Overview

Blade and Sorcery is a name that many people in the Indie VR scene will recognize. The game was a staple of the niche Physics-based Virtual Reality Sandbox genre that bore games such as Battle Talent, Hard Bullet, and the legendary Boneworks. I, and certainly a few others, believe that Blade and Sorcery is one of the big two, as it were, standing alongside Boneworks (Or the pseudo-sequel Bonelab, which is the only one accessible to Quest players as of writing this) as the King and Queen of virtual reality combat and physics simulation. 

Blade and Sorcery began as little more than a rough tech demo called “Sorcery” in 2016 that, while promising, had little to show besides attacking physics enabled people with a sword. The project evolved, I personally began following it sometime in 2018, around update 4, but it would be a while before I would have a home VR system that would allow me to actually experience it.

I first began to play Blade and Sorcery around update 5, when I had an oculus quest 1 that I would plug into my laptop to play. It was a crude setup, but it worked more than okay. At the time, the game was little more than a sandbox where you would spawn a weapon or play around with the magic menu, and fight waves of enemies; Even then, though, the game had extreme potential with some of the most kinetic and satisfying melee combat in any VR game.

Nowadays, Blade and Sorcery has reached it’s final form, still a sandbox at heart, but now with a progressive dungeon-crawling campaign mode. It also has a dedicated port for Meta Quest, which is what I will be discussing today. 

To my observation, there’s not very much difference between the Nomad (The Quest Port) and the Original steam version, aside from the natural graphical limitations of the Quest. There is something to be said about the capability of Community modding, which, while Nomad does have a decently robust one, it’s nothing compared to the original, due to Nomad’s different code base and lack of support for scripted mods; this doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things though, as most installable mods are weapons or character skins, which only enhance the game so much. 

Before I start going into the Device specs and my experience with the Hardware end, I should muse a little bit about the combat that I gushed about in the title.

That is to say, Blade and Sorcery, even compared to games like Hard Bullet and Boneworks, is the very best Melee combat game on any Virtual Reality system, and it’s not close. The combat is addictive, kinetic and satisfying, the Crystal Hunt mode gives a rhyme and reason to the sandbox violence, and enables multiple tactics to be used, like sneaking around, attacking from range or up close, and the huge variety of weapons allow you to easily change tactics to suit your situation. That’s not to say it is an accurate simulation of actual melee combat, as fun as it is, it generally seems to be more hollywood inspired, especially with how the enemies fight you, it’s rather funny that if you apply any conventional real-world swordsmanship to your playstyle, most enemies will fold like paper, even those with very heavy armor, which can definitely be fun, but I find it exciting and fun to “play by their rules” as it were, and get into long, Princess-bride esque sword fights by deliberately slowing myself down and parrying their slashes and thrusts.

Comfort & Observations

In my sample gameplay, and in the past of my playing this game, I find that the game is incredibly comfortable, but may induce motion sickness in those less experienced with VR due to the high movement required and the stick based locomotion, and the lack of a teleportation option or vignette, personally, I hate these features and they’ve never mitigated motion sickness for me, but they are features that should be included for those who struggle with it. The Quest itself is very comfortable on my head and I can use it for hours if I have the energy, (I have to admit, I did not at the time, and my eyes did begin to strain after about 30 minutes, but I chalk that up to my tiredness.) My head doesn’t start to hurt as some have reported, perhaps I just have a higher tolerance for that sort of thing. The gameplay of blade and sorcery is naturally exhausting and nonstop play may require taking a break just due to how much exercise the footwork and swordsmanship require. Not to mention learning to master the game’s mechanics, like working the physics engine to throw things effectively. But the game is very intuitive and the Quest handles it quite well – speaking of,

Device Specs

I was using the Meta Quest 3 512 GB, Which is about halfway full, storage-wise, and had no performance issues to speak of. As I was playing crystal hunt, i was playing with Mods off, as community-made mods are naturally less stable than officially released programs.

The Meta Quest 3 In general holds up incredibly well, and I want for nothing especially compared to the older models which had a tendency to feel cheap and break easily.

Control System

I was using the Quest’s native touch controllers, as I feel that’s generally the best way to play most games. They can function as a gamepad or as hands depending on the situation, and the  hand tracking in the Quest’s system, while cool, still feels like too much of a novelty only for use in VR Entry games like Job Simulator. The touch controllers are very well designed and ergonomic, both for navigation and hand usage, and I honestly can’t imagine trading them for anything. I am excited to see how they interact with Bonelab and the upcoming Boneworks quest port’s new Elbow tracking that’s supposedly coming in the near future. As futuristic as the hands feel, I find them clunky and frustrating, but that tends to happen when a technology is ahead of it’s time. As I play, though, one thing I find myself feeling is that I wish I had control over my feet. Blade and Sorcery has a Kick function, where you click a button on the controller to make your character kick forward and knock some enemies over, but it’s quite immersion breaking seeing your leg kick forward when your actual leg is still on the ground, it’s also quite a clunky feature that I rarely use due to the fact that it has a tendency to have WAY too much kinetic impact and launch enemies across the map. Some kind of foot tracking or maybe even a foot mounted controller would make the game feel even more immersive and cool, being able to trip enemies with your heel or stomp on their head when they’re knocked down. Additionally, I’ve seen talk of Omni-directional treadmills and I think Blade and Sorcery could benefit greatly from such a thing. One thing that does put a damper on the experience is that if you are playing in a relatively small space, you run the risk of hitting things, doubly so if you get too immersed and start dodging with your actual feet instead of the ingame stick movement. An Omni-directional treadmill would nullify this problem completely and you could freely move and dodge as though you were actually there.

Gameplay Length

I played for about an Hour, starting a new Crystal hunt run from the beginning. In that time, I was able to progress all the way through the first “run” and get to the first Dalgarian (runs are marked by heading through multiple dungeons and then a super dungeon called a Dalgarian where you fight a boss at the end) and defeat the boss. For other people less experienced it may take longer than that, it definitely did on my first playthrough, but I given that this was my second playthrough and I had spent hours upon hours studying how the enemies fought and how best to defeat them, even with the weakest early game weapons I ripped through the dungeons. It helped that I knew the location of a secret, free, slightly higher tier weapon on the shop map that I used to get my way through the Dalgarian. During the time, I did start to feel more tired than usual, which I also chalked up to my tiredness, but that may be worthy of consideration if implementing VR in a workspace setting, is I found it considerably more difficult to use while tired, especially with the strain on my tired eyes. I believe the quest has a Night mode and next time I try and use it while tired I’ll try that out and see if it makes a difference.