All eyes are on Valve to see what it does with VR software for Vive, but kit creator HTC has its own plans in the works.
In a press release launched this week the Taiwanese company revealed that it is developing its very own VR videogame named Front Defense. Details on this mysterious title are thin right now, though a small description does reveal that players will wield “pistols, rifles, submachine guns, hand grenades to anti-tank rockets” on a battlefield. It sounds like this could be the type of first-person shooter that we’re used to in traditional gaming, then, but it will be interesting to see how the company uses VR to create twists.
It just goes to show how much the advent of VR is changing HTC itself. The company has gone from a straight up smartphone maker to being one of the major players in the VR industry, and is now even branching outside of hardware. There’s no news on when or even if Front Defense might be released, but we’d certainly love to give it a spin.
Front Defense will be on display at the 2016 Computex event in Taipei, Taiwan next week, along with a handful of other Vive-based experiences. These include a new VR fitness experience named Holodia, Futuretown’s frantic FPS Jeeboman, mutiplayer shooter Ruckus Ridge from Foreignvr, and I-Illusions’ Space Pirate Trainer. That’s a pretty good selection of titles to showcase the HMD’s Room Scale tracking and other features.
Sadly, there’s still no sign of a full VR game from Valve, which provides the SteamVR support for the Vive. The company is known for developing some of the industry’s most celebrated titles such as the Half-Life and Portal series, and there have been vague hints that it could be doing something with the latter franchise. Earlier this year Valve did launch The Lab, a minigame selection of sorts that was critically praised, but we’re hoping for something a bit more substantial from the company soon.
