Just under a year on from PC VR launch, The Wizards: Dark Times finally hits Oculus Quest. How does it stack up to the original version? Find out in our The Wizards: Dark Times graphics comparison!
Carbon Studio has achieved a lot in the past five years. The Poland-based team has released not one but three different iterations of The Wizards series and, where it can, ported them to a wide range of platforms too. Not only that but the team is one of the few to push the boundaries of VR visuals, with amazing fantasy worlds. That’s especially true of the 2020 PC VR release of The Wizards: Dark Times, a game we were very fond of. Just like the port of the original The Wizards from PC VR to Quest, though, a lot has inevitably changed to get the game onto a standalone headset.
The Wizards: Dark Times Graphics Comparison
From a technical perspective, this port is an incredibly ambitious one. Dark Times offers an expansive single-player adventure with gorgeous and diverse worlds you can navigate in different ways. All of that is intact in the Quest version of the game – you’ll still get the same levels, enemies and weapons summoned from the excellent gesture-based system.
But, as is to be expected, there are heavy concessions to get the game running on Quest. Dark Times is a game of sweeping vistas, ones that look immaculate on PC but scaled back on Quest. You won’t see the mountain ranges in the distance, textures are much more blurry, and lighting is streamlined to do away with shadows and other effects.
The same is true of the spells. Fire no longer glows with the same brilliant orange, ice weapons don’t subtlely glisten in the sunlight, and your magical shield isn’t imbued with the same sorts of details. Effects like damage displays and shattering frozen enemies have been paired back, too, and the changes to lighting give the game a less convincing color palette. While Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife made design choices that allowed for near-parity across PC and Quest, Carbon has clearly gone all out for the PC VR version, making the gap with what’s possible on Quest that much more noticeable.
With that said, compared to other Quest games, Dark Times is still very much an achievement. For the most part, level geometry is exactly the same as it was on PC and, though they’re not as detailed, it’s still incredibly impressive to take in the views in the standalone version. It’s definitely one of Quest’s better-looking games even if the difference between it and PC is night and day. Still an easy recommendation, then, but if you have a PC up to snuff then you probably want to try playing Dark Times through Air Link.
The Wizards: Dark Times launches on Oculus Quest on May 6th and is already available on PC VR.
