Zero, huh. This could be great. As I load in to the into the game I stand up and get in your typical hunched over gamer form, an old habit of mine that I’ve failed to get rid of over the years. The main menu features a grand structure, it almost resembles a giant factory. The structure features the text “Zeta Foundation” above a set of double doors in the center of the exterior. Assembly lines are moving along within the structure, with what looks like giant test tubes with blue opaque liquid in them. The machines lifted these tubes and shook them vigorously. I wonder if this is some lore related building. I’d later come to find I was right as I clicked the play button.

A cinematic features the Zeta Foundation building was playing. “Welcome to the Zeta Foundation. While this is only your first day, we can guarantee it won’t be your last. While we wish to give you the best warm welcome possible, we’re currently in a dire situation. I’ve contacted the crew you’ll be working with. They’ll fill you in on what it is you’ll be doing for today. Have a great day Zeta,” The cinematic voice stated with a typical job training video voice.

The game then goes through the basic controls. It’s your typical left-stick to move, right-stick to turn, a jump button, a crouch button, a reload button, a shoot button, etc. It’s what you’d expect, you can’t really deviated from standard controls these days, especially for a competitive shooter. Though the fact that this is in virtual reality is already makes it different from majority of shooter games on the market.

I reached the tutorial of the game after looking around a dark void used as the loading screen. These loading screens never get any better do they? The same voice from earlier speaks into an intercom, “Welcome to Zeta Training. In the arenas of Zero you must be able to not only be quick with your gun but also have great mental capacity. Though many of our previous trainees are missing the later requirement. Anyways, I’m sure you already understand the controls so allow me to explain the rules of engagement in the Zero arenas.” I clicked the next button and waited. “In Zero arenas you are only allowed to carry two weapons at any time, with the exception of grenades of course. Feel free to look down and get a look at your holster and vest, this is where you can grab your guns and grenades. The gun on your right holster is your Mag pistol. While this pistol may look unassuming and bland, it is your most deadly weapon. Make sure to always aim for the head while a shot to the head without any armor with any weapon will kill your opponent, this pistol will quickly take out any armor on your opponent with enough shots. That would of course open them up for a head shot and giving you an easy kill. Now, the gun in your left holster isn’t there. Why would it not be there Zeta? That’s right, you don’t have a secondary. In the arena there will be dedicated weapon drop offs, this is where you’ll pick up a secondary. Every secondary weapon in the arena is made for a specific purpose, whether it be as a rocket launcher, laser rifle, or a marksmen rifle that’s capable of doing a lot of damage. You’ll learn about each weapon and their intended purposes later in the Zeta training course. On your vest you have two grenades. These grenades are extremely dangerous and must be used wisely as you will not get these back until you respawn. A well landed grenade will destroy your opponent’s armor. If you land two great grenade throws on one target the first one will destroy their armor while the second will kill them. Though keep in mind the amount of damage done is proportionate to how close the grenade is to the opponent in question. That’s it Zeta! Are you ready for the active training portion of this exercise?” That was a long one, but it was very informative and didn’t lose my attention. Interesting. I clicked the ready button.

I am sent to a firing range, “Alright Zeta, it’s time for weapons training. Go ahead and pull your Mag out of your holster.” I do as told by the tutorial. The Mag is a large pistol, the body is made mostly of completely perfect right angles. I wonder if there’s any skins or customization options for the guns. I hold the gun up to aim down the sights. Line up the front and rear sights, and pull the trigger. The gunshot echoing through the firing range. The recoil was pretty much non-existent. I wonder if that’s why this pistol is so good according to the tutorial. “Good job Zeta! You’ve learned to shoot without me telling you.” Annoying much? I sigh as the tutorial continues. “On your right you’ll see a weapon drop off. Go ahead and grab the weapon using the same button you use to hold your pistol. Oh and also, you can not wield both guns at once.” I’m assuming that’s for game balancing reasons. I grab the gun, and hold it up to aim down the scope sitting atop the gun. It’s a sniper rifle. It looks unwieldy and like it would be a pain to carry in real life. Thankfully this is just a vr game and everything in vr is weightless, at least with today’s technology anyways. I’m not sure I’d want it to be any other way though. I aim down the scope at one of the long range targets and fire the sniper. “Not the best aim Zeta. As you can see the target’s armor is broken, you could either fire another shot with the sniper to finish them off or switch to your pistol to conserve ammo. You can’t replenish secondary weapon ammo unless you take out an opponent with the same weapon or pick up the same weapon from a fresh weapon drop off. Go ahead and switch to your secondary to kill the target.” I do as the tutorial asks and wait for the next voice prompt. “Great job! You’ve already made it further than 99% of our applicants.” Are people really this stupid in the game’s lore? The voice continues, “I’m sure you see the target to the left of the one you just practiced your sniper on. Go ahead and grab a grenade from your vest and throw it at the target. Try to land the grenade as close to the target as you can.” I grab the first grenade and throw a perfectly landed grenade at the target’s feet. The explosion destroying their armor and my ears. “Alright Zeta, you’re ready for your first challenge in the arena. Next I’ll explain arenas, go ahead and let me know when you’re ready to move on.” I click next in hopes of being able to speed through these next sections.

The voice comes over the intercom, “Alright Zeta, I’ve placed some maps of arenas in front of you. Make sure you familiarize yourself not just with the layouts but also locations of weapon drop offs, extra grenade spawns, and objective locations. In the arena you will be facing others of equal skill to you so be sure to keep that in mind and tread lightly. I’ll first go over some of the objectives you’ll be working towards while in the arena. First is King of the Hill. Put simply, you want you and your crew to be kings of the hill. On the arena map in front of you there are squares that mark the hill locations in that specific arena. Familiarize yourself with the locations of these locations as the hills always spawn in the same order.” The first hill in this arena spawns directly in the center of the map. It’s a standard three lane map design, you have your left side and right side of the maps and the middle of the map, with team spawns being on opposite sides from one another. The main highlight of this map is a small bridge sitting above the hill. I take mental notes of the map and click the next button. The voice explains more to me about the game mode. In King of the Hill you want your team to hold the hill for a total of sixty seconds, once your team captures the hill your team is given a capture point and a new hill spawns in the next location on the list. You need four capture points to win the game. Games can also end in a tie across most game modes. I suppose that’s so games don’t last for hours at a time. The voice continues blabbering your typical failed video game comedy script at me while I wait to learn about the other game modes. “Alright Zeta, next is Team Elimination. This is my favorite! I love seeing everyone’s bodies hit the ground with great force.” Odd for a video game, but makes sense I guess. I listen to this strange rant once again and finally pick out the details needed to understand the mode. In Team Elimination both teams face off in a round based mode. It is simple, in order to win the round you just eliminate the enemy team. There are no respawns in this game mode unlike King of the Hill. You win the game once you and your team have won nine rounds. The next mode in the list of rants was called Carrier. Pretty simple name but it could be misleading. In Carrier an orb spawns in the center of the map. This orb is essentially a moving objective. In order to score points in Carrier you or a teammate needs to sacrifice the ability to shoot and carry the orb. Ideally you’d want the carrier in a place that’s hard to contest and have your team defending them, but I’m sure we all know why that doesn’t always work out, especially in online video games. The first team to hold the orb for a total of two minutes wins the round, first team to win two rounds wins the game. The final game mode the voice explained is called Nuke. In Nuke both teams are assigned as either the attackers or defenders. As a defender you must defend one of the two sites located on the map. As an attacker you must place the Nuke on one of these two sites. A classic game mode that’s been around since the dawn of competitive gaming. It takes five seconds to place the Nuke on a site and it takes seven seconds to disable the Nuke as a defender. If you disable the Nuke your team wins the round. There are no respawns so this mode also acts as Team Elimination but with a Nuke to worry about. First team to 7 wins the game.

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The voice lets out one final set of words, “Great job! You Zeta have completed our training course. We hope you enjoy your time here at the foundation.” I’m not sure providing a ton of boring paperwork worth of information is enjoying my time but all tutorials are like this. The main menu is changed, there is a set of new buttons. The first button is play of course, the second is customization, the third is the shop. Typical live service video games, they all just need a shop nowadays. I click the play button. I’m greeted with a new menu. This menu lists the game modes, but there is an extra game mode. This extra game mode is Ranked Play. Ranked Play features all of the current game modes in the game with a set map pool and modes that will be played on each map. I clicked Ranked Play not expecting much. The ranked mode seems to work with your standard match making rating system or MMR for short. Simply put, if you win the game you gain MMR with a loss resorting in the opposite. I queue up for a Ranked Play and wait to find a game. The wait wasn’t long, only a few seconds. Didn’t know THAT many people were playing right now. A lot of games struggle with queue times, especially in ranked mode queues so instantly queuing into a match is rare.

Loading into the pregame lobby we’re sitting in a sectioned off portion of the arena. This arena being named Arpeggio. It’s a very green arena with tons of moss and vines along the walls and the ground being a mossy stone texture. I assume this arena is meant to represent some old ruins to some degree. The randomly selected game mode was King of the Hill. I meet some players. The first seeming to be the most experienced with everyone else being about as new as me. Their name was Inari. Inari spoke over the in-game voice chat, the standard for communication in competitive video games, “Alright guys I’ve just played against the other team and I think we can win. I’m aware you guys are new so I’ll take it easy on you. Mainly for my own sake.” I was taken aback that someone could be nice in a competitive game, it is rather rare especially in more competitive games. Whether this was because this game isn’t taken as serious or because they’re like me and just don’t want to get mad and end up doing worse due to the lack of focus is unknown to me. The game countdown began, an announcer speaks from above. “Three...Two...One... Begin!”

We all begin making our ways to the first hill in the center of the arena. I pick up some extra grenades from a grenade drop and begin to throw my newly acquired grenades at the hill. One of the grenades manages to land next to an enemy destroying his armor and leaving Inari to kill him quickly and clear up hill for a couple of seconds. I enter hill with another teammate as Inari goes to grab a gun from a weapon drop off above the hill. Just about as quick as we entered the hill we lost it as the enemy team had great timing when deciding to peak the hill from their spawn and take both of us out with a sniper and pistol combo. This game is much harder than I thought it would be, but it seems fun so far. I respawn after the ten second respawn period and quickly make my way to the hill. I throw a grenade on the hill and equip my pistol. The grenade explodes next to an enemy, this grenade destroying his armor so I shoot him. My shot surprisingly was a head shot for just point aiming. Maybe point aiming is what all of the good ranked players are doing. I decide to continue point aiming for easier shots. Another enemy peaks around a pillar that is to the left of the hill. I quickly turn and begin landing head shot after head shot on them. They tried to run but didn’t make it around the pillar in time. After a few more seconds we managed to take the hill and secure the first capture point of the match. Everyone runs to the next hill with an occasional one on one or two on two firefight on the way to the next hill. I pick up a sniper on the way to the next hill. The next hill is to the left of our spawn point at the bottom of a set of stairs. There is a three directions enemies can come from, a small tunnel on the left lane of the map, a tunnel in the middle of the map, and that same staircase that leads to our spawn. I keep my eyes on the spawn flank as my team is well spread out among the three locations. The enemy team begins to flood our spawn and I call out to my team, “Entire team in our spawn! Entire team our spawn!” I retreat back to the hill and fire at all of them doing substantial damage to each enemy as my team sweeps in and assists me in eliminating them. That was the quickest hill of the match, with us swiftly not leaving a single second for the enemy team to properly regroup again. Making the match two to zero in our favor. The third hill was rather uneventful as I managed to keep the enemy team pretty far away thanks to my lucky sniper shots. I am not much of a sniper in normal FPS games so I’m not sure what left me in such a good position to be a sniper for this match but it just seemed to work out in the end. Three to zero for us. The enemy team seemed to have lost all sense of team composition as we continued to obliterate them in the next hill. Grenades and the Mag pistol being the main weapons of choice. We held the hill for a solid sixty seconds without letting them get a single second on the hill once again winning us the game. I didn’t keep track of what anyone was doing but I opened the scoreboard since the match had ended.

I was the second player on the scoreboard, Inari was first, and the other two were below us. Inari had a rank icon next to his name. I wonder what rank that is. The icon was in the shape of a sci-fi styled helmet and was purple with dark accents. I turned and asked Inari about the icon. Apparently there are seven ranks in Zero. In order from worst to best they are, Copper, Iron, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Zeta. Zeta was the highest rank so I didn’t think the purple meant highest but Inari had confirmed that Zeta was the purple rank icon in question. And I was similarly skilled to Inari in that last match. Inari said the rank disparity was probably just a ranking system bug but he said that they are going to probably end up fixing it before the end of the day. I go back to the main menu after sending Inari a friend request. You can only see the enemy team’s profiles after the game ends so I check their ranks. They were all a mixture of Diamond and lower ranking Zeta players. This has to be some visual bug or something, we cleaned them perfectly without really communicating much at all. Was I secretly just really good at VRFPS games and never knew? I shook my head in disbelief as I scrolled throw the enemy team’s ranks. Zeta is a special rank, it is the only rank in the game that shows your current position in the global rankings. The global rankings is where you will find the best players in the game. Everyone in the top one hundred on the rankings had MMRs so high I couldn’t even fathom. It takes an MMR of ten thousand to reach Zeta. The top players have over thirty thousand MMR. Those guys must be aliens. I could imagine reaching the highest rank, but tripling that is like a whole new rank on its own.