Adr1ft - FPX in VR

[Nespresso]

 

By ThreeOneZero

 

Official Site

Release Date: March 28th 2016

 

ABOUT

Quote

ADR1FT is an immersive First Person Experience (FPX) that tells the story of an astronaut in peril. Floating silently amongst the wreckage of a destroyed space station with no memory and a severely damaged EVA suit, the only survivor struggles to determine the cause of the catastrophic event that took the lives of everyone on board. The player fights to stay alive by exploring the wreckage for precious resources, and overcomes the challenges of an unforgiving environment to repair the damaged emergency escape vehicle and safely return home.

 

“The Three One Zero team epitomizes the tremendous passion and creativity of independent game development,” said Ian Howe, president, 505 Games. “I’ve wanted to publish ADR1FT from the moment I first saw it at DICE; we’re looking forward to working with Three One Zero to deliver a bold new gaming experience to all types of players.”

Three One Zero is being led by founders Adam Orth on the creative side and Omar Aziz on the technology side. At its core, ADR1FT is an emotional journey through action, consequence and redemption. In the end, the player will be left to contemplate the parallels between the choices he makes within the game and the ones he makes in real life.

 

“I’m very happy to be partnering with 505 Games for ADR1FT” said Orth. “From the very beginning, Ian Howe and his team have passionately understood the game Omar and I are trying to make. They have empowered us with the freedom to explore and create something special with ADR1FT, both traditionally and with VR technology. It’s clear from games like Payday 2, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and some of their upcoming titles that 505 is not afraid to take chances and give gamers something fresh and new. That’s important to us. That’s what we’re all about. We’re excited to be part of that.”

 

 

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VIDEO

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Interesting write-up by Polygon. In before "Gravity: The Game lolol".

[Hello Goaty ♥]

505 Games?

This better not be a Poundland version of Elite Dangerous!

[Nespresso]

Day 1.

[ZOK]

Weird how there is all that stuff floating around, and none of it bounces off the helmet visor.

[robdood]

Apparently this has Rift support. Oh man.

[Chadruharazzeb]

I never thought I'd be interested in a game called Adr-one-ift.

[gospvg]

Latest Trailer (release date September 2015)

[Dimahoo]

Can you eject in Elite Frontiers and look around using OR in that?

[Nespresso]

505 Games has just announced that the space exploration game Adr1ft from Three One Zero will be an Oculus Rift launch title in Q1 2016. Details about other platforms will be announced later.

[Nespresso]

9 minute gameplay vid!

Looking good! This game could sell me on a VR headset to be honest.

[Mentazm]

Looks like the game elite should have been.

[Mr. Gerbik]

Looks like the game elite should have been.

Do you mean that Elite should have been an Oculus launch title or that it should have been a first-person exploration game instead of an space sim?

[Fry Crayola]

Might have alienated their backers somewhat if they made a game where the spaceships have all been destroyed.

[jonamok]

Looks very pretty, but the tasks look repetitive, just looping through the same few sections, and worse the constant running out of oxygen gets very old in just the 9 minutes of the video.

Does look amazing, but the player is clearly scripted as they are barely looking around to take in the environment. Unless the head is anchored to stop you doing that, and it's all down to thrusters to reorient your view?

[Nespresso]

Looks like the game for VR right now. Damn! 

 

[RubberJohnny]

Did anyone play this in the end? I thought it was really bad.

 

It's trying to be something it's not - it should be a disaster fiction genre piece, y'know, but instead it's trying to do what a lot of indie games are and tell a very personal, literary story, so you get all these audio logs about a dead astronauts struggle with substance abuse or something and nothing about what happened to the station.

 

Also gameplay wise it's unsatisfying - it's almost a walking simulator, but tries not to be and adds a gameplay loop where you need to restore oxygen, but also your suit can get damaged, which speeds up the rate of oxygen loss, so you have to find repair stations. This means the mechanics discourage exploration and most of the gameplay involves you trying not to interact with the environment, so it falls in this halfway house where it's the worst-of-both-worlds.

 

Also the UI is really bad, they have floating 3D AR notifications everywhere, and no objective marker, which is 2D on your radar and useless for navigating, almost by design to pad the game out.

 

And it can't even trade heavily on exploration or audiovisuals, because while the graphics are nice the art is very generic and bland, it discourages more relaxed sightseeing and it has one of the worst soundtracks I've ever heard. Like seriously, it's just repetitive droning that feels it was composed by a deaf person, when it started playing I thought there was an alarm going off in the environment.

 

The whole thing is just kind of filled with baffling design choices, and it's something that could so easily have been a lot better, y'know - make it a bit like Alien Isolation: pretty light gameplay, some Metroidvania exploration and environmental interaction with you finding new tools,  and survival gameplay would make an interesting disaster game. Use the oxygen as a way of changing the pacing of the game, have pressurised sections of the station where it's not an issue, make suit damage something scripted for time-sensitive action sections rather than a part of the gameplay loop, etc.

 

Also fire the composer, just going with royalty-free classical would be better than what they have.

[Lorfarius]

What did you play it on? Vive or OR?

[RubberJohnny]

Just regular PC.

[Padaxes]

It's a really nice VR experience, as long as you don't get sick. But it's not a great game.

 

It's also really badly optimised. I can play Elite Dangerous, Project Cars etc fine , but this chugs which indicates a "throw polys at it and don't worry" attitude.

[Sponge]

It didn't hold my interest for more than five or ten minutes. 

 

Edit: Actually I'm not sure how long I was playing it, but it didn't feel very long and I wasn't drawn to go back to it.

[Nespresso]

Yeah the reviews I've read haven't been very kind to it, mostly all describing the same issues RJ was having with it. 

[Qazimod]

This was released for PS4 today - I imagine PSVR support will be patched in later:

 

https://store.playstation.com/#!/en-gb/games/adr1ft/cid=EP4040-CUSA02519_00-ADR1FTGAME000001

 

EDIT: or not!

 

 

[FozZ]

Owned this for a while as it was really cheap on Steam a bit back, but only gave it a go today. Played for 3hrs with just a short break, which for me is a long time to be in VR.

 

What an experience so far! I don't half feel funny now though and had to come outside to come back to earth (sorry!) so to speak. 

 

Pushed it to 2x supersampling as it's really blurry on default. Got a little slow down in places but otherwise perfectly smooth.

[Alex W.]

I just finished this the other day on PS4. I have a fondness for all those wonky extreme sports games and remote control helicopter sims and things like Lunar Lander where half the game is getting to grips with a weird control scheme, and I'm a sucker for games that try to tell new kinds of stories, so this really worked for me. Unfortunately the level design isn't quite coherent enough to encourage re-exploration; even at the end, when your suit is leak-proof and you can travel basically indefinitely, it's too hard to get a good sense of the layout of the station to really dig around and figure out what corners you might've missed. (And the scripting can get slightly confused as you backtrack.) As a straight-through exploration game it's really solid though, a nice balance between freedom to explore and not letting you get too lost.

 

Shame it has fallen off the face of the Earth. These days you'd expect there to be at least a spoiler video for the various endings, but nope.