Earlier this week Insomniac Games announced their next project was a virtual reality (VR) title called Stormland, which was described as an epic sci-fi adventure. Now, in a recent interview with Variety, Insomniac Games chief creative officer Chad Dezern gave some insights into the upcoming title.
“This is our fourth VR game at this point, we have been on a journey.” Dezern notes at the start of the interview. “Stormland is the culmination of all of that, ultimately, this is about taking components of the open world structure and gameplay from Ratchet & Clank, Sunset Overdrive, and Spider-Man and marrying that to what we’ve discovered in VR development.”
Stormland is being created in collaboration with Oculus Studios and will be an open world action-adventure experience in which players take on the role of a robot. With their history of developing exciting and engaging titles, the team is aiming to deliver another standout title with Stormland.
“It’s about creating a lot of player choice and not being constrained in any way by the medium,” Dezern explains. “We put you in a world where you can go anywhere with a set of traversal mechanics. On top of that, there is a combat model that is free form. You can steal weapons from an enemy, you can upgrade the android’s ability to shoot electricity from its arm, to cloak from enemies, or create a shield. You can use the environment to place traps or blow up enemy munitions. It’s how you want to play, how you want to engage.”
“We stay in first-person from start to finish,” Dezern adds, talking about what the team has learned from their other VR titles “As we have developed games in VR, we have learned to lean more on player agency. We do use some cinematic devices that send objects and set pieces to you, but we never do a hard cut.”
Lead designer on Stormland Mike Daly comments on the journey players can expect to experience in the title adding: ““When you travel up the Stormland, you enter in this cloud sea populated by islands, each island has new equipment, powerful enemy ambushes, something to discover about the world. As you go out and explore, you have to get this, ‘Just one more island’ hook. You are continually moving up. There are things you have to do on each layer of the cloud sea.”
“You’re not restricted to any one plane,” he adds. “The ability to move precisely in any direction opens up all sorts of new shapes to explore.”
Daly also mentioned during the interview that the title is being built to support multiplayer and is essentially perpetually playable. This means the title will be able to piece together elements of islands in order to create new levels for players to explore. “It is the culmination of so many things, a universe we love crafting, a story we love telling, building on systems we’ve been wanting to bring to the world,” Daly said. “It’s a world that changes every single week, so you have new playgrounds to get around in.”
Currently Insomniac Games have no released many more details on the title at this time other then it wil be exclusive to Oculus Rift. VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest on Stormland in the future, including any details on a possible release window.