In addition to their VR-first wave shooter The Last Hope, Croteam are porting the entirety of "The First Encounter" (the HD version of the original Serious Sam game) to VR.
Steam page
(a few neat third person "AR" segments in that trailer, with in-game illumination of the player if I see that correctly)
This includes the entire campaign, and all coop and multiplayer features of the original game!
VR-SPECIFIC FEATURES
- Serious Locomotion - Explore the levels using trackpad movement (if you are brave enough), go with safer built-in teleportation system and move quickly to avoid charging enemies with the help of Sam's personal translocator device or tweak and adjust the way you move through the VR space to best suit you playing style with using our own Serious Warp (tm) locomotion.
- Double the Gun, Double the Fun Let go of the keyboard and gun down enemies, one weapon in each hand, or dual-wield them, quadrupling your stopping power. Combine different guns or just grab two of the same, but whatever your style, remember: Mental must be stopped!
- Old School, New Engine Hordes of enemies and non-stop action set against the expansive and visually stunning backdrop of ancient Egypt - all powered by the latest Serious Engine 2017 to create one of the most impressive VR experiences yet!
More information about the development process and relation to TLH:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/552450/discussions/0/152391995413966312/#c152391995415140811 said:The relation between TLH and TFE VR is not as simple as one might imagine. First off, while implementing TFE in VR was not a small engineering effort (*) and quite a bit of content had to be adjusted as well, TLH has a huge amount of completely new content. TLH is an extremely "content-dense" game. For what amounts to 3 minutes of play (one location on one planet), designers need months to model, texture, decorate and tune for gameplay. But we didn't want to give people yet another wave shooter, we wanted one where they could experience great high-quality visual content. The amount of cool stuff that's yet to come is hard to present. I know it looks like it's taking too long for the new planet to arrive, but the fact is that the planets that are already shipped are reusing quite a bit of existing content. Especially Earth. The other three planets are much more novel and that takes time. But I'm sure you'll love the results when you see them.
So, while TFE VR game is quite an extensive engineering effort, and some more mundane content work, TLH is a lot of highly creative and slow content work. While there's some overlap, especially in the technology, those are done by different parts of the team. While other parts are working on Sam4. And some are working almost exclusively on tech. I know it may sound crazy to take on all that, but we've grown about twice the size since Talos, and we are now also at the point where a lot of previous slow effort that was going on for years is coming to fruition. Without those previous efforts we wouldn't be able to bring TFE to the latest engine now, so "suddenly". That's something that's been worked on since SS3 was released. In the background. It's a continuation of the TSE's "Fusion" effort, and you'll see some other interesting results of that in the near future.We are very dedicated to working on things long term and doing what is good for the gamers.
The fact also is that TLH has moved a bit slower than planned during the last month. And the reason for that is quite simple - the original plan for TLH didn't include implementing coop at all. It was planned to simplify tech implementation and concentrate on content, thus way too much of the behavior of the game was scripted in Lua, from enemy and especially boss behavior all the way down to the HUD, menus and even the way player receives damage, death screen. The premise was "this will not have mutiplayer, so we can use scripting in places that normally wouldn't allow it, so we can make better content faster". Now, after the release, the community has asked for coop a lot. And we delivered it. It wouldn't be EA if we didn't listen to what you guys wanted. That coop implementation required a lot of additional engineering work to both (a) move a lot of scripted features to C++ code, as they couldn't be reliably networked from script as well as (b) hugely improving the support for networking the scripted behavior so not all has to be C++-ed. And it also required moving some gameplay designers that would normally work on setting up gameplay on levels for the next episode into adjusting and tuning the fights for coop.
We are currently working on the skill-tree update for TLH as well as pushing for the next three planets. They are not developed in sequence, but overlapping, so once planet #3 is released, planet #4 will already be quite a bit along the way.
(*) You can't even imagine all the things that seem natural and logical in VR but are completely different than how they are done in "flat" FPS games. And so many things that you wouldn't expect are a problem until you try them. And while "wave shooters" are somewhat similar to FPSs in appearance, the implementation is a whole other can of worms. For example in TLH you just stand in place and can't really collide with geometry. In TFE you could be e.g. standing on the stairs, and as you walk around the roomscale, you actually also go up/down in VR. And a metric ton of things like that.
More information about the engine:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/552450/discussions/0/152391995414948516/#c152391995415163454 said:
