Here is what it's like to play Among Us VR on the Meta Quest 2

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Thanks to an oopsie by VR developer Bit Planet, the makers of the Ultrawings games posted what looks to be a PSVR 2 in the wild in someone’s spine indented leather office chair.  It’s fair to assume this is more than likely a dev kit but it does look very much like the production design we have seen from Sony. It even had two cables still in plastic packaging so Internet sleuthers you tell me is this a dev kit or what we will see in our living rooms? Bit Planet gave the tweet a few hours but then removed it after garnering a few hundred retweets and a lengthy thread. In the thread below their redo tweet with a stock PSVR2 image Bit Planet claims it was fake news but great photoshop. Fake or not this was some good publicity for the VR devs, I just hope they didn’t break any NDA’s they had with sony. 

Speaking of developers, the company with all VR headsets Meta found itself in the hotseat this week with developers as a story came out that some devs are not happy with Meta’s 30% cut in their app store. Especially after Zuckerberg has openly criticized app stores on Andorid and Apple being a quote unique stranglehold as a gatekeeper of what gets on phones” The 30% to the app store cut is standard across steam, google play and the apple app store. Meta defends its share by saying unlike apple and android its easy to download apps through third party stores giving sidequest as an example. Obviously the baked in Meta app store that comes with the headset is going to get the bulk of the players eyes so I’m not sure that’s exactly a fair point. Sidequest is a great third party store and even with its newly released easy install setup you still need to know how to enable dev mode on your headset to access it. Which I'm not sure everyone would want to do. I guess on the bright side 30% is better than the 50% meta is taking from horizon worlds creators…But if you do want to learn how to download the new easy install version of sidequest and access their appstore in your headset I made a tutorial this week, expand the description to find the link.

On the other side of the coin, meta did finally release video recording settings for the quest this week. Well for developers for now at least. If you have made a developer account for your quest you can download the oculus developer hub and sign in. Once your headset is connected you can check out the video settings they made available in the dev hub 2.6 update. Including  4k, 1440p and 1080 60fps widescreen options. And the real winner in my eyes is the bit rate options for higher quality captures and less noise and artifacting. In a helpful touch, when you choose a widescreen mode and single eye view for recording,... inside the headset you are given black bars on the top and bottom to let you know what is and isn’t being captured. Hopefully this will become a feature for all to access in upcoming quest firmware updates but the caveat here is that when you record with high settings it does effect game play performance and I’ve seen frame drops, but hey I’m just glad it’s an option now.  

In VR Game news just a quick reminder for the PCVR gang out there the steam summer sale is blazing hot right now and running until July 7th. So if you haven’t yet go grab half life alyx now for half off and a ton of other great games with big discounts. Personally I picked up the survival game the forest for 5 bucks and I mean payday 2 with its VR mode is 99 cents so yeah. I’ve linked the VR store sale in the description. Also can someone let me know if Rick and Morty’s virtual rickeality is any good? I mean at $5 I know I should just do it but I figured it doesn hurt to ask.

For those of you looking forward to the new Among Us VR adaptation from schell games we got a little update from the games project director Mike traficante in an interview with VR Scout. When asked about the teams plans for future updates he stated, “Right now it’s all about getting the game out. But I mean, we’re close and we already know that we’re going to continue to add stuff to it. I think most of our questions about what we do next—whether it’s a new map or whether it’s more hats or whether it’s, I don’t know, wristwatches or something weird—it’s all going to depend on what we see players doing and asking for and where the community has excitement.” So I guess the good news here is that they are close to finishing up and hopefully we will get a solid release date soon. Mike also revealed a new among us task built for vr in the game where you have to lean over in real life long enough to have your character's face scanned without looking away. Hopefully you won’t get chopped in half while uploading your yellow mug to the spaceship data base.

In some fun news VR dev and youtuber Valem challenged himself to create a VR game fully inside his quest 2 headset in 24 hours. Using horizon workrooms he prepped his idea from scratch and then accessed his computer virtually for coding. He then used shapes XR to design the game world and Virtuoso for the soundtrack. The journey is a wild one culminating in a hang gliding experience you can play yourself. Checkout his channel in the description below and make sure to watch his video where he created the largest VR game using an outdoor athletic track, quest passthrough and a bicycle.  

Sadly this weeks vr news has come to an end but just like that weird guy on the bus, I’ll see you next week.

Sidequest Easy Install: https://youtu.be/0OGATkBy3DM

Steam VR Summer Sale: https://store.steampowered.com/vr

Valem Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ValemVR

We finally got a little more information in the newly released Among Us VR trailer and an interview with the game’s project director so let’s go ahead and jump in..

Right off the bat from the trailer we hear some voice chatter between two players as they pass another in the hallway, showcasing that we no longer will have to call an emergency meeting to talk with our fellow crew mates.

The games project director Mike Traficante explained in an interview with tech radar that 

In among us vr the rule of thumb is if you can see another person you can hear them. Volume of course depends on the distance between you and the other character. So you may want to go ahead and prepare your inner creep and start hiding behind doors to listen to what's going on inside. Maybe you’ll eavesdrop upon a body being sliced into a hambone.

On the flipside the imposters can also do this but keep in mind they will not be muted inside those vents either so if the imposter is an excitable mouth breather they might be easily sus’d out.

If you do end up getting whacked though you won’t see your death in first person, your screen will go black and you’ll get a cutscene just like the flatscreen version. Once you become a ghost of yourself you also get proximity chat with your fellow dead crewmates but also you get to listen in on the other active players while completing your tasks.

Lastly if voice chat is too much and I have a feeling it just might be, AVR will offer quick chat lobbies to keep it chill and quiet for us boring elders.

Customization will be available for your character's suits and of course there will be hats. The team at schell games stated they will be listening to what the players really want and really need to make sure the game gets the support that will be most appreciated when it comes to future updates.

Mike also shared that the movement system will be smooth motion while restricting your view to a smaller circle in front of you to help fight motion sickness for those that are susceptible to it. So for those old school VR players unfortunately no teleportation here. 

That narrower field of view as we’ve shared before will give quite the advantage to the vent traversing imposters making the VR version a lot harder for the crewmates but this is where the beauty of that proximity chat function comes in to level the playing field.

When translating the skeld into VR, Schell games also made sure to design the elements within the ship to be obvious what can and can’t moved around or picked up for tasks. 

https://www.techradar.com/features/among-us-vr-will-be-more-chaotically-fun-than-the-original

Taficante explained that “We have tasks that came over almost untouched from the original game, but there are some tasks that are pretty different because you have to interact with your hands,“VR presents new opportunities and so it made sense to add new tasks.”

In the trailer we get to see how some of these tasks look in first person VR including aligning machine parts, submitting scans, uploading data, priming shields and a new whack a mole minigame inside the medbay entitled reaction time. This task will track if you have completed it and time how quickly it took you to finish. Fun fact if you can beat 9 seconds you are better than game director Mike..

For a quick moment we did get to see the skelds camera system and its birds eye view of the ship's innerworkings looking like a flowers for algernon maze. Then Last but not least we did finally see a first person murder sequence. Which honestly it wasn’t much to write home about. We didn’t see a knife or anything in the players hand so I wonder if  this may be all that we get.

Either way I’m excited for this game and as for the release date there hasn’t been any change from the holiday 2022 assessment from back in april, so I’d still expect that steam leak date of mid december, and be happily surprised if it comes earlier. Thanks again for watching and I’ll catch you in the next quickie.

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