MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Oculus Rift owners were temporarily left out in the cold following last week’s launch of Doom VFR.
The VR shooter was only ever pitched as being for HTC Vive and PlayStation VR, but with so much cross-compatibility in modern VR, Rift owners fancied their chances. As it happened, however, the game did not support the headset at launch, despite working on VR headsets from other manufacturers like Lenovo.
The game has since been patched to support the Rift, although it sounds as if the changes came from Valve as opposed to the developers themselves.
“Our development team has focused on making the game look and play great on HTC Vive and PSVR platforms first,” an official statement read. “However, as we’ve always said, our goal with all of our VR titles is to bring them to as many platforms as possible and we continue to evaluate expanding these options.
“At launch, we are only supporting Vive and PSVR. While we’ve heard Steam has been updated to allow the game to be playable on Rift via a Beta, the development team has not yet had an opportunity to test, optimize, and refine the game for Oculus Rift. That is why the game was not playable on Rift immediately; we don’t want anyone to have a bad experience on something we haven’t tested yet.
“We understand Rift owners found this frustrating today, and we apologize for any confusion. Our goal is always to provide players the most stable and optimized experience on every platform we support.”
The PS4 version of Doom VFR has had a mixed reaction from critics. It currently sits at 67 per cent on Metacritic, with some hailing it as one of the best VR experiences and others lamenting its controls. Certainly fellow Bethesda release Skyrim VR has proved the more popular, with a current PS4 Metacritic of 78 per cent.
