Get into the beta early through Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Gears of War studio The Coalition will kick off a multiplayer beta test for Gears of War 4 on April 18, Microsoft announced today, calling it an “opportunity to help shape the multiplayer experience" of the upcoming game.
The Gears of War 4 beta will be available in "early access" on April 18 to those who have played the Windows PC or Xbox One version of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. Xbox Gold Live subscribers can access the beta starting April 24. The multiplayer beta will run until May 1.
Here are the specifics for getting access to the Gears 4 beta, per Microsoft:

To qualify for early access to the Gears of War 4 Multiplayer Beta on Xbox One, log in to Xbox Live and play Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on Xbox One or Windows 10 by 11:00PM PDT, April 11. Tokens for the beta will be distributed in waves through the Xbox Live messaging system and begin arriving Monday April 18. For both Early Access and Xbox Live Gold periods, must be 17+. Xbox One, broadband internet (ISP fees apply) and Xbox Live Gold membership (sold separately) required. Beta dates, content, and features subject to change. Not available in all markets. See https://GearsofWar.com for the latest information.

Gears of War 4 will be released later this year on Xbox One.

The devil has arrived The second season of Netflix’s Daredevil will be made available to subscribers on Friday, but the company has released a final trailer for the series ahead of its release.
In the trailer, war is raging in Hell’s Kitchen, with various heroes and villains aligning themselves amongst the similar minded. Unlike previous trailers which spent more time highlighting the new characters being introduced this season — including Punisher and Elektra — the final trailer gives us some insight into what to expect this season, narratively speaking. It’s also one of the first trailers that really gets into the fight choreography that so many people fell in love with during the first season.
The trailer promises an incredibly dark, gory and twisted season that should please those that liked the direction Daredevil was headed in. For those who liked the disturbing nature of Jessica Jones’ first season, there’s also hints of that in here, too.
Daredevil, which stars Charlie Cox as the titular hero, is currently streaming on Netflix with the second season being made available March 18 at 3 a.m. ET.

Narrative-focused games don’t have to be indie-only Fragments of Him is a game that might test your limits. The story-driven indie project by Netherlands-based studio Sassybot isn’t challenging — not in the conventional sense of the word. But what the game does, and does well, is force players to confront feelings and consider situations they might prefer not to address.
“We’ve had a lot of players in tears ," lead narrative designer Mata Haggis said before we tested the game ourselves during Game Developers Conference 2016. "We’ve been at conferences and a lot of people crying at our booth."
That’s exactly the reaction that Haggis and his co-designers anticipate and embrace. Fragments of Him makes it obvious from the jump that it won’t be an easy game to get through, emotionally; the story unfolds over two-and-a-half introspective hours, during which players switch between four different characters.
These include Will, who dies in a car crash during the beginning of the game; his college ex-girlfriend, Sarah; Harry, Will’s partner at the time of his death; and Mary, Will’s grieving grandmother. Each character’s story centers around Will’s death and plays out with a series of vignettes. There are no puzzles, no alternate routes; Fragments of Him is a linear frame narrative, one that’s heavy on self-reflective narration.
That’s the point, Haggis explained. The highly personal game draws inspiration from theater and literature. It’s meant to be a cathartic experience — and not just for the player.

"The best writing tends to come from drawing from your own life," he said. The game isn’t autobiographical, but many elements, from the story to the design, draw on Haggis’ past. Books seen on characters’ shelves are those in the designer’s own library; Sarah’s dorm room is an exact replica of Haggis’ from his college days. Haggis and Will, whose commitment issues and subsequent relationship woes form the crux of the game, are both bisexual, and much of the game deals with characters’ understandings of his sexuality.
Despite these specificities, Fragments of Him aims to tell a universal story. "No matter who you are, heartbreak is still going to devastate you," Haggis said.
" trying to find the most comfort in how we’re all the same."
The abstract, minimalist art style is one of the ways that the game is able to translate a personal story of loss into one that’s broadly impactful. The game is almost entirely in black and white, save for the colored outlines that highlight which object players need to select next to progress through the story. All of the playable characters have blank faces, and people in crowds or in the background are seen only in silhouette.
That stylization is meant to afford players stronger engagement with the storyline, Haggis said. Fragments of Him is as much about crafting your own relationship to the events as it is revealing the effects of them on the characters. Reducing the characters to avatar-like models and drawing attention to certain objects with just a hint of color is what he called an "emotionally neutral" choice, which asks the player to fill in the blanks. It’s a subtle yet surprisingly powerful mechanic, letting the story — and our own empathetic experience — take precedence.
We found ourselves near tears toward the end of our demo, in which we controlled first Will, then Sarah. What at first felt like a static narrative without much visual intrigue soon became an immersive and overwhelming experience. That was thanks to the level of commitment the developer put into letting players understand the lead characters’ emotions. Exploring their relationships to each other — and love and loss overall — in this stylized manner is truly moving, and it was hard not to get our own feelings about those subjects caught up during the cinematic playthrough.
"make me know why i’m shooting that anonymous robot "
There’s another reason for that subdued, non-photorealistic style, however: Fragments of Him is developed by a three-man team.
"If we tried for photorealism, it wouldn’t be possible," Haggis said. "Indies can’t afford that."
He contrasted this with triple-A development, which he said emphasizes powerhouse graphics over story. Narrative games like Fragments of Him or the similarly intense That Dragon, Cancer are often the purview of indies, he said. But that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, or that indie releases are the only ones Sassybot is interested in.
" games are not the mainstream yet, and we all accept that," he said. Yet "I’ve spent 200 hours on Destiny, myself, but that story needs to get better. It brings more added value to the game — make me know why I’m shooting that anonymous robot, and then shooting that anonymous robot feels better.
"I don’t think story and mechanics have to be at argument with each other," Haggis added. "Of course there will be people who skip every cutscene and just want to shoot that anonymous robot in the face, it’s now commercially viable, and there is a small feeling that there’s an established audience out there ."
Fragments of Him and Destiny have little in common, but Haggis hopes that making games like his will help all games get better.
"It’s a virtuous cycle where indies try out these new things and triple-A say, ‘I like this bit, let’s bring that in,’" he said. "I try not to think of these as separate parts of an ecosystem."
Fragments of Him will launch on Windows PC and Xbox One in April 2016; a PlayStation 4 version will come later this year. With its launch, the team at Sassybot hope it will not just follow a trend of heart-wrenching indie storytelling, but instead lead the charge in making all games consider storytelling as of equal importance to gameplay.

User research data can change the face of play If it weren’t for this team, you likely wouldn’t be able to ride animals in Far Cry Primal, figure out the compass in The Division or master some of the moves in Assassin’s Creed.
Rarely cited, hardly heard of by players, Ubisoft’s editorial user research department quietly tracks the way players play before, during and after a game’s launch, and makes sure the development team knows what needs to be fixed, what players hate and what players love.
“We gather a lot of data based on what players do and say," said Sebastien Odasso, Ubisoft’s director of editorial user research, which started in 2001. "We make them come to our facilities, to the labs, and we make them play the game and observe them through direct active observation and then we use a lot of methodologies and protocols based on psychology and ergonomics to analyze how they play."
Once the data is gathered and aggregated, it’s handed off to the development team to show them what works and doesn’t work.
"We give this feedback to the development team so they can fix the issues to improve the quality of a game before release," he said. "It’s meant to be an iterative process."
Ubisoft has been using deep user research to track player engagement with games for about eight years. While it initially was relegated to bringing gamers into a lab to play an unreleased game, the group’s work has since been expanded to include beta tests and even live games.
The key motivator behind this data-intensive approach to user research is the knowledge that everyone sees things from a different perspective.

"Our users, our players won’t see the game as we intended," he said. "Every player will see the game differently and that’s something that needs to be kept in mind."
The tools used by the team vary greatly. Sometimes it’s something as simple as an in-game survey, asking players to press the D-pad in one direction to choose, after a specific moment in the game, whether they liked it. Other tools include using special gear to track where a player is looking as they play, to ensure that they are looking where the designer wants them to be looking. The team also combines gameplay data with graphics to do things like create heat maps to show where players are and aren’t going on a map. That approach can sometimes inspire a developer to rework an area to make it more challenging, easier to find, or any other number of solutions.
After Far Cry Primal’s beta, the user research group discovered that players weren’t happy with one element of the map.
"When we gathered data from the players we observed that they liked the game, but one thing they didn’t like was navigation," Odasso said. "They said it took too long to travel and was too tiresome to get from point A to point B and move between missions."
Odasso and his team gave that information to the developers.
"They said in the game you can tame animals to make them fight for you," he said. "Why can’t they ride the beasts to go faster? When we playtested it again after the change was made, they said navigation wasn’t an issue."
The team was also quick to spot that The Division’s original compass was too complex and too loaded down with visual indicators to be useful. They’ve also been able to spot when a particular move in a game like Assassin’s Creed is not being used enough, allowing the developer to tweak its use or how it’s performed.

"We are working with the development team very early in the process and throughout the process," he said. "Throughout production and even now after the game releases."
Currently, Ubisoft has 13 user research labs spread out around the world. The two largest are located in Montreal and Paris. In those two labs alone last year, Ubisoft held 203 play tests that were attended by 1,923 players.
As games continue to evolve, so does the methodology and tools used to track and analyze play.
"We are exploring biometrics know to see if we can go deeper," Odasso said. "We’re looking at little sensors playtesters might wear on their fingers or wrists to better evaluate the emotion of players in real time, but that still in R&D."
He said the team is also already working on unique ways to gather statistics on gamers as they play virtual reality titles.
"We came up with some very interesting insight," he said, "We can predict if a player will be motion sick in a game thanks to a questionnaire and several other things."

The joy of cooking is alive and well In between rounds of Dota and League of Legends, video game streaming giant Twitch wants viewers to consider taking a break to watch chef extraordinaire Julia Child whip up an amazing dish.
The company announced today that it would be launching a full time food channel to offset its gaming content, starting with a 24/7 marathon of Julia Child’s The French Chef. To celebrate the launch, Twitch is going to stream all 201 episodes of Child’s show consecutively over four days. The company has explored non-gaming marathons before, including the incredibly successful stream of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting in November, which drew 5.6 million viewers during the first week his show was offered on the site.
According to a press release from the company, Child used The French Chef and cooking as a way to bond with her audience and build a community. It’s similar, the release added, to the way Twitch streamers used gaming as a way to connect and build their own audience.
“Julia Child was the precursor to Twitch’s social cooking movement, making The French Chef show a great reminder about how visionary she was," Bill Morrier, head of Twitch Creative, said. "To put it in terms our community can relate to, Bob Ross is the Julia Child of painting."
Child will join other Twitch Creative talent who have already made a home for themselves on the company’s channel, including Dan from DomesticDan and Christine from CookingForNoobs. All together, there are six dedicated chefs who will continue to host their own cooking shows for Twitch’s new channel.
Ashley (FakeGamerGirl), Franziska (Goldamsel), Chef (WorkingChef) and Lulaboo (Lulaboo) will also host a variety of programs alongside Dan and Christine, from serving up vegan dishes to preparing meals based on Ross’ paintings.
Twitch’s marathon of Child’s The French Chef kicks off today at 2 p.m. PT.

You have five minutes to figure out who the werewolf is and kill them Ubisoft’s Werewolves Within gives friends a chance to drop into virtual reality and try to figure out who the killer is among them when it hits this fall, the company announced today.
Social party games that have a group of friends gathering and trying to figure out who the outsider is before they’re killed by him or her have been around and popular since the ’80s. What started as a Russian psychological experiment of sorts called Mafia quickly spread among college students in the country and then abroad. By the ’90s it had been commercialized and taken many new forms, including Werewolf.
In all of the games, the concept has a group of friends all secretly taking on different roles, with nearly everyone trying to figure out who the baddie is.
Ubisoft’s Werewolves Within is based on that classic party game, giving each player with a VR headset a cartoonish avatar and a secret role to play, and then setting players loose on one another as they sit around a campfire.
While the game allows players to cast suspicion on a player, or use their roles to see or hear certain clues, it is mostly driven by the players themselves and their ability to talk, argue, like and compel one another over the built-in voice chat.
As you speak, your avatar’s mouth moves and the game uses the tone of your voice to animate the character’s face and body movements. A player can also use the D-pad to call up a few canned movements, like pointing at someone or crossing your arms.

After five minutes of gameplay and arguing, the game forces players to vote who to kill as the werewolf. Then, based on that decision and the rules, it announces the winner.
To win the single-round game you either correctly choose who the werewolf is, survive as a werewolf or convince players to kill you when you are the “deviant."
The game is given a bit more in the mechanics department than simply bluffing and arguing through the use of randomly assigned roles, each of which has its own ability.

A townsperson can elect a leader, giving that one person two votes.
A village tracker can lean in either direction and, if a werewolf is on that side of them, hear growling.
The watcher learns two possible roles for a player; one is true and one is false.
The gossip learns one possible role for one of two players.
The werewolf can sense each player’s role and know the identity of other werewolves.
A turncloak is a human who wins if the werewolves win. He or she also knows who the werewolves are, but they don’t know who he or she is.
A deviant can only win if he or she is killed.

Gameplay starts with the game showing each player a piece of paper with their identity written on it. Once started, players use a book to see how many of each role are in play that session. They can also use it to help mark someone as suspicious or use their special ability.

Every time a person is marked suspicious, they receive an exclamation point over their head that everyone can see but them.
The game also allows two players to lean toward one another, if they’re sitting side by side, and activate a private chat that no one else can hear. Standing up in real life mutes everyone in the game for 10 seconds so the standing player can argue their case.
The charming graphics and setting, a campfire, add a lot to the experience, but mostly they are powerful tools for inspiring people to really invest in the game and become more gregarious. The result is surprisingly fun.
David Votypka, creative director for virtual reality at Ubisoft’s Red Storm studio, said that the team started playing around with ideas for VR games a few years ago. Ubisoft’s chief creative officer, Serge Hascoet, mentioned the classic party game formula of Mafia and asked if the team could figure out a way to get that sort of social play into a VR game.
"We spent about a year and half," he said.

What the team discovered, he said, was that when you put a group of players — in this case, six — into a shared virtual environment and network their head positions, body movement and voices, it starts to feel like they are really in the same space.
In action, that sense of community is quick to take root, and powerful once it does.
Granted, in the demo I tried, I was in the same room as the five other players. But in the game we were all sitting around the fire in a random order. After the game ended, I took my headset off and was a bit surprised to find that the person who was sitting next to me in the game was actually sitting across the room with another cluster of three players.
Werewolves Within is designed to be played entirely remotely, with no two players in the same room, and the team has put a lot of work into increasing the social aspects of the game.
"There’s a lot of nuance that drives discussions between the players," Votypka said. "For instance, no one can figure out who the werewolf is by theirselves."
While the game felt fully fleshed out to me, Votypka said it’s still in alpha.
"I feel like we’re in the right place for balance," he said. "Now it’s about finishing it up."
That includes things like potentially adding scorekeeping for people who might want to play a set of matches, or adding a way to let players feel like they’ve progressed in the game or accomplished goals.
I saw six character models in action, but Votypka said there are many more and even the ones I saw had different variations.
Werewolves Within, which is due out this fall, is "targeting all major" VR headsets, he said. He declined to specify which setups that included, though we played the game on the Oculus Rift.

It’s not subtle, but it shows the promise of VR to make a point Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to Polygon on YouTube

Tilt Brush is a virtual reality painting and sculpture program that allows people to create images in three dimensional space.
One artist recently used the program to draw what amounts to a political cartoon by starting with a caricature of Donal Trump with a hidden twist: if you step through that first image you see a hidden portrait of Adolf Hitler.
We’ve included a video above that shows both the drawing process and the act of exploring the final product.
“At a Tilt Brush artshow, my favorite piece was of a campsite with a teepee by a fantastic artist named Akin Bilgic," Tipatat Chennavasin, general partner at The Venture Reality Fund told Polygon when we asked about the work. "It had an easter egg where if you look inside you saw this great interior. I really liked that idea of looking inside the art and seeing more, which was only possible in VR."
Comparing political figures to Hitler is nothing new, but it’s taken on a new life with Trump, whose campaign rallies have grown increasingly violent. A clash between protesters and supporters that canceled an event on Friday only increased criticism of Trump in this way.
Chennavasin has been drawing and releasing some amazing pieces in virtual reality for a while now, but this was his first attempt at a political cartoon.
"I thought it was time to try and actually say something since art is most powerful when it has a message or meaning," he explained. "I am very concerned about the rise of Donald Trump and his brand of ugly bullying and advocacy of violence as the first response and as an artist I wanted to say something about it."

It’s one thing to see the work described in a video, one of which Polygon made to really show off the work’s 3D aspect, and another that Chennavasin created that is also embedded on this page. But the art loses something unless you’re wearing a Vive yourself and can see the 3D aspect of the drawing, and then step through Trump’s image to see the second portrait underneath.
It’s a work that all but requires virtual reality to experience "correctly," which is a challenge when so few people have access to the hardware.
"It’s strange but that is entirely the point of what I want to explore with VR," Chennavasin said. "When it comes to anything I experience in VR, I always ask why is this in VR and how is it a better or more interesting experience because of VR. Otherwise it might be better to do it in the other mediums."
I asked if drawing a comparison, literally and figuratively, between Hitler and Trump fell into the trap of Godwin’s Law, but Chennavasin disagreed.
"Godwin’s Law points to this ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ problem we have with Trump where when he are finally seeing a demagogue rising up by appealing to the worse of us but when we call it out, it gets lost in the noise," he explained. "I think one way to stop him is by getting the word out and voting, especially to the people who usually aren’t political."

Your movies and games, floating in a black void! The $399 PlayStation VR platform isn’t just for gaming content, Sony announced during its press conference for the virtual reality hardware. You’ll also be able to play games and watch movies that weren’t designed for virtual reality.
The system also has a cinematic mode, which “lets users enjoy a variety of content in a large virtual screen while wearing the headset," the press release stated. "Supported content for the Cinematic mode includes standard PS4 games and videos as well as variety of PS4 features including Share Play and Live from PlayStation. Users will also be able to enjoy 360 degrees photos and videos that are captured by devices such as omnidirectional cameras on PS VR via PS4 Media Player, which will let them feel as if they are physically inside the captured scene."
How big will the screen look? That’s up to you, but Sony gives some idea. "Users can enjoy content on a virtual screen up to 225 inches (5 meters in width) at a distance of 2.5 meters," the release explains. "The size of the screen will feel different depending on individual users."
The cinematic mode will allow you to play existing PS4 games and use video features, and the player will be able to select small, medium or large sizes for the virtual screen. We were able to try the feature during Sony’s event, and the software places the viewer in a black space watching a floating screen; there is no surrounding environment. Nearly all UI elements of the PlayStation 4 will function in this mode, although Sony didn’t detail which features wouldn’t be available.
PlayStation VR launches this October for $399, and requires an additional camera accessory to function.

The Holodeck is a long way off says former Pixar technical director Max Planck, 10-year veteran of Pixar and the technical founder of Oculus Story Studio, threw cold water on his audience at Game Developers Conference 2016 today. For half an hour he explored the many constraints working against creatives working in virtual reality, and argued for prioritizing shorter experiences ahead of longform work.
“We’re kind of at where film was back at the time of the nickelodeon," Planck said, "where people were willing to pay a nickel just to see something cool. And I think we should embrace that."
Planck cited the independent games scene as evidence that consumers are willing to spend less on smaller experiences, while admitting that VR doesn’t have a pricing model yet.
The nitty-gritty of his talk focused on the limitations for developers working in VR, and delved into both the practical and philosophical.

For instance, in his years working in computer-generated animation Planck explained how he’s gotten used to a certain kind of workflow. Multiple teams can work on multiple portions of a motion picture at the same time without much interference, and directors can monitor their work from over their shoulder, essentially. That’s not the case with VR, he said, showing a video of one member of his team wearing a VR headset, trying to explain herself while her staff of animators tried to follow along on a traditional flat screen behind her.
Simply sharing the same virtual space is a practical impossibility for the artists and engineers building today’s experiences, and that slows down production. But by working slowly and carefully, his team has been able to produce short experiences like Henry, pictured above, which is available for viewing now.
Most importantly, the kinds of tricks that directors have used for years — like cuts, pans, fades and simple scene transitions — simply don’t make sense to the every-day consumers of VR. When they applied them to Henry, he said, people hard a hard time determining if he was real or a ghost.
These skills may evolve in the future, as the audience becomes accustomed to the medium, but it’s also up to content creators to create a new visual vocabulary.
It’s also up to content creators to create a new visual vocabulary.
"If you showed a movie now to someone who was watching movies in the 1920s," Planck said, "it would look like art. They would say, ‘This is moving too fast. These are just abstract images being fed to my eyes.’ I think VR is going to go through that same arc."
Instead of longform, wide-open experiences with lots of interaction Planck stressed the need to take things one step at a time. By focusing on smaller, more deeply refined experiences, teams around the world can help move the medium forward.
"The Holodeck is a very long way away," Planck said, "and I think that everyone wants the Holodeck now. They see virtual reality and our imagination has been filled up with the idea that this is what we should be making, and I feel that people are making less-compelling experiences because they’re reaching too far."

Climb on the Bullet Train Despite its intensity and clever design, Epic Games’ first foray into an entirely original virtual reality game still has no promise of a street date.
After spending an hour explaining to an audience of developers and press how Epic tackled a number of key issues found in VR game development while creating Bullet Train, the project’s lead designer broke their hearts.
“You’re not going to see this in the foreseeable future," Nick Donaldson told one attendee, when asked about a release date.
It remains unclear why that is, but Nick Whiting, technical director for VR and AR at Epic Games, said that the playable level of the game — the only one that exists — could be made into a full game.
"The experience does scale," Whiting said. "This is only one level. If you layer on top of that game-isms like combos, scoring, different environments, you can scale it up.
"If you’ve played it a few times you start getting much more physical with it, and then hygiene and fatigue are limiting factors."
The game has already grown quite a bit since development started on what was to become Bullet Train. Whiting told the audience that the game was a direct byproduct of both what Epic had done in the past and where VR game development might head.
Epic’s first foray into VR was shown at E3 in 2013, a simple demo. Next, the company created a tabletop game demo. Then Epic created Couch Knights to play with the idea of multiple people using the same game space. In 2014 came a demo called Showdown, which was meant to show how cinematic a VR experience becomes when running at 90 frames per second.

Last year, the team worked with Weta Workshop to turn a moment in The Hobbit films into a purely visual VR experience.
"All of those things had something in common," Whiting said. "We adapted content we already made into VR."
For its next VR demo, Epic decided to build something from the ground up, a playable demo that uses the Oculus Rift’s touch controllers, leans on the learnings from previous demos, and pushes what the team knew forward.
The goal was to create a game built for a GTX 970 graphics card — a step down from the card needed to run Showdown — but to make it look better.
The developers also wanted to make motion controls to be a central part of the game.
And they only had six weeks to flesh out the idea.
Epic eventually showed off the Bullet Train demo during last fall’s Oculus Connect event. In the short demo, which we adored, players fight around a train station shortly after disembarking from a bullet train (get it?). The game uses Oculus Touch controllers to control its guns. Instead of reloading, players simply drop or throw away their guns and grab new ones. Players can also slow down time and pluck flying missiles out of the sky to redirect them at enemies.

But months before, the team’s first approach for the Bullet Train prototype was a shooter that played a bit like a virtual reality version of the light gun arcade classic Hogan’s Alley.
"It was a basic shooter gallery," Whiting said. "We had a table filled with weapons and bots would run at you. You could pick up the weapons and use them and blow the crap out of everyone."
Then the team thought of turning that concept into a co-op multiplayer game, with two players standing back to back, facing two alleys as they tried to take down waves of enemies.
But both approaches got boring quickly, he said.
So the developers went back and started looking at what makes shooting interesting in movies. They quickly realized that to make the game more fun, they were going to have to deal with the issue of movement in VR, a problem that’s hard to address without causing motion sickness or unease in some players.

They examined Asian action films like Oldboy and Hard Boiled, and liked the idea of doing a single camera shot. The idea was to follow alongside the player as he or she worked their way through a stream of enemies with a seemingly endless combination of gunfire and physical attacks.
"The one-shot solved the motion problem because the camera is moving through the action continuously," Whiting said. "We also control the path. So we can do things like change directions and have players go through those movements. And there would be a lot of chaining. As you go through the scene, you attack one guy, punch him, shoot that guy, take his nightstick and beat the next guy with it.
"It looks like you’re a badass and you feel like a badass."
The problem the team ran into was that players would start to turn and eventually obscure the tracking cameras, basically breaking the motion tracking.
Eventually, the team came up with the idea of minimizing movement by allowing players to teleport around a map. They could still move if they wanted to, but by combining the ability to teleport with some smart design decisions, the game was able to mostly keep players from walking around too much.
First, the game takes place in a train station. A train track running through the center of the game map is a natural, though subtle, reminder to players not to walk across the map, but rather to teleport.
The team also programmed enemy AI to move toward the center and make sure the boss of the level appears and stays in the middle of the map.

Once Epic layered in the ability to teleport to different sections on the maps to get weapons, take out enemies and move away from danger, players simply didn’t feel the need to manually move much.
To highlight the fun of chained attacks, the developers worked in a few other interesting tricks.
Bullet Train uses a stealth teleport to essentially always move you close enough to an enemy that you’re trying to punch, if they’re already pretty close to you.

Unbreakable

It turns out that playtesting an in-progress game for the Oculus Rift and its Oculus Touch controllers can sometimes result in frustrating moments. During their GDC talk, the Epic duo mentioned some of the incidents that the touch controllers survived.

Being thrown across the room.
Being thrown into a wall.
Being punched into a wall hard enough to remove some of the plaster.

"These controllers are indestructible," Donaldson said.

Epic also tweaked the way some of the harder weapons, like rockets and grenades, work. If you keep missing with your throws, the game starts to subtly, slowly auto-adjust the trajectory of your toss to make sure you hit what you’re aiming at. The assist on those throws went through a lot of iteration before Epic found the balance between helping a player to have fun, but not coddling them.
"It’s really hard to fail," Whiting said. "The longer you suck, the less you suck."
The developers also made it impossible to die in the game.
"We didn’t allow failure to be an option," he said. "There’s no death; you only become more badass."
The end result is a game that quickly makes you feel like you’re a badass, throwing weapons at enemies to stun them and then teleporting by their side to grab that same weapon as it falls and use it to kill them.
The team hammered on playtesting and continued to add new twists and ways to have fun. That included being able to juggle your weapons between two hands to quickly switch which hand is holding which gun; racking the shotgun as seen in Terminator 2; and being able to toss a grenade and then shoot it out of the air.
Bullet Train lead Donaldson said Epic even played around with the travel speed of bullets, just to make sure players caught a glimpse of them.
"Our solution was to slow the bullet down to a quarter of its original speed over one-tenth of a second and then to speed it up to 1.25 the original speed over time," he said. "The total time is about the same, but early on it’s slow so you can see it."
While Donaldson enthused about living through "oh shit" moments in Bullet Train, he also made sure to point out that VR gaming is still very much in its infancy.
"It’s like the early mobile game days," he said. "I think it’s the same with VR. You’re not going to get to play 120 hours of Skyrim on your couch.
"I think it is going to be a completely different sort of games that succeed."