We’ve been waiting patiently to hear more about Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, the well-established franchise’s first VR game. Now Oculus Studios and Respawn Entertainment say you’ll be able to storm the beaches of Normandy and finish the war all in time for Christmas.
Today at Facebook Connect, Respawn Entertainment announced that Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond will be launching on SteamVR headsets and Rift via the Oculus Store simultaneously on December 11th.
As if that weren’t surprise enough coming from an Oculus Studios partner, this will also include crossplay between the Steam and Oculus Store versions for the multiplayer portion of the game.
We can only surmise this is due to Facebook’s total 180 on PC VR headsets, as the company is retiring Rift in 2021. In fact, there’s no mention of the game coming to Quest outside of the obvious Link integration.
It makes more sense from a content perspective to recuperate as much money as possible now that PC VR is no longer a priority for the Oculus vis a vis Facebook. When it was first unveiled last year, Facebook was still very much gung-ho about Rift as a product class, so it may be that developers incapable of slimming down PC VR projects to fit into Quest 2 right away may be given the sort of leeway we’re potentially seeing with Respawn.
Any way you slice it though, it will sure be strange seeing ‘Oculus Studios’ listed as a publisher on Steam.