We have called it a cross between the Battle School of ender’s game and last frisbee. we have called it final fantasy x blitzball meets virtual reality. It made two of our Best VR Games lists — three, if you count the one I did for CNET before going back to the edge. It convincingly puts you in a robot body inhabiting a zero-gravity arena, where you have to use your wrist boosters, obstacles, teammates, and even enemies to catapult yourself to victory. even became his own sport.
But now, echo VR (née Echo Arena) is being killed by Meta (née Facebook). Facebook bought its developer Ready At Dawn in 2020, after making echo VR one of the flagship games for the release of Meta Quest (née Oculus Quest) and Rift S. Meta will not offer any refunds for in-app purchases, in-game currency, or DLC.
in a blog post purporting to be “open and communicative”, Ready At Dawn says the reason is… well, it doesn’t really provide any good reason! “This decision was by no means taken lightly. But it was done for a lot of good reasons, chief among them being that the studio came together to focus on our next project.”
That is. That, and the ability to keep playing (and its FPS counterpart echo combat) until August 1, 2023 at 10am PT, when the servers will shut down for good. It also unlocks a ton of in-game rewards if you play a match.
It will never be clear to me why companies shut down their perfectly good games because they’ve decided they can’t “support” them anymore. If they’re good, keep them around! There are much worse things in which Meta continues to inject money.
I admit I didn’t play that much echo VR as I would like, because I could never convince my friends to buy VR headsets and play VR games, and I didn’t enjoy playing this awesome team-based game with the foul-mouthed kids I usually found there. The phenomenon of the foul-mouthed child is not exclusive of echo VR, even thoughany.
I’ll see you in zero gravity on August 1, I guess. And remember: the enemy’s gate is below.
