“That actually happened in the very first instances that we played at work,” Weerasuriya says. It’s a strange phenomenon the developers felt in even the early stages of their product, a social recognition they call “magical.” And the more we fooled around in the air, the more existent each avatar felt. Our avatars move their arms and heads as we do, making each virtual space body a believable companion. A spot-on intercom system keeps all of the action comprehensible you can hear in each voice its distance and position relative to yourself, even as players dart across the room. More shocking to us than our new weightlessness, though, was how successfully social the multiplayer “Echo Arena” of Lone Echo truly was. My teammates and I spent the first half of our demo time happily screaming, learning to throw our bodies around and punch each other in the face, all while Captain Dave (a developer and pretty much our camp counselor) herded our playtime through various training rooms. “The very first thing we did was build something for VR that actually solved something for VR,” Weerasuriya explains. “Most people would have told you don’t move so much in VR, don’t have 360 degrees of freedom, don’t allow the player to do so much.”īut Lone Echo isn’t a fan of those warnings. “It was almost like going against the grain,” Ready at Dawn president and creative director Ru Weerasuriya tells me of their traversal system. Then you fly infinitely until you hit another wall, floor, ceiling, etc., and you’ll bounce yourself away once more. For emergency maneuvering, there are micro-boosters on each wrist of your exosuit, able to push you lightly in any direction. Instead of propelling around zero gravity with a jetpack of some kind, players must grab something - walls, floors, ceilings, blocks, even other players - and push off in the direction of their choice. It would all be fairly mundane without one key component: Lone Echo’s incredibly successful movement system. In the middle is a disc, which one team must grab, pass, and throw into the opponent’s goal for a point. I got to live the extravagant life of these hypothetical space camp kids, or maybe just a nicer version of Ender’s Game, thanks to the multiplayer of Lone Echo on Oculus Touch.Įach round of the game’s multiplayer mode starts with two teams of up to five players flying into opposite ends of a sci-fi soccer field. And at that space summer camp, these kids will probably play ultimate frisbee in zero gravity. Some time after that, the inhabitants of this planet will have kids, and then they will send those kids to summer camp. One day, mankind will colonize another planet.
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