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All the PlayStation VR news from today's big Sony event

All the PlayStation VR news from today's big Sony event

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The team behind Sony's PlayStation VR headset, formerly known as Project Morpheus, had a lot to show off at today's Paris Games Week keynote. That included both new announcements, like a VR add-on to horror game Until Dawn, and new trailers for known projects, like robot basketball game Rigs: Mechanized Combat League. Since we don't know anything about PlayStation VR's launch date — except that it's supposed to arrive in the first half of 2016 — there are few specifics, but it gives us a taste of what to expect at the very start of modern VR gaming.

The video above is a compilation of clips from various PlayStation VR experiences, from classic demo London Heist to a tie-in for Robert Zemeckis film The Walk. Released today, it's a good introduction to Sony's VR ambitions. As for all the other news, here's everything we saw today.

PlayStation VR GIF

Headsets on? Let's go.

A VR add-on to Until Dawn

This year's PlayStation 4 title Until Dawn was something between a horror adventure game and an interactive slasher film, which turned out to be a pretty good combination. Rush of Blood, based on what we heard today, is a more carnivalesque take on the world. It's "a roller coaster ride, a shooter experience, and the descent into madness of one of our characters from Until Dawn. So, taking some key scenarios and things we'd know from Until Dawn and approaching them in a very, very different way." Without any more details, we're wavering between describing this as "DLC" and yet another VR tie-in for a bigger piece of media. Hopefully it's substantive enough to be the former.

A new trailer for Rigs: Mechanized Combat League

Rigs feels like an indirect answer to Hawken, the mech combat game that was hugely anticipated but never quite realized on the original Oculus Rift development kit. Announced earlier this year, it's a team-based sport where six players control giant robots and play basketball by way of Quake deathmatches in the year 2065. When I tried it out at E3, it was being pitched as a potential e-sport, but of necessity, it was also fairly friendly to new players — and fairly fun. It's one of the most obviously skill-based VR games in the PlayStation VR catalog, and one of the few multiplayer ones, along with space dogfighting game EVE Valkyrie. The trailer above shows off a new arena set in Dubai.

More details on Robinson: The Journey

Crysis developer Crytek has been playing around with dinosaur-themed VR demos since at least 2014, and we found out why at this year's E3: it's planning a dino-heavy game called Robinson: The Journey. Well, we now know that Robinson is coming to PlayStation VR, and that it appears to star a character named Robin, a panoply of extinct animals, and a small robot with a distinct resemblance to Halo's Guilty Spark. Crytek has been clear that none of its demos so far are part of the actual game, but the one we got to try earlier this year was a tense and clever prehistoric (or, more likely, science fiction) rock-climbing experience.

Battlezone is still coming to VR

The VR reboot of classic Atari arcade game Battlezone (which itself had VR-like features, at least by '80s standards) was already announced, and there's only so much you can say about it. You're a tank. You fight other tanks. It's got a pretty cool neon-drenched low-poly art style. And you'll see a lot of all these things in the new trailer above.

Gran Turismo will be VR-compatible

There. That's effectively all we know about the virtual reality components of Gran Turismo Sport, which was announced at the keynote. We don't know a lot about the non-VR version of the game either, but what we heard today is collected here.

Tekken 7 will have VR too

Again, this is all we know, although 3D fighting games feel like a natural fit for virtual reality — players would have a front-row seat at the metaphorical fighting ring. If you want to hear Tekken characters talk a lot about their interpersonal conflicts, the non-VR-specific trailer is above.