Category: Game

Here we go! Oculus made the launch lineup of the Oculus Rift official during this year’s Game Developers Conference, and you can take a look at the games, their prices and comfort levels in the handy chart below. You can organize by alphabetical order, price, release date or comfort level depending on what you’re interested in seeing.
There are 30 games total, three of which are bundled or have no price listed at the time of publication. There’s also Eve: Valkyrie. Anyone who preorders the Oculus Rift gets that for free; those who don’t will have to buy a $59.99 “Founders Pack." We listed the price of that game at $60, which puts the average cost for an Oculus game at launch at $21.65, give or take.

A few things to note: There is a wide range of prices, from free-to-play games to full-priced releases and everything in between. Many games that you might’ve seen demoed on the HTC Vive and that don’t currently have a release date will likely be detailed more when we have a set release date for the upcoming Touch motion controllers.
Also, there are a lot of games here, and very few of them I would consider filler. Some will be better than others, but in terms of launch lineups this is pretty far on the "killer" side of the spectrum. You can expect coverage from many of these titles during GDC this week as move closer to the launch of the Oculus Rift on March 28.

Gods of Egypt this is not The upcoming adaptation of William Wyler’s 1959 classic Ben-Hur finally has a trailer.
The movie, which stars Boardwalk Empire’s Jack Huston as the main character, Judah Ben-Hur, follows a fallen nobleman through years of slavery before the prince decides to exact revenge on the man who betrayed him. The film will be directed by Timur Bekmambetov, best known for his work on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Wanted.
Also starring Morgan Freeman and Toby Kebbell, Ben-Hur will be released on Aug. 12.

The Division has made a fair few promises since its announcement in 2013.
When Ubisoft and its Massive studio pulled the curtain back on The Division several E3s ago, they promised a new kind of game in the Tom Clancy universe that married extensive online multiplayer support with a unique, beautifully rendered modern-day New York City setting. But as years came and went without a release and delays piled up, doubts collected at The Division’s feet as to whether it could actually deliver on any of the hype.

The good news is that in many ways, The Division executes well enough on the parts of its identity that would seem the hardest to get right in an open world. But The Division’s slavish adherence to the drip-feed mentality of massively multiplayer online role-playing games makes it feel like much less than it could be.
There are few things you do in The Division that don’t involve guns

The Division is set weeks after a weaponized pathogen called the Green Poison ravages New York City. The titular organization is a government sleeper agency called from the denizens of the city to try to restore order and investigate the cause of the plague but, this being a video game, things go bad quickly. Left to pick up the pieces, it’s your job to restore the Joint Task Force of local law enforcement and medical services and try to bring hope back to the people of NYC.
You primarily do this through shooting people.
I’ll get this out of the way now. There are a few things you do in The Division that don’t involve guns — cool augmented reality tech allows for in medias res snapshots of events during the outbreak and provide little mysteries to follow, and sometimes you’ll help citizens in need on the street. But these scenarios are pretty underdeveloped, and the gross majority of The Division is spent running from one place in its open-world Manhattan where you shoot people to the next. This isn’t unusual for a video game, and I’m not going to slam Ubisoft Massive and its partners for it unnecessarily. I’m just saying, there’s not a lot of variety here in that regard.

Thankfully, there’s a lot to like in The Division’s shooting, and when combined with some varied terrain and a lot of differences in verticality, the foundation of a good third-person shooter is present. This is more impressive for two reasons: First, The Division is an open-world game, a genre not typically known for competent shooting; second, for all intents and purposes, The Division is an RPG.
When you shoot enemies in The Division, damage numbers fly off as loot drops and experience is earned. Other games have tried this model with varying success, two of the best examples being Gearbox’s Borderlands and Bungie’s Destiny. Both of these examples often struggle to make their shooting feel properly responsive, meaty and powerful. But somehow, The Division’s gunplay more often than not feels like a shooter should.
Don’t get me wrong: Contrary to some of Ubisoft’s messaging around the game, The Division is largely playable solo, and a scaling difficulty system made sure that as long as my level matched the recommendation for the encounters in question, I had a surmountable challenge in front of me. Also, despite the MMO overtures, there is a story and important characters in The Division, complete with cutscenes and some plot development that goes beyond the more passive presentation in many online RPGs.

The Division is constrained by its MMO ambitions

But you don’t need to play alone, as there are deep multiplayer hooks in The Division in almost every part of the game. Finding people to play with is remarkably easy, both with friends and strangers, thanks to some very good in-game tools. Friends are shown on the map and are joinable at any time, and there are easy matchmaking systems in place for every main story mission and at every safehouse.

Like most things, The Division is more fun with friends, generally speaking. And as importantly, it allows the skill system to function as intended. There are three trees of upgrades that are unlocked by improving your base of operations — one for medics, engineers and tanks — and when each class is represented, there’s a suggestion of what The Division could be. If, that is, The Division weren’t so constrained by its MMO ambitions.
Character progression feels very minimal, as skills and perks give bonuses that are often small percentage improvements to existing abilities. Others give practical benefits, like the ability to carry more medkits or grenades, or to enter more contaminated spaces, but these aren’t especially distinctive or exciting. It feels very rote, and the way The Division’s New York plays at level 27 isn’t especially different than it was at level 5.

The Dark Zone
While The Division’s main component is strictly PVE, there’s a more dangerous chunk of Manhattan walled off from the rest of the city. This Dark Zone, so named because it was abandoned due to excessive viral contamination and chaos, is an all-bets-are-off space where just about anybody can be an enemy — including other players.
The Dark Zone is clearly intended to be late-game content, with a suggested level of 25-30 — which could take most players 25-30 hours to reach, if they’re extremely goal-oriented — and low-level players are in for a rude awakening if they wander in unaware. The Dark Zone holds special, more powerful loot that can’t be carried out. Instead, it has to be extracted via helicopter. This process takes time, and sends an alert throughout the zone, so less scrupulous players can take this opportunity to attack and steal your spoils.
In addition to providing a competitive element, the Dark Zone also has its own progression system atop The Division’s basic leveling component, which gates the Dark Zone gear you can use and containers you can open.
So far, I’ve only spent a bit of time in the Dark Zone. Initial impressions: It’s an interesting conceit that adds a level of tension that other multiplayer shooters don’t quite manage, and the consequences for being a marauding villain — which puts an increasing bounty on your head that you can then collect yourself if you can evade interception by justice-seeking players looking to end you — add some great wrinkles as well. I’ll continue to play The Division in the coming weeks and update our review if necessary.

As only a casual MMO player, to me this nonetheless seems like a case of systems and sensibilities lifted from that genre with little practical reason. I know my character was getting more powerful on paper because I saw the numbers go up. But in practical terms, the only real result I saw from better guns and gear and higher levels was keeping up with similarly leveled AI opponents, who otherwise kicked my ass up and down Manhattan with just a couple of levels above me. This stands in stark contrast to action RPGs like Diablo or even Borderlands, which more effectively manage the balancing act of more powerful stuff with more powerful enemies.
And while wandering around The Division’s frequently beautiful — albeit destroyed — Manhattan with friends is the sort of open-world experience I’ve been waiting for since the game was announced almost three full years ago, it often feels full of busy work, rather than meaningful tasks. There also just don’t seem to be that many different things to do. After securing your 10th mercy drop or performing your eighth JTF support mission, they all sort of feel the same — just harder.

The Division is more fun with friends

This is staved off somewhat by the good combat fundamentals and level design that, early on, feels more or less on par with other good third-person shooters. But later levels feel particularly constrained to overly simplistic level design ideas. The sort of iteration and slow introduction of new factions and enemy types finally gives way to “this one is purple, and that one is yellow." Almost as if in acknowledgement of this shortage of new ideas, the challenge in later missions is often reduced to elite enemies rushing your position with shotguns or LMGs, rather than anything truly new or inventive.
In wider, more open spaces, this made for some fun, on-my-feet strategizing as I scrambled from one piece of cover to another. But in more constrained spaces with lots of level geometry to get hung up on, it led to quick and frustrating deaths, making the The Division feel artificially bogged down, and much less fun.
This late-game drought of new ideas is frustrating in part because The Division teases at least one encounter later on involving the kind of escalation it struggles with so often. It wasn’t just exciting, it felt new — and then the game ended.

That is, insofar as The Division ends. I was greeted with a pop-up after finishing the last "proper" mission in the game that there would be more story-oriented mainline missions and "endgame" content to come. I understand that MMOs have to make promises like this, but in a game I played by myself — effectively, and enjoyably, I might add — as often as I did with other people, the lack of any proper resolution to The Division’s story doesn’t feel like a promise. It just doesn’t feel finished.

Sony’s eyes say “Maybe," but their lawyers say "We’ll get back to you" Microsoft recently opened the door to enabling Xbox One and PS4 gamers to pit their skills against each other online, but it would appear that Sony’s not quite willing to walk through just yet. That said, the company’s not slamming doors in anyone’s face either.
In a statement issued to GameSpot, the company wrote:

"PlayStation has been supporting cross-platform play between PC on several software titles starting with Final Fantasy 11 on PS2 and PC back in 2002.

"We would be happy to have the conversation with any publishers or developers who are interested in cross platform play."

Like Microsoft, Sony stopped short of mentioning the competition’s name directly, only adding more delectable tension to gaming’s hottest "will they/won’t they" relationship.

Here’s a rundown of what the small box does and doesn’t do Sony has kept mum on the capabilities of PlayStation VR’s processing unit to this point, but the company finally provided some details on the box during a presentation today at the 2016 Game Developers Conference.
“It is not extra GPU power CPU power," said Chris Norden, senior staff engineer at Sony. "It is certainly not a PlayStation 4 expansion unit or upgrade."
Norden added, "Actually, it’s not really accessible to the developer in any way," noting that "the PlayStation 4 is perfectly capable of 120 Hz."

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Sony’s been so secretive about the box, which is officially called the "processor unit," that we weren’t even allowed to take photos of it as recently as December. The company provided the dimensions of the box yesterday, following the announcement of the PlayStation VR price and release window: The processor unit is about the size of four CD jewel cases stacked together.
So what does the processor unit do? A slide in Norden’s presentation explained that the box handles processing of object-based 3D audio, and displays the "social screen," which is Sony’s term for the second screen that you may use with PlayStation VR. (The box allows the PS4 to simultaneously output an image to the headset and, say, a television.) The processor unit unwarps the headset image so it can be displayed on a normal screen, and that process drops the resolution somewhat for the social screen.
The processor unit can use the social screen in both mirroring mode and in a separate mode, according to Norden. And the box also handles the display of the PS4 interface when the PlayStation VR headset is being used in cinematic mode.
We’ll have more from Norden’s talk soon.
Developing …

Checks going out soon to more than 20,000 athletes The $60 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought by college athletes against Electronic Arts will pay claimants an average of $1,600, according to a document filed in court yesterday.
The size of the settlement was set in June 2014 after the NCAA added $20 million to what EA and the NCAA’s top licensing agent, the Collegiate Licensing Company, agreed to. The settlement resolves a case brought in 2008 by former UCLA basketball All-American Ed O’Bannon over EA Sports’ practice of basing its college games’ rosters on real-world performers without their permission.

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The per-player payout is subject to a number of factors, notably how many people file for, and are awarded, claims. According to a March 14 court filing, 24,819 individuals were found to have valid claims. Lawyers are awarded 30 percent of the $60 million settlement, leaving the players to divide the remaining $40 million, which accounts for the $1,600 average payment.
Lawyers had said that as many as 200,000 players could have made valid claims, which would have significantly lowered the individual payments.
The amount each player actually receives will vary widely — under the settlement terms, as some ways in which their likenesses were used are considered more valuable than others. Also, appearances in earlier versions of the games are worth less than more recent appearances. Players are also compensated for each use, and some may have appeared in more games or in more years than others.
O’Bannon, who is currently a salesman and marketing officer for a car dealership in Las Vegas, will receive $15,000 as a lead plaintiff, along with former college quarterbacks Sam Keller and Ryan Hart, whose lawsuits against EA were consolidated into the O’Bannon case earlier this decade.

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The payments should resolve one of the longest-running and most far-reaching civil lawsuits affecting not just video games but major sports in North America. O’Bannon’s litigation led to the shelving of EA Sports’ NCAA Football series in 2013 after a nearly 20-year run (EA’s NCAA Basketball/March Madness franchise was canceled in 2009 for other reasons).
While this resolves the video games portion of the former athletes’ litigation, there is still an ongoing lawsuit against the NCAA itself over the other means by which it and its members profit from college players’ performances, mainly in the form of television broadcast rights. The larger case, in which both the NCAA and O’Bannon won key points in the appeal of a judge’s ruling back in September, could still have enormous consequences for the major college sports model.

Insomniac’s decision to go third-person makes all the difference When Edge of Nowhere was announced this past June I’ll admit I was a bit puzzled. The value proposition simply didn’t make sense to me at the time. Why would an early adopter, investing in the immersive promise of the Oculus Rift, even bother with a third-person adventure game?
But, after 30 minutes with the demo shown at Game Developers Conference 2016, I’m of a different mind entirely. Edge of Nowhere is shaping up to be a must-have Oculus title. It represents a carefully calculated and confident leap by Insomniac Games into VR, and I can’t wait to experience the final product.
The reason the team at Insomniac elected to go with a third-person perspective is straightforward. Right now, most potential players simply aren’t acclimated to being in VR. Anecdotes of nausea and discomfort in first-person games are common, even among experienced gamers.
Insomniac’s creative director Brian Allgeier said that his team wanted to make sure their players were as comfortable as possible, and a third-person perspective was a simple way to achieve that goal.
With players’ stomachs at ease, Insomniac had the wiggle room to mess with their minds at a much deeper level.

“We also just love the idea of VR and horror," he said. "That fear of not knowing what’s around each corner and being able to look around it."
Edge of Nowhere is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness. It puts players in the shoes of Victor Howard, a man searching for his friends in the snowy wastes of Antarctica. But as the game progresses, Howard begins to slowly go insane.
"He can’t really trust his senses about where he is at all times," Allgeier said, "and we like that concept of being in virtual reality while at the same time not knowing what’s real versus what’s not real in-game. That’s a running theme that goes throughout."
By the end of my demo, Howard had fought off horrifying monsters that defied description only to be transported from the heart of an icy cavern all the way across the world to Miskatonic University. In the final moments, he began hallucinating conversations with people who weren’t actually there and imagining himself in places he hadn’t visited in years.

"There’s a lot we can do with going insane," Allgeier said, "by transporting Victor to different parts of his memories. So that’s something that will continually surprise people where they get to play it."
The most impressive part of the demo was how well the VR experience enhanced the traditional third-person gameplay.
Much of my time was spent traversing sheer walls of ice, picking my way along with ice axes and crampons of the period. As I leaped from wall to wall, the scene extended above me and below me. By looking down I could give myself a palpable sense of vertigo. But when it got too intense, I just refocused on the gameplay being presented right in front of me.
Allgeier explained to me how Insomniac designed certain interactions to encourage players to look up. Chunks of ice would rain down on me as I climbed, but by looking up I could dodge them. Horrific creatures hid in the shadows of the ceiling, waiting for their moment to fall down and devour me. But by looking up, and planning ahead, I could toss a rock their way that would dislodge them, leading to an easy melee kill.
By looking down I could give myself a palpable sense of vertigo
One interesting feature of the game was how it handled cutscenes. When I interacted with an object the third-person perspective faded away and the camera came in tight — almost between Howard and I. It was like I was standing next to him, inside the same circle of conversation.
It don’t think I’ve ever been that close to a cutscene before. It was almost intimate, and certainly something completely new for me in VR.
Right now, Allgeier says, his team isn’t quite sure how long the game will be. He put it in the strangely wide range of 2-10 hours. He’s also not sure how much it will cost. All he could tell me is that it would be ready shortly after the Oculus’ launch this spring.

Step onto the desert planet yourself If you ever get a chance to check it out, your visit to a virtual reality Star Wars in its current form will be all too brief.
The Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine demo runs for maybe seven minutes in its entirety, and only a brief moment within that time is actual gameplay.
The demo opens with the familiar burst of music so familiar to anyone who has seen a Star Wars movie, and then comes the text crawl, marching off into the star-filled distance until it finally disappears.
Next you see Tatooine and then, finally, you’re there, standing by a landing pad next to a clutter of boxes and storage bins in an alien desert.
The Millennium Falcon swoops down, and after a bit of banter and a quick repair or two, R2-D2 hands over your lightsaber. The controls are precise, but smoothed out to prevent the jitter some might deliver with an unsteady hand. I was able to perform tight figure eights in the air with the tip of the lightsaber and tiny, nearly invisible circles with controlled wrist movement.
While the virtual weapon obviously lacks the heft of a physical object, I was surprised at how real it felt in the experience. It’s been a while, but I spent my high school and college years learning and teaching fencing. This weapon behaved like it should when it came to tip control.
It did feel ever so slightly behind the faster of my real-world wrist movements, but not enough to throw me out of the experience.
After a few seconds of adjusting, my place sort of under the Millennium Falcon was attacked by a swarm of stormtroopers, and Han Solo asked me, over an intercom, to protect R2.
I spent the next minute or so swatting red lasers out of the air, trying my best to both protect the droid and also angle the laser blasts back at the approaching troopers.
I found using the tip of the lightsaber was easier and more efficient than trying to, essentially, parry the blasts with the edge of the weapon.
It was fantastic fun, but over way too quickly for the buildup. I was also surprised to find that a few times I bumped the wall with my controller.
Later, the person demoing the game for me said that the typical virtual wall that pops up to warn a player that they’re about to hit something was turned off for the demo because the developers thought it took away from the experience.

Check out the video above to see the entire demo, and me awkwardly swatting my way through it.

We now know how much the PlayStation VR headset will cost, and when it will be released: $399 in October. Sony made those announcements today during the 2016 Game Developers Conference, and shortly afterward, the company released a bunch of product photos of the final version of the unit. Check out the PlayStation 4’s VR accessory — which won’t come with the required PlayStation Camera — in the images from Sony below.

High Voltage’s Conduit series landed on Wii and mobile. Now the team is attempting a shooter in VR Like a benchmark, any time a new platform comes along, people try to make first-person shooters for it. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. It happened on Wii and mobile, and now it’s happening in VR.
Developer High Voltage Software has been through each of those phases, developing the Conduit series on Wii and later overseeing a mobile port. Now it’s developing Damaged Core, a first-person shooter for the Oculus Rift.
While in many ways shooters seem like a natural fit for VR, with the player looking through the eyes of the main character, they don’t always work as well as they seem because the amount of movement often makes players feel uncomfortable. High Voltage’s solution was to take out the movement.
In Damaged Core, you can’t walk or run. Instead, you teleport between stationary enemies (or orbs floating in the sky if you need a bird’s eye view). You play an AI and the enemies are robots, so you jump into a robot body, shoot the enemies in your view, then hop out before all the nearby robots turn on you. You can teleport into most enemies you can see, though in some cases they might not be immediately available and have a shield you have to shoot off first, for instance.

In practice, movement feels great. It’s easy to target an enemy and “inhabit" them, and the strategy seems to be more about choosing where to teleport than having perfect aim. When I played it at a recent press event, the most exciting moments came not from killing enemies, but from abandoning bodies at the last possible second. It’s like a game of hot potato, using up what you can from one robot then finding another to keep the streak going.
In the level I tried, it seemed like many of the enemies stood still to accommodate this design, giving off a bit of a shooting gallery feel. High Voltage chief creative officer Eric Nofsinger says the team showed the level I played to show how the mechanics work, and that other levels will have more enemies that rush you like you might expect from a traditional shooter.
"On that level, I’d say because of the space it is — the open, almost arena-style play space of that level, which is one of our smallest levels — they tend to give you a little bit more room and not get up on you," says Nofsinger.
Because of that open space, where enemies spawn all over and sometimes behind you, I also turned around a lot while playing. The developers seemingly anticipated this, since at the press event one booth attendee’s job was to stand next to the player and hold the cord that sticks out of the headset, moving it as players turned so no one got tangled in the cord.

Producer Doug Seebach says he hasn’t seen many issues with players getting tangled in the cord, and that players who get to understand the game’s flow often look 90 degrees to their right or left, and then return their view to the center where they began, and repeat that sequence. Nofsinger adds that in the development team’s office, many choose to play sitting down in a swivel chair rather than standing up like at the press event.
As a base concept, though, Damaged Core is already a lot of fun. The rhythm of hopping between characters came because of VR limitations, but feels like something that would be fun in any format.
And as the game plays out, Nofsinger says the team has plenty of other twists on the formula in the works — like a Valkyrie enemy that you inhabit then aim its missiles by tilting your head, and different generations of enemies that you can’t inhabit until you upgrade to a certain level. The game will also have bosses, many of which you can’t inhabit, and a story worked on by BioShock Infinite and Saints Row writer Drew Holmes.
High Voltage doesn’t have any multiplayer plans, and is currently preparing for a spring 2016 launch.