Originally released in 2018, Vox Machinae is a gem of a VR mech game that’s well loved by those that have played it. Though the title looked destined to remain focused on multiplayer, the developer today made the surprise announcement that it plans to release a fully featured single player campaign this year.
Vox Machinae has a storied history dating back to at least 2014 when the game was first previewed, well before the advent of motion controllers as the standard means of input for VR content and nearly two years before the first tethered consumer VR headsets even hit the market. Despite its very early entrance into the VR scene, indie backing, and lengthy development period, Vox Machinae defied the odds and managed to make its way to an early access launch in 2018. Even in 2022, the game stands as one of the best VR mech sims available today.
However, from the outset the game has been (understandably) limited to a multiplayer in scope. And while it’s fun, there’s plenty who have craved a narrative adventure on which to take the game’s hulking mechs—despite that kind of project being well outside the realm of possibility for developer Space Bullet Corp, the tiny indie studio behind the game. Or so it seemed.
It turns out the studio has been quietly toiling away on just that—a single player campaign for Vox Machinae—which it expects to launch this year as a free update to the base game. The update will coincide with the 1.0 version of the game which will bring it out of early access after all these years.
Space Bullet Corp indicates it has a fairly ambitious scope for the project which it says will include a full cast of voiced characters, a story spanning multiple planets, an original soundtrack, and more.
There isn’t a trailer yet, but the studio shared some short teasers with us so far, including a mech ‘launch’ sequence and what appears to be an absolutely massive carrier-like mech platform which players will presumably encounter in the campaign.
A full single player campaign seems so ambitious for the tiny studio that I asked how on Earth they’re managing to pull it off.
Space Bullet Corp co-founder Jakub Czeszejko-Sochacki told me that the studio consisted of a crew of just three full-time developers at the early access launch of the game in 2018. As they’ve begun working on the single player campaign they’ve ramped up to six full-time developers with three additional contractors. And they’ve purportedly been working on the project for more than two years at this point.
That’s still quite a small team to pull off a full single player campaign, but the studio has already shown the capacity to punch well above its weight class, so they’ve certainly got our attention.
Space Bullet Corp says it expects to launch Vox Machinae 1.0 with the single player campaign sometime this year, but hasn’t given a more specific release date yet. The early access version of the game is currently available on Oculus PC and Steam (including non-VR support); when I asked if the studio had any plans to bring the game to Quest or PSVR, I was told—in a seemingly teasing way—it would “have another announcement to make in the near future to address these kinds of questions.”