The screenshot above is from Gunjack, a VR game from the creators of popular MMORPG EVE Online. Gunjack is a full-featured first-person shooter built for VR, sticking a player at a turret for some frantic shooting action. Gunjack is available on the Gear VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, but its sequel will be coming exclusively to Google’s Daydream VR platform. Boasting support for Unreal Engine 4, Unity and the Vulcan graphics API, any device certified for the Daydream platform should have no issue chewing through the doubtlessly breathtaking graphics and frantic gameplay that CCP is likely planning to offer with the sequel, tentatively dubbed Gunjack Next.
Taking to Facebook to post about the new game, CCP didn’t offer much in the way of information about the gameplay, aside from the fact that it will be similar to the first Gunjack title. The new game is being developed by CCP’s Shanghai studio, the same dev house responsible for the first Gunjack title, as well as the EVE Online tie-in shooter DUST 514 on the Sony Playstation 3. Gunjack Next is expected to be another bar-raiser for mobile VR gaming, harnessing the power and rich feature set of Daydream. CCP’s CEO, Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, said of the new platform, “When we heard the details about Google’s Daydream platform, we knew immediately that we wanted to be involved,”. Naturally, a gaming studio getting excited over a mobile VR platform means that the platform must pack some seriously powerful features; as you’ve probably read, Daydream does.
The original Gunjack was built in Unreal Engine 4, which means that the same engine will likely be used in the sequel, although the minimal amount of information in CCP’s Facebook post about the new game leaves this unconfirmed. With the new Gunjack title being exclusive to Daydream, it can be optimized for the available hardware and control scheme, rather than having to stick to more general specifications within the bounds of Unreal Engine 4 in order to keep compatibility with a wider range of systems. Google has expressed a desire to keep a tight leash on the quality of titles hitting Daydream, which means the studio will likely have help in bringing out the hardware’s best, hopefully flipping the typical notion of unimpressive launch games for a new system on its head.