We’re happy to announce that we’ve been working on an update for The Assembly to enable the game to support motion controllers. This also enhances your ability to play the game as a roomscale experience. It’s coming to HTC Vive tomorrow at 9am PT / 5pm GMT, plus Oculus and PSVR by the end of the year. Those later dates will be confirmed soon.
Why Motion Controller Support?
As a VR developer, the community is very important to us. When we released the game a few months back we were delighted about many people’s enthusiasm for the game, however we received some criticisms from the Vive community for the lack of support for Vive controllers.
Until then we’d focused on making the game an accessible VR introduction across all the headsets and to us that meant gamepad as the primary input. It was something we’d set out two years before the Vive was released (and before the Vive had even been announced), and while we delivered on this goal, the community’s passion for motion controllers had taken off during this time in a way we hadn’t anticipated.
Following the launch, we took this on board and looked at how we could best address the criticisms and this brought us to the motion control patch we’re announcing today. We’d have announced it sooner, however we wanted to ensure the patch was final and submitted to Steam before we said anything, in case what we could do had changed and we under-delivered on our plans.
The Patch
The patch allows you to use your motion controllers as an input device for the game, along with enabling some key motion control mechanics. The functionality developed was chosen using the feedback from the community about what was most important, whilst focusing on what was possible without completely remaking the whole game. We want to be very transparent as to what patch does and does not contain so have pulled together the below list. You can also see this in action in this video we’ve made.
What you can do:
- You’ll see the motion controls as your hands within the game. These can be used as an in-game controller, so you can select and interact with items and menu options.
- You can reach out and interact with key objects in the environment, hold onto then, and inspect them closely.
- All the gamepad’s controls and buttons have been carried across, so you can now control your movement using motion controls. Just highlight where you’d like to move using the trigger, then you can blink to that location.
- We’ve improved The Assembly’s room scale by decoupling your look direction from your forward movement.
What you can’t do:
- Because of the way the game’s underlying systems have been built, we were not able to add dynamic physics into the game. So, interactions are still digital. For example, you can’t fluidly open and close a drawer using your motion controls – you highlight the drawer, press the button, and it opens in front of you.
- You also can’t throw items around, or interact with every single object within the rooms and labs of The Assembly.
- The game was still originally designed as a seated experience and not a room scale one. As such whilst it works great if you stick to the limitations of the in-game environment, if you do want to try and break the game (e.g. walk through walls) it’s very much possible.
You can find screenshots of the patch’s content on our blog.
Sale and Free Content
To celebrate the launch of the patch, The Assembly will be included in the Steam Thanksgiving Sale at 35% off. We’re also releasing some extra free content, which you can get if you’re a new or existing owner of The Assembly on Steam. This includes the official soundtrack, the script, desktop wallpapers, and a complete version of our behind-the-scenes video series. These can be downloaded for free on Steam tomorrow.
Finally…
We’d like to say a big thank you to all of you who have supported the game so far and provided feedback on what we could do to improve the experience. We take feedback from the community seriously and hope that this goes some way to address the criticisms we’ve received around The Assembly. The speed of innovation in VR is hugely exciting and is one of the reasons we love working in it so much. However, it also means that, along with the rest of the industry, we won’t get everything right all the time over the next few years. That’s why we value the VR community so much – listening to you is what makes us better VR developers.