Despite the news that CCP Games is shelving VR for the time being, the company promises that their last title Sparc will not only go on, but CCP is carrying through with plans to launch the game on both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Update (11/17/17): ‘Sparc’ is now available on Steam for Vive and Rift, and Oculus Home for Rift. Both stores are selling for $20, and promise cross-play support. Besides support for more headsets, no additional content has been added. Considering CCP has closed its Atlanta studio, it’s likely ‘Sparc’ will receive minimal support moving forward.
Original article (11/02/17): Launched initially back at the end of August for PSVR, Sparc is a 1v1 VR sport from CCP Games, the company behind EVE: Valkyrie and others. The company today announced that the game will launch on November 16th for both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift (via Steam and the Oculus store), priced at $20. Cross-play will be supported across all three platforms, allowing Rift, Vive, and PSVR players to compete head to head.
CCP designed Sparc as a VR sport where players face off in 1v1 arenas, attempting to strike their opponent (or score a goal) with their orb, while simultaneously defending their own goal and dodging or deflecting the opposing orb. Visually it’s a good looking game with some cool avatar customization, but in my hands-on with the PSVR version, the system’s controller tracking sometimes made me feel like I wasn’t able to be as precise as I would have liked:
As you can imagine, with PSVR’s less-than-stellar tracking, having your tracking camera set up just right is important to success in Sparc; you’ll want to make sure your arms don’t exit the tracking volume when at their maximum extension in all directions. It wasn’t until I tweaked my own setup (and a fair amount of practice) that I felt like I was able to achieve reasonably accurate throws. CCP has lathered on a fair amount of aim assist to help with this (though it is reduced in the ‘Advanced’ game mode which is designed for greater levels of competition).
It remains to be seen if the more precise tracking of the Vive and Rift controllers will translate to improved throwing accuracy, and whether or not the studio is tweaking the aim assist to compensate for differences in tracking performance. For a competitive game especially, it would be unfortunate for the platforms not to be well balanced. With the game launching in two weeks, it won’t be long before we know the answers to those questions.
