July 28th at Noon (12 PM) US Central Time, we'll be kicking off our Open Alpha test which will last for 60 hours. (Here's a handy Countdown to the start of the test).

If it's your first time in the Alpha

Welcome aboard! We're glad that you're able to join us. We've put together a handy First Time Player's Guide just for you, so be sure to check it out!

Download the launcher to install the game: https://community.orbusvr.com/t/alpha-game-client-download/1261?u=riley_d

Check out the testing feedback thread if you have issues or questions: https://community.orbusvr.com/t/open-alpha-feedback-thread/2000

For our testing veterans

The main focus of this test was addressing some of the bugs that have been on our list for a while, and just generally cleaning things up for a hopefully massive influx of new players. We also redid the inventory system (more on that below), and we spent way too much time staring at the Profiler in Unity so we could squeeze more performance out of the game. We were able to increase performance by as much as 50% in some areas, so let us know if our efforts were successful on that front.

Inventory Overhaul

One of the things that we've been asked repeatedly is how large we intend the inventory to be long-term for the game. In addition, we were dealing with a whole host of bugs related to people running out of inventory space at key moments (like during questing). Rather than trying to make you play whack-a-mole with your inventory every time you want to go on a quest bender, we decided to just give you a bit of an upgrade. Meet your new inventory screen:

Your new inventory system comes equipped with 200 slots across 5 tabs, and items now have weight. pic.twitter.com/nHTSTYQSB4 — OrbusVR (@OrbusVR) July 27, 2017

As you'll notice, there are now 40 slots available, across 5 tabs. So you now have 200 inventory slots to play with in your personal inventory. For those of you who like to be organized, you now have a ton of slots to play with, and multiple tabs, so you can keep your inventory nice and neat if you want, without worrying about using up all of your spaces.

Of course, we want you to have to make decisions about what you carry with you out into the world, so we're introducing weights for each item. We can assign a weight to each type of item, so for example a crafting ingredient you've gathered only weighs 1/10th of what your helm does. The nice thing about this system, though, is what happens when you exceed your limit. With the old system, if you ran out of slots it was really hard to know what to do. Make you fail the quest? Send you an item in the mail? Nothing really seemed like a good option.

With the new system, if you exceed your weight limit you will become overencumbered, which means that you will move very slowly. You can choose to either discard items in your inventory to get yourself back under the limit, or you can slog your way back home and put some items in your Personal Chest. If you go past double the weight limit you can carry, you'll become extremely encumbered, at which point you won't be able to move at all, talk to NPCs, or trade with players.

We feel like this system is a better balance between still causing you to make choices about what you want to carry into the world with you, while at the same time not making you feel like you're restricted in terms of how you organize your items.

Finally, this system allows us to assign a weight of 0 to items such as the Ranger's arrows and Musketeer's orbs, so you no longer have to feel like carrying those loadout choices with you is taking up valuable space. Do note that other gear, however, including gear you have equipped, does add weight toward your total. We have given you a weight limit of 45 to compensate for this, since we didn't previously count those slots against your total before.

One additional note, your Personal Chest now has 200 slots across 5 tabs as well, and no weight limit, so you can basically store about as much as you'd like in there.

Have fun, and we'll see you in-game!