Stellar Relic

Category - News

New information for the public

Kaiserreich Imagines Germany Victorious in WWI

kr_load

Kaiserreich, a popular alternate history mod for Darkest Hour, recently released its 1.7 update. Kaiserreich is an exhaustively complex scenario for the Hearts of Iron 2-derived strategy game Darkest Hour, packaged as a full modification, and celebrates its tenth anniversary this month as well.

I dearly love Kaiserreich. Its alt-history setting is well-thought out and realized. As in Darkest Hour or any Hearts of Iron game, players choose a nation and guide it through war and peace from 1936 on, making important decisions, designing and directing their armies, and so on. Despite the engine’s age, Darkest Hour is a great experience in its own right – the final and best iteration of HoI 2, and far superior to HoI 3.

In Kaiserreich, the Central Powers won the First World War. The defeated Entente powers of Britain and France fell to Socialist revolutions, with the royal family fleeing to Canada and a rightist French government in Africa. German colonies, greatly enlarged, extend across the globe, but a showdown between the forces of Syndicalism and Mitteleuropa is imminent. India is divided and headed for war, and the United States, robbed of the moderating influence of FDR, seems destined for a second Civil War.

Just a few months ago, Kaisserreich 1.6 released, overhauling the Indian subcontinent. 1.7 is a more modest update, though Mexico has received a good deal of necessary work. (Mexico is quite a fun experience, incidentally – if you’re lucky, you can intervene in the Second American Civil War and steal back the lost states.)

Kaiserreich Europe, 1936

Kaiserreich Europe, 1936

It’s an astonishingly flexible and polished experience, the product of a decade of work. The alternate history setting means that various gameplay elements can be balanced without making the whole exercise inaccurate. Unlike the standard HoI/Darkest Hour experience, which tends to play out WW2 along historical lines with historical actors, every playthrough of Kaiserreich is unique. Almost every nation has the opportunity to join a different faction, and the mapgame plays out in very unpredictable ways.

You can download Kaiserreich from this Paradox forums thread (I recommend the ModDB link). For those interested in the setting but who might not have access to Darkest Hour or the time to play it, Ofaloaf’s outstanding LP “This Land Is Your Land” is ongoing, serves as a solid introduction to Kaiserreich’s mechanics, and is a great read in its own right.

World of Warships Sets Sail

atagostellar

Wargaming.net’s latest foray into, uh, historical vehicular arena combat (there has to be a better way to describe it), World of Warships, has finally raised anchor from the semi-public beta and released publicly. How many tortured nautical metaphors can I fit into this post? Let’s “sea”!

By all accounts I’ve heard, World of Warships is Wargaming’s best offering yet. It is also impossible to acronym properly. Your friends will all assume you’re talking about World of Warcraft, and they will think you’re cool and normal, and you will hesitate to disabuse them of this notion. It can really torpedo a conversation!

The game features a wide selection of WWI and WWII warships, with destroyers, cruisers, battleships and aircraft carriers (in escalating order of size and juicyness). This weekend is probably a pretty great time to give it a shot – there’s an x3 experience bonus until Monday, and you can be sure that the servers will be clogged with players as charmingly new and inept as yourself. Give it a shot, landlubber! I like boats.

Take a look at Rossmum’s videos (especially the ones with commentary, like this destroyer and this battleship vid) to give yourself a leg up on the competition; Rossmum’s an old Wargaming pro and knows his stuff. Oh, and if you’re interested in 20th century warships, check out Shipbucket, CombinedFleet.com, Navweaps, and Wikipedia’s Battleships Portal. That should be enough to get you hooked on these big deadly metal dildos of the sea.

Jake Solomon On XCOM 2’s Strategy Layer

strategy

Earlier today, Firaxis Games’ Jake Solomon, the mastermind behind 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, took to Firaxis’ Twitch account to “dive deep” into XCOM 2’s strategy layer. The archived broadcast is available for viewing. For those of you who don’t want to sit through an hour-plus of (admittedly entertaining) banter and designer-talk, below is our take.

Details about XCOM 2 have been trickling out over the past few weeks. At Gamescom, that trickle became a flood, as Firaxis showcased their first demo footage of the Geoscape (strategy layer) and the Avenger (XCOM’s new mobile base/flying fortress). Jake Solomon and Pete Murray first played through the Gamescom footage in its entirety, then ran it through once again, taking time to pause and elaborate on areas of interest.

In XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within, your Geoscape objectives were to research new technologies, build new weapons and devices, and respond to alien attacks. XCOM 2’s Commander has many of the same tasks, but a whole wealth of changes and additions, as well. The activities and objectives of a resistance group are very different from that of a global defense organization, and XCOM2 appears to reflect this.

upgrades

Talented staff is hard to find for a gang of rebels on the run. Every engineer and scientist is an individual with their own mugshot, and these individuals can be assigned and reassigned to various projects by the player. Engineering (headed by Lily Shen, the daughter of your XCOM EU/EW Chief Engineer) is similar to the 2012 release, in that you use resources you’ve gained to build items. There are two major divergences here: first, there are, reportedly, many more items in XCOM 2 than in EU/EW. Secondly, instead of building individual weapons, you build a weapon “class” – say, Magnetic Rifles. At that point, you have an unlimited supply of Magnetic Rifles. This makes a great deal of sense, given the many ways to customize and upgrade individual weapons in XCOM 2. You can upgrade your weapons, paint them, even name them. Similarly, Rookies can be trained into specific classes – player’s choice – and once they are veterans, many more customization options unlock for the player.

advancedwarfare

One of the most interesting new tidbits dropped by Solomon is a detail regarding the Advanced Warfare Center, one of the later upgrades for the Avenger. Its primary task is to speed up the healing of soldiers – and as your squaddies become more advances and powerful, this will become increasingly critical. More intriguing, though, is that it apparently can uncover “hidden” perks within your soldiers as they level up. This means that it’s possible for soldiers to receive perks from outside their class – Snipers could conceivably receive Run And Gun, to use Solomon’s example. This is extremely exciting, and integrates the “Training Roulette” Second Wave option from XCOM EU/EW without losing the essential nature of XCOM 2’s classes.

As for the Geoscape itself, it is much different. In XCOM EU/EW, the strategy was clear: the entire world was begging for your help and players had to rush out satellites and fighters to save nations from spiraling into panic and leaving the Project. In XCOM 2, the player starts with control over a single region, and must expand the territory influenced by the Resistance by making contact with cells, gathering intel, and striking back at the alien occupiers. There’s a lot of stuff to actually do in the geoscape besides wait for missions – the Avenger flies around at your direction to influence events, investigate rumors, and support allies.

darkevents

The aliens certainly aren’t static, either. They have their own plans, drawn from a large deck of objectives, and their own win conditions. The player encounters these through the “Dark Events” Geoscape popup, giving XCOM the opportunity to pre-empt or respond to alien activities. Players can spend Intel (one of the new resources, along with Supplies) to dig deeper into the enemy’s plans and flip hidden cards.

Solomon repeatedly came back to his “mantra” for XCOM 2: that, in comparison to Enemy Unknown, the sequel should be more unpredictable, more replayable, with Firaxis’ “hands off the reins.” This can be dangerous idea, particularly in terms of balance, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s Solomon, Garth DeAngelis, and the rest.

CCP Announces Iterations On New EVE Sovereignty System

ExeFile 2013-05-25 23-27-59-330

Yesterday, game designer CCP Fozzie announced a batch of changes to the recently-rebuilt EVE Sov system.

We previously touched on the new mechanics, commonly called “Fozziesov” or “Aegis Sov.” EVE’s nullsec players have been crying out for changes to the sov system for years now, and the Fozziesov mechanics are the product of months and months of discussion in Reykjavik. They also came with a promise to improve, patch, iterate and otherwise build upon the new system.

That promise is being fulfilled, as the reaction to Fozziesov has been far from uniformly positive. Many of the features are sound in principle, but require tweaking in practice. Most of the complaints seem to revolve around the amount of wasted time it takes to defend space, even against nuisance raids. Fozziesov has seen the rise of the “trollceptor” fleet: gangs of difficult-to-catch Interceptors roaming through space and triggering defensive timers with no intention of contesting them in battle, merely wearing down and annoying the defender with busywork. More overarching complaints, like the relative paucity of rewards for holding space, will have to be addressed as well.

The general thrust of the proposed changes seems to align with the most common player concerns with Fozziesov, as chronicled by Thoric Frosthammer and Wilhelm Arcturus. It is reassuring to see iteration come so quickly, and the promise of further work on Sov is good to see, as well. CCP put their “superstar” devs on point for this; with Fozzie working on mechanics and Punkturis building the interface, it’s hard to imagine a stronger commitment.

Most interesting, perhaps, is the “preview” of coming updates in the final paragraphs of CCP Fozzie’s post:

Galatea is just the beginning of our commitment to iterating and improving nullsec and sov. We are hard at work on the changing coming in future releases, including formal methods for dropping sov, the ability to turn IHub upgrades on and off, updates to the formula for calculating activity defense multipliers, new PVE experiences for sov nullsec and much more. Nullsec and Sov remain our focus here at Team Five 0 and we’ll be continuing to update you on progress as we go forward. We are listening to your feedback and continuing to observe the results of our changes as we make them.

These Galatea changes will also obviously not be the final changes to the capture mechanics themselves. We have some changes we know we want to make (like partially captured structures returning to defender control at a slow constant regeneration pace to reduce the need for “maintenance linking”) and others that we don’t want to rule out but that also need more investigation and internal/external discussion before making final decisions (such as ship restrictions on Entosis Links). Thanks to everyone who’s been providing constructive feedback so far, we hope you’ll continue.

The promised iterations are to be released, along with a host of other features and updates, on August 25 as part of the Galatea update.

Planetary Annihilation: Titans Releases on Steam

planetary

One of the best strategy games in history was released in 1997: Total Annihilation. Long-defunct developer Cavedog created a title that spawned a legion of fans and a few well-received spiritual sequels. The most recent, and most troubled, of these sequels is Planetary Annihilation. Today sees the release of a new stand-alone expansion, Planetary Annihilation: Titans – and it just might turn the franchise around.

These games, at their best, truly make the player feel like a commander – a general of armies – with warfare on a grander scale than other contemporary RTSes. Even in the original TA, players managed hundreds or thousands of units without feeling overwhelmed. It was one of the first ever 3D RTS games, where terrain really mattered and projectiles were true objects. In an oft-cited example, a shell from a Big Bertha artillery piece, flying across the map, could vaporize an aircraft that happened to be flying through the shell’s trajectory. Stuff like that can’t happen in Starcraft.

A sequel (in spirit) wasn’t released for ten years, but Supreme Commander eventually came out in 2007 to almost universal acclaim. Once again, it debuted features we take for granted in most strategy games now, the fully zoomable map being the most prominent. Supreme Commander 2, though worse than SupCom, continued the tradition, and is a fine game on its own merits.

Then Uber, a new developer with lots of old TA and Supreme Commander vets at the helm, announced a new title: Planetary Annihilation. This was one of the first big Kickstarter projects, and it soaked in cash from the legions of fans looking for a modern take on the old formula.

Upon release, my experience was similar to that shared by many old Annihilation/Commander fans: extreme excitement, followed by confusion induced by the poorly-written tutorials, followed by disorientation and disappointment. The “fighting across multiple planets in a solar system” thing is a great advance in theory. In practice, the planets are tiny, making battles feel cramped and their consequences swift. There’s no space to trade for time, and managing multiple bases across multiple planets and moons quickly became tiresome. The key selling point of the game just didn’t work.

A few years passed, and the developers at Uber patched and updated and patched again. By all accounts, Planetary Annihilation has become much more playable. Today, Uber capped this all off with the release of Planetary Annihilation: Titans, a stand-alone expansion.

Titans looks interesting. It adds the titular Titan mega-units (similar to the Experimentals from SupCom) along with a hodgepodge of other new toys. Multi-level terrain, which was shockingly not part of the original PA release, is finally implemented, as well as a totally rebuilt tutorial experience. Titans is priced at $40 for new buyers, with a 66% off promotion available for previous owners of some version of PA (bringing the price down to $13.60). Additionally, those who backed the original Kickstarter will receive Titans for free.

For those of you – like myself – who felt burned by Planetary Annihilation, now might be the time to give it another chance.

Drifter Wars Turns EVE Online Into A Side-Scroller

eve online drifter wars

Update: CCP Games has asked Rixx to pull Drifter Wars down, in accordance with their intellectual property rights. The game can no longer be played, but the original article has been preserved below for historical purposes.


 

The EVE Online community creates all sorts of external tools and software for players to use, from Aura to Eve-Central. However, there are surprisingly few fangames, especially given the general tech-minded playerbase CCP has cultivated.

Drifter Wars is one of those precious and rare non-CCP EVE games. Created in a collaboration between Rixx Javix and Igor Puschner, Drifter Wars is a side-scrolling shooter in the vein of Gradius. You can pick from a few different ships, travel from left to right, and shoot incoming enemies. That’s about all there is to it.

While Drifter Wars isn’t a particularly good side-scrolling shooter, it’s such an interesting concept that it’s worth playing through at least once. There are, however, many flaws for the discerning shooter player. There is no wiggle animation on the player ship when going up and down, there’s extremely bad slowdown when the attack cooldown is charging up, bullets have no impact when they hit an enemy, the controls are a little too rigid, and there’s very little visual or audio feedback when you actually do something cool.

What if the EVE Online ships were rendered in side-scroller fashion? How does the universe of EVE translate to an arcade game? Where are all the EVE fangames, for fuck’s sake? These are the questions Drifter Wars asks, and while the answer isn’t a great game, it’s certainly a great project. We need more fangames, and hopefully the hard work of Rixx and Igor will inspire others to take up the mantle. I may not be a fan of this game, but if they improve on it and release a sequel, it’s quite likely that it’ll be a genuinely good experience. Keep an eye on it.

Warframe Update Brings Smoother Parkour

warframe-echoes

Digital Extremes certainly has a hit on their hand with Warframe. One of the most consistently played games on Steam – it currently sits in 11th place on the concurrency list – Warframe continues to get great releases that not only improve existing systems, but also add new ones. The latest patch, Echoes of the Sentient, touts a parkour revamp as its major feature, but it’s much more than that. New mods, new enemies, underwater archwing sections, a new duality-based warframe, a whole new utility mods system, and a reworked boss fight are all present in Echoes of the Sentient.

Bullet Slides and Wall Latches

That said, Parkour 2.0 is definitely the biggest improvement in this patch.

Parkour in Warframe before now was decent, but suffered from a few issues. The biggest was that the speed of movement heavily favored something called “zorencoptering,” where players would slide jump into the air and melee attack to zoom along super fast, at the cost of looking incredibly silly. Other issues included a restrictive stamina system that was never used to good effect – its only purpose seemed to be to slow you down – and a weird pause whenever you did movement that interacted with wall collisions.

No longer! Parkour is now much smoother, zorencoptering has gone the way of the dinosaur, and you can use as many movement abilities as you like without being constrained by that annoying stamina. While certain actions take a little longer to get used to, like wall-running. overall the parkour system’s revamp is a much-needed, much-appreciated improvement. A lot of Warframe’s appeal is in the fantasy of being a cool technofuture space ninja, and the old parkour system felt a little too rigid for the sort of ridiculousness that often played out in big firefights.

As a side-effect of this change, all stamina-related mods are now gone from Warframe. In its place, you will have a suitable number of fusion cores, depending on how many stamina-related mods you had and what their levels were. Free levels for your other mods and the removal of a mediocre system is a great way to start a patch.

Exilus Mods

For those players that wanted to have certain utility features like loot radar, but didn’t want to give up a whole mod slot, there’s good news: all warframes now come with an Exilus slot, which has been explicitly designated for utility mods such as Thief’s Wit.

This requires a special upgrade to unlock. Once it is unlocked on a particular frame, it will stay unlocked, even if you use a Forma to reset the frame’s level. Indeed, you can use forma to change the slot’s polarity, which allows you to tweak your builds more handily.

This may not seem like a big deal, and it really isn’t that major of a change, but it’s a really nice quality of life improvement. Most of the mods that were redesigned to use the Exilus system were rarely used, as they ate up valuable space that could be used on mods like Flow or Vitality. With this update we’ll see more and more players with interesting utility effects, and some of those unused mods will finally see play.

Equinox, or: Day/Night Cycles in Space

The latest frame is Equinox, and it’s certainly the most unique frame so far. Two frames in one, Equinox shifts between day and night forms in order to use different abilities.

By using this shift, players can go between the more damage-heavy Day to the more support-focused Night. Day’s abilities are all about power by either dealing damage or making players more effective at dealing damage. Conversely, Night’s abilities make enemies fall asleep, allow players to heal from kills, and reduce damage taken from nearby enemies.

This frame is a pain in the ass to craft, though, as you have to collect and craft the parts for both the Day and Night frames and then combine them into a single frame. It’s a bit of ridiculous grind in a game that already has plenty, but most veterans are so rich that it shouldn’t matter too much. Still, if you buy any single frame with platinum, this might be your best choice, purely because of the frustration it’ll take to craft.

Odds and Ends

Of course, there’s also the standard patch miscellany. Weapons can now be hid while holstered, which allows you to build more perfect-looking frames that are unmarred by rifles and swords cluttering up their appearance. New enemies, mods, and environments abound, with underwater Archwing levels being a big feature. Tyl Regor, the boss of Uranus, saw a rework that made him both harder and more satisfying to fight, as you must kill him in a rapidly flooding room.

Finally, PvP saw a pretty extensive rework of modes, and with the new parkour system it actually feels sort of fun. If third-person shooter PvP is your sort of thing, but you’re not fond of the slow pace of Gears of War competitive play, Warframe might be what you are looking for. They even added a PvP-specific progression, in case you want to minimize your fights against NPCs.

An excellent update all-around, both for its new additions and much-needed reworks. Somehow Digital Extremes keeps making my favorite free-to-play game even better.

Paradox Announces New Grand Strategy Title: Stellaris

Stellaris

Paradox just finished up their Gamescom presentation in Cologne, Germany today and have officially revealed their new grand strategy title under development. Stellaris, their new game, is being developed by their internal studio and was codenamed “Project Augustus.” Partially because of this codename, there was some hope that this would be a Roman Empire-centric title. However, given that Runemaster was “Project Nero”, Hearts of Iron IV was “Project Armstrong” and Europa Universalis IV was “Project Truman”, cooler heads suspected that, if anything, a project codenamed “Augustus” categorically could not be a Rome game (though a few Paradox devs took the opportunity to gleefully troll the community). Speculation was further fueled by a series of hints posted by Paradox on their official forums.

Unfortunately for Paradox, their big reveal was undercut by a leak from the Steam client, with images from the upcoming title’s Store page uploaded to Imgur. Today’s reveal confirmed the leak: the new title from Paradox Development Studio is Stellaris, a pausable real-time strategy game set in space, with a focus on exploration and diplomacy.

Game Director Henrik Fåhraeus (former lead for the Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron series) spoke after a short cinematic trailer. Stellaris is an intriguing concept – the game map is always randomized, and the alien species you encounter will be random as well. The experience is designed to be original and unique with every session, with a focus on procedural storytelling. There is no easily-predictable tech tree. Technology is acquired individually, like “loot” or a trading card. The initial stages of the game are focused on discovery and exploration, with players sending out science ships and crewed by hand-picked officers and diplomats. In the late game, as players encounter larger alien empires, the diplomacy and war functionalities become more prominent, with the experience being similar to Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis. Also promised by Fåhraeus are a ship designer, visually-appealing space combat, and internal factions within your population.

The Swedish publisher and developer had quite a lengthy presentation before the Stellaris announcement – awkward and scripted, as these things always are. Probably most exciting was the announcement of the first major expansion for Cities: Skylines, titled After Dark and focusing on a newly added day/night cycle. Josh Sawyer came on stage shortly after with an update on Pillars of Eternity’s upcoming expansion and patches.

Next on the docket was Hearts of Iron IV, with a new trailer focusing on a hypothetical successful Operation Sea Lion. Following the trailer, lead designer Johan Andersson spoke a bit about the upcoming WWII strategy game (nothing we don’t already know). Probably the most entertaining part of this presentation was the spectacle of Johan – a short-ish man in what appeared to be jean shorts with a high, lilting Swedish voice – talking about blitzkrieg and coordinated assaults. This was a slightly uncomfortable trailer to watch, given the cultural context and Gamescom’s location. Going on about alternate history victories for the Germans in WWII without mentioning Nazis or Hitler isn’t a good look and reminds one of the Hearts of Iron III “Hitler narrates the tutorial” debacle.

At any rate, Stellaris represents an ambitious step for Paradox’s developers. All their previous games have been grounded in history, drawing on nationalism and alternate history fantasies to help hook players. Stellaris is entirely their own universe. Can randomized alien races on a random map be compelling nemeses? I’m optimistic (PDX hasn’t really misstepped since Hearts of Iron 3 in 2009) but we’ll just have to see.

Stellaris is expected to release sometime early next year.

Frontier Announces Elite Dangerous: Horizons

Elite Dangerous Horizons

When Frontier kickstarted Elite: Dangerous, they promised continued development that would greatly expand the universe with planetary exploration, walking in ships and stations, and other such niceties. Now that the multiplayer combat variant (as opposed to the existing open world) of Elite, titled CQC, is just around the corner, they’ve decided to unveil another component to the growing space sim: Horizons.

In the Horizons expansion, players will be able to land on planets, drive a Surface Recon Vehicle (SRV), and explore new lands. Frontier is promising activities such as mining ore deposits, discovering hidden signal sources, and attacking fortresses protecting valuable goods. It all sounds very similar to the Mako sections of Mass Effect, which were – depending on who you ask – either incredibly awful or a mixture of terrible and okay. I lean more toward the latter myself; the physics of the Mako were always comedic and I like to coast across alien surfaces. 

This announcement is a welcome one for explorers, as there’s a severe sense of boredom when it comes to charting new systems. Most of the galaxy is comprised of balls of inert ice and rock, which give very little payout when scanned. This means you can go hours without finding anything of significant worth and limits your payout to (on your average expedition) a few million credits, tops. With the addition of planetary exploration, scanning, and combat, there’s going to be a lot more for explorers to do than mindlessly jump from star to star until they hit the jackpot.

This announcement didn’t come without its own bit of drama, however. Horizons is currently priced at £40, which is £20 less than Elite: Dangerous at launch. Furthermore, it also comes with the core game. This pissed off a significant number of people, ranging from veterans who expected the expansions to be piecemeal to newcomers that feel cheated for buying the core game at retail price. Some are also complaining that Frontier is charging for a half-finished game, saying that there is not enough content in the game as is to justify purchase. The associated reddit thread is unsurprisingly large and filled with salt.

It’s a similar problem faced by other developers in recent memory, most notably Bungie with The Taken King (the recently announced Destiny expansion). It’s a difficult problem to solve – how do you please both existing consumers and potential consumers with the same release? – but it’s one that should definitely be considered from both sides. After all, game developers need money to live, but consumers should be rewarded for their loyalty in the early era of a game’s lifespan.

Elite Dangerous: Horizons launches Holiday 2015. For those players that already own Elite: Dangerous, you get a £10 discount on the expansion and a free Cobra Mk. IV, a variant of the popular multirole Cobra Mk. III. Frontier recently reopened their lifetime expansion subscription as well, at a whopping £130 for all future expansion content.

CCP Announces ‘Gunjack’

Gunjack

On August 3rd CCP Games, developers of EVE Online, blasted out a press release, unveiled a trailer, and activated social media accounts for the rollout of a new game: Gunjack. It’s an arcade turret shooter, set in the EVE universe, and intended to be a release title for the upcoming Samsung Gear VR (the mobile-based ‘little brother’ to the Oculus Rift). The release of Gunjack is stated to coincide with the ‘official release’ of the Gear VR, which appears to be a bit of a nebulous concept; the Gear VR Innovator Edition has been available for purchase since 2014 and other iterations have since come out.

As for the game, it looks – well, it definitely doesn’t look great. And as someone who has long watched CCP, this announcement is more bewildering than anything else. Among the many questions that come to mind are the following:

  • Why a simple, bland-looking turret game? Just to have a piece of the action on another upcoming VR platform?
  • Isn’t having not one, but two games in development for unreleased platforms while the playerbase of their core product shrinks kind of, um, risky?
  • For that matter, why do this instead of fleshing out Valkyrie?

The answer to that last one may have something to do with CCP’s structure. Valkyrie is being developed by a team based in Newcastle, while Gunjack appears to be the product of CCP’s Shanghai studio. Of course, it’s obviously very much based on Valkyrie – to my eye, it’s essentially Valkyrie with player movement stripped out and turret game mechanics slapped in. It seems likely that CCP essentially sent Valkyrie over to Shanghai and said “alright, make a game for Gear VR using this tech.”

CCP Shanghai was supposed to be working on something else, though. We can only speculate about the fate of Project Legion (a re-imagining of CCP’s troubled PS3 shooter DUST 514 intended for the PC), which, as of earlier this year, was already being downplayed in favor of its predecessor. It is unclear what impact the development of Gunjack had on Project Legion’s apparent deprioritization, if any.

There’s historical reason to be skeptical in a more general sense here; CCP has a checkered track record with new titles. DUST 514 was (and remains) a flop and the long-lamented World of Darkness MMO was cancelled after languishing in development for nearly 8 years. EVE Valkyrie looks fantastic, but remains unreleased.

One thing is clear: CCP is going in hard on VR. As CCP’s CEO says in the press release linked above:

“We believe that virtual reality will be a defining element of gaming’s future.  It may take some time to get widespread adoption, but we’re going to be there on day one,” said Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP.  “We’re making smart investments in VR so we can learn important lessons early and blow people’s minds when they get their hands on their first VR headset.”

CCP appears determined to make a big splash as VR arrives for the broader consumer market in the near future. Whether the investment is worth the risk remains to be seen.