Unity’s Vision Summit keynote was home to a lot of news, but a certain game definitely stood out. Multiverse’s Seeking Dawn made an appearance and rocked the stage with a trailer that showed off a shooter with RPG elements and visuals that popped. Here at E3 2017 we got a chance to play some two-player co-op through a mission and based on that impression, this visually stunning title could use some work.
From the get-go, Seeking Dawn is a visual feast. You stand at a computer terminal with menu options, grass swaying around you, and huge beautiful towers in the distance. When we switched to the mission, we were tasked with moving to a few points to get details and head out to the conflict zone. There were so many things going on around us like walking mechs and the many soldiers going about their business. Eventually, we got on a drop ship to head out and that’s when the issues started to rear their ugly heads.
The opening area seemed okay, but various bugs and design issues plagued the majority of the playthrough. There were bugs with doors opening for one player and blocking the other player off, confusing paths covered in flames that seemed to deter us from entry but were required for us to traverse through, enemies running through closed doors, and generally confusing level design.
The re-spawn system, in its current form just isn’t very well-designed. You can die fairly quickly in the game and when you do, it seems like the enemies linger near your downed body. Thus, when you re-spawn, it’s a matter of seconds before you’re down again. This was more prevalent in the boss fight at the end of the demo, my character reviving right in the middle of a conflict where you have to be aware of a large monster and flying waves of creatures. Also, my co-op counterpart had a stock look with a rifle despite the fact that he had other things equipped, but that could easily be changed by the final release.
The controls weren’t so much a problem as they simply took some getting used to. You use the left track-pad to move around and you can either influence the horizontal axis with the headset’s direction or by pressing the right track-pad and dragging your thumb across it to turn. Both felt comfortable even though I’m typically susceptible to motion sickness in VR with artificial movement. Multiverse wants to implement rope-swinging, climbing, and swimming too so it’ll be interesting to see how things translate.
Despite its issues, the building blocks for a solid experience were there. The game wants to include some exploration elements that will likely push it to the 10-hour playtime and we came across a couple branching paths that weren’t open to us at the time of the demo. When taking down enemies, there were quite a few items to pick up and they seemed like objects that would contribute to a crafting or upgrade system.
Stay tuned to UploadVR for future updates on Seeking Dawn where, hopefully, builds become a great deal more polished. You can read more about our time at E3 at our news hub.
