'Obduction' Getting Oculus Touch, HTC Vive Support On March 22

Cyan Inc. announced that its sci-fi adventure game, Obduction, will soon have support for HTC Vive and Oculus Touch motion controllers. The developer plans to show the updated game at PAX East and SXSW Gaming before it launches in late March.

Cyan, the developer famous for the Myst and Riven franchise, launched Obduction last summer after a successful Kickstarter campaign back in 2013. The developer was looking for $1.1 million to fund the creation of the game, and as an incentive, Cyan promised to add Oculus Rift support if the Kickstarter reached $1.3 Million. The Obduction campaign closed with $1,321,306.

Cyan originally expected to release Obduction in October 2015, but in the end, the development process slipped well into 2016. At E3 2016, we had the chance to try the game, and Cyan had it running on Oculus Rift. At the time, we were told Obduction would launch on July 26, but on July 19, Cyan pushed the release back another month.

Obduction finally launched on August 24, 2016, but Cyan didn’t deliver on all of its promises. The Oculus Rift version was pushed back again--this time until Halloween, and the macOS build of the game has yet to surface.

When Cyan committed to supporting the Oculus Rift in 2013, the company couldn’t have known that motion controllers would dominate consumer VR. The Oculus DK1 had only just begun shipping to backers a few short months before, and the DK2 wasn’t yet a consideration. Oculus Touch wasn’t even a concept back then. As such, Cyan developed the VR version of the game as a seated VR experience that you play with a gamepad.

Gamepad locomotion works well enough in Obduction, but not having your hands in the game feels lacking. It’s hard to go back to a gamepad when you’ve had a taste of the freedom that the motion controller offers. A game like Obduction, which forces you to explore and interact with the world around you, screams for 6-degree of freedom (6DoF) motion control. Thankfully, Cyan was happy to listen to customer feedback and add support for Oculus Touch motion controllers. While they were at it, the team added support for HTC Vive, too.

“We have over 200,000 fans on our Steam wishlist, many who have been asking for hand controls for Obduction,” said Rand Miller, CEO, Cyan. “As a VR-centric studio, we’re thrilled to be delving even further into these platforms, bringing ever deeper immersion to our worlds and pushing the edge of what’s possible.”

Cyan said the free motion controller update for Obduction is scheduled to roll out on March 22, 2017, but the developer will run demos of the game at the Cyan booths at PAX East from March 10-12, and from the SXSW Gaming show from March 16-18.

If you don’t have a copy of Obduction yet, it’s available for $29 on Steam, GOG, Humble Store, and the Oculus Store.