Out Now, New ‘Beat Saber’ Music Pack is Also a Final Farewell to Quest 1

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Jun 4, 2024

The original Quest headset, launched in 2019, has been on its way out for quite some time. Now it’s getting a final farewell from Beat Saber, as the game’s new OST 7 music pack is the last that will reach the headset.

Beat Saber’s newest free music pack, OST 7, is available now on all platforms (though temporarily delayed on PS4). The pack brings with it five new tracks:

F.O.O.L — “Damage”
Camellia — “Lustre”
Teminite x Boom Kitty — “The Master”
Lindsey Stirling — “Untamed”
Nitro Fun — “World Wide Web”

It also includes a newly upgraded background visuals:

OST7 comes with a brand-new environment called “Collider,” which builds on the latest lighting tech that was first introduced in the Daft Punk Music Pack. The team also expanded on laser physics, so in addition to colliding, lasers can now reflect from certain surfaces (even multiple times). That adds up to more breathtaking light shows and effects moving forward.

Image courtesy Beat Games

While Beat Saber OST 7 is available on all Quest headsets, it’s the last new music pack that will reach Quest 1. Meta confirmed that no future music packs or content updates will come to the original Quest headset. The company plans to end Beat Saber multiplayer and leaderboards on Quest 1 by November 2, 2024.

Luckily Meta reminds people that Beta Saber is tied to their Meta account, so if they choose to upgrade to a newer Quest headset—or want to play on PC via Quest Link—they’ll be able to jump right back into the latest version of the game, complete with all purchased DLC.

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When Quest 1 launched, it was something of a revelation that it could handle Beat Saber at all. Not because the graphics were too heavy or because the game was too big, but because no standalone headset up to that point had motion controllers that were accurate enough to really make the game shine.

That’s why we were impressed back 2019 when our early hands-on with the headset showed that Beat Saber was satisfyingly playable, even on its hardest difficulty. As we’d come to learn, Meta had been using Beat Saber as an internal benchmark for its controller tracking performance, and was determined to make it good enough to be playable on the headset.

That decision helped propel Beat Saber from ‘big’ to ‘massive’—making it easier and more affordable than ever to play VR’s killer app—pushing Beat Saber to become one of VR’s most commercially successful games.

With the success it saw from Quest 1, Meta quickly doubled down on the standalone headset concept. It was only a little more than a year later that it launched Quest 2—a cheaper and more powerful version of the headset.

And while Quest 2 is still chugging along nearly four years later, the original Quest started to be phased out some time ago.

To Meta’s credit, Beat Saber has supported the aging Quest 1 longer than most. The game still has feature parity with every other platform, despite the headset being more than five years old.

With Quest 1’s birth so intertwined with Beat Saber, the end of support marks a significant milestone in the headset’s epilogue.

ViRGiN

RiP Quest 1, you paved the way for the future.
Still supported longer than valve index ever was.
- J.C.
  
  Huh, do new VR games on Steam not work with the Index? Wait…they do! Most of them even work with the Vive and its now-godawful icrecreamcone controllers. Almost every VR headset works with Steam. My friends with older headsets can dust them off to try any game on Steam that they’d want to.
  
  I have a Quest 3. It’s awesome hardware, but I use it mostly to stream from my pc. Meta has already proven that they’ll happily abandon a platform if they decide they want to focus elsewhere; the Oculus store doesn’t even have sales on games anymore.
  
  Meanwhile, Steam VR games, even the very first ones, still mostly work even on the newest (or oldest!) headsets, because of Valve working to standardize VR. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s better in the long run. For VR, Meta is running pop-up shops, Steam is the congressional library. Valve definitely has at least one more big thing cooking for VR, but who knows what that’ll be. But Steam will still exist, even after Meta actually kills the Oculus store.
  - ViRGiN
    
    Steam has proven time and time again that they can’t be anything more than resellers if someone else property. Rome didn’t fall in one day.
J.C.

I find it amusing that Meta points out that if you’re worried about your headset’s longevity, remember, you can use your PC to extend its life. “Our headset is being retired, but you can still use it at better-than-ever capacity by just feeding it from your pc, a thing we actively tried to block for a while. Please ignore that we have abandoned the Oculus Store except when we use it to make you feel like your headset ISN’T just as abandoned as it is!”.

Meta’s insistence that games be ONLY made for the headset is frustrating because of precisely THIS. Yes, the Quest 3 is incredible, right now, but there will come a point when new games won’t support it. Maybe the new headsets will be so awesome that most users won’t care, but the hand-me-down market WILL.

ViRGiN keeps whining about how terrible Steam supposedly is, but guess which platform lets you play any VR game it has with any VR headset you’ve got? It’s not Meta. If Meta had kept going with games that were Oculus Store crossbuy, their newest games’ potential audience would increase from even their oldest headsets being handed off. It’s the games that they make money off of, not the hardware…yet you wouldn’t know that from the way they behave.