The technology behind the “Control Theatre” and the game’s movement system lies at the heart of Espire 1: VR Operative’s gameplay and intuitive VR control system. Any time a player performs any artificial locomotion, the game world shrinks down to the size of a floating tablet, with the Control Theatre visible in the player’s peripheral vision.

This “VR within VR” system allows for precise full freedom of movement, maintains immersion, and also eliminates “VR motion sickness” for almost everyone.

The Control Theatre is fully customizable to suit the player’s level of comfort, up to fully disabled for those already comfortable moving in VR.

Originally planned for release today, Espire 1: VR Operative has been delayed until later this Fall.

Hello everyone,

We here at Digital Lode and Tripwire Interactive have been excited to see the anticipation for Espire 1: VR Operative growing over the last few months.  With that said, we have some important news to share about the release date.  While originally planned for tomorrow, September 24th, we unfortunately need to push the launch day back a bit further.  We know this is not ideal and apologize for any plans we may have interrupted.  

So what has happened to cause this change?

A few things:

Throughout the year, we’ve been taking Espire 1 out to shows and meeting excited fans at events such as E3, Gamescom, PAX and others. During that time we’ve gotten invaluable feedback from those players and realized we would not be able to incorporate as much of it as we would like into the launch build.

And, while working with our partners doing Quality Assurance checks around the release candidate builds, it became clear that there were a few lingering issues that were not so readily apparent in previous testing.  Currently we have found some stability and performance issues, that while not always impacting the player, will be frequent enough with sustained play that we feel it would hinder your enjoyment.

So what is happening now?

Work continues to incorporate player feedback, and the team is full on investigating the root causes of the issues and working to apply targeted fixes.  Effective immediately, we are pushing the release date back by several weeks while the team works on these issues.  As the investigation continues we’ll be able to provide some more details on where the ship date has moved to.  We hope to provide more on that front in the very near future, but are still targeting a Fall 2019 release. 

Key Features:

• The definitive VR stealth experience: Espire 1 brings the stealth genre to the exciting medium of Virtual Reality, delivering gameplay mechanics for the stealth and action genres that have yet to be explored.
• Full freedom of movement: Espire 1 allows players the freedom to move anywhere within their virtual environment, moving, climbing, and falling with full comfort and no motion sickness for almost all players.
• Complete single-player story, rich in detail: Espire 1 is being developed as a dedicated single player VR experience with individual story missions and scenario missions that use the story mission environments for short challenges.
• Voice control: Using the VR headset’s onboard microphone, you can make commands and perform actions simply by speaking. The noises you make could draw the enemy to your location – use this to your advantage.
• Arsenal of weapons and gadgets: As an Espire 1 VR Operative you will have access to dozens of unique gadgets and weapons such as a tranquilizer pistol and deployable spy cameras in order to complete your mission objectives.
• Global Leaderboard: A worldwide tally awards players a competitive score based on mission time, movement, stealth, ammo conservation, takedowns and other factors.
• Intuitive controls that mimic real life: Interaction in this game aims to be natural and intuitive. Instead of memorizing dozens of button combinations for every action, you perform them as you would in real life. You can crouch and enter cover by physically using your body.
• Smart AI: Enemy combatants in this game actively hunt the player. The AI responds to sight, sound, and other stimuli and will react to with varying levels of suspicion based on your physical stance, movement speed, cover and relative location.

Espire 1: VR Operative is scheduled to launch on all major VR platforms in Fall 2019, including Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S, HTC Vive, Valve Index, Windows Mixed Reality, and PlayStation VR.