The week-long 2015 Game Developers Conference kicks off today, and it's looking like virtual reality is the star of the show. Everybody's bloody at it this year, including Valve and their new friends at HTC, who are partnering up to make the RE Vive.
Elsewhere on the VR front, Sony has announced a four-hour event dedicated to their VR-but-with-glowsticks Project Morpheus headset. Expect hands-on demonstrations, and maybe even a few VR-focused game announcements and trailers.
Face-smothering goggles aside, we'll be seeing much more from Valve, which is betting big on GDC this year. In addition to the aforementioned Vive, it'll be giving demos of a "refined" version of its long-awaited Steam Controller, and announcing new "living room devices" (Valvespeak for 'Steam Machines'). Meanwhile, rumours abound that it'll finally show off Source Engine 2 – the original has served the studio well, but it is high time for a successor.
Microsoft has a few gaming talks scheduled for GDC, including a panel entitled "Advanced DirectX12 Graphics and Performance". Like a thirtysomething rediscovering a favourite band, Microsoft is getting back into PC gaming in a big way – or it'd like us to think so, at any rate. Expect fancy visual demonstrations from the folks at Unreal too, who will be at GDC scorching eyeballs from their very sockets with Unreal Engine 4.
But what about games? GDC isn't typically the place for game announcements, but it did happen to coincide with the reveals of Battlefields 3 and 4 in previous years. Last year EA promised more Star Wars: Battlefront details in "Spring 2015", which is pretty much now (give or take a couple of weeks). Fingers crossed for a proper reveal sometime this week.
