Last week at the annual Oculus Connect conference in San Jose, CA, the VR giant set the world on fire with the announcement of the new all-in-one standalone headset, Oculus Quest. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on stage for the reveal, explaining that the device will launch in Spring 2019 for $399 with over 50 launch titles. That’s a lot to look forward to.
We’re still a bit vague on the full launch lineup for the Oculus Quest, but we do have a few confirmed titles to work off of. Specifically, we know for sure Superhot VR, Face Your Fears 2, Tennis Scramble, and Dead and Buried are all guaranteed because we played them all. At the event they also confirmed Moss, Robo Recall, and The Climb as well. Based on the trailer footage (embedded below) it certainly looks like some variations of The Unspoken, Marvel Powers United VR, and Beat Saber will make their way over too. But that still leaves about 40 other titles that are big ol’ mysteries.
“We want people to understand that you can do a ton with this device,” said Sean Liu, Head of Hardware Product Management at Oculus. “So, we’re taking all of the top titles from Rift and bringing them over to Oculus Quest so people understand you can have those incredible experiences on this all-in-one device.”
If we look at this logo collage that was shown on-stage at OC5 of developers “experimenting” with Quest, also shown below, we can make some assumptions on what those top titles might be. In addition to the three guesses from before, we see Ready at Dawn (Lone Echo, Echo Arena, Echo Combat), Twisted Pixel (Wilson’s Heart, Defector), Pixel Toys (Drop Dead), Against Gravity (Rec Room), Funomena (Luna), High Voltage (Damaged Core, Dragon Front), nDreams (The Assembly, Shooty Fruity, Bloody Zombies), White Elk (Covert, Eclipse), Halfbrick (Fruit Ninja VR), Vertigo Games (Arizona Sunshine, Skyworld), Gravity Sketch, Ozwe (Anshar series), Schell Games (Along Together, Floor Plan, Adventure Time), Solfar (In Death, Everest VR), Survios (Sprint Vector, Raw Data, Creed, Electronauts), Harmonix (Rock Band VR, Harmonix Music VR), Bigscreen, Coatsink (Esper series, Augmented Empire), Force Field (Landfall, Pet Lab, Coaster Combat), and more all featuring logos. Fingers crossed on The Elder Scrolls: Blades too!
That’s a ton of potential games.
“There are lots of great titles we’re bringing over from Rift, like Robo Recall and Moss, but also new titles like Vader Immortal,” said Allison Berliner, Product Marketing Manager at Oculus. “We’ve shipped hundreds of dev kits and people are building some really cool stuff. What you see at OC5 is just the first wave of what we’re showing and we’re gonna have a lot more.”
If you’re an avid part of the VR community, you probably have a lot of the games listed above already. Having to re-purchase them on Quest would be a huge pain, but thankfully that doesn’t seem like something that Oculus wants to happen as long as developers agree.
“We want to make that a platform feature but it’s a developer choice,” said Liu. “You’ll have some experiences that have different materials between the titles but other devs will try to publish the same content so it’s a developer option.”
I also asked about cross-play between compatible titles as well. For example, if a version of Echo Arena, Sprint Vector, or something else with multiplayer support comes to Quest, it would be silly not to leverage the large user-base that already exists on the Rift for multiplayer.
“It’s up to the developers to choose, but we fully support it and you could even say we encourage it,” said Berliner. “For some games it will make a lot of sense.”
Hopefully we find out more concrete details about the launch lineup soon, because I’m dying to know whether or not I can slice boxes and Hulk-smash people on a standalone headset in Spring next year. Let us know what you think in the comments below!
