How Eve Valkyrie and Oculus Rift are rethinking the videogame spaceship

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...ie-cockpit.jpgFormat: PC/Oculus Rift Publisher/developer: CCP Release: 2014

CCP Games know about spaceships. The company has spent the past eleven years making Eve Online, an MMORPG in which players direct their hulking craft like vast units in a complex, social strategy game.Eve Valkyrie’s spaceships are very different, though. Not only are they small, one-man fighters designed for rapid, real-time multiplayer battles. They’re designed for virtual reality, having been built from their first polygon to work with the Oculus Rift headset. When you’re no longer making a game to be played on a flat screen, but building something players are going to sit inside, everything changes.“As we’ve been doing these tests at E3 and Eve Fanfest, we’re constantly saying to people: ‘move your head, look around,’” says CCP’s Andrew Robinson. As one of Valkyrie’s 3D artists, Robinson is partly responsible for modelling the avatars and spaceships players will climb inside.“Then the missile lock,” continues Robinson. “Once you’ve done it once, people get it and start to look around.” The missile lock mechanic sits at Valkyrie’s core: in order to target enemy ships, you fix your gaze on them for a few seconds while holding down a trigger button on a gamepad. After those few seconds pass, you’ve got a lock, and release the trigger to launch a volley of missiles.

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