With the Oculus Touch Controller now on sale, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company came to the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week to talk up some new games that support it.
If you're an Oculus Rift owner thinking about buying the Touch controllers , you'll want to make sure the additional $199 outlay is well-spent, and to a large extent that depends on how well game developers integrate Touch support into their titles.
That, in turn, depends on the style of gameplay. If you're familiar with first-person shooters, you'll want to take a look at From Other Suns, one of the four major upcoming titles that Oculus showed off this week.
From Other Suns is from Gunfire Games, which built in a ton of customizability to how players use the controllers. Perhaps the most intriguing option is the two choices for how you move around within the game. There's the teleport-style movement that VR aficionados will be familiar with, where you look in the direction you want to go and then use the Touch joystick to jump there.
But From Other Suns also has a "Comfort Mode," which essentially mimics the movement style of a first-person shooter. You use the joystick on the left-hand controller to move forward, backwards, and sideways, similar to navigating with a gamepad in a conventional console game. Meanwhile, you can change the direction of your player's gaze with the joystick on the right-hand controller.
Related
- The Best VR (Virtual Reality) Headsets of 2017The Best VR (Virtual Reality) Headsets of 2017
It's a much smoother movement process, but with a major caveat: you don't move your head at all, so there's a good chance that you'll experience motion sickness the first time you use Comfort Mode. Master it, though, and the game becomes much more immersive.
As for the gameplay itself, From Other Suns is a four player co-op shooter in which you face a bevy of threats to humanity from bad guys in outer space, and you have to chose which ones to solve.
In addition to From Other Suns, Oculus also showed off another co-op called Brass Tactics, the strategy game Blade & Soul: Table Arena, and the dungeon-crawling RPG The Mage's Tale. All are in development and are planned for release "soon," although none of the developers announced a specific release date.