Respawn has partnered with Oculus Rift to make a realistic war game for VR that appears to put players in the trenches of a historical war.
Since the first wave of modern high-end virtual reality platforms — Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PlayStation VR — launched in 2016, VR enthusiasts and fans have wondered when the experience would be capable of emulating the most popular traditional video games forms. Sure, there have been plenty of on-rails shooters, and even a more full-bodied experience in Farpoint on PSVR, but we are still waiting on those huge AAA franchises: The Battlefields, the Call of Duties, and the Titanfalls of the world.
At Oculus Connect 4, Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment announced it is working with Oculus to deliver a “first-person combat experience” to the Oculus Rift in 2019. Here’s everything we know about the game so far. Details are scant for now, but we will update this article as more information comes to light.
Respawn unveiled a teaser trailer for the forthcoming shooter at Oculus Connect 4 in October 2017. The vast majority of it is video montages of historical war footage. No actual gameplay footage or even cinematics are shown in the trailer. But at the beginning, when the trailer is still black, a narrator delivers the following lines:
“You go from knowing you’re dead by noon to, I’m gonna live and I’m not even wounded in a matter of a few hours. It’s like no feeling you’ve had before.”
This statement, delivered by a man who is obviously a soldier, evokes what Respawn and Oculus are going for with its war shooter: Realism.
Later on in the video, Respawn said it is striving to “depict being a soldier in combat in a more fully fleshed out and realistic way.”
Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella went also said, “the combat experience in VR really gives you the chance to experience life closer to what a soldier would experience in real combat. It gives you more of that feeling of paranoia and that tension.”
The trailer shows a user wearing an Oculus Rift headset and wielding a pair of the upcoming revamped Oculus Touch controllers. The only hint that we see as to gameplay is through motion- capture clips, which from the movement onscreen, hint that the game will be room scale VR.
A blog post penned by Respawn director Peter Hirschmann ruled out the obvious: The game will not be connected to either Respawn’s other current active franchises — Titanfall or Star Wars.
It would appear that the shooter will be a new franchise altogether and by the looks of the footage shown in the trailer, it could take players back to a historical war. World War II seems likely, given that the footage includes the iconic shot of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima.
While the teaser trailer didn’t reveal much at all, that is because the game is still in its early development stages. Respawn said the currently untitled game will hit the Oculus store in 2019.
