On the Subject of the Oculus Rift

We’re hard at work on the next big Starry Expanse announcement, but we wanted to take a moment to address a question that has come up a lot recently, the Oculus Rift. For those of you who are not aware, the Rift is an upcoming head-mounted virtual reality display, specifically built for video games. It blasted through its Kickstarter campaign, raising over 900% of its original goal (that’s over 2 million dollars!), and is now well on its way to becoming a reality. It is backed by a lot of really big names, like Valve and Epic games, and already natively supports Unity and the Unreal engine.

So naturally, everybody wants to know – will The Starry Expanse support the Rift?

Our answer to that is, unfortunately, a vague one. We here at 59 Volts all agree that the Oculus Rift looks pretty dang cool. Playing our game on a head-mounted display as great as the Rift promises to be sounds like a dream – Myst is all about immersion, and what better way to immerse oneself than through VR?

At the same time, as much as it pains me to say this, our game is far from being complete. Like, still a few years, at least. With that in mind, we’re unwilling at this time to commit ourselves to supporting anything beyond what we’ve already promised – that the game will play on a standard Windows computer, or on a standard Mac OS X computer.

To be clear: this is not to say that we will not support the Rift. In all likelihood, we will ultimately do what we can to support the Rift. But we’re not promising anything until the game is a lot more complete.

Thank you to everyone who has contacted us about the Oculus Rift, we hope that this is enough of a satisfactory answer. As always, stay tuned for more updates about the project soon!