beat-saber — Image courtesy Beat Games

‘Beat Saber’ for Rift & Vive to Get New Features Soon, New Tracks “at a later date”

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Nov 9, 2018

The hit VR rhythm game Beat Saber (2018) is coming to PSVR November 20th, which means the developer Beat Games has been working full time on fleshing out the features, modes, and available tracks in a push to make it ready for PSVR owners. But what about players on Rift and Vive?

Beat Games responds to PC VR players in a tweet yesterday to quell some of the fears that the updates to the PSVR version would remain exclusive to the platform, as stated in the initial PS blog announcement. New features include new modifiers, new sabers, and new practice mode that will let you slow down a level play or hop in at any point in a song.

According to Beat Games, everything coming to PSVR users will be heading to Rift and Vive sooner or later:

Dear Rift & Vive players, new sabers, modifiers and practice mode will be added to PC version much sooner in upcoming updates, while campaign and 5 new tracks will come to other platforms at a later date.

— Beat Saber (@BeatSaber) November 8, 2018

Beat Saber left quite an impression on VR users when it launched back in May, garnering the indie title more than $2 million in gross revenue in the first month. The block-slashing rhythm game seemed to hit all the right buttons with VR newcomers and experienced users alike.

While the PC version boasts an unofficial level creator that lets you plug in your own music and create your own custom levels, the game has been largely unchanged since it launched earlier this summer. Two of the much awaited features are still MIA, the official level editor, and the promised online multiplayer function.

11 Great 'Beat Saber' Custom Songs Worth Playing

In a June Steam update, Beat Games maintained work on the multiplayer would begin “after releasing Level Editor,” all of which was done alongside the job of preparing the game for PSVR.

Healthy conjecture: it’s likely the upcoming feature update for Vive and Rift players signals a further stint in Early Access, and that the addition of the level editor, multiplayer, and new tracks will come at the full consumer launch of the game.

In case you missed it, here’s a look at the latest trailer, created for its upcoming PSVR launch.

gothicvillas

I’ll be honest, Beat Saber is great game but without editor and user made tracks, this game wouldn’t be great. If we never had editor, I would have uninstalled it by now. But with the editor this game is pure gold best ever.
- johngrimoldy
  
  I agree. However, I give huge props to Jaraslov Beck for creating the respectably good tunes that come with the default install.
  
  I look forward to an official level editor that will have some amount of auto-creation of beat-maps. I found level creation to be somewhat tedious with the current level editor. Not difficult. Just time consuming.
- MosBen
  
  I sort of agree, but only because the base game doesn’t come with a lot of quantity. But I’d say that the quality of the included games is better than most of the custom tracks that I’ve tried, especially in terms of the difficulty arc. I’d be perfectly happy with not having the custom editor if in exchange we got new official tracks on a regular basis. It’d be better for Beat Saber as well, as the custom editor is questionably legal.
  - G-man
    
    musicians need to get over the idea that using a single song is copyright theft. i own all the songs i’ve downloded in albums, i’ve already paid for them. i’m not paying for them again, i’m not waiting for them and their lawyers and record labels to take years before they arrange a system where a game can implement downloaded tracks.
    
    any musician who is forward thinking should be getting someone to create awesome beat saber tracks for their songs so everyone wants t ply them, enjoys the music and then buys their merch, or tickets to see them live, buy their next album etc.
    - MosBen
      
      I agree that our intellectual property laws need a massive overhaul, but you don’t own songs just because you’ve paid for digital files that you’ve downloaded. You have paid for a license to use those files in very specific ways, but not in all ways. You can’t take your phone, book a venue, and then sell tickets to a show where you just play music that you’ve downloaded. You can’t digitally alter the music files to clean up distortion or remix them into 5-channel surround versions and then market those versions to other people. You can’t put out an album under your name that just includes other people’s music.
      
      Artists should be able to control the use of their creations, at least for a certain amount of time and to the extent that other people shouldn’t be able to profit off them during that time. I absolutely agree that some artists should be contacting the Beat Saber developer and trying to find ways to get their songs in the game (likely for some kind of paid DLC), but often that is something that’s decided by their label or management.
      
      But simply using other people’s works in ways that are beyond the scope of the uses that you paid for is, at best, problematic, and as I said, is questionably legal. As much as I enjoy the fact that the mod exists, if I were Beat Saber I’d be watching the inbox for a cease and desist and have some code to kill the mod at the ready, because it’s almost certainly coming.
      - paratay
        
        Cannot agree more with your comments, the MODS are a significant copyright violation and developers of Beat Saber are certainly liable (now they also have the money to pay the fines)
      - MosBen
        
        Even if they didn’t have money to pay fines they’d be forced to comply with a Cease and Desist notice if they got big enough for rights holders to find out about it. The best example is custom tracks on Rocksmith. Yes, they exist, but they’ve been broken by updates and are not condoned by the developer.
      - G-man
        
        The only part you are right on is selling other people music. I can edit the music ive bought however i want. I just cant sell it.
      - MosBen
        
        Modifying other people’s works is a bit of a gray area, but it gets progressively less gray as you start moving more and more into a public place. The custom tracks mod for Beat Saber as it currently exists allows people to modify artists’ works and release them for free to other users. That’s at best questionable, and likely not legal.
      - G-man
        
        and if need be they can change it so you dont download the music track, you only download the beat map and so you can only use that if you already own the music track. that is unless the music industry sees that theres a potential way to make some money here and just have a subscription service, a place to sell track for a one time payment, artists could even justbe getting people to make good beat tracks for their music as a means of promoting their songs.
MosBen

I’m sure that the “new sabers” are more elaborate than this, but it’d be nice to be able to change the colors of your sabers and have the game update all of the blocks to match. That seems like it would be pretty easy, right? One extra benefit would be that if you wanted to modify the difficulty you could set the sabers to the same color so it wouldn’t matter which saber you hit a block with. There tends to be a significant jump in difficulty between the various difficulty levels, less of a problem with the official tracks than custom tracks, and this would allow a player to try a higher difficulty to play with all the extra movement and blocks, but tone it down just a bit.
- G-man
  
  thats already a mod, at least the coluour change, not the make everything the same colour.
  - MosBen
    
    That’s cool, though it’d be nice if it was just a part of the game.
Baldrickk

I wonder how good an “audio-surf” style mode would be – generating the level from the music itself – you could then play your own music that you already own.