ZeniMax Media’s legal battle with Oculus isn’t over just yet, but that’s not stopping the company from making moves in the VR space.
Escalation Studios, the developer behind the VR port of Please, Don’t Touch Anything! [Review: 8/10] and the Oculus-published Herobound: Gladiators, has been picked up by the publishing company, which owns game publisher Bethesda Softworks. Escalation has worked on plenty of games outside of the VR industry, though a press release notes the studio “will continue to contribute its talents across PC, console, mobile, and VR titles going forward.” No other mention of VR is made within the release, however.
The two studios already share a close relationship; Escalation developed the SnapMap game editor for Bethesda-published Doom when it released last year. The company also created an NBA viewing app for Gear VR as its first step into the industry.
It certainly seems like we could see more VR games under the Bethesda label, then. Currently Bethesda itself is porting its popular RPG, Fallout 4, to the HTC Vive, which is easily one of the biggest and most anticipated projects on the horizon. Hopefully we can expect something of a similar scope from this new deal.
Until late January, Escalation had only worked on VR games that appeared exclusively on Oculus platforms. On January 21st, however, it issued an update to the non-VR version of Don’t Touch Anything, dubbed Please, Don’t Touch Anything 3D, that added support for the Vive. ZeniMax itself is currently awaiting a verdict from the jury in its court room battle with Oculus after it claimed the company had built the Oculus Rift off of its own resources, supplied by former id developer John Carmack, now Oculus’ CTO.
We’ve been waiting on the verdict all week; hopefully we’ll get one today. Whatever the outcome, it seems ZeniMax is committed to growing its VR presence no matter what.
