VR shooting simulator Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades (H3VR) launched its 1.0 release over the weekend, exiting early access after more than a decade on Steam.
Veteran VR studio Rust Ltd has finally brought H3VR out of early access on July 4th—a fitting release date for the hyper-American shooting sandbox’s big 1.0 update.
Studio founder Anton Hand says in a Steam update that while H3VR has been in in “Absurdly Late Access for a very long time,” the game’s 120th update was released to make sure the creator community “had the best options moving forward with a solidified codebase, tools and toys.” You can see the full release notes in the update linked above.
This follows a major overhaul to the game’s main game mode ‘Take & Hold’, which included new modes, challenges, characters, equipment and more. In May, the studio also included initial support for Steam Workshop, which lets you share user-generated levels and content.
Released in early access on April 5, 2016, the game technically went live on Steam for the big release day of original HTC Vive, which at the time was the only consumer VR headset to natively feature motion controllers.
Over the years, the game has grown from a simple VR firearms sandbox into one of VR’s deepest sims, adding hundreds of meticulously modeled weapons, dozens of new environments and game modes, and extensive interaction systems.
Hand maintains the 1.0 release “isn’t the END end,” as there are still bugs to fix, work to be done on creation tools, support hooks for Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame standalone, and a credits scene that still needs inserting—all while creating the game’s sequel, which was revealed in May.
While Hand calls the 1.0 release “the end of a chapter/act of a larger story,” he’s ultimately “crazy excited about what’s to come despite the melancholy of this particular moment.”
Undoubtedly now the studio’s main focus is on H3VR 2, which unlike its mostly sandbox-style shooting sim forbear will be a “full fledged” extraction shooter. There’s no release date yet beyond the previously announced 2026 window, however H3VR 2 is set to launch across coming to Quest 3 and 3S, as well as PC VR headsets via Steam.
