X-Wing VR Mission (PSVR) – putting you in the cockpit

The free VR mission for Battlefront is available now for PS4 owners, and it may just be the best thing so far on PlayStation VR.

Everyone has their dream games; the sequels that will never be, the original ideas that only you seem to have thought of, and the licensed games that appear so obvious and yet never get made. We’ve got at least half a dozen related just to Star Wars, and prime amongst them is being a Rebel starfighter pilot. But now that dream has come true, in what is the most incredible VR demo we’ve ever experienced.



Before you dismiss our enthusiasm as that of rabid Star Wars fans we insist we are not being hyperbolic. The X-Wing VR Mission is both a technical masterpiece and shows how VR can dramatically improve the gameplay of existing styles of games. The fact that it’s Star Wars only makes things even better, but if you’re not a fan we’re confident you’ll be impressed all the same.

Unfortunately though your jaw will only remain agape for about 20 minutes, because this is not a full game. As the impossibly awkward name suggests it’s just a single mission. An experiment given away free to anyone who owns a copy of Star Wars: Battlefront on the PlayStation 4. It has relatively little to do with DICE either, and has instead been created by Burnout studio Criterion – many of whose developers we were able to talk to when we went to play the mission at EA HQ last month.


X-Wing VR Mission (PSVR) – you can take as long as you like in the garage at the beginning

Having already been won over by the demo back at Gamescom in August we were surprised to find that the final version of the mission has changed a lot since then. Part of that is because of the decision to shoehorn in references to new film Rogue One, but that works fine as the movie is already set during the same time period as Battlefront. So now instead of rescuing a nameless Rebel corvette we’re escorting the characters (or at least one of them) from the film in their new U-wing fighter.

We don’t want to spoil the entire experience, but in brief you start out flying in formation around the Rebel fleet, then travel through an asteroid belt learning the controls, and finally end up defending the U-wing against TIE Fighters and the Star Destroyer that spewed them. Despite there being only one action sequence it escalates brilliantly, until you’re fighting off swarms of enemy fighters and desperately trying to cripple their mothership.

But not only has the mission design changed since we last saw it, but so too has the quality of the visuals. The ship models, particularly the inside of the X-wing that you get to sit around and play in before the mission starts, are noticeably more detailed and the resolution is much higher than it was back in August.

We had assumed that this was simply because it was playing on a PS4 Pro, but EA was showing the game off on normal PlayStation 4s. In fact, at the time the developers hadn’t even tried the mission on a Pro. Although since the demo has just gone live (alongside the Rogue One: Scarif DLC) we just tried it for ourselves on a PS4 Pro, and found no obvious difference.

After first trying to explain the improvements away as simple wizardry, technical director Richard Geldard explained that it was actually due to wringing out more power from DICE’s Frostbite engine – which started off as Battlefront’s graphics engine but is now used in all of EA’s internal games.



‘Because our frame rate’s so good we can keep the full resolution [of the PlayStation VR] pretty much all the time’, says Geldard. ‘So it’s partly an element of our core tech team, and the DICE team, focusing on optimising, and the power we get from Frostbite to produce those high quality visuals at a high frame rate.’

This is particularly good news because it suggests that the potential of PlayStation VR is even greater than previously thought, and bodes extremely well for future titles from all developers. (Capcom are also making great strides with Resident Evil 7, if you try the newly VR-ed demo – which is also free to download.)

But the X-wing Mission is especially important for Criterion, which hasn’t released a solo game since 2012’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

‘This is not just the first VR release for Criterion, this is the first VR release for Electronic Arts’, says audio and narrative director Jeff Seamster. ‘For two to three years we’ve been experimenting with VR and prototyping things and seeing what works best for us. And then about a year and a half ago we started talking with DICE, about working with them on the Battlefront franchise. We did the speeder bike mission for Battlefront.’

‘And as we started developing other VR projects we saw a perfect opportunity waiting for us, which is we have access to the Star Wars universe, we have DICE here who are doing development on Battlefront, so let’s take all this stuff we’ve learned about VR and turn it into one of our childhood fantasies, which is flying an X-wing starfighter.’

Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission (PSVR) – the Rebel fleet exits from hyperspace

What hasn’t changed about the mission though is the controls, which are wonderfully fluid and somehow feel exactly how you’d expect an X-wing to handle. By comparison the Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare Jackal Assault VR Experience (which, again, is free to download) feels horribly flat and frictionless. But what’s most interesting about how the X-wing controls is that it causes no nausea at all, no matter how much you throw the ship around.


‘VR development is actually something that goes back quite a bit further than most people realise. Behind the scenes there’s been a tremendous amount of research done on virtual reality, a lot of it by the military. And so we’ve been reading through white papers, and looking through their research, and there are in fact quite a few things that you can easily do to make some of those symptoms of motion sickness or discomfort fade away instantly’, explains Seamster.

‘For example, when you’re first flying out through the fleet there’s always something in front of you. We could have put you out at the front of the pack to start with, but had we done that you wouldn’t have these points of reference. And when you remove points of reference, and start swinging your head around, that’s when you start to get in trouble. And thankfully with the X-wing we have one built-in point of reference, which is the nosecone of the ship. But there’s also aspects to the way the ship responds to your input, there’s the way that the camera is moving along with your head, and so much of what Rich and his team have worked out.’

The surprising implication of this is that flying a TIE Fighter, which has the pilot looking straight out a flat window, with no nosecone, would be a lot more difficult prospect to make work in VR.

‘We’d have to work out how to create the best experience for that vehicle’, says Geldard. ‘We’ve rewritten the handling from the ground up for this X-wing, to make it work. The original Battlefront one wasn’t built with VR in mind, so we had to rebuild the handling side of it while still keeping the control instinctiveness to really produce something that feels intuitive and right when you’re in the VR situation.’

Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission (PSVR) – your R2 unit chirps at you when you look at it

On a technical and a Star Wars fanboy level the VR Mission is hugely impressive, but there’s also the gameplay element we hinted at earlier. In traditional flight sims, space or otherwise, you’re just looking at a flat view out of your cockpit. If you want to look at something that’s slightly up and to the left you either have to move your ship or switch camera views. But with a VR headset you just look. And that completely transforms combat.


We’re sure you’ve struggled in Battlefront to keep your enemy in sight, losing tracking of them as they fly out of view. But in the VR Mission, as long as you keep your ship pointing in roughly the right direction, you can track enemies manually and never lose sight of them. We were secretly chuffed when one of the other developers commented on the fact we’d been doing that, and referred to it as an ‘advanced technique’. Except it’s not in the sense of requiring some esoteric knowledge or long hours of experience, it’s just something that the VR allows for intuitively.

You can see this to a degree in fellow VR game EVE Valkyrie, but the enemy ship movement is too slow and predictable in Infinite Warfare for the advantage to make much difference. But in the X-wing VR Mission the TIE Fighters scream about in a far more realistic manner, and you really need to be on the ball to get a decent high score (there is a high score table, so there is at least some replayability to the mission).

Which of course brings us to the obvious question of whether the VR Mission is going to become a full game, or at least a larger part of Battlefront 2 – which has already been confirmed for next year.

‘I think that the sentiment you are hinting at, which is the same sentiment that we have internally, is that we got done working on it and we thought: “We just want more of that, don’t we?” So let’s just say it makes a whole lot of sense to do more’, says Seamster.

Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission (PSVR) – get closer to one of the big ones

But if you’re really talking about dream games then something that combined the complexity of the old LucasArts X-Wing and TIE Fighter games with VR graphics is a dream we never want to wake up from. And to our surprise Criterion hint that a full game along those lines might be more likely than we had dared to hope.

The basic controls for the VR Mission are the same as in Battlefront, but Criterion has been able to make all the buttons in your X-wing cockpit interactive – so you can use them just by looking at them, with the small cursor dot in front of your eyes, and pressing the controller. A lot of them are just fun details, such as the targeting computer moving into place in front of you, but they’ve also snuck in the ability to switch between fire-linked laser cannons that shoot two or four at a time. Which is an option straight out of the old X-Wing and TIE Fighter space combat simulators.

‘Tests have shown it is far easier to teach someone in VR than if I give you a controller and try and make you remember what all the buttons do’, says Geldard. ‘But if you get in a cockpit and we show that that is the button to go into hyperspace, because you’re doing the action that is always a really easily memorable thing and you learn a lot quicker.’

‘So theoretically we could add a whole lot of depth without actually causing the player stress and a learning curve. Because it just naturally comes from the fact that it’s VR. So from that point of view it’s a really exciting prospect.’

‘The number of ideas that piled up, in terms what other functionality could we add to the X-wing… that list is a mile long’, agrees Seamster. ‘It’s just a matter of we didn’t have time to get to it or, more importantly, we didn’t have time to get to doing it in a way that felt good for a new player. We had a pretty limited amount of time to have our players in there and doing things, but the ideas keep stacking up and stacking up and it could go quite deep.’

Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission (PSVR) – never tell us the odds

Although they stop short of confirming a standalone game, it’s clear that this isn’t the last VR experiment for either Star Wars or Criterion. And having played the X-Wing VR Mission we can’t wait to see other forthcoming VR flight sims, such as Bandai Namco’s Ace Combat 7.

‘Something that’s important for Criterion is that we will continue to work on original IP for Electronic Arts. So there’s more to come from Criterion on that front’, says Seamster. ‘We have a headline project that we’re going to pursue, on our own, and VR is definitely going to be a major part of what we do going forward.’

Since it is free, and only 20 minutes long, it’s pointless to give the X-Wing VR Mission a formal review score. But if we did so just for technical excellence, Star Wars wish fulfilment, and the potential it suggests for the future, it’d be a solid 10/10.

Formats: PlayStation VR

Price: Free for Star Wars: Battlefront owners

Publisher: EA

Developer: Criterion Games

Release Date: 6th December 2016

Age Rating: 16

Rogue One: X-Wing VR Mission (PSVR) – the Force is with it

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