With modern hmds, The Climb shines like never before
I guess Meta back then (year 2014?) got the great idea: "Why not hire some of the best PC game developers in the world to make an awesome VR game?" - and then Crytek, the devs behind the first Far Cry game and the Crysis game series, made this technical VR marvel:
Acrophobia, also known as hypsophobia, is an extreme or irrational fear or phobia of heights, and The Climb gets me every time, but in a good and very stimulating way - I think 🤔 🤗
When the game launched in 2016, the game was so demanding that using the highest settings for graphics, no one could get solid 90 fps with the Rift CV1. Highest graphics settings includes resolution 2.0, which is the same as ss 2.0 or 17 million pixels per frame combining both eyes.
In the Store, The Climb has a very high 86% average rating based on more than 2,000 ratings:
https://www.meta.com/experiences/pcvr/866068943510454/
Polygon levels are very high, you got many animals, birds, insects in the game, textures are very high res, there are dynamic shadows - and many more effects. Today very few games are more high-end than The Climb. Meta and Crytek knew to make future-proof games 😉
The Climb is a nice exercise as you will be moving your arms a lot. But it also an amazing nature experience and feels like a vacation too:
The Climb is special - it does not work properly with Revive - at least super-sampling will not work so it'll be a blurry mess. Super-sampling works perfectly with Rift CV1, as Crytek uses a special engine for the game, and like Robinson, I can only get Crytek's in-game super-sampling to work with my Meta hmd (=Rift CV1). So consider Crytek's games as true Meta exclusives.
If my Rift CV1 no longer worked, The Climb would be a solid reason the get a Quest 3 - also with high-res panels you'll be able to see many things we CV1 users might no be able to - due to lower panel res.
Fun thing - my old review of the game from October 9 2017 is a fresh today as ever:
"One of the most beautiful Rift games, the graphics are awesome, it plays perfectly on my i7 7700K with MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X 8G using 2.0 supersampling. Mostly I enjoy standing still on platforms high above ground and just to watch the view, because in the real world I'd never - EVER - visit such places 😉 This is also Crytek once more creating a simply awesome experience, but do be careful, you need a lot of space for this game, I've already scratched the ceiling and my Touch controller, sigh 🙂 Maybe I should sit down when I play the next time..."
Good point I made there about the ceiling - did hit my ceiling lamp twice last night, so be careful. The game can be frustrating and hard, but it has a nice tourist mode, where you can climb with no time pressure and simply enjoy the magnificent scenery.
Today my rating of The Climb, within it genre, would be 92%. Not sure you really can find other VR experiences with better graphics, and the game is extremely polished - it oozes of Crytek quality.
Btw, all images are by the devs. Due to Crytek's engine and design, I cannot take images with the CV1 - when I try, I'm getting kicked to the main menu. But I swear, the game does look exactly as shown in the above images 🙂
Tested The Climb thoroughly with Revive and Index, and the game does work with Revive. I can confirm that the game does not respond to the SteamVR res slider, there's no difference setting that slider to 20% or 500%. Harder to check the in-game res slider as that ofte caused the game to crash with Revive. I left it as the 2.0 max setting.
The game is fully playable with the Index, but looks blurry - although probably hard to see in the below screenshots. Compared to CV1, it's very easy to take screenshots with the Index:
It's much easier to see the blurry image quality in-game than here. And it's not so blurry it's unplayable - you can enjoy the game just fine.
Surely Crytek made a lot of effort finding shortcuts and tricks to make to game look astonishing with the Rift CV1, while keeping up the performance. Some backgrounds seem maybe not 2D-ish, but at least severely down-scaled in res, and that is much easier to see using a more high-res lcd hmd, which easily reveals all flaws and shortcomings.
Performance also is not good with the Index, I get reprojections even in 80 Hz with the RTX 3090, while I get solid 90 fps with the Rift CV1. Motion smoothing does help with the Index, but immersion due to perfect performance is a lot better with CV1.
You can set antialiasing to off, normal of temporal. Using temporal you can increase sharpness to the max - but no matter what, the game still looks blurry with lcd. And performance still was not solid 80 or 90 fps.
All in all the game is fully playable and enjoyable with Revive - you get no SDE with lcd hmds, but now the game is a lot more blurry - and performance takes a dive. Quest 3 owners have also complained about the game being blurry, so I don't think Revive has anything to do with that.
My rating with the Index would drop from 92% with the CV1 to about 80% with the Index. Maybe an RTX 4080 or 4090 is needed for solid 80 fps with the Index and all in-game settings maxed.
A few more impressions:
Example of the great lighting - sun effects are awesome
More sun - and I really would not try this in the real world 😉
Even if blurry, it looks good - this is a grand and highly recommended experience
For those using Revive, maybe the Vive Pro with oled and some SDE would be a much better solution than the Index, but I'm just guessing.
All shots taken with the Index.
Admitted, I bought The Climb like 7 years ago and never really played it - but my backlog was already very long. For the first time I'm really getting into the game - and I'm enjoying it more and more.
RoadToVR criticized the game for only having 4 levels. While that's true, each level is like made into 3 segments, where each segment represents a different level of difficulty. Each segment in a location is very different from each other - to a degree where it more feels like a genuine level. In that way 3 segments and 4 locations easily work as 12 levels. For example, starting the the Bay level using easy difficulty, you cannot see many fish in the water and the activity from animals life, boats etc is limited - but starting the bay level now selecting medium difficulty, you're placed much closer to the water, and you can now see tons of fish, and there is so much more activity - and it feels like a very different level.
Some dude wrote in the Meta PCVR Store that the game no longer worked, as you could not get access to other levels than the easy ones. You need to complete some easy levels to get points. When you've mastered a few of the easy levels you'll have enough points and the more difficult levels automatically become available.
Btw, for those having bad performance with Revive, try this:
"For Nvidia cards (works flawless):
- Go to Nvidia Control Panel and change settings for Climb.exe "Vertical Sync" to "Fast", remember to click Apply in bottom right
Back-up option in case (works, but with small stutter here and there, depends on your CPU):
- Once the game is started, open Task Manager in Windows
- Go to "Details" tab
- Find "Climb.exe", right click and choose "Set Affinity"
- Deselect all CPUs apart from CPU 0 and 1"
https://github.com/LibreVR/Revive/issues/1703
I can see that many were struggling getting 90 fps with their hmds and rigs in 2016-2020, and I'm starting to forget how the game was with my GTX 1080 - but seems even 2080 could not achieve solid 90 fps using res 2.0 and maxed settings. So it really does seem you'll need at least that 4070 or 3080 to get the very best of The Climb (res 2.0 in-game, max shadows, no distant objects optimization, temporal antialiasing, max sharpness for the temporal antialiasing). Using Revive, lowering in-game res should bring better performance, but will also make the game a lot more blurry. As said in another post, today even the highest in-game res is too low for really great image quality, so I would not lower the res to get better performance.
Btw, those wanting to know more about The Climb can find a great article here:
https://www.theclimbgame.com/blog/detail-scale-and-creating-a-vr-world
Compared to most other VR games I've played the last two years, not sure any were better than The Climb - also not sure any had budgets even close to The Climb, lol.
Not sure what many think of The Climb today, but before Lone Echo, The Climb was king and the first Oculus title to sell for more than $ 1 million:
"In an official Oculus blog post yesterday (from summer 2017), head of content Jason Rubin wrote a bit about the state of VR and Oculus specifically, revealing that, "Multiple games have passed the $1M mark, and players have logged more than 1.3M hours combined in our top five apps by time spent since launch." In a separate talk with Road to VR, Rubin added that Crytek's The Climb is not only among that group of best sellers, but that the game is actually the top-selling Rift title to date. It wasn't made explicitly clear if that's unit sales or dollars, but with a price point of $50 it could very well be both."
Of course, as explained here, this does not necessarily mean that Oculus made ends meet:
"In that same interview, Fargo noted that AAA VR titles can cost upwards of $5 million on the high end, and on PSVR he's seen some budgets as high as $10 million. Needless to say, if you're spending several million on development but a title only generates north of $1 million, that makes profitability challenging, at least in the short-term. Rubin is optimistic that things will be getting better quickly, though."
Quotes from: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/oculus-the-climb-is-rifts-best-seller-to-date
Note that the 1 million mark was reached within a year after the game launched, and ratings have gone up a lot since summer 2017.
My 12-year-old son enjoys the game too, but only in tourist mode, where you don't have stamina and can hold on to a rock for more than few seconds. But you need to complete several levels using stamina to unlock new levels, where you then than can use the tourist mode.
In tourist mode you have all the time in the world to enjoy the magnificent scenery
After some climbing, and tons of deaths 🤗, my son now has access to all levels in tourist mode. Personally I'm much more into tourist mode too - where you can enjoy the awesome scenery for as long as you want. In the stamina-modes, you really have to be quick and can mostly only enjoy the scenery when reaching the few safe platforms in a level.
Also I do feel fitter than usual, especially my shoulder and chest muscles, I wonder what's going on 🤔 😀
Btw, did you know that it only took 8 months to make The Climb?
"Rubin labeled the game "the greatest achievement in VR development so far," partially for its visuals but also because "it was made in eight months, which is amazing." He noted that its success is thanks "partly for how long it's been out, partly because it's great."
Source: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/oculus-the-climb-is-rifts-best-seller-to-date
- but Crytek had several teams working in parallel, each responsible for different levels and aspects, probably a clever way to accelerate its development a lot.
