Crytek

Crytek

Crytek

Crytek

SAN FRANCISCO—The game industry's last major "first-person platformer," Mirror's Edge, was met in 2008 with a small but passionate fan base as it toyed with a more intense view of full-blown parkour. While that novel viewpoint looked pretty cool, it could also feel disorienting during high action scenes, and the gameplay that surrounded it was admittedly quite thin.

We expect to run into very similar issues as virtual reality games launch on new-in-2016 platforms such as Oculus, PlayStation VR, and HTC Vive. Game makers will surely focus harder on getting a new perspective to look cool without making anyone sick... and launch itty-bitty games as a result. Crytek's first retail VR game, The Climb, already appears to fall into this chasm—but based on our brief test of the beautiful game at a December preview event, we think we've finally found a satisfying, better-in-VR form of a first-person platformer.

Left hand, right hand, left hand, chalk

We got to try out a Crytek VR experiment during this summer's E3 conference, but it was advertised as a tech-demo taste of Crytek's eventual first retail VR product. Robinson: The Journey simply had players scale a giant mountain's sides via an automatic pulley system. Occasionally, players would use a conventional controller's trigger buttons to grab onto new pulleys, but there was little "game" to speak of. Instead, this Robinson demo seemed meant to showcase Crytek's technically impressive engine work, which included expansive views of nearby tree-lined mountains and animated dinosaurs all around.

The retail game born from this experiment (which may still see its own retail release in a different form) isn't a VR take on Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, nor is it a slow-moving, on-rails glide up pretty mountains. Instead, The Climb is a speed-climbing game that revolves around scaling mountains using only your virtual hands—but it uses neither a Wii-like motion controller nor a standard pair of joysticks.

Players control most of the game by looking around, and even craning their necks, to guide either of their free, floating-in-air hands toward nooks and ledges on a mountain's edge. Our demo started with us holding down an Xbox One pad's left trigger once we'd looked at a mountain crag and positioned a hand over it, then looking around until we found the next grabbable spot. We moved our head around until we'd aimed our free right hand directly over that ledge then pressed the right trigger to hold on.

From there, we alternated hands and moved our head around, looking for grabbable spots and making our way up the mountain—and noticing how freakin' high we'd climbed after a pretty short amount of time. The Climb's perspective and visual design offer equal measures peacefulness and intensity; you can hang from a particular spot and take a calm breather, soaking up the rustle of wind and marveling at a remarkable view of the world behind and below you, or you can feel a brief rush of mortality while aiming for some of the game's tougher climb motions.

Every once in a while, we'd have to tap a button to reapply chalk on each hand, as we'd lose our stable grip when wear, tear, and sweat wore down our virtual chalk. Sometimes, we'd have to use a button to trigger a jump across small gaps. Otherwise, the demo's challenge mostly came from positioning hands so that swapping from left to right flows smoothly—and looking for alternate paths to speed our climb to each of the mountain's save points.

"They better be important trees"

Crytek's reps talked about the full game offering multiple mountains, each coming in multiple difficulty flavors—meaning, different mountain geometry, more branching paths, different chalking requirements, and other tweaks to make players' attempts for fast times more challenging.

Ultimately, the demo we saw prioritized the basic action of playable platforming in VR—its motions, controls, and upward climbing speed were both easy to understand and easy to withstand in terms of potential sickness—and showcased CryEngine's rendering prowess on an i7 computer with a GeForce GTX 980 card. Crytek Technical Director Rok Erjavec says the game has been designed to run at a smooth 90 frames-per-second for twin VR displays on a GTX 970 or an ATI R9 290, and Crytek has been careful about optimizing its engine for such demands.

"Texture fidelity is important because it's right in your face," Erjavec told Ars. "So there are other things you have to optimize. On a normal 2D display, there are aspects, post-processing-wise, that are either bad for VR or just not necessary, like depth of field, motion blur, and lens effects. Those things take a lot of time to render, so we just take them out or tweak them—we have a sunset, so we do still have some lens flare, for example."

From the sound of things, CryEngine in VR puts a higher stress on up-close textures than on general polygon counts, and from there, it's up to the artists and designers to create mountain paths with as little polygon collision as possible so as not to disrupt the smooth flow of motion. Also, in terms of up-close imagery, Crytek doesn't want to shy away from intense content such as foliage, but as game director David Bowman told Ars, "if you have trees, they better be important trees."

We'll be interested in the final product and its CryEngine implementation less as an exciting VR game and more as a dissectable VR project. In particular, we want to see whether Crytek has implemented any gimmicks or tricks to make the game's lighting and shadows look as good as we saw in our demo. Will the final game offer a physically based rendering system or other intense implementations for the sake of the sun and weather changing for each of our climbs? Or will the other mountains, which we didn't get to see, use more fixed lighting solutions to maximize performance?

The "Oculus-exclusive" game doesn't have a release date beyond "2016" at this point, meaning Crytek hasn't confirmed whether it will be available during that VR headset's launch window. For now, the game's menus appeared to be content-final—meaning, we accidentally clicked through to find what appeared to be a final selection of mountains and difficulty levels (and we didn't see much). As such, we expect this game to shortly follow Oculus' major retail launch, which is still nebulously set for a "Q1 2016" window. We like its take on first-person platforming and are glad to see its climbing mechanics occupy a specific, brand-new niche, but thin games like this will probably dominate VR's first major retail year—and we're already tempering our expectations accordingly.

Listing image by Crytek