Remnant Protocol will take us back to the age of sci-fi spaceflight sims as it launches in VR on the Meta Quest Store and on Steam in the fourth quarter.
The virtual reality game is a space flight sim with a strategy layer that puts you in command of a galactic rebellion. The game was teased a couple of years ago on Steam on the PC as a 2D screen title, but now it is coming out on VR first. On the PC, you’ll be able to play it as a 2D screen game or on VR if you like.
The game is from Progenitor Game Studios, a small, independent team of sci-fi nerds and combat sim enthusiasts based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. They built Remnant Protocol as a love letter to games like TIE Fighter, X-Wing, and Elite Dangerous, with a narrative twist rooted in rebellion, politics, and power. I’m pretty nostalgic about the flight sims of the past like Wing Commander and Rebel Assault, and I wish I could break out the flightsim joystick more often.
The game has been out on Steam on the PC for a couple of years on 2D screens, but now it’s going into VR. And now it has a publishing partner for VR with Meta. With more than 51 million VR headsets in the market (Statista), VR is becoming a viable market for smaller game makers.
Scott McCallum, creative director on Remnant Protocol, started Progenitor Game Studios a few years ago, after moving the game from a hobby to a professional pursuit.
“We put out an announcement teaser on Reddit and YouTube,” McCallum said in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat. “And Coray Seifert (a developer relations manager at Meta) reached out to us through DMs on Reddit. He said, ‘Hey, I’m Corey. I work at Meta. This looks really cool. Send me an email.”
McCallum and his devs thought it was B.S. But Seifert gave a legit Meta email and so they started talking. Seifert handed them off to the publishing team. And 11 months later, after a rigorous greenlighting process, they had a deal.
“And since then, we’ve just been full time on this. We go as hard as we can now as we’ve got the financial backing. We could quit our day jobs. It’s truly living the little dream for a little guy like me,” he said.
The studio has five people now.
“We’re more or less been bootstrapping this since the beginning, and now that we have money, we brought on a 2D artist and a concept artist to help refine things, and we’re looking for some audio people now to really finish that content,” McCallum said.
McCallum has been working on the game for about eight years. It’s funny that there’s a dragon that appears at the end of the trailer — mixing fantasy with sci-fi. It turned out that everybody asked about the dragon but didn’t really have a great reaction to i.t
“It went over so poorly that it’s just become a running joke,” he said. “We put it in an Easter Egg in a scripted mission, and it’s really become a little meme in our community.”
A narrative game
In the story, the game takes place generations after the assassination of the Blessed Mother, and you take command of the Remnant forces still faithful to the cause. From Sanctuary, your hidden rebel base deep in the outer territories, you wage a guerrilla war against the Usurpers who rule with oppressive authority over the galaxy. Your mission: to create an underground movement that will eventually bring down thetotalitarian regime through acts of sabotage and subterfuge.
The action means you will stage raids on outposts, make alliances, manufacture ships, research new technologies and lead your wing mates in battle. Outnumbered and outgunned against a sprawling empire, you must be resourceful as well as ruthless if you’re to succeed.
As for the name of the title, it’s a reference to the remnant protocol that gets activated to tell everyone to go and hide if the Blessed Mother is killed.
Gameplay overview
● Rebellion on a galactic scale. As commander of Sanctuary, the hidden rebel base from which you strike, you’ll make difficult choices required of the long campaign to reclaim the throne. It’s entirely up to you how your limited resources and personnel are allocated for the war effort: operations, research, ship construction, espionage, recruitment and more. The fate of the galaxy rests squarely on every decision you make.
● Intense dogfighting action. Hop in the cockpit and take command from the vanguard in your own personal fighter. Inspired by the classics of yesteryear, genre veterans will enjoy a familiar experience of pushing the ship’s systems to the limit while juggling various components. Newcomers will find a fast-paced adventure that’s easy to pick up but difficult to master.
● You are being hunted. The enemy is actively searching for your secret base, and each ploy that advances your campaign’s goals increases your notoriety and risk of discovery. Your ability to adapt to evolving situations, balancing the risk with the reward of each action, will ultimately determine your fate.
● A living, breathing galaxy. Many factions are maneuvering to secure their position in the power vacuum created by the assassination of the Blessed Mother, each with its own goals and ambitions. This period of uncertainty creates opportunity ripe for exploitation, but each decision you make will ripple throughout the galaxy’s shifting, political landscape. Be careful not to find yourself caught between those who would call you ally and those who declare you foe.
● Every campaign is unique. From the procedurally generated missions to the dynamic narrative elements, the knock-on butterfly effect of each decision you make to the results of every battle, no two playthroughs will ever be the same.
Approaching the market opportunity
The title will likely come out on Meta first, but it will eventually support PCVR and 2D screens on Steam.
“We are adding more VR-centric features to the regular PC version as well. If people want to play PCVR with their beefy desktops instead of on the headset,” McCallum said. “It’s been a challenge adapting something that was for 2D screens to VR. But it has always been a cockpit game, very friendly for head-tracking and eye-tracking, and so adding a head-mounted display isn’t the biggest design challenge.
Technically, it’s still difficult, especially with interactive controls, where you grab a flight stick in VR.
“Those have been big challenges,” he said.
McCallum expects the No. 1 way people will play in VR is with Meta Quest Touch controllers. You can grab the flight stick with a hand and manipulate it in 3D. But other people have fancy setups with PCs where they can connect a gamepad or a joystick via Bluetooth, he said. That’s an easier way to fly, he said.
The cockpit itself has always been highly detailed for flight sim fans to admire. They cockpit actually takes up about 60% of the screen real estate.
The game will run on the Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3, as both have enough memory to run the title while the original Meta Quest does not.
The game is likely to cost $25 to $30, but the price hasn’t formally been set yet. McCallum is hoping the campaign will take about 20 hours to finish across more than 20 missions. There are a lot of secondary missions, such as espionage and intelligence missions, as part of the campaign. Some missions also help the player collect money or resources needed for future missions. It’s not going to be completely linear.
The game has aerial battles that are either close to the ground on a planet or up in orbit in the blackness of space. Players fly small strike craft, much like the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, fighting against the big capital ships of an evil empire. There will be stealth gameplay and quick strikes. Players have to make choices about whether to make peace, negotiate with traders, or move away from conflict.
There’s still a lot of work to do. The company is accepting playtesters on its Discord channel. And it will evaluate the feedback as it comes in.
VR flight sims have turned into a real market with titles like Elite: Dangerous, Microsoft Flight Simulator and even the yet-to-be-launched Star Citizen, McCallum said.
“Flight simulators are definitely big in VR. People love to be able to put their headset on, look around space as they fly through it. This is definitely a unique spin, adding the strategy layer over top of the entire campaign. You’re not just flying the missions. You’re calling the shots as well, and directing personnel and resources to shape the campaign,” McCallum said. “So far, the feedback has been positive. But the market will tell us when we get there.”
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