Ubisoft VR space game AGOS looks awfully familiar, from Watch Dogs 2

Ubisoft today announced AGOS: A Game Of Space, a VR game which... hang on, why do I feel like I've seen this before? AGOS will put players in the silicon of an AI overseeing a colony ship, exploring, gathering, trading, and upgrading to complete the mission of finding a new home in the stars. And it looks familiar because one Watch Dogs 2 mission had us steal the E3 trailer for a fictional game which actually turned out to be real. Previously known as Pioneer, it was in development hell for years, and now it's due to finally launch in October.

So, as the AI running the last colony ship to abandon Earth (Ubisoft optimistically think we'll make it to the year 2057), we'll be jaunting through star systems, building probes that can pilot to explore, mining, scavenging, researching new technologies, trading, completing quests, and such. Explore, power up, don't accidentally destroy a sizeable portion of the surviving population. Gotcha. Easy. And Ubisoft claim it has "innovative controls for a motion sickness–free experience" so you shouldn't sick up all over your cybergoggles while spinning around the cosmos.

A Kotaku report on Pioneer's troubles said Ubisoft started on it in 2013. In 2016, the video popped up in Watch Dogs 2 as a mock E3 trailer we steal from Ubisoft San Francisco's servers, only it was also kinda real. Been a bumpy few years for the project since then, which was reportedly outright rebooted in a new form at one point. Lost the space-western twang, for one thing. Here's that old fake-not-fake trailer from WD2:

AGOS: A Game Of Space is due to launch on the 28th of October for Valve Index, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Vive Cosmos, and Windows Mixed Reality goggs.

Ahead of today's Ubisoft Forward stream, company CEO Yves Guillemot apologised to the people they didn't protect, among other controversies.