Meta's best VR gaming studio is working on "new, exciting projects"
Ready at Dawn delivered hits like Lone Echo and Echo Arena, but lately, the studio has been quiet. And for good reason.
Released in 2017, the PC VR space adventure Lone Echo was ahead of its time thanks to its great hand interactions, body simulations, and motion sequences. With its later-released spinoff Echo VR (consisting of Echo Arena and Echo Combat), Ready at Dawn has shown that it can also create engaging multiplayer games.
The quality of these titles led Facebook to buy the studio in the summer of 2020. It was its third acquisition of a virtual reality studio, following Beat Games ("Beat Saber") and Sanzaru Games ("Asgard's Wrath"). More acquisitions followed.
In the fall of 2020, the Quest port of Echo Arena left beta, and a year later, the perpetually postponed Lone Echo II was released for Meta's Rift platform. It's the last Meta-funded PC VR game for now, and the last major Ready at Dawn project we know of.
Echo VR for Meta Quest (2) is still being maintained. The question is what the rest of the studio, which includes more than a hundred developers, is working on.
Echo Combat and Lone Echo II are history
On its Medium blog, the studio gives an update on its work. First, Ready at Dawn confirms that Echo Combat will not be ported to Meta Quest (2) and that the PC VR game will only receive bug fixes, but no other content updates. The servers will continue to run.
The studio will also leave Lone Echo II behind. The team investigated reports of performance issues on certain PC systems but was unable to track down the cause.
"Due to this and the fact that the team have shifted over to work on other projects, we have no plans for additional patches or updates to Lone Echo II in the future. This includes bug fixes and localization. We understand this news can be upsetting and apologize for any frustration it may cause," Ready at Dawn writes.
Ready at Dawn starts with new projects
What other projects is Ready at Dawn working on? That's not clear from the blog post. The studio only confirms that it is "in the early stages of working on new, exciting projects" that it will only talk about in the future.
It's quite possible that Ready at Dawn is saying goodbye to the Echo universe for now and working on an entirely new brand tailored to Meta Quest 3. This makes a port of the two Lone Echo parts increasingly unlikely.
Surprisingly, Ready at Dawn has just started working on new titles. It will likely be years before the games are released. This is bad news for Quest fans, who are currently waiting in vain for big titles. Meta's big VR gaming offensive hasn't started yet.
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