If anyone’s ‘going to ground’, it’s often a sign that one thing’s gone fallacious. But Eve: Valkyrie’s first ground-based map is a mirrored image of rising confidence at VR studio CCP Newcastle. Solitude, out as a part of the Groundrush replace on Tuesday, is a Descent-like planetary base riddled with nooks, crannies and underground passageways. It’s precisely the form of factor the workforce would by no means have tried earlier than the VR dogfighter’s release last year.
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“When we launched, everything was focused on player comfort,” remembers lead recreation designer Andrew Willans. “Controls and accessibility. Being a generation one VR game, we were really focused on eliminating anything that could potentially cause issues.”
One of these points, it transpires, have been horizons. Early on in testing, CCP found that the seen curve of close by planets precipitated nausea in a subset of gamers. Valkyrie consequently launched with Zero Horizons, if you’ll, and positively nothing approaching a planetary battlefield. But that was then.
“It just felt the right time to do something more radical,” says Willans. “To do something genuinely slap-in-the-face, holy s***, this is new. It made sense to locate it on the surface of a planet.”
Where Valkyrie’s launch maps tapped into the liberty of house, Solitude brings the partitions in shut – constructing on the claustrophobic, Star Wars-style trench runs of last June’s Carrier Assault update. The workforce have surmounted the horizon downside by sinking their base deep right into a crater, embedding a hidden Minmatar complicated within the rock itself.
“I’d be a liar if I said there wasn’t some fan service to some of the games we loved when we were younger,” Willans admits. “I’m old now, so I remember Descent really well. There are some moments in there, when you fly in through the maintenance tunnels, that give you that feel of those tight corridors.”
The map retains Valkyrie’s signature slingshot launch, pinging you outwards from the bowels of the bottom initially of a match – however as soon as exterior, an unfamiliar panorama of angular, jutting towers offers technique to service tunnels and steam pipes.
“You find yourself with underground and overground. I’m not going to interrupt into ‘wombling free’, however that splits the motion up on a complete new degree, actually,” laughs Willans.
Much of the map’s motion takes place beneath the floor. CCP have taken inspiration from the brightly colored corridors of real-life hospitals, to present gamers clear indication about the place they’re within the overarching construction. If Groundrush mode has a defining feeling, it’s the one-track thrill of chasing a pilot down in these tunnels. Either that, or the satisfaction of exploiting map data to take one other participant on a wild goose chase. CCP count on gamers to pore over the enemy-free Scout mode to study the channels and escape routes of Solitude’s industrial structure.
“Without the terrain, without feeling that sense of danger, you don’t feel that speed and that adrenaline rush,” provides Willans.
Beyond that cat-and-mouse, the terrain fosters new tactical prospects. In a Valkyrie first, it’s now simple to interrupt line of sight. A slim canyon runs down one facet of Solitude, permitting pilots to succeed in goals unseen, in a style that merely wasn’t possible within the stark stretches of open house.
For me, Valkyrie’s strongest assertion of intent stays a coaching degree – an escort mission gone fallacious which climaxes with the sudden and horrifying look of an imposing Amarr Titan. It’s nonetheless worth watching on YouTube, and stands as one in all VR’s most astonishing set items.
With this new mode, CCP are tapping into that very same sense of vulnerability – contextualising your tiny spacecraft in an unlimited panorama, and foregrounding the sense of scale that’s one in all digital actuality’s best strengths.
“We dial everything up to give that sense of big fish in a huge pond,” says Willans. “Even though we fly around in these great big carriers, it’s still a very personal thing. It’s you and the cockpit.”
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