CONTRACTORS: SHOWDOWN - A Glimpse Into The Future of Large-Scale VR Gaming - Open Beta Review

hey guys dodgy here all right I don't want to get too sappy but I do want to thank everybody for all the amazing feedback on my last video I really didn't expect to wake up to that it's so cool and motivating to read all your supportive comments you know I kind of started this channel just because something told me I should I never really had any particular aspirations to be a YouTuber or anything but I've been kind of lost lately after some of my other Pursuits haven't quite panned out the way I was hoping and it all kind of fits perfectly with my life so I just started doing it I kind of just follow my gut on everything I do and man seeing all you guys diing the video is just so [ __ ] cool I am ly appreciative of all your support and very excited to start exploring more VR related stuff as well as some other non-vr things that I've been working on with my friends let's get into the video though because everybody has been talking about contractor Showdown and it's been on my radar for a while I actually played the alpha a few times but I just got caught up in other things and never really hopped back in but after seeing everybody talking about the open beta and hearing a lot of positive feedback I decided to jump back in and check it out I really tried to get this video done earlier in the week so that anybody who didn't know about the open Beta had a few more days to play it but these take quite a long time to make and alas life would for no YouTuber I'm posting this late Friday night though so you still got all weekend it runs until March 17th you can close the video and go play right now if you want to I'll put a link to their website in the description where you can find information on how to join the beta unless it's after March 17th 2024 of course in which case hi how's the future this is just a beta retrospective so I'm not going to get too into the weeds with gameplay details I want to save all that for the actual review Once it releases and I wanted to get this out to you guys quickly so that you have a chance to play before it ends although details are in my nature so no promises also I want to tell tell you right up front that I really suck at this game like I'm just really bad at it I tried so hard to get you guys some cool background footage to watch but God damn it I'm just terrible I don't understand how people get so good at these games man but I'm going to hop back in after I write this and see if I can't eek out a few more cool moments my initial impression is just wow this is a big game and not just the map I mean everything it truly is a nearly one to1 remake of war zone and VR and while still Rough Around the Edges it's pretty damn impressive overall I mean we're talking about a game where they are testing 60 and 75 player servers complete with fully reimagined VR mechanics solid combat a deep progression in skin system and matchmaking all running on Quest Hardware it's really kind of mind-blowing and it got me thinking about where we might be able to go with large scale VR games in the future I know that you probably want to check out the game though so I'll talk about that at the end so yeah this is just a straightup war zone clone I don't think they ever hid that so if you know war zone you basically understand this game it's the grittier military themed Battle Royale for those of us who aren't really into the fortnite Apex population one style games you know say what you want about Call of Duty I know it gets a lot of [ __ ] and for good reason I personally fell out of love with it around Black Ops 2 but I always kind of liked war zone I mean don't get me wrong it's still an overly monetized microt transaction hellscape that shoots its little dopamine hooks into you at literally every possible opportunity like every button you press and everything you do in the game makes some sort of badass cool sound or guitar stab it's kind of funny how over the top it is it's like okay man I get it I'm a [ __ ] badass super soldier who's all out of bubble gum but war zone 1 and the early days of war zone 2 were actually a lot of fun I know that a lot of people are starting to get burnt out at all the battle Royals I do get that although if you went by player counts you wouldn't know but I never really played them too much and War Zone was a decent balance between arcadey Call of Duty Gunplay and Tactical Team oriented games not to the extent that I usually prefer but it was decent for the type of game it was and you did have to work as a team if you wanted to win it's kind of interesting how on paper a battle royale sounds like a great concept everybody gets dumped into a large map with no gear you scramble to kid up and eventually get pushed into Close Quarters combat by the ring but in reality dying early into a match and waiting around where your teammates play actually kind of sucks and I thought war zone did a good job of providing ways to get you back into the fight without just giving you free respawns there are actually a lot of good ideas in the game it's just kind of hard to take it seriously when Nicki Minaj is running around the battlefield we live in weird times though and I try to enjoy the absurdity instead of letting it piss me off anyway all of that is to say that I am totally on board with the war zone VR game hell yeah sometimes it's exactly the type of game I want it sits perfectly in between something like Veil or regular contractors and a more tactical slow paced Mill Sim like hell let loose or Squad I know those aren't VR games but we don't really have anything like that in VR yet which I'll touch on later you're going to hear a lot of people on Reddit complaining about how this is just another battle royale game but ignore them they hate fun population 1 is the only active Battle Royale in VR right now and it's all right but I'm not really that into it I like games in a more realistic and grounded setting so this is right up my alley I'll get into some more details but overall I think this is going to be a great game it's just super fun to play a game like this in VR it's awesome for when you want to Squad up with your friends and play a game that really requires team coordination to win it's perfect for when you want something that makes you think a little more than your standard Arena shooter and it's pretty deep it's got a lot going on they've been able to create basically everything in war zone except for vehicles in the goog I don't know if there's any plans to add those or not but every system and mechanic in the game seems thought out and ready to go it feels like a AAA game in that regard it wouldn't be out of place next to any of the bigger flat screen Shooters in terms of gameplay mechanics and features the gameplay Loop is the same as war zone you start in a cargo plane and parachute onto the map then grab what you can while fighting or avoiding other squads and trying to survive as long as possible when you hit the ground you'll start looking for loot it's not that hard to find a decent gun and you should be up and running pretty quickly I really like how they've adapted the war zone mechanics to V they came up with some really clever ways to interact with the game one of your main tools is this thing that they call a I don't know what it stands for and I've just been calling it a PDA cuz I'm old but basically it's a little device that sits on your chest rig and you use it to interact with the map Mark targets and buy things from vending stations it's a pretty cool idea to view the map you pull it off your chest and hold it up in front of you and you can expand the map by clicking trigger then you can place markers and zoom in and all that stuff but if you lift it up and point the bottom of it away from you you can use it like a laser designator to Mark targets and call in air strikes which is a super cool way of doing it there is one guy at landed back here too take it fire I hear something I got one I got one with yeah you little [ __ ] you put armor on by grabbing this little armor plate icon and sliding it left or right it seems like a bit of a weird way to do it at first but it actually works really well and it's fast and easy to do in the middle of a firefight instead of an inventory you have a backpack that you can access by reaching over your shoulder but it's divided into a grid it's not a big open space like in Tabor and you can take items out as needed you can also let it go in front of you and it will hang in the air so you can use both of your hands when you kill an enemy player they leave a little loot box and the same backpack style grid comes up so that you can quickly pull out the stuff that you want it's a simple smooth system that works really well there's a good bolting and mantling system in place and you're able to get up over most barriers like fences windows and walls the movement is pretty fast and you can slide too the map is huge and not just for a VR game it's a proper size map smaller than war zone but it's fewer players and it holds its own next to flat screen games it's got a lot of nice train VAR creations with suburbs mountains beaches forest and grasslands I'm not ever really thinking about the map which is good it's big enough to feel like you're always in a different place and just occasionally being like oh I remember this spot it's got some character too all the different biomes are pretty detailed and unique but I'll get into that more for the final review when it comes out I noticed a bunch of little areas that look like Holland though I wonder if one of the developers is Dutch the Gunplay is solid these are the same guys that make contractors so it feels a lot like that you've got your standard manual reloading and I love how you can check your ammo by pulling the mag out and looking at the little number on it I like how they've made things that could have been button presses or HUD elements into manual action so that doing things like checking ammo or looking at the map require you to take your hand off your weapon it makes you think about your positioning and when it's safe to do things I'm glad they've leaned into the manual aspect of VR for this game but also didn't make it too tedious I think they struck a good balance the Scopes are super stable and actually usable in this game they're super low res but at least they aren't shaking all over the place I have really shaky hands that I can't control and have basically just avoided Scopes in most games even with my gun stock speaking of gun stocks though they've got the same physical stock calibration system from contractors so I'm happy to report that you can use your physical stocks in this game it's probably going to be a personal preference thing though because this is a pretty fast-paced game but a lot of the engagements are also at range so I'm still not quite sure where I fall on using my stock for this I generally prefer gun stocks but in a game where you are looting all the time and having to switch weapons quickly it can be a disadvantage in certain situations that being said it's very advantageous in others it's great for ranged engagements and I am generally just a better shot with it for the most part it really hasn't slowed me down too much but there have been some situations where I probably would have been faster without it I think overall though I'll probably keep us it oh and I almost forgot this game has proximity chat which should be in every game in my opinion I've had some pretty funny encounters with enemy players I do have a few thoughts about how it's implemented though which I'll cover at the end of the video there's a guy by the house oh [ __ ] you like that [ __ ] that that you know what man good clip I hope I hope you're a YouTuber you can use that the matchmaking system works really well I never had any issues and I was able to find a game pretty quickly at any time of day so considering that this is only a beta I'm pretty confident that there will be a sizable player base once it releases there's a nice functional friend system in place too it's pretty easy to find your friends by just typing in a code and you also get a recent players list which is always nice for when you meet someone chill once you join a match you'll get dropped into a little section of the map where you can run around and shoot each other until the game fills up it usually doesn't take too long but you can expect to wait there for around 5 minutes for the most part when you load the game and in between rounds you'll go back to an oil rig that has a bunch of areas you can do different stuff like unlock rewards change skins or mess with weapons hopefully we'll eventually be able to see all the party members in One World though because right now now you all go to your own separate one the graphics are pretty good on PC but they're going for that realistic style it's not cell shaded or anything so that's going to come with some limitations especially in a game this big there's a lot of texture popping it's pretty bad I'm hoping it will get better closer to release but eh I don't know I generally haven't ever seen an open Beta looked significantly different at release it looked the same during the alpha as it does now at least to me and I'm on PC running at high settings a note about that I was able to run it at ultra settings getting 90 to 120 FPS on a 4080 and a 13900 K but it was kind of jittery and when I put down to high it ran a lot better so I'm not sure what's going on there but it didn't make much perceptible difference anyway I'm not a game developer or very familiar with the internal workings of these things Beyond a basic understanding of the concepts so I'm hesitant to comment on optimization but I would venture a guess that it's not amazingly optimized right now I feel like I should be able to get much better draw distance and performance on PC with my setup but I also understand that they are making one game that has to run on wildly different systems and there are compromises that come with that hopefully PC will get a draw distance bump down the road though cuz the Popin is pretty rough I also hopped into the quest 3 version to get you guys a comparison and well I'll put it this way if you were thinking about getting into pcvr this would be a great game to do it for the quest version is like playing at 480p it's really low res the video doesn't even really convey what it looks like in the headset but honestly the fact that the game this big runs on it at all is pretty mind-blowing the guns and objects actually look really good but the environment is pretty rough the fiated rendering is very noticeable and I kept thinking I saw movement only to realized it was just a texture changing when I turned my head I guess this game is optimized for Quest 3 too so I can only imagine What Quest 2 looks like but it is available for it which is kind of nuts I will admit that I started to get used to it after a while and it ran really well better in some ways like on PC my teammates are all jittery when they're in the plane but on Quest they aren't if you're on Quest it's definitely playable just don't be expecting red matter 2 graphics or anything before I get into some random thoughts about the potential of large-scale VR Gaming I want to go over a few ideas I had and things I'd like to see it is a beta after all so here's my main feedback for things that I think could realistically be improved upon before release first as in regular contractors there aren't any volume options you literally cannot turn the game down on PC without going into your windows volume mixer I'm not really sure how this got through but I'd really like to see your standard volume options like game music and voice chat and it would be super cool to be able to turn specific players up and down as well regarding the proximity chat I love it conceptually but it's implemented in a weird way at least to me there doesn't seem to be much falloff you seem to be able to hear other players at one consistent volume once they're a certain distance away so that means you can't whisper to your teammate about how to approach a situation if you say something like I'm going to head upstairs to get a better angle the enemy he is that is clear as you hear your teammates it really takes away from any tactical play and will just push people on Discord or Quest voice calls which has already happened in a bunch of games two people would be in a call and I'd be there random and they wouldn't communicate with me that's an issue that really needs to be addressed you should be able to quietly tell your teammate something without the enemy hearing it through two stories of a building I'd really like to see better proximity chat fall off that reacts differently to being inside versus outside also dead players are still able to communicate with their living teammates and act like their UAV although they can only see enemies when their teammates have line of sight I guess that this is maybe because they can't stop people from going on Discord and doing the same thing so they just gave it to everybody but the weird part is that the enemy team can hear your dead players too everybody hears everybody alive or dead it's so odd I'm not sure why they chose to do that the whole proximity chat setup makes it so that anyone who says anything about an enemy's position is also heard by the enemy it just seems like a huge oversight in terms of creating interesting enemy engagements and Tactical Team play the same goes for footsteps and it has the same problem Tabor has although not as bad in that I cannot tell where they're coming from there isn't any sense of up or down so it's super frustrating when when you're moving and sweeping very carefully hear an enemy somewhere nearby only to be shot from above or below because it sounds like they're on the same floor God damn it dude where did he kill me from uh above you this is a problem a lot of games have I'm not asking for pinpoint directionality I know I mentioned disliking that in the last video I just want a realistic sense of where they're coming from and I know it's possible because games like six days in fuia do it very well this next one is going against my normal stance on time to kill but I do kind of wish it was a little higher in this game battle Royals need a high ttk to be fun and this one is probably somewhere between regular Call of Duty and War Zone but don't quote me on that cuz I haven't played either in a while I kind of feel like it's a bit too short right now I'm going down super fast even with full armor I keep wishing I had just one more second to make it to cover which would have then made for a fun firefight ttk is always a tough one though because everybody has different preferences and there's a lot to balance from man that sucks I hit him too then get 10 G's damn the last thing I want to mention is that it just feels like the ring closes too soon you'll run from The Ring loot around for what feels like a minute and then the ring is on you again the game seem like they go by way too fast right now however I wouldn't be surprised if since it's a beta they tweak the ring duration to make the games end sooner in order to get people out and back into que to fill the lobbies faster hope we get longer rounds at some point oh actually sorry I lied this is the last thing it would be really cool if they added an option to play again with your current Squad instead of having to go into the recently played list add them as a friend and then add them to your party at the end of the day though this is a solid AAA VR game this is only going to get bigger and deeper over time and I may be lifting some verbiage from awaken toast here but this is definitely a headset seller I can totally see a lot of people buying a quest just to play this if you're one of those people though get a quest three it's worth the extra money if you can swing it especially for a game like this that is already pushing it to its limits there are some more thoughts I had about specific gameplay things but I'm going to save all that for the full review today I just wanted to give you an overview of the game so that you can see if it's something that interests you it did get me thinking though as I've mentioned I'm a big fan of milsims and I've also started playing some War Thunder and VR lately and playing a VR game with 75 players is getting me pretty excited about what we might be able to do in the future as capable Standalone VR headsets become more commonplace and server technology starts getting better and able to accommodate larger numbers of people I'm envisioning a game like hell let loose or Squad in VR I know this is already been tried at least once and was more akin to Battlefield but I still think it's possible and I think that it would work better for a slow paced milsim Style game anyway imagine a game with like 300 players in a match where every Soldier tank and aircraft is a real player in VR imagine flying around like in War Thunder looking down and seeing a massive tank battle going in for a bombing run and knowing that each of those tanks has a real crew in it and every Soldier supporting them is a real person all in VR it would be so perfect people who wanted to stand up and play a shooter could be soldiers people who like sitting down and flying or driving can play Pilots or tankers I know that War Thunder has a mode sort of similar to this but it's all mixed in with flat screen players I'm totally down with that in the meantime but to really do it right everybody would need to be in VR I wouldn't even care if it looked like battle bit or tactical assault at first just imagine hopping into a gigantic battle that lasted a few hours choosing land sea or air and fighting hell at loose style where you push and pull points on a map and have some sort of command structure I really hope that we get to see something like that in the next 10 years it doesn't have to be a war game either what about some kind of massive building game akin to satisfactory but where lots of people in VR could build together on a massive map imagine what people might come up with or maybe some sort of multiplayer City Builder where you get to manage your own little section of a massive multiplayer City people are so creative and will come up with ideas even cooler than that I can't wait to see what kind of interesting games you can make by combining VR with high player counts we just got to get more people in headsets man the more people see how cool this technology is the more we will see developers willing to take risks to create what could be some of the coolest [ __ ] ever done in video game history man I love VR it really has so much potential to change how we do things and be a tool for good in the world as this channel grows I'm going to be exploring all of that so expect videos on more than just your mainstream games but this one is really opening my eyes to the potential for some wild applications of VR at scale that's all for me though I got to go drop in on the island and try to get you guys some better footage see you same building we're stuck here they're they're gone I don't know if he's going actually I don't know hey D how you doing welcome to welcome to [Music] pray why did I like think it was my teammate why did I think it was my team you got him damn on my teammate I'm just going to leave

Channel: Fully Exposed and Out of Ammo

Views: 4,273

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Id: b3sQSoKeQ1Q

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 16 2024