As Sony prepares to launch the PlayStation VR2 in the coming week, its flagship launch title, Horizon Call of the Mountain, will be front and centre. Developed by Guerrilla Games and Firesprite, this action-adventure will bring players into the world like never before thanks to PS VR2, and according to Studio Narrative Director at Guerrilla, Ben McCaw, the innovation extends to storytelling as well.
“Storytelling that you can do in VR is just so immersive and so tactile, that feels pretty up close and personal, a kind of experience that is really very specific to VR. The emphasis is on making sure that story moments feel like they’re in the player’s field of view,” McCaw explained.
“In the opening on the riverboat ride, when the Tallneck walks over you or when the Stormbird flies over you, that’s just going to grab your attention. And that’s how you have to think when you’re when you are designing in terms of storytelling.”
Big set-piece moments are always going to be key to games, but by placing players in the thick of things, there are also more ways to engage with them and deliver some lore along the way. Environmental storytelling, for one, is quite apparent in Horizon Call of the Mountain; from the many beautiful landscapes to the remnants of tribes and the objects left behind that can be interacted with, it feels more intimate compared to the usual gaming experience.
“To me, that’s the stuff that, when I watch people play, that I enjoy the most is how they each get their own kind of individual experience out of it.”
McCaw also highlighted another awesome aspect of the player experience when it came to talking to other characters. With the player being the camera per se, conversations will actually see characters’ eyes following the player, and that “brings a lot of expressiveness and detail to characters interacting with you.” Since the camera never goes away, everything feels more heightened and cinematic.
This new perspective is also coloured by the introduction of Ryas, the master climber central to the story , which makes it easier for a new perspective to an otherwise familiar world for returning fans. This allowed the teams to retain key aspects of the Horizon series, but also made it work when it comes to the way players traverse the world through climbing and combat through archery.
The navigation around the world feels instantly intuitive, but once machines are alerted to your presence, the way Horizon Call of the Mountain deals with combat also requires an altered approach. Rather than allowing players to move about freely, the team “made sure the focus was always on the machine.”
This not only showed off the massive scale of the machines, but also made sure players felt like they were really on the spot. Drawing arrows, dodging attacks, and taking advantage of the environment then became much more engaging, especially with the added tension.
Of course, all of this would not be possible without the hardware itself, and working with the PlayStation VR2 gave McCaw and the team plenty of room to think creatively and create something uniquely theirs to give to players.
“The haptics really helped because there’s just a kind of more tactile, more immersive feel that that you get from that. The visual fidelity of it is so much more amazing. There are many challenges, but we tended to view them much more as opportunities to make the most out of PS VR2,” McCaw shared about Horizon Call of the Mountain.
Balancing immersion and gameplay meant that “everything has to be simultaneously immersive and gameplay oriented.” As an example, the studio narrative director pointed to the climbing that worked thanks to the combination of the “sense of verticality and scale” while the “haptics is giving you feedback.” The way combat flowed also demonstrated how both teams had managed to achieve a good balance.
Beyond all of the gameplay tweaks, there was also a pressing need to ensure that the game was accessible to everyone, VR veterans and newcomers alike.
“We wound up with a lot of great features. Simple things like being able to enable or disable falling, or more on the accessibility side, different combat settings, like auto-loading of arrows or the ability to do different amounts of customised damage settings. There’s just something about PS VR2 and its amazing feature set, that you have the ability to customise so much, so why not take advantage of that?”
And much like Ryas, Horizon Call of the Mountain will represent a new frontier for players to dive into using brand-new hardware, and from what we have experienced, it is an excellent way to kick things off.
Jake is a full-time trophy hunter and achievement gatherer on consoles, and part-time Steam Sale victim. He has a thing for Batman and awesome statues, and running out of space for both. Send help.
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