Anshar 2: Hyperdrive

Dogfight!

Take the role of a newly enlisted pilot in the deadliest squad in the Ansharian arsenal. Bring the fight to the Nergal in dazzling ship-to-ship battles in deep space and lush planetary surfaces. Freely traverse large planet surfaces, dodge space debris and asteroid fields by steering your ship using your hands, in third or first person view.

Fly a variety of ships across 13 missions single player campaign.
Engage other players in a space Battle Royale, in a Deathmatch arena or in a co-op mission.
Level up to unlock various cosmetic skins for your ship, helmet of controllers.

Stéphane Intissar talks about Anshar 2: Hyperdrive

Stéphane is OZWE Games’ CEO.

Why did you remake the game for Quest?

It was a popular request from our fan base! Many fans of the original serie told us that is was a shame that this game is not available on Quest. We were reluctant to port this game at the beginning because we did not want to do a meaningless straight port of the original serie. We were not sure on how to turn this 3DOF game into a full 6DOF/6DOF game but when we internally came up with pleasing control systems, we decided to go all-in! I am glad we did, because that is such a refreshing experience and lets players replay the content from a different perspective.

The trailer mentions new controls, what is new in Anshar 2: Hyperdrive compared to Anshar Wars 2?

Over the years of developing VR games we realized that players have very different ways to play, so we wanted to add more control options than the original serie. The game features a very comfortable 3rd person view, with the ship can be controlled with the hand rather than the head, and both hand can aim and shoot different things. Of course nostalgic player can absolutely set control options to go back the original control scheme, head-based, with one single aim reticle if they want.
It also features a 1st person view, with many different tuning controls, if players feel more being into a cockpit. While less comfortable than the third person view, it provides a pleasant immersive experience when flying around the asteroids for instance. If your stomach can handle it, I recommend checking it out. We also reworked the sounds, to be more spatialized than the original, so you can actually use your ears as a radar to detect where the enemies are.
One of the best additions is haptic feedback provided by the touch controllers. The controllers actually vibrate when you fly into explosions of close to large asteroids, and that is very immersive!

The trailer mentions new visuals, what are they?

We have refreshed almost all the visuals in the game, using more recent techniques. Textures are refined, models are less blocky, and the shaders have been rewritten while keeping the comics style of the original version. Explosions and visual effects are been remade as well, to further fit the desired visual style. This version is actually closer to what we originally wanted when we developed the game, thanks to progresses in CPU/GPU power current standalone devices.

Overall, how does this affect the experience?

The flying with the hand is surprisingly natural but that does not necessarily make the game easier to master. In fact I think the game feels more challenging than the original. For example we have removed the “auto-aim” feature that was necessary with the head-based controls. It is now more natural to aim and shoot and of course less forgiving. We also have provided an option to tune the intensity of the dogfighting. Overall, players can now really tune the game and replay it for a different feeling everytime. We have also made some levels more challenging, so that there is a very good feeling when you manage to unlock a gold medal achievements on some of the solo missions. I will be interested to see how fast players will be able to unlock all gold medals, which will also turn the whole headquarter in gold permanently as a reward.

What technical challenges did you encounter?

Our biggest challenge was to implement the first person view. When running on a mobile chipset, flying over maps that are 100 km wide and maintaining an accuracy of one inch is extremely difficult. If maps were just 1 km wide, it would be easy, but in Anshar 2: Hyperdrive the GPU starts to have precision errors when you are flying far from the origin. Fortunately, we carefully balanced the power budget and we have been able to address this issue without the player noticing it.

The multiplayer mode seems completely rewritten, can you tell me more about it?

First, the player is rewarded by a leveling system, which enables him to collect ships, helmets and controller skins. One can gain XP by playing 3 multiplayer modes: Battle Royale, a last man standing mode where the reachable map is shrinking over time (my favorite), a pure deathmatch mode where the player with the highest number of kills wins, and a coop mode, where player must group to defeat an enemy that is nearly impossible to defeat alone.
Every week one of those three modes is featured and players can earn twice the amount of XP while playing them.
Over the next updates, we will replace those maps with new ones, with different challenges or topologies, to keep the players interested in the game. We are building them right now, and as soon as they are ready, we will release them.