Ironbelly Studios and TectonicVR are bringing a new built-for-VR open world title to the HTC Vive, set within the medieval era, and it’s looking mighty promising too.

Ever held a yearning to live in a time where life expectancy was in the low 30s, your days were filled gathering wood, murdering animals with sticks and making things out of molten metal? Well, Ironbelly Studios and TectonicVR have the perfect virtual reality experience for you. It’s called Yore VR and it promises an open world sandbox experience, on which has been built from the ground up for virtual reality and, it’s set during medieval times.

As to what you get to in that sandbox, the answer is: You get to build it. Players beginning their adventure in Yore VR will enter the environment with no home and the opportunity to build ‘Yore Town’ from the ground up. You’ll need to mine and gather ore and wood, build smelters and blacksmiths in order to progress your construction plans.

After you have your home town defined, from there you get to dive into the surrounding area, hunting deer using bows and crossbows, harvesting meat and generally trying to survive. How aggressively you hunt has an effect on how the wildlife you’re slaughtering responds to your presence in the world too – via the game’s reputation system. Although we’re unclear what other options virtual vegetarians have for food in the game.

“We have been working with indie developers for years to offer our services at affordable prices in order to level the playing field with larger studios” said Ryan Wiancko, Managing Director of Ironbelly Studios. “We aim to bring this efficiency as well as a long history of working with Unreal 4 and VR into the development process in order to help deliver the first open world sandbox game built from the ground for VR.”

On a visual note, Yore VR looks great. It presents a romantic, almost idyllic (and perhaps somewhat stereotypical) medieval ‘fantasy’ world all built with a keen eye on consistent art style and a dash of authenticity. The perfect escape from our modern, technology-dominated modern lives perhaps.

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The game’s developers have spent a lot of time considering locomotion. Their “sick no more” system tweaks view-able FOV during movement for example, diminishing the likelihood of motion sickness on set for those who are particularly prone, as well as offering adjustment to walking speeds too. There’s also a keen desire to provide options to tweak the visuals to match your system’s capabilities, another marker of the care the developer is taking with user experience.

You get the sense from the teams various dev vlogs and blogs that they’re really passionate about the game and this is trickling down into a lot of care and attention to important details. The game is already available for HTC Vive via Steam Early Access for $14.99 with user feedback very positive thus far.

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Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • DiGiCT Ltd

    +1 for those devs
    This is a good example of a rethought VR game.
    Nice game guys

    • Yore VR

      Thanks! If there’s any thoughts you have on what you think would work well or needs changing feel free to head over to our forums (http://forums.playyore.com) and share them.

      • DiGiCT Ltd

        Your welcome.
        I only can say on what I seen from you dev blog.
        Currently pretty occpied as alos working on 2 Titles at this moment.
        One of them is near the deadline for submission to ViveX, which caused the other to be on a hold in development.
        I think you guys are going the right direction with it, thats what i want to say about it.
        You will understand that i have no time atm to analyze your entire game

        and help you build it, but im pretty sure the early access buyers will do as this game looks promising and I as a dev myself can see you guys take the effort to make it a true VR game instead of a ripoff ported game into VR.
        Therefor IMO this game deserves to be noticed in VR, besides that i can also see you guys try to get the art good into the game too.
        Your dev blog tells me a lot already about you guys.
        I will buy it in the time it will be more finished as I might even want to play it then haha, else just to support you guys for what you did for the VR community ;)

  • Raphael

    Nice to see full locomotion. Nice looking game.

    • rabs

      Yeah, that way better than partial locomotion, where you stick on the floor and cannot pass waist high walls or climb on roofs.

      Though I’m not sure were they mentioned locomotion to be enhanced, the article only mention something like basic stick movements with comfort options.

      • rabs

        Cannot edit: After watching the video I understood what you meant.
        It’s full 2D trackpad based locomotion options, not full human locomotion abilities.

        Anyway, I don’t think this game needs more at that state. It looks interesting, but maybe too early access for me.

        • Yore VR

          Ladder climbing and swimming are coming up on our roadmaps. Ladder climbing sooner rather than later as we have a dungeon planned for Xmas

    • Yore VR

      Cheers

  • Yore VR

    Thanks for the writeup guys, really made our day waking up to this and motivated us to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to get our 0.3.3 update pushed out to steam instead of waiting until the morning.

  • Just watched the video in the article, looks great. Nice to see innovation and different methods of ground movement implemented. One of the most personally fun methods of movement in a 2D setting was the grapple hook in Quake. Loved that, no idea how that would feel shooting upwards in VR though. Anyway. watching this one with interest.

  • Nein

    I read “Vote VR”. Rats.

  • Yore VR is a fantastic game which I have already spent hours playing. Everything is complex enough to make it interesting to play. Plus, I’ve learned things such as how to use a furnace, which does not happen in many games. I am really looking forward to the multiplayer version which they are working on, so excited for that!