This year our Game of The Year award went to Vertigo Games’ Arizona Sunshine, and for good reason. This Rift and Vive title combined exceptional mechanics with a compelling narrative and a beautifully created world. The result is a fantastic experience that every VR fan owes it to themselves to at least try, but there is one fly in the ointment: locomotion.
May fans of VR gaming and Arizona Sunshine have lamented its “blink” (teleportation) locomotion system, wishing instead for a more natural, free roaming, movement scheme. Well, it looks like these squeaky wheels are about to get a healthy serving of grease.
During an interview with UploadVR at CES in Las Vegas, Vertigo Games’ Lead Tech Trevor Blom revealed that the studio is hard at work on a new movement scheme for Arizona Sunshine.
According to Blom, “We are constantly listening to feedback from our fans and users and what they think about our game. One of the most consistent things we’ve heard is that people really want a different locomotion system. They seem to be interested in a more free-flowing option that games like Onward use. So we’re working on it. Right now we have prototypes but we haven’t found that perfect solution yet.”
When asked exactly when players could expect this update, Blom’s response was that he simply could not say at this point as he isn’t sure when exactly the perfect solution would be completed. But he did reiterate that its a very high priority for the studio and it is absolutely on the way.
Fans of the original blink locomotion system needn’t worry, however, as Blom said that Vertigo will most likely make the updated scheme optional and give users the choice to switch between it and the existing teleportation system.
CES has been a significant show for Vertigo as it turns out. The studio quietly debuted Arizona Sunshine’s first new gameplay mode since launch yesterday — a cooperative survival experience christened “Undead Valley” — which will be releasing on both its host systems early next month.
Arizona Sunshine costs $39.99 and is available for download on both Steam and Oculus Home.
