Month: October 2022

“It feels like being punished for being poor,” Overwatch player Richard Meunster told Kotaku over email. Along with 19 million other people, Richard and his brother both use Cricket Wireless, one of the prepaid phone services that Overwatch 2 will not accept for its newly instated, mandatory two-factor authentication system, SMS Protect.

Every single Overwatch 2 player, including those who had previously purchased Overwatch, need to provide a phone number that fits certain requirements in order to start the game. As part of those requirements, numbers can’t be attached to a prepaid phone plan, landline, or use VOIP. Though what remains of Blizzard’s heart seems to be in the right place—the developer hopes the requirement will cut down “both cheating and disruptive behavior”—players like Richard are forgotten. Not because they don’t play well or don’t care or don’t want to have fun, but because they can’t afford the right kind of phone.

Prepaid phone plans like Cricket and Mint Mobile allow people to pay the cost of their usage up front. Though unfairly maligned as Breaking Bad-type “burner phones,” prepaid phones are easier to incorporate into low-income budgets, with monthly cost usually between $15 and $50. Some companies like AT&T even advertise prepaid services directly to low-income customers.

Richard, a college student, uses Cricket’s $50 monthly plan because “if you can’t pay it that month they just shut down the phone instead of taking you to collections.”

“If I get a regular phone plan and then can’t pay, my credit score gets destroyed,” he said.

At one point in 2020, there were 74 million prepaid phone plan users in the U.S. alone. Richard is far from being the only Overwatch player being phased out.

“I am ashamed of having a prepaid phone,” one Reddit user, who posted in r/Overwatch and received one thousand upvotes in less than 24 hours, said. “Never thought I would be disqualified from playing Overwatch based on my ability to afford a phone contract, but here we are…Blizzard is the first company to make me feel too poor to play a game.”

Read More: Be Prepared For These 7 Big Overwatch 2 Gameplay Changes

“Cannot believe Blizzard is denying people with prepaid phone plans access to Overwatch 2,” one Twitter user wrote. “Why does it matter how I pay my phone bill?? 6 years of my life, all the time, money, and progress down the drain.”

Blizzard’s phone restrictions seem to primarily and widely impair U.S. prepaid phone plan users, and the company did not return Kotaku’s request for comment in time for publication. Prepaid phone users in other countries have reported being able to log into the game problem-free, which some players speculate could either be because their country necessitates identification in order to purchase a prepaid phone, or because Blizzard has only banned known prepaid phone plans.

“This is why the system isn’t going to stop hackers or smurfs,” one Reddit user wrote. They’ll just use a virtual number service that Blizz don’t know about.”

While Blizzard works it out, Richard and countless other low-income prepaid phone users are hurting.

“It feels like a large injustice,” Richard said. “Cheap postpaid plans are around $90. If you are a prepaid phone owner who really wants to play Overwatch 2, you are looking at $50 more a month to get a Blizzard-approved phone. Talk about going free to play.”

 

As of last week, a long-held dream of playing Valve’s landmark 2004 shooter Half-Life 2 in virtual reality has finally come to fruition. The journey began nearly 10 years ago, when a man named Nathan Andrews managed to hack together a functioning version of the all-time classic in VR. This was before any Vives, Indexes, Quests, or Oculi. With a primitive Sony HMZ-T1 and specialized motion-tracking gear, Andrews risked a resonance cascade scenario to splice together a working foundation for a full Half-Life 2 VR mod. Over the next decade, dozens of volunteers would contribute to the off-then-on-again project, all in hopes of one day bashing enemies with a crowbar in semi-lifelike virtual reality.

And now Half Life 2: VR Mod is ready to play, thanks to the hard work of the Source VR Mod Team and their free, open beta available on Steam. There’s more work to be done for sure—a public roadmap shows what’s to come—but the entire main campaign is already up and running, and pretty surreal to experience. Sharp corners and all, Half-Life 2: VR Mod is well worth checking out right now if you can.

The differences are quite immediate. The G-Man’s opening scene grants a whole other sense of scale since you have active depth perception. Images flash and appear inside of him as fully realized 3D spaces, which you can actually peer inside of and see with greater depth and dimension. This new presentation grants more weight to the whole scene.

As a video game graphics experience in VR, it’s super cool. Your eyes can track flying debris and exploding barrels with the ease and speed of just turning your head. The violence and realistic physics of Half-Life 2 are no longer just simulations appearing on a screen in front of you; they’re happening in a 3D space you feel a sense of presence and dimension in. It all feels so natural that it’s easy to forget this is the end result of a decade of hacked tech created by enthusiastic fans.

And while there’s still more work to be done on the weapons, it is a thrill to be able to virtually hold, examine, and fight with these classic video game armaments. Smashing the aggressive, flying manhacks with a crowbar in VR is so obscenely fun that I want a mini spin-off mod of this alone. And my Fitbit tells me I’m earning “Zone Minutes” by whacking these things. The 9mm pistol feels fun to aim and shoot (and yes, I am only aiming with one hand). More modern VR games tend to have smoother reload mechanics, so this mod’s feel a bit clunky sometimes, but the action remains just as hectic and fun.

In a way it feels like Half-Life 2 was always supposed to be this way. It is very easy to lose yourself in this mod, both as a VR experience and a Half-Life one. It easily pushes past the status of “tech demo” or “mod,” feeling like it’s shaping up to be a solid VR game in its own right.

The Half-Life 2: VR Mod project is currently being worked on by users from the Flatscreen to VR Discord server, led by WormSlayer, whose involvement goes back to the earliest days of the project. Back then, WormSlayer caught sight of Andrews’ early prototypes and offered his talents, starting with work on the gun models.

WormSlayer’s description of the mod’s early days sounds like something you’d need to slap together to survive City 17 itself. The assemblage of tech included a “Sony head-mounted TV, a gun controller for a console, and a professional 3D tracking system [Andrews] had access to,” WormSlayer told Kotaku. That headset in question was the Sony HMZ-T1, which sported “an eye-watering resolution of 640×720 per eye, and a 45-degree field of view,” WormSlayer said. That headset would be left behind in favor of the Oculus DK1, the first hardware the just-incorporated Oculus (now Meta) ever released. You can see footage from those early days in a 2013 YouTube video.

As such an early consumer VR experiment, the project was destined for some roadbumps as new tech hit the scene, quickly aging out existing standards. “Valve and Oculus both abandoned the idea of treating a VR headset as just another monitor,” WormSlayer said. “This was a sound idea for many reasons, but it effectively broke VR support in Half-Life 2.”

After that switch up, the team gave up for a while. Andrews retired from the project entirely. Eager VR community members, however, persuaded WormSlayer to reconsider dropping it all together. “[They] were confident they could hack OpenVR support into the old project,” WormSlayer said. And so the project sparked to life again, making great progress before once again resuming its slumber as essential contributors moved on.

Thankfully, the nascent Half-Life 2: VR Mod would indeed see a second resurgence when the Flatscreen to VR community mustered up a new team. Now that the public beta is out and playable, they’re focusing their efforts on bringing the project to a fully polished and finalized state.

As playable and fun as it is right now, Half-Life 2: VR Mod still has some issues, primarily regarding performance. “The old engine is very single-threaded and only supports DirectX 9, so even with our hacked-together DXVK implementation, we’ve been fighting to hit FPS targets in some places,” WormSlayer said. While I’ve yet to get to some of the more chaotic scenes of the game’s latter half, I’ve found performance so far to be quite good. Given that there’s no teleport-style movement option, however, this mod might be tough on the stomach if you’re new to VR.

Ultimately, the physics and tech of Half-Life 2 are still a joy to play with 18 years later. VR only amplifies the physicality of its world, with the ability to virtually pick up and manipulate objects. Half-Life 2: VR Mod is no Half-Life: Alyx in terms of the sheer amount of interactable objects, but it fits in well as a VR-worthy prequel. And with the addition of the crowbar and a head-mounted flashlight, it has more than a few features and comforts of its own. Being able to virtually manipulate objects in the world is a refreshing way to revisit many of the game’s puzzles.

The most surprising thing for me, however, was how this experience is affecting my perception of the game’s characters, especially the silent protagonist himself.

Gordon Freeman is a quiet guy even when he’s frantically destroying shit. But even just being able to nod at an NPC marks a 100% increase in inter-character interaction. Playing Half-Life 2 and being able to wave at Dr. Kleiner as he shouts with excitement upon seeing you makes me wonder: Is Gordon Freeman even a waver? Does he give a thumbs up to indicate he understands? Does he shake or nod his head when people talk to him? How have I never thought about this for all these years?

NPCs also look at you at eye level in a very eerie way. This feeling exists in other, more modern VR games, but it’s surprising to find it so present in a game from 2004. The simplicity of the models, with gentle head animations and eyes that give a hint of personality and awareness, just barely inches the game out of the uncanny valley into something that starts to feel realistic.

I’m not saying nodding, gesturing, and looking people in the eyes are the hot features you list on the back of the box (that’s saved for viciously beating the shit out of metal manhacks with a crowbar and seeing this classic game in true 3D), but it sure does change the tone of Half-Life 2. One nitpick here: It’s a shame you can’t see your hands while piloting the airboat. Not only did my eyes never leave the G-Man as I blazed past him in my escape from the Combine, I would’ve loved to stare and point dead at him, as if to say “I see you motherfucker. I see you.”

I’m looking forward to playing through the rest of Half-Life 2: VR Mod, spotting the unique changes the new format adds and inspires. There’s still work to be done by WormSlayer and the team, including more improvements to the weapons, tweaks to make the game a bit easier for folks prone to motion sickness, and even some AI-upscaled textures to give the more aged aspects of the graphics a bit of a facelift. Those changes will be very welcome, but for now this first playable version makes for a great way to jump back into this classic game. If you like Half-Life and own a PCVR headset, you should download this yesterday.

Google’s announcement of Stadia shutting down early next year took many people by surprise, including several games developers who planned to release their titles on the cloud streaming service. When Stadia first launched a few years ago, it did so with a small but respectable library of games that slowly grew in time. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Destiny 2, and Cyberpunk 2077 were big names on the cloud platform, but Stadia was also home to a large number of indie games that found a new audience on the service.

With Stadia officially winding down on January 18, 2023, several developers, studios, and PR companies have reacted to the news and how it will affect their games. Some of these studios were still planning to release games on Stadia before the announcement was made, and players could also be at risk of losing all their hard work in certain titles due to a lack of cross-save support.

SFB Games’ Tom Vian described how the public news was the first that they’d heard of Stadia’s impending closure–two days before the launch of Tangle Tower on the platform–and Necrosoft Games director Brandon Sheffield spoke about how Stadia had “the best developer revenue” of any streaming service. Indie games developer Simon Roth lamented about how stressful the game development process can be and how months of hard work had essentially been flushed away.

In terms of big AAA games, so far only Hitman 3 developer IO Interactive and Destiny 2’s Bungie have addressed the Stadia situation. Progression, rewards, and unlockable gear in Hitman games are linked to a personal account in the game, and IO said that it was “looking into ways” for Stadia players to continue their journey on other platforms. Bungie simply mentioned that it had “begun conversations about next steps” for Stadia members, and that it will update its players as soon as possible.

In a more direct example of how Stadia’s closure will affect some companies, No More Robot’s Mike Rose didn’t mince words and tweeted about poor communication from Google and possible lack of payment for an upcoming game from the publisher as well.

Stadia subscribers won’t be too badly affected when Google pulls the plug on its streaming service next year. Players will still have access to their games library until January 18, and Google has confirmed that it will refund all Stadia hardware, games, and DLC purchases made through the Google Store.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

• Elon Musk said that Tesla’s AI bot, which debuted at the company’s AI Day, could have widespread ramifications on society.
• “The potential for Optimus is, I would say, appreciated by very few people,” Musk said.
• Musk told the crowd he predicted the Optimus robot would eventually cost less than $20,000.

Elon Musk has lofty goals for his company’s planned humanoid AI robot product. 

A rough prototype of the bot, which is called Optimus, made its official debut on Friday night at Tesla’s annual AI Day by dancing and waving to a crowd.

But Elon Musk predicted that as the bot’s technology improves, it could have widespread ramifications for all of civilization. 

“The potential for Optimus is, I would say, appreciated by very few people,” Musk said.

He went on to say that the current economy is limited by people and productivity, but that an AI bot like Tesla’s could change the calculation. 

If Tesla’s Optimus could handle manual labor, “an economy becomes quasi-infinite,” Musk predicted.

“This means a future of abundance. A future where there is no poverty, where you could have whatever you want in terms of products and services. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization as we know it,” he said. 

Last year, when Musk unveiled plans for the bot, he said it would be designed to do “boring, repetitious” work. 

While the AI robot appears to be in the extremely early stages, with Tesla’s engineers debuting only a “rough prototype,” Musk told the crowd he plans to make the robot at high volume and low cost as quickly as possible. 

“Optimus is designed to be a very capable robot but made in very high volume, probably ultimately millions of units, and it is expected to cost much less than a car,” Musk said.

“I would say probably less than $20,000 would be my guess.”