Project Morpheus - The Games

[drahkon]

A couple of VR games have been announced at E3 for Project Morpheus.

 

I figured that it would be best to just put them into one thread for the time being, instead of making one for each game. (if a mod thinks this is a bad idea: feel free to make separate threads : peace:)

 

 

Battlezone

 

 

Earlier this year we tasked a team at our Oxford studio to reboot one of gaming’s seminal titles for a new generation of virtual reality games. VR of course, is an exciting challenge – you have to throw so many traditional game design rules out the window and start afresh. In this respect Sony gave us some fantastic support- providing us with plenty of Morpheus development kits and chatting with our coders

and designers on a regular basis to help us develop on this new platform.

 

And here we are today, with a world-first gameplay trailer (spot the old Battlezone references!) and a playable build running on Project Morpheus kits on the E3 showfloor. I almost have to pinch myself!

 

It’s still early days, so we don’t have launch dates or final features to share with you yet but hopefully the early footage will show you our vision for epic tank combat amongst some truly monumental sci fi environments.

 

Source - PlayStation.Blog.Europe

 

 

Godling

 

 

You are a Godling, a toddler God that awakens to the sights and sounds of a beautiful natural world. Just like a young child, you take your very first hesitant steps in this world full of curiosities and wonders only to realise that it also has great perils. And you are one of them.

 

You quickly learn that you have some awe inspiring powers to grow and improve the world but also some formidable abilities to accidentally ruin everything.

 

As a first person virtual reality adventure you genuinely feel immersed and present in the world and because of its sandbox nature, you truly have agency in shaping your environment. As you explore this intriguing habitat you will slowly learn how to use the powers at your disposal, but the question is, how will you use them? Do you become the dutiful, caring master of your domain, or would you rather watch it crash and burn? In Godling, the choice is yours.

 

We use an innovative combination of gaze-based navigation enabled by Morpheus’ positional tracking and the DualShock 4 controller, and with that we feel that you are able to interact with Godling’s world in an intuitive way which we think is very important in a VR game.

 

Source - PlayStation.Blog.Europe

 

 

Wayward Sky

 

 

In Wayward Sky, you are Bess, a young co-pilot flying with your father when you crash into a mysterious fortress that emerges out of the clouds. With your father kidnapped and plane in ruins, you set out to explore the flying fortress and rescue your father. To guide Bess around the fortress, you point with your head to anywhere and press an action button on the PS4 controller to have her walk there. We’ve designed wide open environments and we play with layered verticality to really show off the power of what it feels like to inhabit a space in VR.

 

The game switches between a third-person for movement with cameras hovering over a space and at times switch to a first-person view as Bess interacts with puzzles in the world. There’s also a scale change switch between the two perspectives that’s only possible to do in VR. In third-person, we scale the player camera so it feels like you are a giant looking down on a miniature world. When switching to 1st person, we scale the camera to a standard human scale and you feel like you are standing in the space.

 

In VR, the camera is essentially your head so moving it around without the player’s consent like most traditional games can be uncomfortable to players when there’s a disconnect between what your eyes see and what your body is experiencing. So character movement and exploration of a big environment can be tricky. To solve this, we do camera “blinks” between areas as the player guides Bess through it. During these blinks, we switch camera angles to allow you to explore the world thoroughly.

 

Source - PlayStation.Blog.Europe

 

 

SUPERHYPERCUBE

 

 

Hello everyone! We’re KOKOROMI, a videogames/art collective originally formed in Montreal in 2006. We’re excited to be here today on PlayStation.Blog to announce our new VR game at E3 2015.

 

Introducing SUPERHYPERCUBE — a first-person puzzler developed by KOKOROMI and published by POLYTRON, coming exclusively to Project Morpheus at launch!

 

When motion cameras were eventually introduced, we re-visited the way headtracking worked within the game (earning an Indiecade finalist nod in the process), but were still dependent on red/cyan 3D glasses to create a powerful visual depth effect. In many ways, we’ve been watching technology develop over the last seven years to support our original gameplay vision—a truly physical puzzle game that is both fully enveloping and plays with your perception.

 

Source - PlayStation.Blog.Europe

[Ronnie]

I'd be amazed if Morpheus actually comes out, they clearly half-arsed it at the conference.

[gaggle64]

I'm still not sure how the PS4 can do VR given the clout needed for the Oculus on PCs. I'm genuinely curious but not yet convinced a VR set on a current-gen console has a viable purpose in the face of the competition.

[somme]

I want one Mainly for No Man's Sky or Alien: Isolation though - if they indeed make those games compatible. Will get one regardless though. Wanted to try VR since I was a kid.

[Happenstance]

I'd be amazed if Morpheus actually comes out, they clearly half-arsed it at the conference.

 

They already confirmed before E3 that Morpheus wouldnt get a massive showing during the conference itself because its so hard to demo that way but its been given about half of their space on the show floor.

[Daft]

I'd be amazed if Morpheus actually comes out, they clearly half-arsed it at the conference.

 

Do you really think it makes sense to demo VR at the conference...when it's really about being hands-on with it? You really can't effectively portray VR on a stage. It's on the show floor and it has a pretty strong presence, that's where it needs to be and it's enough.

[Hero-of-Time]

 

I wish there was some footage of this. Apparently Capcom aren't ready to show it off to the public yet. I've read that your tied to a chair in a kitchen and someone tries to help you out, only for zombies to come and attack you. His reactions are brilliant.

 

EDIT: Found a write up about it.

 

Still with us? Well, while Sony London Studio's The Deep unsettled with its shark cage attacks and Alien: Isolation made us shut our eyes more than once on Oculus Rift, Kitchen has been scaring people silly at E3 today.

 

Headset on, you find yourself in a dirty old kitchen, facing a fridge, tied to a chair, wrists bound together. You waft the DualShock 4 controller and your hands try feebly to escape your bonds to no avail. In a doff of the cap to Saw, what looks like a dead body in front of you starts to move, revealing themselves to be a disorientated friend who soon tries to cut your ties with a big knife – waggling it right in your face, for good measure – before fumbling it.

 

But before you can curse his ineptitude, a demonic, long-haired woman is slicing him aside in front of you, before leaping into your face, Ring style, and plunging the knife into your thigh. She pulls him out of the room, with sounds emanating from round the corner that you'd rather not know about. As you look feverishly from side to side for a way to escape – maybe you could grab the knife? Are there tools in that drawer? – a head comes flying round the corner, landing at your feet and oozing blood over your shoes. It's your mate's, obviously.

 

Again, you look around, hearing her breathing but not knowing exactly where she is. The pauses seem to go on for an age, even though the demo is only minutes long. Finally, as you look around, the woman's bloody hands are on your face, the knife is up and you're plunged into darkness...

 

So, VR has its first torture porn demo. Indeed, after my go, in which I flinched and guffawed as you should with all good horrors, I hung around to see how it was received by others. Those who dared to have a go – and many gave it a swerve after word started to get out – made for some of the most amusing reactions yet seen from VR, a Slender-esque procession of jump scares and laughter.

 

A headset's isolating capacity to inflict your own personal horror on you, whatever that may be, has never been more clear. Come on Capcom, give us a full game of this stuff.

Edited June 19, 2015 by Hero-of-Time

[Mr_Master_X2]

I think, at this point, there will only ever be disappointment for VR. We all know what people think of when they think "VR" (photorealistic, fully immersive, bio feedback, holodeck of the mind etc.) I get we have to start this far away from that to get funding and slowly grow bit by bit, but in peoples minds it will never be good enough until we get there. That's VR's problem, ie. it will never be as good as people want, so won't sell as well, so will never make enough money to reach developement stage that people want. It'll require massive hopeful funding on the developement end with no real return/success until we get "there".

[Sheikah]

^ That assumption is already wrong, because even at the stage VR is currently at, people who have tried it have been very impressed with it (in contrast to where you say people will never think it is good enough). I know @drahkon is one. What matters is whether people find it fun, not whether it currently mimics reality 1:1.

 

I mean, you could say the same thing about the Wii, right? Until it completely mimics swinging a tennis racquet, nobody will ever buy it. Except, they did. Thus, enjoyment matters more than complete realism.

[drahkon]

^ That assumption is already wrong, because even at the stage VR is currently at, people who have tried it have been very impressed with it (in contrast to where you say people will never think it is good enough). I know @drahkon is one.

 

Yup, I tried it last year and was thoroughly impressed and had a lot of fun, even if it was basically a tech-demo in which I could wail swords and morning stars on a dummy.

It needs better controlers, though. The Move remotes suck ass.

 

If Sony offesr the headset at a reasonable price and developers get enough time to produce great games this has the potential to take off.

 

Of course, Occulus Rift will be the non-plus ultra for quite some time, but it will probably cost a lot more than Project Morpheus.