Having revealed its latest virtual reality (VR) project, Outlier, last year, developer Joy Way is gearing up for its early access launch via Steam. The studio has announced that the PC VR release will be taking place next month.
Coming from the same studio behind Stride and Against, Outlier is a very different beast, a roguelite shooter set in a stylish sci-fi universe. The narrative revolves around you being captain of the last human ark, vessels designed to find humanity a new home. However, your ark is swallowed by a black hole and during this process, you discover what looks to be a habitable planet. Unfortunately, it’s being attacked, fortunately, that black hole incident has endowed you with powers. So down you go to clear out the menace.
Those abilities include a roguelite’s main feature, rinse and repeat until perfect. With every level procedurally generated death merely means restarting a little bit stronger and hopefully slightly wiser. That does mean, of course, that you’ll encounter different characters and experience new artefacts, weapons, and story pieces.
Player progression is always an important factor in any roguelite with Outlier combining power-ups and ability modifiers for players to tweak their characters. Spells such as the fireball or telekinesis can be merged to create an explosive fireball and a fire push. During early access Joy Way will continue to add more weapons, more powers, and more pickups.
As gmw3 has previously reported, Joy Way plans on bringing Outlier to Meta Quest 2 later in the year, saying in a statement: “Meta has accepted putting Outlier to the official Quest Store. Though, we plan to tweak all main game systems first during the early access period. After we receive enough feedback from the community on the core mechanics and future content of the game, we will start working on a Quest port.”
Outlier is currently scheduled for release via Steam Early Access on 17th March, supporting Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Valve Index. The full videogame is currently slated to arrive by the end of 2022. Check out the new trailer below and for further updates keep reading gmw3.
