Veteran developer Ready At Dawn has revealed that they are shutting down their Echo VR video games later this year.
Ready At Dawn is the same studio that made their name on God of War: Chains of Olympus and God of War: Ghost of Sparta on the PSP, God of War: Origins Collection on the PlayStation 3, and Okami on the Wii. They had lowered their profile after the failure of their first original game, The Order: 1886, on the PlayStation 4, but they hadn’t disappeared completely.
They released another original game, a third person perspective brawler called Deformers in 2017, but in fact, the studio was acquired by Oculus Studios in 2020.
In this capacity, the studio had built several Echo VR games for Oculus. This started with Lone Echo in 2017, an adventure game set in a space station and featuring zero gravity mechanics, exploration, and puzzle solving. Lone Echo was built with a multiplayer mode, called Echo Arena, and this was later also made available as a separate game.
Echo Arena utilizes the zero gravity movement of Lone Echo to build a team based sports game around it. The teams compete over possession over a flying disc to pass it to their opponent’s goal, but there is also a full contact component.
A year after, Ready At Dawn came out with Echo Combat, a first-person shooter with the same mechanics as previous Lone Echo games.
In 2021, Ready At Dawn released Lone Echo II, an expansion of the adventure game with new wrist thrusters and EVA booster mechanics to expand on the zero gravity movement mechanics. This game also includes enemies that players need to avoid.
In a post on Medium, the studio revealed that they will keep the servers running for the entire Echo VR game library until August 1, 2023, 10 AM Pacific. As for the reasons they are shutting the games down, they had this to say:
“By no means was this decision made lightly. But it was made for many good reasons and chief among them is the studio coming together to focus on our next project. We can’t say anything about it yet, but we are all excited and need all hands on deck.”
We can only speculate on the specifics for this decision, but Ready At Dawn’s explanation does seem to mean that they had not been shut down by Oculus parent company Meta, and neither have they announced layoffs. Hopefully their next project will prove successful for the studio and justify this choice.
