Indie VR title Vanishing Realms brought Zelda-esque room-scale RPG action to the Vive all the way back at the headset’s April 2016 launch. The game is one of the top rated titles on SteamVR, but remains in early access more than two years later. Updates from the title’s sole indie developer have been extremely sparse, but it was recently affirmed that work on the title is still ongoing.
Kelly Bailey is the brains and sole developer behind Vanishing Realms: Rite of Steel, and a former Valve employee who worked on the Half-Life series. His indie VR title has been praised for its embodied room-scale VR gameplay. The title comprises the first two chapters of Bailey’s vision, while a third chapter has been on the roadmap for some time.
The game’s last substantial update came in September 2017, in which Bailey said an upgrade to the game engine “will allow the world of Vanishing Realms to expand in the future, enabling the possibility of a more open-world game design.” But since then there’s only been one minor update to the game in January of this year, and little communication from Bailey about the state of of the game’s development.
However, he recently made a rare appearance on the game’s Steam forum, responding to a player asking if Vanishing Realms had been abandoned, and affirmed that he’s still working on the title.
“Hi the_immortal, additional content for the game is still in the works, albeit ridiculously slowly.”
It’s a minor but meaningful glimmer of hope for the game’s fans, many of whom say Vanishing Realms ranks among their top VR titles to date.
Bailey is up front about the pace of the game’s development, saying back in 2017, “as it required over 2,500 hours of dev time to create ch1 & ch2, I’ve concluded it’s quite beyond me to accurately estimate a delivery date for new chapters!”
The last time he talked about the title’s roadmap was back in September 2016, where he promised that the game would come out of early access and eventually see a third chapter of content, likely deployed as DLC. As far as we know, those plans are unchanged, but as Bailey says, he’s become hesitant to commit to any specific timeline.
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