Little Cities, the upcoming city simulator for the Quest platform, is delayed until May 12th. Despite a pushback on launch plans, the team has released a 10-minute gameplay video and post-launch roadmap to get prospective city-builders excited.
Little Cities is fundamentally ready to ship, although release has been a bit of a sticky wicket. Late April was set to the be the month of dueling VR city games, with Little Cities previously scheduled to come out just one week before Cities: VR, the official VR adaptation of Cities: Skylines. That’s until the team decided to take some breathing room and not launch within a week of one arguably its biggest rival.
In the meantime, the team released a post-launch roadmap today that details two future updates: a hand-tracking update in June that will let you ditch the controllers and go hands-on with building, called ‘Big Hands in Little Cities’, and an update in July called ‘Pretty Little Cities’ which will include a new range of buildings and cosmetic items. The team also promises “so much more to come” after those updates.
Created by indie team Purple Yonder and published by VR veterans nDreams, Little Cities is more of a casual city-building experience which abstracts away some of the more fiddly bits of the genre, like having to independently lay down powerlines, watermains, control the flow of traffic. plan bus routes, etc.
Oculus Link is a Quest feature which lets the device act as a PC VR headset, either wired via USB or wirelessly via your home Wi-Fi network. While it works as advertised on Windows 10, if you try it on Windows 11 you may see a constant distracting – and even sickening – juddering effect.
Six months after the release of Windows 11 and Meta hasn’t released an official fix, with the company still recommending Windows 10. Still, 17% of Steam users have already upgraded. For those who need to access Oculus Link on Windows 11, there is a strange but functional workaround:
1) Open the Oculus PC app
2) Open the Oculus Debug Tool (ODT) in the oculus-diagnostics subfolder of the Support folder of your Oculus Rift software directory (by default this is C:\Program Files\Oculus\Support\oculus-diagnostics)
3) Click Service at the top, then click ‘Toggle console window visibility’
4) When asked if you want to restart the Oculus service, click ‘Yes’
You need to keep the console window that appears open and focused for Link to work without juddering. Do not close or minimize it.
Annoyingly, to close the Oculus software you’ll need to repeat these steps to toggle the console window to invisible again. And when you want to use Link again, you’ll need to again follow the steps to make the console visible.
I should note that Virtual Desktop, the paid 3rd party alternative to Air Link, doesn’t have this issue. Developer Guy Godin frequently updates the application to support the widest possible range of PC hardware and software configurations. On Windows 11 with a Wi-Fi 6 router Virtual Desktop performs perfectly for me, with no workaround needed.
Meta announced today plans to open its first ever retail store to give customers a chance to check out the company’s hardware in person. The store will include a dedicated Quest 2 demo area and send participants home with a short mixed reality video to remember their experience.
Meta may only have three physical product lines at present, but that’s not stopping the company from opening its first retail store in Burlingame, CA come May 9th.
The store will allow customers to get their hands on Meta’s Portal, Ray-Ban Stories, and Quest 2 products, though it seems VR may be the thrust of the store’s concept as a significant portion of the relatively small footprint is dedicated to a Quest 2 demo area which includes a huge LED wall that shows observers what’s happening in the headset.
Image courtesy Meta
“The best way to understand virtual reality is to experience it. At the new Meta Store, anyone can demo popular apps on Quest 2 and project what you’re experiencing onto a big wall for your friends to see,” says Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “You can also try our other products like Ray-Ban Stories and Portal, and get a sense of what’s coming as we build towards the metaverse.”
The Quest 2 demo area won’t just show what’s happening in the headset on the wall; Meta says the setup will capture short mixed reality clips showing the participant inserted into the VR experience, and they’ll get to take the clip home with them to share.
Image courtesy Meta
Meta’s Head of Store, Martin Gilliard, says the company wanted to place its first store close to the HQ of Meta Reality Labs—where much of the company’s hardware development happens—so that it can ensure observations about the way people are using its products can easily find their way back into the organization.
“Having the store here in Burlingame gives us more opportunity to experiment and keep the customer experience core to our development,” Gilliard says. “What we learn here will help define our future retail strategy.”
In its announcement, Meta called the new store its “first,” implying there will be more to come in the future.
A bundle of Quest games offers significant discounts with Fanatical offering three, five, or nine games from a list for roughly $20, $30, or $50.
The bundle comes by way of Fanatical, an online store that has “sold over 95 million keys to gamers in over 200 countries, all sourced from official publishers.” The bundle will run four weeks “while stocks last” with a wide range of genres represented among the 18 games available to add. Here’s the list:
An open source tool called OculusKiller makes Oculus Link load directly into SteamVR, disabling Oculus Dash.
The tool, available on GitHub, was developed by software engineer ItsKaitlyn03. You may recognise that name – earlier this month Kaitlyn found code referencing the ‘VR Air Bridge’ accessory for Quest 2 wireless PC VR (the manual for this leaked last week). You might also find the name OculusKiller familiar – there’s actually another tool by the same name on GitHub, though it’s used to forcibly terminate Oculus services running on your PC.
OculusKiller replaces this Oculus Dash UI with a SteamVR auto-loader
From a technical perspective, Kaitlyn’s OculusKiller is an executable that replaces the Oculus Dash executable with a simple SteamVR loader. You still need the Oculus PC app open, but you no longer get the in-VR Oculus PC interface. If you use Oculus Link but solely purchase your VR content from Steam – ie. you don’t use Oculus Store content – it’s a way to make jumping into PC VR faster and more convenient.
Kaitlyn claims the lack of Oculus Dash will “boost performance by considerable amounts”, as it takes up “200 MB of memory + GPU, even when not in use”. There is one problem however – there’s no way to exit SteamVR from inside VR, since when it closes it will just be automatically launched again. You need to take the headset off and close the Oculus app manually, which will close SteamVR too.
Of course, if you’re using the wireless Air Link you could alternatively purchase Virtual Desktop, which itself bypasses the Oculus Dash UI and has a one-click Launch SteamVR button. OculusKiller seems more suited for those opting for a wired USB connection.
To install OculusKiller just follow the instructions on GitHub – rename your existing OculusDash.exe to something like OculusDash.exe.bak and paste in the replacement OculusDash.exe. To get Dash back, just delete the new file and rename the old one back to OculusDash.exe again.
It appears Ubisoft’s long-awaited Assassin’s Creed VR title has suffered a pretty serious leak, as footage of the game’s starting menu seems to have found its way online along with a few player impressions.
According to information from Reddit user ‘Echiketto’, Ubisoft is calling its upcoming Quest 2 game Assassin’s Creed: Nexus. The name can be seen in a video of what appears to be a working prototype of its main menu and mission selection screen. You can view that video below, courtesy of Brad ‘SadleyItsBradley’ Lynch.
Echiketto on Reddit shared a title screen video for Assassin’s Creed: Nexus
In the video, we get a look at what appears to be a Quest 2 build. It starts with a calibration sequence that makes you do a ‘T’ pose, and then allows you to either start a new game or ‘Enter the Animus’, the franchise’s virtual reality machine developed by the antagonistic mega multinational, Abstergo Industries.
The video also shows up to the selection of the first mission, named ‘The Sword of Ezio’. The text box appears to be unfinished, as it’s labeled ‘Sample text – needs to be scrollable’.
Image courtesy Echiketto
The text reads: “Ezio makes a surprise return to the family estate at Monteriggioni at the behest of his sister (and fellow assassin) Claudia. Claudia, it seems, has been trying to rebuild the ruins of Monteriggioni, and things have been going very slowly. She’s got her suspicions as to why this is so, what isn’t read to act yet. Instead, Claudia suggest Ezio fins out what’s going on, then leaves him with word that she’s hidden a knickknack of his that he loved as a child somewhere in [illegible] that sports a puzzle.”
The anonymous leaker says they’ve already played a “fair bit of the game,” and maintains it will include many of the assassins from game’s past, although they allege the only thing that substantially changes from assassin to assassin is “the hand model and the way people address you.”
The leak, which we have not been able to verify independently, is said to include a number of the usual Assassin’s weapons such as a sword, hidden blade, throwing knife, smoke bombs, and crossbow. Combat is said to be timing-based, with Echiketto’s description sounding much like how melee is handled in Asgard’s Wrath (2019). “You have to wait until your enemy lowers his cover and strike fast,” the leaker says.
“Missions are linear, so no open world. The missions areas are fairly big. Backtracking is a thing,” Echiketto writes.
Additionally, the leaker says jumping—typically an important feature of the series—works by holding the “A” Button and walking towards bespoke areas to initiate a jump. From that description, it sounds very much like a concession to keep the game comfortable and more linear in how the player approaches the world.
A separate leak, reported by Exputer, maintains Nexus includes things such as “stealth movement, pickpocketing, lock picking, combat, climbing, and even the leap of faith.”
Exputer says Nexus features 16 missions, which you can play in either smooth locomotion via the controller analog sticks, or via teleportation. Ostensibly evening the playing field between the two locomotion styles, it’s said teleportation comes with a sound bar that indicates how much noise you’re making to nearby enemies.
“Overall, Assassin’s Creed Nexus seems like it’s going to be a really cool and immersive VR experience, and it’s not hard to see how the previously announced Splinter Cell VR game will also play due to both games similarities,” says Exputer.
On the other hand, Echiketto seems pretty unimpressed with the game, saying it “looked like a cash grab to me. Nothing new.”
We’re still waiting to hear more about Ubisoft’s other title, Splinter Cell VR, both of which were announced back at Connect 2020. Neither game was mentioned in this year’s Quest Gaming Showcase, which featured games slated to arrive sometime in 2022, which suggests we may see those games release in 2023.
Meta’s campus in Burlingame, California will be home to its first physical retail space where you can check out Quest 2 and its accessories as well as the Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses and the Portal video-calling device.
The store opens May 9 with interactive demos for “Beat Saber, GOLF+, Real VR Fishing or Supernatural on a large, wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what you’re seeing in-headset,” according to a blog post from the company.
“If we did our job right, people should leave and tell their friends, ‘You’ve got to go check out the Meta Store,’ Martin Gilliard, Head of Meta Store, is quoted as saying. “We’re not selling the metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it.”
The store is said to be 1,550 square feet and also offers the ability to do a test call with the Portal video calling device and try out different styles of the Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses. It sounds like the main attraction here, however, will be the Quest 2-powered mixed reality installation, which promises to give VR players “a 30-second mixed reality clip of your demo experience that’s yours to share”, with the video wall offering a live view into VR as it is being experienced.
The Meta Store represents a major new milestone in the transformation of Facebook into Meta, with a tab on Meta.com added where people can buy a “Meta Quest”, with the $299 entry level price of Quest 2 likely meaning that the new URL will become the entry point for millions of future VR buyers picking out their first VR headset.
The store will be open from May 9 Monday through Friday from 11 am to 6 pm Pacific time, located at 322 Airport Blvd in Burlingame, California. You can purchase Quest 2 and its accessories as well as Portal video calling devices, and if “you’re interested in purchasing Ray-Ban Stories, a retail associate will help you order them directly from Ray-Ban.com.”
Apple opened its first physical store in 2001 ahead of the release of the iPod and now its global footprint with hundreds of locations offers service and repair to products which didn’t exist at launch. As Meta builds toward new generations of wearable computers, the Meta Store could become a major part of fitting and testing these products.
Here’s some images provided by Meta showing the store:
