Posts Tagged ‘Vive’

HTC Vive Pro is going to cost £799, but normal Vive gets price cut to £499

Vive Pro

HTC’s new-fangled Vive Pro finally has a price and release date. If you want a piece of its higher resolution screen, fancy pants headphones and slightly comfier design, these blue-tinged VR cybergoggles are going to set you back a whopping £799. Pre-orders, you’ll be happy to hear, are also open right now at Vive, GAME, Overclockers and Scan.

If all that sounds a tad steep, however, you’ll be even happier to hear that the regular Vive has now had £100 knocked off its original price, taking it down to a mere £499.  Read the rest of this entry »

Jealousy drives Gabe Newell to start shipping games again

Screen Shot 2018-03-10 at 12.49.03 PM

Valve’s new game Artifact has a vague release window of 2018, but thanks to a bit of jealousy on Gabe Newell’s part it won’t be the only Valve game we can look forward to in the next few years. Who do we have to thank for this? Nintendo.
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How to avoid Vive’s VR subscription price hike

Viveport

For the five of you that own an HTC Vive, I’ve got some bad news for you. At the end of March, the price of HTC’s Viveport subscription service is going up. In the UK, £6.99/month will become £8.99/month on March 22nd, with a similar price increase taking place across all 60+ countries where Viveport’s available.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to avoid it if you’ve yet to sign up to it. All you need to do is become a subscriber before March 22nd and HTC have promised you’ll be able to keep the £6.99 sub price for at least the rest of 2018. The same rule applies to all current Viveport subscribers too.

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RPS Feature

CES 2018: HTC’s new Vive Pro looks like it will eat your soul (and wallet)

Vive Pro

HTC announced a new version of its Vive VR headset last night in the form of the eye-boggling, potentially soul-stealing Vive Pro. Upgrades include sharper OLED displays, all new headphones and a shiny redesigned headband. But the true star of HTC’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) line-up is arguably the first official Vive Wireless Adaptor, allowing you to cut the cables on both the Pro and regular Vive for a completely wire-free VR experience.

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RPS Feature Goggle-eyed

My Experience Of HTC Vive VR

I need to put a huge proviso on this piece. I have readily forecast that VR will be an eventual flop for years, as I did here. My argument is, succinctly, that it will not get a broad enough userbase for major publishers to recoup the hundreds of millions they’d need to spend on triple-A games, so will remain a novelty for relatively well-off tech enthusiasts. I stand by that argument.

I am also a relatively well-off tech enthusiast. I’m excited to play with VR ideas, and see what it can do for gaming. My suspicions are: “not very much”, but I’m interested to see the process, really hoping to be surprised. Valve sent us a few HTC Vive Pres, the pre-release version of the technology, and I’ve been trying to get one to work for a while now. I now look at it with a burning hatred, having suffered for so long trying to set it up. Here’s why:

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RPS Feature Through the Aperture

Hands On: The Lab, Valve’s Portal-Themed VR Games

Our Vive hands-on experience with The Lab took place in Valve’s GDC booth. Actually, ‘booth’ isn’t the right word at all. Valve had transformed a large chunk of the Moscone North hall into a suite of sleek, white virtual reality chambers. The setting itself is a statement of intent, clean and minimalist in comparison to the usual attention-grabbing showfloor stalls, and quietly but efficiently guarded. As Pip and I sat in the waiting area on the final day of the show, the ‘Demos Full’ sign out front had two stickynotes attached: “No, really.” “Really, really, really.”

We were there to see The Lab, which I understood to be a Portal-themed collection of minigames (I suspect you’ll be reading about a lot of minigames in these early stages of VR). They turned out to be four small demos that took us back to the world of Portal and explored the possibilities of the Vive’s virtual spaces and impressive motion controls.

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