I bought into the early alpha of OrbusVR, due to come out soon into Steam Early Access. As far as I'm aware it's the first MMORPG to be released for VR and from what I've played so far I've had fun.
There's lots of really neat ideas and interactions, like being able to bodyblock mobs as a warrior tank from reaching squishy party members, and as the warrior abilities are tied to combos, where you slash your enemies in certain directions to do abilities. For example, to pull off your aggro combo you slash leftward, rightward then upwards, then once you have aggro you should aim to keep a slowing debuff on your target, which is an upward, rightward, leftward then upward slash. That lasts for a few seconds so you can weave in damage combos before you have to refresh the slowing debuff.
I want to learn how to do magic, but I have yet to do the quests that take me down that path. It seems really fun, with mages being able to cast any magic they want as long as they know how to draw the required runes, not requiring any sort of resource. And by know, I mean not an ingame learnt skill, but just knowing how to draw it. So it's not unusual to see mages about in the game, teaching each other different spells, or hanging around in town teaching each other how to produce fireworks.
It takes a lot of good ideas from other games, such as telegraphed area of effect attacks from mobs (WOW with addons or FFXIV). It has FFXIV style classes where you can play as any class, you just have to change your weapon, and XP is seperate for each class. It also has some twists on old school style mechanics that I haven't seen for a while, (probably mainly because I've tended to play more casual MMOs) such as open PVP areas with death making you drop all your non-equipped items, and bounty systems for player killers where PKs need to basically stay away from civilisation until they are killed for their bounty or the bounty on their head clears. It also does a many things differently which suit the gameplay; questgivers will tell you what they need of you and how to do it, but you never have anything like quest markers. Instead you have a compass and map and you have to rely on the directions of the questgiver and your ability to read a map to get there. See a waterfall with a bridge to the east when atop that cliffside? Check your map - you'll find that landmark and can use that to figure out where to go next.
This is the sort of game I've been really looking forward to in VR, and it shows a lot of promise.
Also I finished The Gallery - Episode 2 yesterday. Reminded me of why I loved the first game so much, but it was much longer, took me four hours to finish. The game still reminds me a lot of Myst and The Dig. Can't wait for the third episode, but I have a feeling it will take a while given how long this one took. It does have some performance issues though that need to be worked out - currently there's an issue bottlenecking frame rate and it seems to be CPU or memory related.
11 Oct 2017, 7:53 pm
