Produced | 93913 Media Center
Written by | Dafu a grain of millet
Edited | William
At the end of 2021, at the TGA 2021 Awards Ceremony, the world-famous "Space Werewolf Killing" "Among Us" announced the launch of a VR version, which is expected to land on the PSVR/Meta Quest 2/Steam platform. A few months later, the official Twitter of Among Us VR also released a lot of intelligence, from which it seems to be seen a space werewolf kill that is different from the end game.
Back to the real world, various reasons have made the script killing, werewolf killing and other offline games rise, attracting the interest of a large number of young people, who does not have a few friends around the circle of friends shouting "playing ben" in the circle of friends on the weekend? Obviously, werewolf killing and script killing have become one of the main forces of young people's offline social networking. VR has been using social as the main breakthrough in recent years, but in fact, in VR, game-type social networking such as werewolf killing and script killing is absent.
Now that Among Us VR has emerged, can it fill the gap in vr for game-based social networking? Or can it change the social form of VR?
Among Us VR Intelligence Gathering: More Exciting! Jump kill!
First, let's introduce the game "Among US" to a small friend who has never played it. It is called "Space Werewolf Kill", which refers to the player playing the role of a crew member of a spaceship, which has two characters, "Inner Ghost" and "Normal Crew". There are two ways for ordinary crew members to win: one is to perform the mission in each part of the ship, and everyone can win by completing it all; second, to correctly cast the inner ghost out of each voting session. The inner ghost needs to use tunnels, card vision, sabotage in the spaceship, etc. to kill the crew undetected during the mission, and kill a certain number of times to determine victory.
Simply put, it is a werewolf killing game set in space, the only difference is that there are not so many identities, only civilians and wolves. But the different maps, missions, and limited field of view make the game full of variables and fun.
According to the official video, the initial map and basic gameplay of "Among Us VR" are no different from those of the end game, but VR players and end gamers cannot communicate with each other.
In terms of movement mode, although anti-vertigo point-to-point transmission is more popular at present, "Among Us VR" still chooses the way of panning. But in fact, it makes the player's physical exertion become larger and the game ineffective for a longer time. So I guess that if you want to ensure the fast pace of the original game, there will still be some adjustments on the map area, or speed up the panning speed, which may cause discomfort to some players.
I've gathered some officially released intelligence to summarize three of the highlights of Among Us VR that are interesting to players.
First, Among Us VR was produced with the assistance of Schell Games, the developer of Quest's I Expect You to Die. After the announcement of Among Us VR, many VR players expressed concern that it would be possible to develop a VR game by a developer who had never been exposed to VR before. But that concern was quickly dispelled by the news that Schell Games assisted in production. Many players were also happy with the news:
Schell Games' puzzle game "I Expect You to Die" has done remarkable job in puzzle design, atmosphere rendering, VR interaction, and VR optimization, and has been loved by many players. Having them help make Among Us VR avoids many of the "newbie issues", and the similarities in the nature of the games can benefit Among Us VR.
Secondly, this is also a relatively big change, from the god perspective of the end game to the first perspective in the VR version. In the original trailer, just 2 seconds showed only a picture of looking back to see the "inner ghost", which is also a common jump scare in horror movies, which is often seen in "The Five Nights of the Teddy Bear". This image also became the original reason why Among Us VR caused a sensation among players.
In the subsequent materials, we see that there will be the same field of vision restrictions as the end game, and the player is likely to "meet love around the corner", and even the beautiful scene of "looking back, the person is waiting for the knife to you" in the middle of the lights. There will be a very good gaming experience for players who like excitement.
In addition, between the high immersion and high anthropomorphic pursuit of VR social, "Among Us VR" also added VR exclusive interaction, you know, in the end game, the player is a "bean", only the foot can not see the hand, only when the knife man will appear out of thin air, so there is no interactive action. In the VR version, the player's hand becomes resident (although a little weird...). ), but it can achieve interaction such as waving, high-fives, etc., and even two people can pose a similar "heart-to-heart" action.
Based on this, in fact, it is not difficult to imagine that in the future, the VR version will also have a rich content such as the full horse mode of the terminal game, the mirror map mode and so on.
Will "Among Us VR" be the next blockbuster?
Just looking at the game content, it is still very interesting. But we always expect the next blockbuster to take VR games and even the VR industry forward, just as "Beat Saber" appeared that year, reversing the weakening reputation of VR. So will "Among Us" be the next blockbuster in VR?
Let's take a look at what Advantages Among Us VR has. In the four years since its release in 2018, "Among Us" has received 540,000 reviews on the Steam single platform, and under such a huge number of reviews, it still maintains a 92% praise rate and more than 200 million downloads worldwide. In the end game with VR version, it also belongs to the minority. Combined with the highlight features mentioned above, at least it shows that in terms of gameplay, "Among Us" has a strong advantage.
Secondly, and personally, I think is a more important point, playful socializing. This point can actually refer to Tencent's mobile game "Glory of the King", "Peace Elite" and so on why the perennial list, each analysis of the reason will not escape the "surface game, actual social", the game and social integration together, so that players can also enjoy the joy of playing with friends. Some negative teaching materials, such as a classic magic IP mobile game, forcibly pull players to form a team, it becomes a hard pull and forced socialization.
"Among Us" is a good game that integrates gameplay and sociality, and in many previous interviews, its team has repeatedly mentioned that it attaches great importance to the construction of game sociality.
▲ Player-made terrier diagram
Although it is required to play in teams and communicate frequently, there is no built-in voice, and the community does not have to speak, only needs to type and communicate. And the game will be randomly divided into two factions, if you want to win must work together, which will naturally quickly close the player relationship. So it's not hard to understand that many players would write in the review that it's good to play with friends:
In addition, the Among Us team is also more creative, maintaining a monthly update frequency over the years, which helps maintain the vitality of the game.
Of course, there are benefits and problems. For example, the same world, the same unstable server, the early days do not contain Chinese, few maps, single routines, and so on. This is actually a relatively big problem for VR, a game with a relatively high upfront cost. To put it bluntly, how many players can be retained in a game that is troublesome to play and cannot be played every day? Of course, we also hope to see that after the VR version is released, these problems will be improved.
Write at the end
As anyone knows, "Among Us" was actually a not very successful game in the early days of its release, and its popularity relied heavily on the "fun interpretation" of various anchors, and its development team, InnerSloth, once revealed that the popularity of the Twitch platform brought sales growth by more than 50 times higher than any previous event or promotion. Imagine if you switch to VR, and the effect of the program is designated to quack and explode.
Overall, we're optimistic about The Potential of Among Us VR to be a hit because of its gameplay social. In fact, there are also gameplay socials such as VRChat and Demeo in VR, but there are more or less problems, the former emphasizes sociality too much, while the latter is too hardcore (and the built-in voice is not very good... ), which shuts out the majority of non-hardcore side players. "Among Us" is not only an excellent game in itself, but also suitable for most players to start, and can add a lot of color to the lack of gameplay social networking in VR.