Meta’s Ready at Dawn Working on ‘new projects’, No Plans for Lone Echo or Echo Combat on Quest

Ready at Dawn, the Meta-owned studio behind Lone Echo affirmed today that it has largely moved on from its prior PC titles and has begun work on “new, exciting projects”.

Ready at Dawn is the studio behind one of PC VR’s most immersive games: Lone Echo (2017), and its popular multiplayer spinoff, Echo VR. Following the release of those two titles, the studio was eventually acquired by Meta in 2020, and then finally launched Lone Echo II on PC in late 2023.

Between those two points, Ready at Dawn brought its multiplayer spinoff, Echo VR, to Quest, where it has remained a popular social game on the platform and the clear focus of the studio.

But not all of Echo VR made it to Quest in the first place. On PC the game is compromise of two modes, ‘Echo Arena’ (a game of zero-G ultimate frisbee) and ‘Echo Combat’ (a zero-G team shooter). Only ‘Echo Arena’ ever made it to Quest.

Image courtesy Ready at Dawn

Today the studio affirmed it will not be bringing ‘Echo Combat’ to Quest, nor does it plan any future content updates for the mode.

Echo Combat was built specifically for the Rift using PC spec and PC engine specific features as our guidelines for building maps and systems. Moving this game mode over to Quest / Quest 2 would not be possible without major changes to the game itself. Therefore, we want to reiterate that we will not be bringing Echo Combat to Meta Quest. Combat is still available for play [on PC VR].

[…]

Our team loves this community and the work that we’ve put into Combat, but it isn’t feasible for us to continue to maintain. Echo Combat will remain available for play and our servers will continue to operate for our players. Thank you so much to our community that continue to highlight Combat, showcase some top tier gameplay, and always bring a smile to our faces.

And while we had some hope that Ready at Dawn’s silence meant it was busy at work bringing the singleplayer Lone Echo and/or Lone Echo II to Quest, it appears the studio is also ready to leave those projects behind, saying the team has shifted to other projects.

[Regarding Lone Echo II] we are aware some players have reported issues on specific PC set ups, we unfortunately haven’t been able to identify a specific root cause for the crashes reported. 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.

To that end, the studio has little to share on what’s next, but did confirm that it’s “in the early stages of working on new, exciting projects and can’t wait to share more information about them in the future.”

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It isn’t clear at this point whether those projects will be based on Lone Echo or new IP, nor do we know if they will even be VR titles (but our fingers are surely crossed).

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