Co-op VR Shooter ‘After the Fall’ Delayed to Early 2021

Vertigo Games, the studio behind Arizona Sunshine (2016), today announced that its long-awaited co-op VR shooter After the Fall for PC VR and PSVR is going to be delayed until early 2021.

After the Fall was first announced back at E3 2019, offering up zombie-shooting four-player co-op action in a frozen wasteland. It was originally projected to arrive sometime in 2020, which at this late date would have put it releasing around the holidays.

Now, Vertigo Games says it won’t make the 2020 launch due to “the Covid-19 outbreak and everything going on in the world.”

Here’s the full statement below, which the studio tweeted out earlier today:

We have made the difficult decision to move the launch of After the Fall to early 2021, to ensure the development team has sufficient time to deliver the experience that meets our vision.

We want to make After the Fall the best and most gripping co-op VR FPS experience possible. However, with the Covid-19 outbreak and everything going on in the world, are facing several challenges that require more time to safely develop After the Fall and meet our high standards.

We understand that this is not the news you were hoping to hear and we can assure you we would have loved to have delivered you a great experience this holiday season. At the same time, we want to deliver the best 4-player co-op action VR FPS that you can expect from us. Therefore we are taking the additional time to get everything just right. We have big plans for After the Fall and we cannot wait to show you more.

Thank you for your patience and support, please stay safe.

We went hands-on with After the Fall back at E3 2019, and although clearly very early in its development, Road to VR’s Ben Lang said it was lacking a clear a sense of immersion for multiple reasons, including less than optimal object interaction and overly arcade-y controls, making it feel more like a point-and-click experience than a proper shooting experience.

Here’s what Lang concluded Vertigo Games needed to accomplish if they wanted a more immersive, more fun game for VR players:

After the Fall has a long way to go if the developers want to deliver gameplay that feels native to VR, and I hope they do. The only thing the game really seems to have going for it is some pretty darn good visuals (a big upgrade from the studio’s previous title, Arizona Sunshine). Right now it almost feels like Vertigo Games is designing After the Fall to work on flat screens too—maybe they have ambitions to release a non-VR version of the game? Being overtly distracted with high-level non-VR game design goals that evoke the non-VR loot shooters is a sure-fire way to end up with a VR game that feels like a port, and Borderlands 2 VR already has that covered.

We haven’t seen the game in the wild since then due to the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent cancellations of all in-person events, so we’re curious to see how much headway the studio was able to make in the meantime. Whatever the case, we’re hoping for a pleasant surprise after more time in development.

The post Co-op VR Shooter ‘After the Fall’ Delayed to Early 2021 appeared first on Road to VR.

Ream more: https://www.roadtovr.com/co-op-vr-shooter-fall-delayed-early-2021/