14 DAY TRIAL // Despite previous statements, it seems that the developers working on the Hawken MMO will not be able to offer full support for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset on launch and will only support it once they get hands-on time with the new hardware.
Bill Wagner, the chief production officer at Adhesive Games, tells GameSpy that, “We’re really excited about it but we want to get the hardware first.”
“We’ve got designs and plans on how we would do it, like enabling people to look around inside the cockpit while still being able to move forward and control the mech. But it’s super early to be talking about it right now,” he admits.
Wagner can’t offer a clear window for the patch that will introduce Oculus Rift support.
He further argues that, “Right now we have a huge focus on hitting our December 12 release date so it’s hard to say right now. We want to get the hardware and we want to make the experience as great as we can for our customers and make sure it fits within the game.”
The official page for Oculus Rift on the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter still states that the new MMO will support the virtual reality headset on 12 of December, the day it launches.
The Kickstarter effort for the new piece of hardware has ended with more than 2.4 million dollars (1.9 million Euro) and at the moment only prototypes of the devices are available for a limited number of developers.
It’s not clear when the Oculus Rift will be offered for sale.
The virtual reality headset has been compared to the smartphone and the Kinect motion-tracking system in terms of the impact that it will have on the gaming industry.
Hawken is a free-to-play PC-based mech combat game.