Mika Laaksonen and Kimmo Kaunela are currently working on an amazing sci-fi role-playing game where you experience the life of a colonist on an exoplanet light years away from Solar system, called Planetrism. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and below you can find some stunning screenshots.
Planetrism aims to combine personal experience of adventurous colonist life with leadership and management of whole colony. The key to survive in Planetrism is to understand environments, collect data and always be ready for different situations. Dynamic weather will make it hard and challenging to build and run colony and its people.
The game is currently supporting first and third person modes and it also has full VR support for hi-end devices with roomscale movement and different locomotion modes. According to the developers, VR will bring the most immersive experience but their goal is to deliver great experiences for non-VR players too.
Players will be able to customize their character appearance and gender, and there will be different environments to discover and explore and devices to use. The main environment is around 25 square kilometers in size and contains caves and lakes with different biomes and animals. The game will also have vehicles and different types of functional NPC characters and robots.
Enjoy the following screenshots and GIFs, and kudos to our reader Simon for informing us!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Insta-buy as a VR sim enthusiast.
Love that they’re doing VR support. Will buy for sure.
Reminds me of The Solus Project which I enjoyed. They have my attention.
Me.Andromeda meets The Solus Project 😀
I love it 🙂
Looks quite stunning. I love how they are trying to make it a good experience for both VR and non VR, rather than just aiming for a VR only game.
Dumb name, questionable scope.
I’ve had a Samsung Odyssey since last October, but I’m a VR nut. Whenever I talk to people who want to get into VR, I tell them to wait for gen-2. Gen 2 is going to be standalone(not requiring a console or PC) and will be wireless. They’re going to have eye-tracking which will enable foveated rendering(where the on-board GPU only fully renders the tiny bit of the image that you’re looking at while everything else is blurred, like in real-life). It’s going to be crazy.
I absolutely love my headset but I still long for being untethered and to be free of cables. Field of view isn’t too bad right now but the first 200-degree field of view headset is already in heavy development.
One other thing I try to explain to non-enthusiasts is that even though there is some relation to virtual reality and video games(interactive 3D rendered worlds using coding engines), VR is about simulations and less about “games”. SkyrimVR, to me, isn’t really a game; it’s a fantasy world simulation.
VR is about BEING and video games is about WATCHING. VR’s lineage is derivative of reality whereas video games are more derivative of things like board games and action figures.
All my favorite VR titles are simulations: Thrill of the Fight, BoxVR, SkyrimVR, Racket Fury Table Tennis, Bullet Sorrow, .etc. You can be a “gamer” and also like VR but you can also never have been interested in video games but become a VR enthusiast. It’s a different experience.
Alright, so it looks like I’m waiting for Gen2 at this point, which I don’t have a problem with if it’s going to be that much better than the first generation. It does sound pretty crazy when you put it like that, and it honestly just sounds like an insane jump in technology for something so new.
I tried the rift once at a Best Buy with one of their VR demo’s, and the sense of being “inside” the video game as opposed to playing it was so incredibly amazing that I honestly forgot that I wasn’t actually in the game at some point, it just felt like I was transported into a Space Ship and was in an actual dog fight. I loved it so much, that I’ve been dying to buy into the tech but I just don’t have the money to upgrade my PC that much at this point. I’m sensitive to frame rate drops, so I’d probably end up throwing up with my PC sadly.
With that said, I agree with you calling the games “simulations” because that is how they feel. I also tried some Free Climbing game where you’re towering on a cliff a good hundred or so feet above some coastal village. It legitimately gave me vertigo like I’ve never felt before from a video game. Something like Skyrim VR would be great too. I’ve also heard some good things about Fallout VR too, but I only know one person who has it and he likes it a lot.
He always talks to me about this game called Pavlov(I think?) that’s supposed to be like Counter Strike but in VR, and from what he says(he’s a cop) that it legitimately feels like the body awareness of an actual gun fight is needed to not be shot, which sounds cool as hell since I’ve wanted games like that since the first really terrible VR headsets came out back in the 90s. I’m not sure if you remember those, but they were downright terrible and now that the technology has advanced so far to where it’s not terrible I feel like we’re on the cusp of something major happening.
I have a feeling that one day a Monitor will no longer be something that’s used for gaming, I feel like VR Headsets will be the thing we just use by default, even for 3rd person games and all other types, just because of the fidelity some of these headsets are going to be capable of.
With that said, enjoy your headset you lucky, lucky, lucky man.
>Alright, so it looks like I’m waiting for Gen2 at this point
Yeah, gen-1 VR is amazing, but it’s not ready for the mainstream consumer. You’re tethered to a PC or console so you have to deal with all the niggling annoyances of having a peripheral that is so multi-faceted and so many things that can go wrong, it’s something you often have to wrestle with to get everything perfect.
Once we have standalone, wireless headsets with proprietary operating systems MADE FOR VR and nothing else, the whole experience will be much more stream-lined. I can usually get into my headset and in a sim via SteamVR within 30 seconds but even that process can be greatly optimized.
I want to have my future VR/AR headset/glasses sitting on my nightstand and be able to pop it on and be in a sim within seconds. We’re not quite there yet.
I was a “gamer” starting in the early 80s but I haven’t even booted up a pancake(non-VR) game in over a year. It’s a very strange sensation that’s hard to explain, but when I’m in, say, Thrill of the Fight, I throw a punch which connects on my opponent’s chin, there’s a deep THUD, his eyes go squirrely and I start throwing punches until one clocks him and he drops like a sack of potatoes? There isn’t an experience, short of knocking out a real person, that comes close to that.
I know we’re in the very early days of VR so the consumer base is very small, but the potential for the tech is limitless. The form factor has to get much smaller and sexier and it needs to be cheaper to attract more users and thereby attracting investors, developers and publishers to make better content.
VR really is about just BEING in a variety of simulated environments/situations without any kind of rule sets or contrived goals. When I’m in SkyrimVR and walking along a path(using the Steam app, Natural Locomotion, where you naturally swing your arms to initiate spatial movement) I’m not in a game; I’m just in another world. It’s a virtual REALITY.
In regards to Pavlov, it’s like playing airsoft/paintball but without the stinging sores. lol It’s a virtual sport, really. There’s no auto-aim or help. Your skill in the game depends on your skill in the real world. If you can’t aim a gun in the real world you’ll fail in VR shooters.
So, yeah, I say to wait a bit but I think your life will change once you buy in, similar to how when you got your first PC, console, smartphone, Internet access.
Ill keep an eye on this as im interested in it for VR. That walking/jogging animation looks weird though, I hope they change that.