All Oculus Rift preorders will ship with the amazing Eve: Valkyrie

 

 Oculus and CCP Games, the developers of Eve: Valkyrie, announced that all Rift preorders would ship with a free copy of the game. This is going to go over extremely well with virtually anyone who has played the game’s demo in VR, because Valkyrie is frickin’ amazing.
As I discussed last summer, playing Eve: Valkyrie is immersive in a way I’ve never experienced in any space combat or flight simulator. Positional head tracking lets the player actually look around the cockpit, following a bogie as it rockets out of your field of view.
PCWorld has an extensive write-up on how CCP’s implementation of VR has evolved over the past two years and the lessons the team has had to learn on everything from menu design to button placement. Every aspect of the player experience has to be thought out again when working in VR, often with surprising snares and pitfalls. Even as a player, you sometimes find out that things are jarring in places where you didn’t expect it.

As an example: I had an opportunity to demo an HTC Vive headset last week as part of AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group meeting in Sonoma. In the VR demo for Arizona Sunrise, I had to physically kneel and reach out with a disembodied hand to pick up my chosen weapons. In previous VR demos, I’ve never been bothered by not having hands — after all, most FPS games put weapons in your field of view, not body parts. Once I had on-screen, disembodied hands, I suddenly found not having arms visually disconcerting. Issues like this are going to crop up a lot as VR development continues, so it’s good to hear that CCP has been steadily iterating on building better environments for players.

The VR question

As great as Eve: Valkyrie looks, I’m not certain I’d go leaping out the door to order an Oculus Rift. Early VR content is going to arrive in a slow trickle, rather than a flood, and I expect most of what we’ll see will be smaller-scale demos, games, and a bare handful of larger titles. The demo versions of Arizona Sunshine, for example, doesn’t allow the player to explore the environment — you shoot an area of the screen to move from Point A to Point B, with waves of zombies attacking at each new point. Solving the basic question of movement within the game world is an issue that has plagued unusual controllers before (Exhibit A: Kinect).

The zombie shooting was fun, even if the game looked a bit like an old Source title.

The bottom line is that VR titles will tend to either offer limited movement and exploration compared with current open-world environments, or will limit their scope and size while studios and researchers figure everything out.
At an expected price point of roughly $400, and coming in on top of already-steep PC requirements, the Rift is going to require a substantial investment, and I’m not sure a bundled game is enough to really convince people on the fence about it — but if Eve: Valkyrie is a tenth as good as it looks, already-committed buyers are going to get a great game to show off.