Glassbreakers Gets Release Date And Apple Vision Pro Port

Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss brings the action-strategy multiplayer game to Quest 3, Steam, and Apple Vision Pro next month.

Offering a PvP spin-off set in the Moss universe, Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss announced its return back in August following an open beta that began in 2023. Controlling a team of three Champions tasked with breaking through to an enemy’s ‘Glass Stronghold,’ Polyarc previously confirmed Quest 3/3S and Steam releases, and an Apple Vision Pro version now joins them.

Detailing this further, Polyarc states Glassbreakers is the first VR game developed in Unreal Engine to launch on Apple Vision Pro. The studio plans to release a fork of the Unreal Engine with “all the enhancements and work that went into integrating the engine with visionOS,” stating other studios will be able to use this code.

Speaking to UploadVR in a written Q&A, Technical Director Cyril Saint Girons gave us further insights into this new port. While this version has cross-platform multiplayer with Quest and Steam, Glassbreakers will support hand tracking with “native pinch events” on Apple’s headset. However, Girons did not confirm or deny if hand tracking support is coming to Quest.

Weighing in on adapting Glassbreakers for hand tracking, Girons described it as “a fun challenge” to figure out how best to utilize Apple Vision Pro’s technology.

“We took some time exploring fairly different paradigms like toggle controls, which could create too much cognitive load, as well as different input gestures like fists, which could be unreliable.

“But in the end, we think we found a good balance between leaning in controls that Apple Vision Pro users will expect coming from the platform with gaze and pinch, and maintaining the features we felt were important to Glassbreakers by adding
middle pinch gestures for movement and adapting some of our higher-level
gestures to the hand tracking space.”

Promising improved graphical performance with passthrough enabled between matches on Apple Vision Pro, Girons confirmed that the studio reduced GPU usage by implementing Metal’s Fixed Foveated Rendering on visionOS. This allows it to render Glassbreakers “at a super high resolution,” though specific figures weren’t provided.

Finally, this all leads to one particular question: are there any plans to also bring Moss and Moss: Book 2 to Apple Vision Pro? Girons advised that “we’d love to bring the Moss games to Apple Vision Pro,” stating the idea’s been discussed internally since Polyarc began working with Apple on Glassbreakers. That said, the team has “nothing to announce” at this time.

Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss launches on November 13 on Quest 3/3S and Steam for $19.99, while Apple Vision Pro users need an Apple Arcade subscription. A preview weekend for Quest players takes place on October 24-26, with sign-ups available through the official website.

Why Glassbreakers: Champions Of Moss Is Bucking The Free-To-Play Trend

With many VR multiplayer games going free-to-play, Glassbreakers is a curious exception taking the opposite approach. We interviewed Polyarc to learn more.