It’s been a lot of fun to watch VR evolve over the years as developers expe❀rimented with what experiences benefit most f꧅rom such an immersive platform. For a long time, shooters were the default VR genre. Then the Quest cut the cord, and fitness and rhythm games dominated the market.
Many have tried to convert other genres to VR with mixed results, but my favorite experiences are ones that take already good games and make them better with VR. Powerwash Simulator VR is the best example, giving players a port of a beloved game thaꦦt feels like it was always meant to be in VR. Similarly, Demeo proved that tabletop-inspired games are much better when you can sit around a virtual table with your friends.
Homeworld: Vast Reaches gives me a similar feeling. The upcoming real-time strategy game from FarBridge, Inc. surprised me when I played it at GDC last month. The RTS g🤪enre is notoriously complex and demanding to play, and I didn’t think the simplified, motion-based inputs of the Quest 3 would be well suited for it. But not on꧋ly has FarBridge adapted traditional RTS mechanics into VR beautifully, but the translation offers some interesting advantages when it comes to planning and controlling the battlefield.
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I’m not well-versed in Homeworld, but Vast Reaches uses simple and familiar RTS staples to help you get started: send your miner to extract resources from nearby asteroids, use resources to build out a fleet of ships, and send those fleets to explore the vast infinite space and take on enemies. Story beats occasionally interrupt gameplay to inform you of developments in the mission, but otherwise it's just you, your army of spacecraft, and the final frontier.
What immediately struck me about Vast Reaches was how easy it was to navigate through both space and menus. It utilizes simple gestures like turning your wrist to open menus to streamline things like shipbuilding. With the selection of ships in front of you, all you have to do is reach out and grab the one you want to build, then place i𝓀t within your fleet in the formation that you prefer. The added physicality does make things that would otherwise be a simple mouse click significantly more demanding, but I found a lot of appeal in it too. Pushing, pulling, twisting, and grabbing objects in the air made me feel like the conductor of a space opera, and I’m sure I looked like one too.
When it comes to navigating space, it’s a lot more intuitive than the traditional RTS. Rather than dragging your mouse to the edge of the screen to slide across the world or trying to pinpoint the exact spot you want to see on🦂 a mini-map, all you have to do is point at where you want to go and pull the trigger. Outer space can be tricky to move around in in💛 most games, but in VR, there’s no way to get disoriented.
You can look around you, move anywhere instantly, or stand still and make the world move around you. Holding the inside triggers and turning your hands like a steering wheel will rotate the entire universe, and pulling your hands in and out will make it grow and shrink until you find the ideal scale for plotting your fleets’ movements. FarBridge has found some ingenious solutions for implementing real time strategy mechanics in VR, aඣnd I expect others will want to learn from Vast Reaches’ innovations.
I was impressed by the unexpected ease of playing the game, but I wasn&r🌄squo;t blown away until we switched over to Mixed Reality. In Passthrough Mode o👍n the Quest 3, the blackness of outer space disappears, replaced with the real-life environment you’re physically in.
Sudd🌼enly, the hotel room where I demoed the game became the setting of a thrilling dogfight. A bomber swooped in front of the TV set while enemy ships soared over the bed. It w🍰as quite a sight, but it was also very confusing. Moving through space to track different parts of the battlefield no longer made sense because I wasn’t actually moving around in the room, and I had a hard time keeping track of my fleets as they flew around the complex geometry of the room.
Then I scaled everything down to fit right on top of the bed, and suddenly I was playing a live-action miniature wargame. It felt like playing a hologram game from a sci-fi movie, and I was suddenly overwhelmed at all the possibilities this presented. If I needed to fine-tune a formation or interaction with specific objects I could quickly z൲oom in close, then scale it back down and watch the entireᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ battlefield at once.
Playing Vast Reaches on an actual table might end up being even more immersive than being in virtual outer space. It’s the best implementation of Mixed Reality I've seen yet on the Quest 3, and an experience I’d recommend regardless of whether or not you’re an RTS fan.
Homeworld: Vast Reaches🅰 is coming to Meta Quest 2 and 3 this year, you can wishlist today at HomeworldVastReaches.com.
