The best free game is a heavy title for any title (pun intended) on the Oculus, given the thousands of game titles in the Oculus Quest Store. For Harry Potter Fans, Echo Arena stands out as a Quidditch style game, where the players fly through the game arena and toss discs at their goals to gain points, while fighting off their opponents with melee combat. The thrill of E-Sports, experienced from the comfort of our room, is truly a unique VR experience which can open your eyes to the rule breaking physics that can only be achieved in VR (or in space).

The Weightless Experience

One of the best things that Echo Arena has to offer you is the experience of weightlessness. This is by no means an easy feat, especially because the user is not truly weightless while playing the game. While playing it, you are still physically standing on the floor, rather than suspended midair. As you can imagine, the game has to do quite a bit to convince your brain that you are flying, not walking. However, it also has to ensure that you do not feel motion sickness, so that you can fully enjoy and engage in its thrilling and combative gameplay.

Ru Weerasuriya, president and creative director of the game’s developer, Ready At Dawn Studios, in an interview that the team studied what makes you sick and realized that it’s all about sending the right signals to the brain. If you grab at something and you can actually clench something in the game, that doesn’t make you sick because it is a one-to-one interaction where your hands in VR do exactly what your brain wants them to do. [1] Thus, the mechanic of grabbing and pushing off objects in the arena was added to Echo Arena to support player movement, a crucial aspect to allow players to fully engage with weightlessness.

Through these design tricks and seamless motion tracking, Echo Arena unlocks weightlessness for the player like no other game can.

Presence and immersion

Outside of weightlessness, the game also achieves total immersion and a delightful sense of presence through the use of spatial audio and reduced motion blur. Immersion is fundamentally about tricking one’s body that they are in a different space, based on the visual, audio and all other senses.

Spatial audio was also incorporated to make the arena feel real and allow users to communicate or locate their teammates freely via team chat. The subtle angles of the audio direction allows users to truly feel as though they are physically co-located with their teammates and even swivel their head to accurately find the location of their teammates.

In other VR titles like Rec-Room, when the player moves, one’s vision narrows, to allow users to feel less motion sickness as the brain and eyes are only exposed to what is directly in front of them. This approach, however, exposes and break the sense of immersion that the player has. Instead of doing that, Echo Arena limits the movement speed to 5 meters per second for the players, so there is no need for narrowing the vision and motion blur. Hence, the user can actually feel like it is a more natural environment, contributing to the sense of immersion and real life.

Suggestions for improvements

The only problem I see with Echo Arena is its unintuitive throwing mechanic. I am unsure if the mechanic was intentionally made to be different than throwing a frisbee in real life, but I often found myself wondering about the physics of the discs, whenever I attempt to toss it with the principles that I learnt for frisbee in real life. I would suggest the developers to incorporate more throwing training and guidance into the game, especially for users who are unable to hit their goals accurately and easily during the first few tries in the tutorial stage.

Conclusion

Echo Arena is an incredibly fun and interesting game, coupled with multiplayer combat and easy to understand game mechanics. I highly recommend any beginners getting started with VR to try this game out, and experience for themselves the unique possibilities only afforded to VR players. Since it came out in 2019, it has been a major hit on the Oculus platform and I can only imagine more players loving this title as VR adoption continues to ripple across the world.

Citations:

1 – https://venturebeat.com/business/echo-arena-hands-on-gameplay-of-zero-gravity-multiplayer-in-vr/