Firewall: Zero Hour tests how well you can target your enemy in VR

First Contact Entertainment is putting the finishing touches on its virtual reality first-person shooter, Firewall: Zero Hour. It pits four human players against four other humans in multiplayer first-person shooter matches through PlayStation VR. Coming later this year, the game can be played with a PSVR Aim controller or a standard gamepad.

I gave it a try at a hands-on session and found the experience was just like playing Rainbow Six: Siege. I couldn’t hit anything. Aiming in VR has proven to be quite difficult, and the PSVR Aim controller certainly helped. But getting good at it means that you have to unlearn what you’ve learned over the years with a 19-button controller on a 2D screen.

I talked to Adam Orth, creative director at Santa Monica, California-based First Contact Entertainment, about this challenge. I played a couple of multi-round sessions of the game, and I got better the second time around. I talked about shooting in VR with Orth, and I also tapped into his experience about pioneering in the VR industry over the past few years. He was kind of tired of the demo-interview scene, but he gave me some straight answers about how he sees the VR industry.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Adam Orth: I don’t know if we have enough time for that [laughs]. The thing is, I always just want to be making something that’s unique and pushing the boundaries a little bit. That was definitely the case with Adrift and for sure with what we’re doing in Firewall: Zero Hour.

We started the process of, “Well, what are we going to make,” and it was pretty simple. We looked at our studio and the legacy of games that people have made: Call of Duty, Overwatch, Halo, Medal of Honor. A pattern emerges pretty quickly. It lined up with a couple of other things we wanted to accomplish tech-wise as a studio. We wanted to do good, solid first-person locomotion in VR, which is the endless question. We wanted a fun multiplayer experience. After making Adrift — which was a very insular, in-your-own-head kind of experience — and having done some really cool VR experiences where you’re interacting with each other, that was really important.

The other thing was, we wanted to make a VR game for everyone, where beginners and hardcore players could play without any kind of after-effects that people feel in VR. We worked really hard on our locomotion system.

Orth: We spent a lot of time making sure every element of the way the player moves and the way the camera moves — even graphically, there’s a bunch of tricks we’re doing under the hood that make this game feel really good. In the last six months, we’ve had the game in the hands of quite a few people. You’re never going to eliminate it 100 percent, but we’ve got it so that it’s really comfortable for everyone.