I still remember the stories of players getting motion sickness from Mirror’s Edge, because it was the first time they’d seen their feet in a video game. Something about that touch of reality and the prospect of falling off a skyscraper was enough to make people queasy. So with that in mind, I can only imagine how their stomachs would churn when faced with Stride.
Due out sometime this winter, Stride is being billed as a story-driven parkour game built for mixed reality headsets, Valve Index, HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift ecosystem. There’s a lot more guns than Faith ever played with in her original outing, but the general principle here is the same: you’re vaulting from one rooftop to another, taking massive leaps of faith, and just dealing with the slight ringing you get in your head as you get ever so close to falling.
Developers Joy Way, who are based out of Moscow, published two teasers over the weekend. One is a slightly longer gameplay trailer that shows what the rough moment-to-moment gameplay loop would be like, while the teaser trailer is more about crazy long jumps and flying headshots.
If you’re wondering how a parkour game in VR actually functions, the developers posted a live video matching the real life movements to those in-game. There’s a lot of upward climbing, jogging with your hands and swinging forward to mimic the motion of running. That’s probably pretty good for people with lower-end headsets, since it makes it a bit easier if you don’t have full room-scale tracking. All the spinning around might be a bit of a pain, though.
For more info on Stride, you can follow updates on the official Steam listing here. There’s no official release date beyond “summer 2020” – that’s the Aussie winter. Gracefully, there is a note addressing the motion sickness problem:
Testing has shown that Stride VR does not cause significant motion sickness. The gameplay has been designed such that the player’s hand movements coincide with his avatar’s movements. This means that the load on the player’s vestibular apparatus is kept to a minimum. Although most people do feel minor uneasiness when they first start playing the game, as you master the controls, motion sickness disappears entirely.
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