Virtual reality has been in a perpetual state of being promising for years and years now. The hardware is good, but imagine how good it might be in a year, we say every year. This game is a great showcase of potential, but imagine what we’ll see in a year.
It may be an undesirable state for the young medium, but in a lot of ways it mirrors how we felt about PC gaming back in the 90s. Each new game was exciting in itself, but also exciting for what it predicted. When we played Doom, we were imagining Quake. And when we played Quake, we were imagining, well, Quake 3, probably. And so while there are lots of good VR games out there now, we can’t help but imagine what the VR games of tomorrow will be like. Here are a few of the games we’re looking forward to most.
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Skyworld
Release date: 2017 | Works with: HTC Vive | Website: skyworld-game.com
When we first tried the Rift and Vive, we gravitated toward games and experiences that put us in the middle of strange worlds, but a surprising development has been how well strategy games work in VR. Peering down on little worlds is just as novel as being in them. Skyworld is a turn-based strategy game which, for now, appeals largely on that basis: its colorful island map is a game board we wish we could have in the real world.
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Ark Park
Release date: 2017 | Works with: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive | Website:arkparkvr.com
Studio Wildcard has teamed with Snail Games to translate the prehistoric fantasy of Ark: Survival Evolved into a Jurassic Park-like experience (where nothing goes terribly wrong, presumably). According to executive producer Sky Wu, players will go on excursions into the park, ride dinosaurs, and collect ‘gene cubes’ to materialize dinos in a personal petting zoo. Some of the first VR demos we saw took this obvious approach to the medium—hang out with big scary animals!—so we fully expected to see the idea elaborated on quickly, but from the looks of it Ark Park might be the best of them yet.
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Killing Floor: Incursion
Release date: 2017 | Works with: Oculus Touch | Website:killingfloorincursion.com
The co-op wave Zed gore machines of Killing Floor and Killing Floor 2 might lose a little something in translation to VR—namely, running in circles a lot—but there’s plenty to gain, as well. Like 4A, Tripwire’s always made some of the best guns in games, and getting to handle them and toss them around in VR while horrible skin beasts close in looks like a pretty horrifying use of our time (in a good way).
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Budget Cuts
Release date: 2017 | Works with: HTC Vive | Website: Neat
Budget Cuts uses VR’s current mobility limitations as a feature—it’s a stealth game designed with teleportation in mind, having players zip through vents and around corners to take out guards. Even last year, it was one of the most fully-formed VR games we saw at Valve’s Developer Showcase. There’s a free demo on Steam so you can try it for yourself, too.
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Source: PC Gamer