Obduction adds Vive, Oculus Touch VR hand-tracking support - diazthereave1956

Time to rematch Obduction, I guess. This morning Cyan announced that Vive and Oculus Touch support has been added into the game, allowing you to explore Hunrath, Kaptar, and the rest of its spacefaring Myst successor with full hand-trailing support. Pull levers, press buttons, move out around, explore.

I sporting tired half an time of day doing just that with the Vive, and it's stunning. As I wrote nearly during Obduction's groundbreaking Oculus release last year, Obduction in VR gives you a whole different sense of scale. That iconic little white family with its picket argue? It's non then wee erstwhile you have the headset on. Ditto for the towering cliffs of Kaptar, stretching down into a mist-filled void. It's enough to give you vertigo.

And like all hand-tracked VR, there's the novelty that comes with operative machinery with your men. Information technology sounds silly, but especially for a game in the Myst vein that's mostly about interfacing with oddish gizmos there's something specialised about doing so in VR. (The same applies to Myst-like venture Call of the Starseed.)

Not that on that point aren't issues. First and firstly, performance. You'atomic number 75 going to need one hell of a auto to run Obduction smoothly in VR. I have a GTX 980 Cordyline terminalis in this machine and still had some stuttering with the graphics defaulted to Medium. That's besides a shame because Obduction's nontextual matter is one of its strongest features, and you lose a little of that here.

There are also parts of the courageous that just plain weren't designed for VR, and that's unclutter. Recitation notes is a conscientious contend at the moment, and I think inevitably to be reworked for VR. IT's cool to pick up notes, merely some are virtually impossible to decipher.

And so there are the moving bits. Father ready for your stomach to lurch while you'rhenium riding around in Hunrath's mine cart. There's as wel an lift at one point, plus a plethora of steps, all of which are things people tend to avoid in made-for-VR titles.

It works, though! There are still few full-duration games available in VR, and even fewer that are any good. Obduction satisfies both those demands. It inevitably some fine-tuning, and I could easy see somebody switching back and forth between VR and a normal monitor. But playing something Myst-esque and organism able to walk around, explore, gain forbidden and "touch" the machinery is bad amazing. I don't know if Obduction leave move over VR headsets like Myst sick CD-ROM drives, but it certainly feels like the assonant eccentric of step forward for Bluish green.

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Hayden writes about games for PCWorld and doubles every bit the resident Zork enthusiast.