebastard MMO EVE Online will get new maps, ships, and modes with the launch of its free expansion 'Warzone' on September 26th, and more importantly will no longer require VR goggles. I've quite fancied a go at Valkyrie's first-person space-dogfighting but am no gogghead so this is splendid news.
]]>It wasn't hard to find the VR doubters at EVE Fanfest. One high profile EVE Online player told me he had no interest in CCP’s VR games but would “rather they have new teams working on VR than moving people from EVE to something like World of Darkness, which was left in the corner like a rotten apple.”
Another said he was “glad that the VR side of the business will be there to support EVE Online financially.” For a while at least, I figure it’ll be the other way around. It might seem strange to see a free-to-play MMO as the financial foundation that a studio relies on, but then CCP are a strange company and to some people their dedication to VR might seem like their strangest move yet. I spoke to VR Brand Director Ryan Geddes and CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson to find out what the future might hold, and why they believe VR is an important part of that future.
]]>Out at the EVE fanfest, where I'm out talking to the movers, shakers and griefers of EVE Online, CCP have just announced an update that takes the VR multiplayer dogfighting sim from the wide open spaces of...space...to ground-based scenarios. Going by the title Groundrush, it launches April 11th with one new map, Solitude, which I've spent some time with today. Solitude is set around a series of structures in a snowy canyon-type environment. There are other changes too, including "weirder and wilder" temporary game modes, as originally introduced in the Wormholes update, and expanded co-op to include the Control and Carrier Assault modes.
]]>CCP make bloody good trailers, don't they? This one for EVE: Valkyrie [official site] and its Wormholes update a) reminded me that EVE: Valkyrie is the VR game I definitely enjoyed playing when it was in the preview stage and would like to play more of and b) just makes space look really cool with rainbow trails and explosions and dogfighting extravaganzas.
]]>EVE: Valkyrie [official site], the cybergoggle spin-off from CCP's spaceship MMO, has warped into another pair of goggs. Having debuted on Oculus Rift back in March then hitting PlayStation V VR in September, it's now on HTC Vive headwear for your Starbuckin' satisfaction too. Valkyrie, I'll explain in case you missed all the boxfaces yelling, is a first-person spaceship dogfighting game. Along with singleplayer, it has co-op missions and competitive multiplayer. And Katee 'Starbuck off that there television' Sackhoff as your spaceboss.
]]>The first major free update for EVE: Valkyrie [official site] is now live, which means you can finally take the fight to an enemy team's carrier ship. Called Carrier Assault, this new mode taps into every Star Wars fan's obsession with flying down trenches, shouting "you're all clear kid," and then making really expensive military equipment blow up.
]]>While most of us are still waiting for our Oculus Rifts to arrive, EVE: Valkyrie [official site] has been building a name for itself as one of the most beautiful and intense VR experiences. Free with every Rift preorder, Valkyrie released last month, will be arriving later this year on the Vive, and, best of all, will sport cross-platform multiplayer between the Rift, Vive, and even Playstation VR. But despite the high praise, it's worth questioning whether Valkyrie is capable of being more than just a brief spark in the first wave of VR games due to its somewhat simple combat and progression. I braved the blustery winds and fermented shark bits of Reykjavik, Iceland during EVE Fanfest 2016 to find out what CCP has to say.
]]>EVE Valkyrie [official site], launch title for Oculus Rift, has launched, as you might expect given the Rift also launched yesterday. I've typed the word "launch" too much and now it doesn't make sense and I've started thinking about "lunch". Lunch was great. Bring back lunch.
ANYWAY, to celebrate the launch of this launch game in which you launch spaceships down launch tubes and then launch gunfire at the other launched spaceships there is a launch trailer on YouTube. You might say that the launch trailer launched on YouTube.
Launch.
Here's some virtual reality space dogfighting:
]]>Back in the day, I’d often get asked whether PlayStation or Xbox was best. Helpless efforts to argue "well, actually, PC is..." aside, I’d defuse their concerns about which had the superior graphics by naming which games you would or wouldn’t get on each. It’s not going to be any different for VR.
But for now, when numbers are really all we have, I'm going to list some numbers at you below. It's too early to say for sure which headset you should buy if you're planning on buying one at all, but this should help you to determine whether one virtual reality headset or the other might have better image quality or motion tracking.
]]>And so the age of VR truly begins. It's been a long time coming, but 2016 is the year we finally find out if facebox gaming will sink or swim. I'm extremely excited personally, but still doubtful that it can reach far outside an adoring techno-niche: something far more elegant is needed for that, I feel. But that's for the future. Right now, today, the long-awaited consumer version of the Oculus Rift [official site] has gone on pre-sale. The bad news is that it'll cost you a terrifying $600 before tax and shipping if you're Stateside, and it gets even worse if you're based in the UK or Europe - £500 for the former, €700 for the latter - before shipping. Maybe VR just sunk already?
Though you won't actually have to stump that hideous sum up until the thing's about to be posted out, which we now know will be in March.
]]>"Happy new year!" reads the email, as if this were good news. As if were a happy thing that, mere days after the traumatic horror-spend of Christmas, I need to find a few hundred quid from somewhere to buy an Oculus Rift headset, pre-orders for which open tomorrow.
]]>Pip played EVE Valkyrie [official site] earlier this week, getting to grips with the virtual reality space shooter in its near-to-final form. You can read what she thought right now. But alongside the impressions is news that a copy of Valkyrie is being included with every pre-order of the Oculus Rift.
]]>I'm at a press preview event for EVE Valkyrie [official site]. It's CCP's multiplayer dogfighting VR game which they've just announced will come bundled with every Oculus Rift headset at launch. As lead game designer Andrew Willans explains the project: "The goal from day one was always to make you feel like a badass space pilot – Tom Cruise in Top Gun in space."
]]>Half the draw of Valkyrie [official site], EVE Online's VR dogfighting spin-off, is how zip-zap-straight-to-the-eyes it will look on your facebox of choice, so this here two minutes of space-shooting footage scarcely tells the whole story. It's closer than most such trailers to giving some sense of how the real deal with look and feel, though maybe I'm just saying that from my ivory tower of Elite Dangerous + Oculus experience. It's a looker alright, though.
]]>EVE Valkyrie [official site] has a modest aspiration: to be the best competitive multiplayer game in virtual reality. It's a great statement in terms of grabbing headlines, but how are the development team at CCP's Newcastle studio translating that aspiration into a working reality? I asked that exact question of lead producer Owen O'Brien at the recent EVE FanFest event. His answer: "by talking to the best competitive multiplayer players in the world and letting them help us design it."
]]>EVE: Valkyrie [official site] is so very, very pretty. The multiplayer dogfighting spin-off from CCP's intimidating MMO seems to capture what EVE battles sound like when someone tells you about them, not the confusing zoomed-out radar screen covered in blips that big fights actually look like. Being made exclusively for VR cybergoggles means the immersive view looks jolly good too.
With their annual EVE Fanfest going on in Iceland right now, CCP have released a new staged gameplay trailer showing all this off. Oh me oh my it's a corker:
]]>One of the things people were most excited about at this year's E3 was getting new information about the Oculus Rift. It's turned out news of the virtual reality headset was fairly thin on the ground, other than a reiteration of things we already knew: a consumer version likely won't come till the end of next year, and that the company continues to use Facebook's billions to hire every living engineer.
If you were disappointed there wasn't more, then comfort yourself with this new trailer for EVE Valkyrie. The Rift game from CCP is set within the EVE Online universe, is about quick, arcade-style dogfighting, and is being co-published by Oculus. Find that new trailer below.
]]>I've played EVE Valkyrie at so many events that, last time I climbed into its virtual cockpit (GDC), I immediately decided I'd try and break it. Mostly, this entailed me standing up and seeing if my "head" would pass right through the cockpit's glass, and - much to my surprise and elation - it did. Sadly, I did not immediately die of explosive decompression. Oh well. But I guess what I'm saying is, we really haven't seen much of this game's, er, game yet. Just the same tiny war, waged eternally, its cadre of wind-up toy soldiers none-the-wiser. There will be more to it, though. That's why CCP is bringing on Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff - aka, Starbuck - to voice Valkyrie's lead pilot in missions. And it'll all happen in Unreal Engine 4, because the gaming industry has forgotten other engines exist.
]]>Sometimes interviews go perfectly according to script and everything is just dandy. Also, frequently boring. In those instances, you nod dutifully after exhausting every possible line of questioning, turn off your recorder, and usually buy some form of burrito to soak up the tears. But other times things just sort of naturally veer into wacky territory. That's not to say that CCP CEO Hilmar Pétursson's dreams of a virtual-reality-born utopian future aren't admirable (personally, I'd love for them to come true), but these are some huge - almost preposterously so - ideas. Do you want to hear how EVE Online could, according to its creator, help end class disparities once and for all? Then you've come to the right place.
]]>You might remember that I recently encountered a peculiar situation while chatting with CCP about virtual reality magic face-space portal EVE Valkyrie. Namely, the developer refused to confirm that the seeming PC shoe-in would even launch on PC at all, or even Oculus Rift for that matter. Madness, right? I'm leaning toward "yes," given that CCP and Oculus are now walking down the aisle, eyes locked in the beautiful, undiluted sort of love that can only blossom from a co-publishing deal. You can be rest easy, ladies and gentlemen. Valkyrie is safe. It's not dodging PC in favor of, um... what were its other options again?
]]>EVE Valkyrie has caught enough eyes to populate the world's weirdest, most Halloween-friendly gumball machine, but let's be honest here: we don't actually know all that much about it. Yes, it's glittering, glorious dogfighting with a thing that sounds amusingly similar to "Octopus" strapped to your face, but EVE is more than just a series of battles. Much, much more. It's a universe of politics, corporations, and player-powered intrigue. The spaceships are nice, yes, but they're only one piece of the highly fractured intergalactic puzzle - pawns in a game of blood and money. So where does Valkyrie fit into all of that? How will it integrate with EVE as is? Will we eventually be able to explore in first-person, or just exist in the universe as we please? And what about Dust 514? Where does it end up? I asked CCP's David Reid, and he returned fire with the most potent space laser of all: answers.
]]>I love the idea of being in space, but I've recently come to realize that the reality of space is entirely horrifying. No air, no gravity, no control. Humans weren't meant to exist outside our warm, loamy cradle of a planet, and mortality's icy hand becomes much harder to ignore when it's inches away from your face. That's the power of EVE Valkyrie, the suck-the-air-out-of-your-lungs appeal that virtual reality - truly well-done virtual reality - brings. It's one thing to watch your EVE ship float around from some detached camera angle like a roving intergalactic deity, but it's quite something else to see fog overwhelming your cockpit's glass, creeping like fear. Can that added element of immersion sustain a full game, though? And are Valkyrie's other elements up to snuff? Here's what I found during an all-too-brief play session.
]]>I recently had the opportunity to go hands-on with CCP's Oculus-Rift-powered wonder EVE Valkyrie, and - shock of all shocks - it was really wonderful. More on that soon. First, though, some minor yet potentially meaningful strangeness. After clambering out of my head-mounted cockpit (that sounds incredibly dirty), I quizzed CCP all about its plans for EVE, Dust, Valkyrie, and how they'll intertwine. I'll have the full interview up asap, but one bit stood out: chief marketing officer David Reid was quite adamant that EVE Valkyrie won't necessarily be launching on PC or Oculus Rift. I'm not really sure what to make of it, to be honest, but here's what he said.
]]>Remember that Eve Online Oculus Rift dog-fighting game that Brendan had a peep at in April? CCP were very coy about it, stating it that it was a prototype, and even hinting that it might never see a wider release. Well, it turned out when they were saying that they were also wearing Oculus Rifts, so we couldn't see the winking that was going on. This is the biggest flaw of the Rift: the subtle interplay between journalists and winking developers collapses when you can't see eyes. Anyway, CCP have realised this and set the record straight at Gamescom: it will be coming out, it'll be released in 2014, and here's a bloody trailer of EVE: Valkyrie.
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