Wired: Lucky's Tale will blow your mind
I’ve tried to describe Lucky’s Tale, with words and stuff, to other people at the E3 show here in Los Angeles. I can’t do it. I usually end up saying, “You’ve just got to go try it.”
Oculus still hasn’t said anything about when it plans to ship the consumer version of its virtual reality headset. But it’s already working with game developers to show off some real games — not tech demos, but actual consumer products it’s developing as first-party software for the Rift. One of them is Lucky’s Tale, created by Playful, the new studio started by Paul Bettner, co-creator of Words With Friends.
So imagine a Mario 64-style third-person cartoony run-and-jump platformer game. Now imagine that the Oculus take on this is not that you are seeing every vomit-inducing jump and roll from Mario’s eyes, but that you’re just hanging out watching as Mario does all this stuff. You’re in there with him, controlling his moves, but you’re on the sidelines. And by moving your head around you can get better views of the action.
That’s Lucky’s Tale. It doesn’t sound like it should work, sounds like kind of a waste of virtual reality — what, it’s just like playing a regular videogame but the screen wraps around your head? But the sense of presence is staggering. It’s like you’re actually in there. When Lucky hits a box and stars pop out of the top of it, you naturally look upwards to see where they’re going to fall. And at that moment you feel like you’re staring up at the sky in real life, looking at things that are about to fall on you.
If you don’t expect that this would be so impressive, neither did I, and neither did Paul Bettner.
“When we first got together with Oculus, we looked at this new platform and realized, all the rules of making games just got thrown out the window,” he told WIRED on Tuesday in a meeting room within Oculus’ E3 booth. “When we realized that… we decided the only way to figure this out was to rapidly create one prototype after another.”
Bettner and his team, working alongside Oculus, cranked out all kinds of different, playable game ideas, over 40 of them, over the course of four months. But it was the third-person platformer that stuck. “The moment we saw it, we were just blown away — oh my gosh, this works better than anything else we’ve tried,” he said.
There’s a cool only-in-VR moment as well. Lucky can pick up and throw bombs, and you’ve got to aim at targets by just moving your head and focusing your gaze on the bullseye. It’s intuitive, simple and deadly accurate.
The flexible nature of the cartoon platform game, Bettner says, means we can expect all sorts of experimenting with the play controls in Lucky’s Tale.
“It gives us an excuse to put all these different experiences into one game,” he says. “If I’m a gamer and I just got my shiny new Oculus, I want a game that’s going to take me to all these different places and do all these different things.”
That’s the big question — now that we’re starting to see some full games that promise to blow us away with the power of VR, when can consumers expect to actually get their hands on a finished Oculus Rift?
“We designed this as a launch game for the consumer Rift, so our launch date is their launch date,” Bettner says. Now I really can’t wait for that day.
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/oculus-luckys-tale/
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The Verge: Playing the mind-bending new Oculus Rift games at E3 2014
The latest games show how far VR has come — and how far it has left to go
Virtual reality development has come full circle.
When we first saw
John Carmack's version of what would become the Oculus Rift, it was playing a copy of Doom 3. But over time, developers realized that motion sickness and outmoded interfaces made first-person action games a tough sell. At the 2014 Game Developers Conference, Oculus declared that VR was more of
a "seated experience,"putting you in cockpits and on couches.
Then, at E3, they decided to send you running around a deserted spaceship. Since being acquired by Facebook, Oculus has rapidly ramped up its hiring, recruiting the likes of former THQ head Jason Rubin to work on publishing dedicated VR titles. Company CEO Brendan Iribe is cagey about what this means for the product, though he emphasizes that it's still focused firmly on games. He wouldn't comment on rumors that Oculus is
working with Samsung on a mobile headset, saying only that the company has worked with many partners.
According to Oculus, hardware isn't the main issue right now. With the fundamental technology in place, it's turned to the question of what people will play and how they'll access it. The company has been working on a Rift interface to replace the current clunky system of starting games from the desktop, but it's supposedly still in the design stage. Iribe wouldn't rule out 2014 as a shipping date for the final product, but he said that this year is mostly about the development kit. Along with that interface, Oculus has been aggressively building a catalog, and those efforts have borne fruit at E3. The company is showing off three games: third-person platformer Lucky's Tale, survival horror game Alien: Isolation, and
bullet time shooter Superhot. And with them, they've made their strongest case so far for the Rift.
Virtual reality often gets talked about as an experience for the eyes alone, but 3D sound is behind the best section of the demo. In Superhot, enemies are trying to shoot you, but time moves only when you do. The result is like an extended gunfight from The Matrix.You carefully feint and dodge your way down a hallway, leaning and ducking to avoid bullets — it's a very cool use of the newly added head-tracking technology. But the best part is that if a bullet gets too close, you'll hear it whistle past your ear. I wasn't expecting this when it happened, and it turned an abstract video game gunfight into something that felt like it could genuinely affect my body.
Lucky's Tale is unlike Superhot in almost every way. Developed by the creator of Words with Friends, it's a cute and straightforward game that feels like looking in on a diorama. In it, you guide an anthropomorphic fox around a cartoon garden and forest; if you look at the fox, he'll use the Oculus' gaze tracking to stare right back at you. I didn't spend enough time with it to evaluate its merits as a platformer, but as a Rift demo, it showed how an omniscient third-person perspective can remain immersive.
For early enthusiasts of the Oculus Rift, however, Alien: Isolation is probably closest to the original promise. It's a dark, spaceship-bound survival game where you're constantly looking over your shoulder for a threat, slower than a shooter but no less atmospheric. While the game's interface still isn't optimized for the Rift, its horror elements take advantage of how close things can feel in it — namely, the creature tearing you apart. (My time was cut short by the arrival of Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles. His reaction, after leaning around imaginary corners and crawling into a vent, was a combination of pleasant surprise and mild bemusement.)
Alien: Isolation's most instructive flaw is that it's just realistic enough to drive home its unrealism. Lucky's Tale and Superhot are both experiences your body doesn't expect to grasp, but we understand things like walking intimately, even if we'll never meet a xenomorph. The more your avatar is doing something you could do, the more you feel the lack when you open a door but can't touch it, or curl up in a tight space while your body is comfortably sitting in a chair. Don't get me wrong, it's still fantastic. It just makes you long for something more.
Iribe sees visual immersion as the biggest component of virtual reality. Tactile feedback and motion control systems like the Omni Virtuix Treadmill and the Leap Motion, he says, provide improvements that are significant but incremental. We also aren't at a point where we can take VR graphics for granted. This week's demos are only the beginning of developers figuring out how to move, see, and act in the Rift, and the short E3 demos don't provide enough time to evaluate them as games. The most exciting part of them isn't even how well they actually work — it's seeing hard proof that people are feeling out the limits and potential of virtual reality.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/11/5...llet-time-inside-the-latest-oculus-rift-games
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Parece que com esse Lucky's Tale, todos os momentos que eu sonhei com um Mario 64 em VR não foram em vão. Eu sabia que esse tipo de game seria incrível em VR, que não era necessário que todos os jogos fossem FPS, e esse será a prova disso. Como eu queria que a nintendo fizesse jogos pro Rift, MY GOSH. Imagina o que ela faria, as ideias sensacionais no uso do tracking (que eu espero que seja aperfeiçoado no CV1, para termos ao menos liberdade de 1 metro em 360°).
Talvez num futuro, quando VR for algo natural e do tamanho de óculos de sol [o Palmer já disse que o CV1 seria algo entre o DK2 e um óculus de sol], a nintendo faça um console focado nisso (desde que toda a família possa usufruir, é claro).
Mas até lá, já fico satisfeito em ver os grandes games que irão aparecer no PC, e com o co-founder da ND criando estúdios para a Oculus, veremos o momento triunfal dos jogos de plataforma!!!