Anyway, as for Hitman 3 VR, my main hope is that they include Freelancer. Such an immersive mode is perfect for VR, and it would really help distinguish it from the PSVR version.
Sure, this no doubt has more immersive controls (as zombie 47 does seem a bit weird), but the interactive stuff the original does have is honestly good enough.
But yeah, this is one of the reasons I decided to finally take the plunge on a Quest 3 so I hope it ends up being good. I love WoA in VR so hopefully this is the ultimate version. My main worry is that it’s so cheap that it may be a reduced experience and be essentially just the third game but with cel shading and better controls.
I’ve just thought: the rumour is that this is only 3, hence the name, but 3 by itself would be disappointing narratively speaking. However, perhaps the levels are remixed with new targets and a new storyline to fit those maps (like the Patient Zero bonus levels).
I could definitely see that being a thing if they do limit it to just those 6/7 maps
I don’t think they’d do that just for one single platform (that doesn’t even have as many potential players as any of the other platforms Hitman is available on).
(I’d love to see remixed levels like the good old Summer Bonus Missions, and especially Patient Zero 2 though… but for everyone )
I’m hoping to see the “added interaction” being able to pick up things like wine glasses at parties just to roleplay a bit.
If you drop it or throw it away, it could just respawn back at its table.
IDK how the original H VR system worked, but I think I’ve seen it mainly uses button prompts to perform automated actions.
Yeah, getting first footage in August is disappointing but hopefully it’ll at least end up pretty good!
As for the original system, you could move your gun freely in gyro, and strangle using it too; however, most things are button prompts. You do have to reach towards some stuff with your hands, but I don’t think anything aside from doors can be triggered using motion alone.
A 45-minute interview with people from XR Games about VR: Reloaded.
Some interesting things I noted:
It’s been in the works for 3 years and started as a Quest 2 product, so well before PC VR support was added at the start of Year 2.
XR GAMES CREATED THEIR OWN OFFLINE MODE. Level progression, mastery, challenges and items are unlocked WITHOUT DEPENDING ON SERVERS. Funny that they’ve been able to do that after only working on the game for 3 years, eh IOI?
It’s confirmed that there are 7 locations, ICA Facility and the 6 standard missions of season 3 (Ambrose Island didn’t exist when development started).
New mechanics have been added in certain areas to fit with the added interactivity, such as being able to manually input codes into keypads using your fingers.
You can now free throw items instead of just throwing them at people (which I didn’t even know wasn’t a thing up until now, yeesh). You can also place items on the floor directly, instead of using a keyboard (or not at all in PSVR).
Dual-wielding has some interesting mechanics: you can’t shoot with one gun while reloading the other, but, for the first time in the series, you can use a gun in one hand and use melee items in the other (melee attacking and throwing), which sounds like a unique and goofy way of getting through combat situations. You can also dual-wield with any firearm, not just pistols.
Inventory management has received a neat upgrade: when you want to quickly retrieve an item, instead of using the bubble in the middle of the screen to access the inventory, you can now store single items in rings around your left and right hands that you can retrieve with a slight flick of your wrist without pausing the gameplay.
Most of the normal gameplay UI is now all brought up by raising your arm to bring up 47’s wristwatch, including what disguise you are wearing (which you wouldn’t know from a glance as you are hands-only instead of full-body), your objectives, your detection and trespassing status, the mini-map, etc.
While you don’t see 47 in a disguise, if his hands are disguised with gloves or anything else, they will be gloved to show this.
There is room-scaling and standard VR movement options, and teleportation has been removed for the sake of the AI and the essence of stealth mechanics.
Blend-in prompts are now unlocked, so you are no longer forced to stand or sit in one place, and can freely wave around your hands, wine glasses, etc.
The new cell-shaded style reduced the polygon and triangle counts and processing power due to the more-realistic art style of the standard game being impossible to port to mobile headsets. Tools were created by XR to speed up and streamline the process of changing styles, meaning 80% of the process was automated, and the other 20% was done by humans.
It sounds ambitious and I’m interested to see more footage on the 15th, but it’s still not convincing me to dump half a grand into a VR kit just to play a third of the game in a new art-style and with dual-wielding.
It’s interesting to know that it has been in development for 3 years, and in parallel to the current VR.
And for the new gameplay element for interaction, I’m interested to see some of them.
In the teaser the Dubai servers looked really different compared to the vanilla ones. So I wonder if they created a curated interaction with them. Normally it’s interaction prompt, animation of 47 pulling a server rack out.
And since they are no server rack at all on the VR models, multiple screens down, and no interaction prompts visible…
Thinking about the exploit known as the mud shot… I wonder if you could open a locked door by shooting a lock with both guns at the same time? That’ll be a thing to try.
It’s on exactly the 32 minute mark, he doesn’t specifically mention mastery, but he does mention completing challenges and unlocking items, so I think it was implied that the mastery system is going to be the same.
Premiering very soon, we’ll have more details on this new version soon!
Okay! They started off the presentation with a brief trailer with lots of gameplay clips of H3VR.
The cel-shading art style definitely was used to mask how flat some of the textures look, IMO. But compromises had to be made for Quest I guess!
I briefly saw that manual reloading seems to be a thing now, needing to interact with the guns in a specific way to reload.
Dual wielding two ARs to go FULL guns blazing is now a thing
You can knock out NPCs with the butt of your gun, is that new?
Overall, we’ll need more hands-on impressions to really get detail on what’s new and added here, but hopefully it ends up being a better mechanically VR title for Hitman