Launching originally for PlayStation VR, Robinson: The Journey was carefully optimized and tweaked to ensure consistent performance across all PS4 systems. The recently released Rift version—despite lacking Touch support—fortunately puts control into PC players hands, allowing you to max out the visuals, if your computer can handle it.
No one knows how to better eek out gorgeous graphics from CryEngine than Crytek themselves, the company who built the engine and developed Robinson: The Journey atop it. As far as VR games go, Robinson is easily in the top five best looking VR games made yet, bringing a feel of AAA quality to the VR content landscape.
And, if you’re playing on Rift, you may be able to make it look even better. In the game’s Settings menu, a new Graphics option (not present on the PSVR version) lets you toggle Resolution Scale, Shadow Quality, SSDO Quality, Anti-aliasing, and Distant Object Quality.
While the default options are set to allow the game to run great on hardware that meets Oculus’ recommended spec, those of you with more capable PC hardware will be able push the games graphics even further.
The Resolution Scale option is going to make perhaps the biggest difference. This effectively ‘supersamples’ the game, rendering each frame at a higher resolution, and then downsamples to fit the Rift’s display. This results in sharper edges thanks to finer data available during anti-aliasing. The difference between the 1.0x and 2.0x options is significant.
With the rest of the settings maxed out (testing on the Exemplar 2 with a GTX 1080), the game’s lush world and high quality lightning really pushes the graphical bar for VR games, giving you what feels like a ‘AAA’ visual experience.
We captured 15 minutes of Robinson gameplay on the Rift (see video leading the article), to give you a taste.
