The Witness will support Valve's VR tech

Despite some early pessimism, The Witness creator Jonathan Blow is sold on the idea of Valve's VR prototype and his upcoming puzzle game will fully support it.

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Jonathan Blow's The Witness is centered around the idea of exploring a large, mysterious island. Given its bright and engaging visual style, it makes sense that the Braid creator would want to experiment with the idea of virtual reality. In particular, Blow has been intrigued by Valve's VR prototype and is working with the company to help it work with The Witness.

"Last year I was pessimistic about VR systems in the near future, since the ones I had tried didn't seem to offer much (certainly not enough to justify wearing a bulky headset all the time and fighting back feelings of Nausea)," Blow wrote in The Witness blog. "But I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at Valve’s virtual reality system. It is so much better than anything else I had used that I was instantly very excited by it. Right away I could see games you might design for this system that had been impossible before; so it isn’t just a matter of the system being very immersive (which it is) but that it can take video games in general to a new place."

Blow has been working with Valve's VR device since November, keeping developments top secret due to the prototype's secretive nature. He notes that the entirety of The Witness is 'theoretically playable' on the device, but acknowledges that it greatly affects performance. Blow also hopes to get his game working with other VR tech, noting, "we will be supporting this device (and any similar devices) with The Witness."

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Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?

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  • reply
    January 25, 2014 4:00 PM

    Ozzie Mejia posted a new article, The Witness will support Valve's VR tech.

    Despite some early pessimism, The Witness creator Jonathan Blow is sold on the idea of Valve's VR prototype and his upcoming puzzle game will fully support it.

    • reply
      January 25, 2014 4:41 PM

      Eh? I thought Valve pretty much said themselves that the prototype is essentially a vision of VR many years down the road and that they are instead assisting Oculus. So confused.

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        January 25, 2014 5:19 PM

        To my knowledge they did release a vr sdk, that allowed vr games to run in big picture mode vr. Right now steam doesn't hand off the sensor data unless it supports the steam vr sdk.

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        January 25, 2014 5:19 PM

        Yeah, I don't know what Blow is talking about.

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        January 25, 2014 11:23 PM

        They better not muddy the fucking waters with their redundant vision.

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          January 25, 2014 11:25 PM

          Yeah, fuck those guys for contributing to the development of a growing technology.

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        January 26, 2014 12:29 AM

        What that stuff has boiled down to is a VR API that sits between (currently speculative, other than oculus) VR hardware/drivers and the game itself, so that developers can code to a universal system that will remain up-to-date as new systems and techniques for things like tracing and input arrive.

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      January 25, 2014 5:02 PM

      Oh my god. I guess I will have finished the game before rift comes out though. Unless the witness comes out a long time from now.

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      January 25, 2014 5:42 PM

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      January 27, 2014 12:30 AM

      Blow is most likely a bit confused.

      So does this confirm that The Witness supports Oculus Rift?

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        January 27, 2014 12:31 AM

        Ahh damn, I wondered why it looked familiar, he already confirmed it like six weeks ago.

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