Braid creator working with Valve to bring The Witness to VR systems [update]
Puzzle fans eager to be stumped by The Witness' island might have noticed a coy post in November from game designer Jonathan Blow, which featured double-vision screenshots of the game's environment. Blow followed that tease in December by announcing The Witness' 3D TV and Oculus Rift support, but an update from this week revealed that the initial post had more to do with Valve than the Oculus Rift.
"Last year I was pessimistic about VR systems in the near future, since the ones I had tried didn't seem to offer much," Blow wrote, noting the bulkiness of headsets and the nausea associated with some forms of virtual reality. "But I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at Valve's virtual reality system. It is so much better than anything else I had used that I was instantly very excited by it."
It's worth pointing out that while Valve worked with Oculus Rift on the Crystal Cove prototype shown at CES, Valve also showed its own VR hardware at Steam Dev Days. Valve has announced no plans to bring the latter to retail.
We've reached out to Blow concerning whether fans can expect to play the game using VR at launch and will update if we hear back. The Witness is planned for release on PC, iOS and PS4 sometime in 2014.
Update: In response to our question about potential day-one VR support, Blow replied, "We will see what happens ... The interesting part of the situation to me is the working-with-VR itself. If we do any kind of business thing to launch with something or whatever, I don't know, maybe that will happen and maybe it won't."
