There are some great shooters for the HTC Vive, but nothing quite yet offers a compelling balance of both single and multiplayer modes. Primordian might be the first to do so.
Take a look at the trailer for this new game from Newport Beach-based Stonepunk Studios and tell us you’re not impressed. This is an action game unlike anything else we’ve yet seen on HTC Vive, with weird, creative weapons, monstrous enemies and fantastic environments. According to developer Jason Morris, it takes the spirit of classic movies and TV series like Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans, and Land of the Lost along with a dash of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto to create a prehistoric adventure for both online and offline play.
Primordian is set billions of years ago on what’s believed to be the first ever planet, Morris tells me over email. “Because of it’s rotation, one side of the planet is always in darkness and the other always in light, every two thousand years or so a small moon passes between the planet and creates and eclipse that allows the beings form the dark side to travel amongst the light,” he explains.
The game’s campaign is set during one of these eclipses. Players take on the role of Grygor, a being that’s trying to restore light to the dark lands. You’ll follow him on a journey across the planet as he travels to temples to gather artifacts stolen from his people, though all isn’t what it seems, Morris teases. The developer describes it as a full campaign with branching paths.
To get around, Stonepunk is assigning movement to the Vive controllers’ trackpads. “Having played many VR shooters I wanted to spend as long as it takes to achieve a system for locomotion through the world that feels very natural, so no teleportation,” Morris tells me. “This is the most important thing to me, to have a fluid movement in VR that you can just forget about eventually and enjoy the world so as long as it takes to get that perfect is what will be done.” The game will also support room scale tracking, however.
Morris is promising a long campaign (“many hours”) in which you’ll battle monsters that dwell on the planet as well as other inhabitants using strange guns and swords. Those features will then transfer over to a multiplayer battle mode in which players will hopefully be able to set traps and ambush each other.
Stonepunk wants to have a version of Primordian‘s single-player content in Early Access before the end of the year, with multiplayer support to follow. Ambitiously, the developer is also planning the game’s sequel of sorts, which Morris describes as the second part to the story. Part 1 will have to succeed for that to become a reality, though.
If Stonepunk can pull off everything it’s promising, though, I don’t see that being much of a problem.
