Eve: Valkyrie’s multiplayer makes me want to throw a virtual reality LAN party

It’s been at least a decade since I last threw a LAN party at my place. Maybe I’ve gotten too old and grumpy to stay up 48 hours straight just to play a game. Or maybe I just haven’t found a multiplayer experience that has my friends hyped enough to drag their gaming rigs over to my house.

This may all change, however, with one virtual reality game.

Last week, I checked out a multiplayer demo of Eve: Valkyrie, CCP Games’ virtual reality space flight combat game (coming to the PC using the Oculus Rift and the PlayStation 4’s Sony VR. Those who preorder the Oculus Rift will get a copy for free.). Eve: Valkyrie isn’t necessarily news to anyone following virtual reality, since its single-player demo has been flooring us (and if you suffer from motion sickness, literally) for the last year at various virtual reality events.

But this is the first time anyone in the media has tried multiplayer in Eve: Valkyrie, and I’ll just confirm for you now: it’s really addicting.

Let’s pick a ride

The group of media at this Eve: Valkyrie session split into two teams of five. Each participant sat in front of a massive gaming rig PC, whose specs I couldn’t quite scope out, with an Oculus Rift headset and a Xbox One controller attached.

After a lot of awkward fumbling around with the Oculus Rift headset, everyone was finally in the world of Eve: Valkyrie. Once inside, I suddenly appeared inside of a ship hangar, which allowed me to check out several different vehicles.

Ships in Eve: Valkyrie are in three major classes: Fighter, Heavy, and Support.

Fighters are the well-rounded combat jets of Eve: Valkyrie. They’re quick, highly maneuverable, and aggressive. These ships are capable of many styles of play, but the trade-off is that they don’t necessarily specialize in anything, either, flying around with armor and weapons that are mostly middle of the road. The default Fighter has a Gatling gun on the right trigger and a missile launcher on the left trigger.

When I want more firepower and armor, the Heavy ships are my go-to ships. These vehicles are slow but sport durable armor and weapons that do a ton of damage. The starting Heavy contains a sort of space shotgun cannon and a warp drive that is Eve’s take on a dash mechanic (except you have to charge it first).

Support is probably the most complicated of the ship types. This class contains weapons that repair friendlies and drain enemies. These are the weakest of the three when it comes to taking damage, but they are extremely fast and maneuverable. The first Support ship has shield heal/drain weapon and a weird web-mine that makes sections of the map uninhabitable for enemy ships. If an opposing vehicle does enter the web, robot spiders will attach themselves to it and start pulling the ship apart. Friendly players that enter the web get a small boost to their health amounts and shields.

You can tweak and modify these classes can with a variety of unlocks and a tech tree of ship blueprints, which you earn with experience points. This makes it possible to run a Fighter loadout that may have more Heavy-like assets, or visa versa. Ship exteriors and interiors cab be custom as well, with a variety of paint jobs, decals, panels, instrument consoles, and flight sticks, that are also unlocked through experience points.

Fly me to … the danger zone

I’m sure this is nice and all, but let’s get to the cool shit: the gameplay itself. The first mode CCP Games loaded up for us was a basic 5-vs.-5 team deathmatch. Each team gets a carrier that they spawn from, which has a set number of clones its “Clone Vats” can hold (which represent your team’s lives). Once one carrier’s Clone Vat is empty the other team wins.

Controlling a ship in Eve: Valkyrie should be familiar to anyone that plays flight combat games. The left stick is used to navigate up, down, left, and right. Main weapon is bound to the right trigger, with the secondary weapon tied to the left. Speed is increased with the A-button, and slowing down is the B-button. Barrel rolls, probably the most dangerous two buttons on the controller if you’re sensitive to motion sickness in virtual reality, are the two bumpers.

The best part of this control scheme, however, is tied to the virtual reality headset itself. Although I am inside a cockpit, I can rotate and turn my head around to see all aspects of my environment. Other space sims tend to tie this sort of action to the other stick, but it’s always felt unnatural. But looking around the cockpit in Eve: Valkyrie just using my head is so much more intuitive (as it should be).

This is especially innovative considering that some weapons’ aiming systems are tied to where you’re looking, not the direction the ship is flying.

The default Fighter is a great example of this. The Gatling gun fires straight ahead, requiring keeping a target at 12 o’ clock, but the missile will only lock onto targets that I am looking at. This allows me to engage a target without needing to keep my vehicle chasing their tale exactly.

Where this look-to-aim control scheme was most effective was when I was trying to chase down an especially squirrelly target that I couldn’t consistently lay my Gatling gun’s target on. As long as I kept matching speed, I could keep the swerving-and-swaying baddy in my sights and put a missile lock on them.

This also presented a unique challenge, since it becomes tempting to try to fly just outside of an enemy player’s view and start locking on with the viewpoint system. This often means jetting in one direction, while staring in a completely different direction, which also occasionally sent me crashing right into something I didn’t see in front of me. It’s like texting while driving, except I’m staring awkwardly out a side window at another driver.

Being able to look around also helps me visually scan where everything is in the skies around me, which is a cool feature all alone. You have blind spots in the usual places, since I’m inside a space ship with support beams and control panels, but I can mostly see everything going on. It adds this sense of, and forgive the cliché pun, reality, to the experience.

Virtual reality combat

I’ve been covering a lot of virtual reality lately, and really great experiences are coming down the pipeline. Some of them are designed to be great in-between presentations sitting on the border of movies and immersive reality. Others are trying to be a full-blown virtual reality world, where your body moves through it without boundaries.

Eve: Valkyrie, so far, is a great middle ground for games and virtual reality. It’s designed to function like a legit space combat sim, but how it uses immersion isn’t like being kicked into the deep end of the pool. You’re in a virtual reality world, but that world is strapped to a chair inside a cockpit.

I found a weird sense of comfort to that. I’m not tricking my body into walking or flying. My butt in both realities is stuck in a chair, and wires in my brain aren’t being crossed like in other experiences. If I barrel-roll, I’m not falling out of my chair feeling like my entire body is doing it. It’s whatever pod I am sitting in that is spinning, swooping, and diving. And this makes it feel OK.

Other ways to die in space

After several team deathmatch battles, CCP Games loaded us into Control, which is a take on the Dominance style mode in most other competitive games. The battlefield has three locations that the two teams must try to capture and control. Unlike other games, capturing and controlling a point doesn’t require the player to buzz around a specific section for a certain amount of time. Players need to get close enough to the objective to launch a personal drone, which will attach itself to the control point. Defending a control point requires shooting down drones, not so much enemy players (but gunning down the enemy obviously helps).

This mode was enjoyable, but it was a little confusing when it came to spotting drones. Although friendly drones emit a blue attachment beam, and enemies use a red beam — I had a difficult time visually spotting them for some reason. Maybe I just didn’t know what to look for?

CCP Games is promising other modes, such as Survival, which will be Eve: Valkyrie’s version of horde. A player will be able to face off against waves of computer controlled ships, which get more difficult and daunting with each round.

It’ll also have a scout mode, which CCP Games claimed was the most requested feature, where players can simply fly around without actually engaging in combat. That sounds relaxing, but I suspect most players will change their minds when they’ve engaged in a good player-versus-player experience.

Although CCP Games claims it won’t have single-player campaign, Eve: Valkyrie will have Recall, a mode that will present short mission-based objectives.

So, anyone want to come over for a weekend?

As of this article going up, CCP Games will have announced that consumers that preorder the Oculus Rift will get a copy of Eve: Valkyrie.

From my experience with the game, that is an extreme value.

Although the game is still in prerelease and this is, technically a preview, I am convinced Eve: Valkyrie has the chops to be one of virtual reality’s first killer app for gamers.

Whether my friends want to drag their PCs out to my house to experience it on a LAN connection, like everything virtual reality, it’s going to take some convincing. But only because we’re all too old to carry heavy equipment, and broadband connectivity is really good now days. Still, I am hopeful that CCP Games’ end product makes the cajoling worth it.