I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar (2021) launched in late August across all major VR headsets, bringing fans of the original game a fresh taste of spy-flavored puzzles and adventure. Now developers Schell Games say it’s done so well that the sequel has broken past the $1 million revenue milestone only a few days after launch.
I Expect You to Die 2 launched simultaneously on all major VR platforms on August 24th, including Oculus Quest, Oculus PC, SteamVR, and PSVR. At $25 a pop, that would mean it sold 40,000 units over the course of “less than a week,” the studio says.
However you slice it, that means the sequel is performing very well. To put it in perspective, the first I Expect You to Die (2016) reached the $1 million revenue mark a few months after its initial launch in late 2016, first landing on PSVR and Oculus Rift, and then later coming to Steam.
Momentum appears to have sped up as Oculus Quest entered the scene in mid-2019. The original—an official launch title on Quest—generated $2 million in revenue on Quest alone in its first year.
The sequel’s success is well-deserved. When we went in for our full review, we noted that, although it felt like a direct extension of the original, it ultimately offered up another substantial slice of clever and intuitive puzzles wrapped around high quality, well, high quality everything. Set pieces, voice acting, musical numbers—the game seemed to hit every mark. Check out our full review to find out why we gave it an [8.5/10].
“We have been blown away by the support of gamers and VR enthusiasts from all over the world,” said Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games. “We’ve received countless heart-warming messages from our players sharing their stories with the game, and we are so grateful to our existing fans and new agents who used their creativity and cunning to put a stop to Zoraxis’ nefarious schemes. This is an important milestone, not just for us and our business, but for the ever-growing VR market. VR-first franchises like I Expect You To Die can succeed and studios should pay attention to where this market is going.”
I Expect You To Die 2 is available on Steam (Vive, Rift, Index), the Oculus Store (Rift, Quest), and the PlayStation Store (PSVR).
I Expect You To Die and Until You Fall developer Schell Games’ next VR title will try to find a balance between physics-based gameplay and hyper-reality.
Studio head Jesse Schell teased as much to UploadVR in a recent interview (of which there is plenty more right here). Talking about design philosophies, Schell expressed caution in fully embracing physics-based mechanics in VR. “I think you have to be careful when you’re focusing too much on the idea that, ‘Oh, if I just simulate reality, that’s going to be the most fun’,” he said. “I always think about what Kirt Vonnegut said is that ‘God never wrote a good play in his life.’
“You’ve got to make things hyper-real. Reality isn’t your goal, you’re trying to create a certain experience for the player. And there are elements of physics-based play that can do some of that, but it’s only a part of it. So you have to strike that balance. We’re doing some work now on– I’m trying to think can I talk about that? I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about that. I’m probably not supposed to talk on that.”
But talk about it Schell did, if only a little: “We’re working on a game that involves a balance between physics and reality and figuring out when to use the physics in order to enhance the experience and when to say ‘Okay, that’s enough. That’s not what we want, we’re going to make things a little simpler right now’.”
Don’t expect this new project to fully simulate the combat of, say, a Boneworks or Blade & Sorcery, then. But it sounds like the game could be more physics-driven than the arcade action of Until You Fall. “I think physics-based games can work well, but you can’t be purely physics-based because it gets boring, complicated, and there’s too many ways to cheat it,” Schell continued.
“You don’t want people finding ways to just do this spammy thing and then it works. This is an ingredient, it’s like salt. The right amount of it? Yeah. It’s really good. Too much? It can be not the best experience.”
Given that Schell’s latest VR title, I Expect You To Die 2, only launched last week, it’ll likely be some time before we hear about this new project on a more official basis. For now, make sure to catch up on our thoughts on the latest puzzle hit.
Jesse Schell is incredibly bullish about VR. He’s also often very wrong about it.
This is not something he hides, it’s actually something he seems to enjoy. In fact, Schell once revealed he thought VR would be a mainstream technology by around 2005. The jury’s still out but it’s looking like he was off by about 20 years or so.
And that’s far from the developer’s misfire; in 2016 he made 40 predictions about the future of VR during a GDC talk, some of them are yet to come to fruition, some of them were right, but many of them were staggeringly off the mark, like the prediction that PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive would sell a combined total of eight million units in 2016. Even now that VR is finally gaining steam, he admits it’s growing faster than his more recent, much more conservative predictions suggested.
So, why should you listen to Jesse Schell?
Well, aside from years of experience being incredibly charismatic and often electrifying to simply listen to, Schell knows that getting things wrong is not only okay, it’s actually part of life with new tech. It’s this spirit of trial and error that’s kept the developer invested in VR for nearly 30 years and, notably, even informed some of his studio, Schell Games, best titles. I Expect You To Die is all about persistence, experimentation and the eventual satisfaction that comes with success. Jesse Schell and the wider Schell Games’ story is much along the same lines.
In fact, Schell’s work with VR extends even further back than when he founded the studio in 2002. He can trace his first memories of hearing about VR back to an early-90’s issue of Mondo 2000 magazine (described in his own words as a “techno-hipster” vibe). From that spark would come three decades of on-again, off-again association with the tech. He attended Carnegie Mellon Information Networking Institute, where he met a professor that was exploring early work in VR. “I asked if he needed any assistance from people who were doing networking work and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m creating the Networked Virtual Art Museum.’ And I said ‘Wow, what’s that?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know but I could probably use some help.'”
VR’s First Quest
The Aladdin ride at DisneyQuest featured a large headset and a haptic chair.
You might imagine that the VR of the 90’s was very different to where we are now. And it’s true that the hardware was clunkier, heavier and much more cumbersome than an Oculus Quest 2. But, to Schell, the differences stop there. “The tracking worked magnetically instead of with video, but you had head tracking, you had hand tracking, you had fewer polygons on the PC, but when you’re on the silicon graphics machine you had about what we have now. The difference is the cost is about 1000 times different. The machines we’re working with were typically $200,000 to $400,000 machines. and now we’re talking about machines that are like, $400 machines and do the same thing.”
And you can very much see that in the projects Schell would work on in the mid-90’s, when he joined the Walt Disney Imagineering team. Imagineering developed a range of projects but one of its primary focuses was on the virtual rides and attractions for DisneyQuest, a somewhat unique addition to Walt Disney World Resort in Florida and, for a time, a standalone location in Chicago too. DisneyQuest was essentially an immersive arcade, with themed rides that used 3D screens or other interactive elements. Two rides, however, used elaborate VR headsets. One was a melee combat game named Ride the Comix and the other was a virtual ride on Aladdin’s Magic Carpet.
Whilst Ride the Comix was developed by an outside studio (though Schell notes there are some interesting direct comparisons to draw with Until You Fall), the developer worked directly on the Aladdin experience. “I learned so much about both game design and VR during that experience,” Schell recalls. “Elements of it, and moments in it, I’m intensely proud of. It was groundbreaking in its use of audio, steering interface, and even a tactile seat.”
But DisneyQuest, overall, was a strange venture for Disney itself. As Schell points out, the Florida location was successful in its 19 years of operation, though the Chicago center was short-lived, struggling to find an audience outside of holidays and weekends. “The biggest problem DisneyQuest had was too much focus on first-time experience,” Schell reasons. “Again and again, we’d ask management, ‘Do you want us to focus on first impression, or on replay?’ And the answer was always first impression. As a result, it was a great time for tourists, but what it needed to survive was a mix of tourists and regulars.”
But the actual tech behind DisneyQuest’s VR experiences was solid, if cumbersome. “I remember sitting at Disney in 1995 and staring at the problem, these magnetic trackers, which were hard to work with, and talking to one of the senior engineers and saying, ‘Why don’t we just do this with video? Why don’t we just use video and track it?’ And he laughed and he’s like ‘Yeah, maybe in 20 years, but the CPU can’t do it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, no, I guess you’re right. It’s gonna be a lot of processing.’ Turns out he was right.”
Once DisneyQuest had launched, however, Schell wouldn’t return to the world of VR for some time. Imagineering’s next project was the family-friendly MMO, Disney ToonTown, and Schell left the group shortly ahead of launch to move out east taking a job back at Carnegie Mellon University to teach at the Entertainment Technology Center. There he would continue to teach about building virtual worlds and critique those his students created. During this time, though, he started up a side gig consulting for some companies on a freelance basis. Old contacts at Disney and others came through to offer some early work eventually, consulting turned into light development work. This became an increasing emphasis. He called the outfit Schell Games.
A New Beginning
But, even as Schell Games was born, Schell himself had no intention of diving back into VR development. “VR had gone really cold because we’d seen what was possible, knew how hard it was to do magnetic tracking and it was really expensive. So it could only work if you’re gonna do entertainment. It was only going to work in location-based situations.”
Instead, Schell Games toiled away for over a decade on various projects, including some different types of experiences that would prove formative to the developer’s identity. Alongside games for the Nintendo DS, the studio would also work on educational and medical apps, with a particular focus on the former. But it wouldn’t be until the summer of 2012, a decade into Schell Games’ existence, that VR would enter the conversation once more. That was, of course, with the help of Oculus’ historic $2.4 million Kickstarter campaign.
“I remember seeing that and thinking, ‘Oh wow, this might be ready’,” Schell recalls. “Because it was working with optical tracking and a number of problems that we had worried about were getting solved.”
And so Schell Games started to do what it does best, to tinker. The developer would host internal game jam weeks where members could work on passion projects. Some members started to work on VR content, but not without a push in the right direction from Schell himself. “That was actually a really important part of it because I was always hype on VR, but a lot of people in the studio were like, ‘Ah, it’s just bad. It’s going to be like the next Kinect.’ So I started working with Jason Pratt, one of our engineers here, and said ‘Hey, see if you can fold together the best of the best experiences we can show people.'”
Some of these experiments led to Schell’s first commercial VR games. A Gear VR port of its ‘choose your own adventure’ sci-fi spoof, Orion Trail, was born out of a joke about how the text-based game would work in VR. It turned out if you ported the game to a virtual screen and then sat players in a Star Trek-style bridge, it worked pretty nicely. Water Bears VR, meanwhile, was an idea Schell himself bought off of some of his students at CMU for an educational grant the studio was applying for. It came to mobile first but the team thought its logic-based, pipe-connecting puzzling would be a great fit for VR.
Despite discovering some incredible experiences (Schell fondly remembers Daniel Ernst’s Blocked In) and working on its own, there was still some pessimism about VR within Schell Games in these early years. Ironically, that skepticism would set the team on the path to its first fully native game designed for VR first and foremost.
“We had somebody working on a prototype and I was like, ‘Okay, now I don’t want any locomotion in this because it’s gonna make people sick. I don’t want to deal with motion sickness. So do teleporting, keep it limited, try and avoid it,'” Schell says.
“And they completely ignored me that they just had you flying all over the place. And I’m like, ‘Whoa, this really makes me sick’. And they’re like ‘Yeah, this is why VR sucks because you can’t go anywhere. You put on the headset and you feel like you’re going to be a superhero and you’re not a superhero, you’re tied to a chair. What kind of superhero gets tied to a chair?'”
“We all looked at each other and said that actually happens all the time, but nobody ever made a game about that.”
No Mr. Schell, I Expect You To Die
The bones of I Expect You To Die were in place much earlier than you might think. The game wouldn’t release until November 2016, when the Oculus Touch controllers first shipped for the Rift. In that iteration it would feature fully interactive levels designed for hand controllers. But, long before that, Schell actually published its prototypes for the game on the now-defunct Oculus Share platform, where developers could release free experiences for the first two Rift development kits.
Its first release was, in Schell’s words, a “weird bookcase room” with some initial mechanics in place. “No one really paid much attention,” he says. “And we were like, ‘That’s okay. Maybe we can do better.’ And so then we worked in one that was a lot richer and had a lot more detail and we put that up and people really started to notice it and it became the highest-rated experience on the site.”
In fact, the demo remained one of the platform’s most popular experiences right up until Share’s demise in early 2016.
For Schell Games, this was a sign it was onto something. And so the team kept pushing the boundaries of what was becoming an escape room-style spy game in which players would have the power of telekinesis. Objects would handle in realistic and expected ways, but you’d be able to grab them from afar and bring them back toward you, or fit puzzle pieces on the other side of the room right in place. This was I Expect You To Die’s super power, a game that delivers richly-detailed and highly interactive environments that you could explore from the comfort of your chair.
More than just a puzzle game, though, Schell was building out a world where challenges had to be solved with real world logic. That’s why the team built cardboard sets that would mimic their virtual levels, so they could more easily get a feel for how things should be proportioned in a world and what would be in the player’s peripheral vision. It’s a perfect distillation of how VR development gets much closer to replicating reality than is necessary on a flatscreen.
The team was also adamant that there should be as few discrepancies between the real and virtual as possible. When I interviewed Schell a little earlier on this year, he spoke a little about that: “I remember on the first game we put in a champagne bottle as a prop and people were like, ‘Oh, great. I want to open it!’ Oh, of course you do. Okay. Now it’s got a cork and you can open it. ‘Now I want to pour out the liquid into a glass!’ Of course you do, now we’ve got to support liquid. Okay. All right. We’re supporting liquid now and ‘Great I poured it out and I can drink this champagne and that’s so cool. Now I’ve got an empty bottle. I want to break it.’ Oh, of course you do. Okay. So now there’s a broken glass. ‘Oh, okay, I want to take this broken glass, use it as a knife and cut this wire.’ Oh, of course you do. Now this is impacting our puzzles, but oh, okay, actually, that’s kind of an interesting side solve that maybe we didn’t think of and think about.”
The attention to detail clearly paid off. Nearly two years after launch, I Expect You To Die had generated $3 million in revenue on PC and PSVR headsets. It went on to launch on Oculus Quest in late 2019, drumming up a further $2 million on that platform alone by mid-2020. Several free levels were released, which Schell says allowed the developer to keep the game at its current price point. And, of course, it’s sequel launched this week, something that precious few VR games have enjoyed in the past five years.
Keep On Fighting
But, for all its success and innovation, I Expect You To Die had been a difficult project. “So we had our success with I Expect You To Die, but we knew the problem of making [it] is that it’s really hard and slow,” Schell says.
“You can’t make good puzzle games fast. You gotta think about them hard, you gotta build prototypes, you gotta do it wrong 50 times, and then you’ve got to polish it and polish and add and add and polish. It just takes really long to do.”
And, for all that work, you don’t get something that’s intensely replayable. A first-time run of I Expect You To Die’s missions could take you a few hours to see through. But, once you know what you’re doing, repeated playthroughs could take mere minutes. For its next project, then, Schell Games wanted to make something that players could go back to time and again.
“I always felt like the fantasy of sword fighting is a strong fantasy,” Schell says. “It’s like core to Dungeons & Dragons and so many different games. It’s just a core thing that video games have always delivered on pretty poorly.”
Plenty of VR games had looked into sword fighting, of course. Early hits like Vanishing Realms remain some of the best experiences for headsets, even. But plenty of other experiences suffered from poor implementation. Schell calls it the “waggle problem”; the idea that you can just stick your hand in an enemy, waggle it about and they’ll die in no time. That, Schell points out, isn’t sword fighting. But, without haptic feedback to help inform a player’s movements, how could you possibly make sword fighting work in VR?
“We can create tactile feedback in VR because every human being is already wearing a tactile suit and it’s made of muscles,” Schell says. “And if we can figure out ways to activate it, we can actually create tactile feedback.”
That was the basis for Until You Fall, a radically different experience to I Expect You To Die. Players would tackle an endlessly replayable dungeon, facing down different types of enemies in arcade-style melee combat. But the key to the game’s fighting was that it was lightning quick and reactionary – players would first block a series of attacks telegraphed by on-screen indicators. Eventually an enemy would tire and you could get in some fast-fire swipes. By keeping the combat light with only momentary contact between blades, Schell wanted to trick players into a sense of impact.
“When you know [where an attack is coming from] it creates a desire in you to move your weapons to that spot and stop. And when you quickly move a muscle and then stop your body, does this kind of pulse thing at the end, because that’s just how muscles work. And it sounds silly, but that pulse thing feels tactile, not necessarily the conscious level, but it’s at an unconscious level. It feels the clunk as you move your arm around. So we basically built a whole game around this notion of this, in this feeling of a thing that’s halfway between a rhythm game and an action game.”
Until You Fall took this concept and ran with it, creating one of VR’s most playable experiences (that still sits in our list of the 25 best VR games). The entire game is one big exercise in wish fulfilment, from slicing through the hordes of enemies to even little things like picking up a powerup and crushing it in your hand to activate it.
“To me, honestly, it is my favorite VR game of all time,” Schell says. “I’ve played it more than I’ve ever played any other VR game and not just because I had to work on it, but just because I just really enjoyed it. The whole, the way it involves your whole body. It’s just exhilarating, like physical activity in a virtual world can be really exhilarating and be really rewarding.”
Until You Fall was successful on a sales front, if not the runaway hit Schell had seen with I Expect You To Die, but the studio is planning more content in the future.
VR’s Lift Off
Perhaps what’s most surprising about Schell Games is that it has these two tentpole VR releases, with a sequel out to one of them, but it’s far from the only work the team’s done and doing in VR. Alongside those early mobile VR releases there’s been work in AR with Lenovo’s Jedi Challenges and Magic Leap, partnerships with Google for Daydream titles and Lego for more VR. The team’s also retained its focus on educational experiences, putting out Chemistry experimentation app, HoloLAB Champions in 2018 and HistoryMaker VR last year.
“VR is a tool for education,” Schell told me in a previous interview. “It’s an incredible tool for that. However, practically, so far that’s been in the realm of experimentation, the platforms that have been out, the PSVR and the Vive, the Quest, none of them are particularly friendly to educational institutions. None of them are designed for that. So that’s a little bit of an uphill battle market-wise to figure that out, but that’s going to come, that’s going to happen.”
So, no, Schell hasn’t always got things right. And, like every other VR developer, the path hasn’t always been easy. Schell, prone to firing off great quotes, once said that if Oculus Quest couldn’t make it the industry should “hang it up”. But Quest has succeeded, and it’s succeeded faster than the developer had predicted. Now Schell Games doesn’t have any reservations about pushing on in VR.
“We spent years trying to get the rocket to take off and now the rocket is launching and flying across the sky and we’re not going to jump out now,” Schell says. “We’re going to go, we’re going to ride this thing.”
“And for me, this is personally important because I really believe in the medium of video games. I believe in video games as just a powerful means of artistic human expression and VR is the most immersive most powerful video game experience there is. It might not be the number one most lucrative, but it’ll be in terms of human experiences that can be had and artistic experiences that can be created it’s going to be the sort of the vanguard and the most powerful and the best in the world.”
Schell Games’ VR sword-fighting game, Until You Fall, does have more content planned, but the studio is waiting for the right time to release it.
CEO and founder Jesse Schell confirmed as much to us in an interview this week. When asked if there were plans to expand the game, Schell instantly replied “Absolutely.”
The problem, however, is deciding when the market is big enough to push a premium expansion for the game. “Because we designed it to be an expandable game. It’s something that we really wanted to do, but of course it’s a very luscious game. So the expansions, they’re not free, it is a lot of work and we’ve done a little bit, we’ve added some things, over time,” Schell explained.
“Where we are right now basically is as a studio internally, we have to struggle with okay, are we adding more to Until You Fall right now? Are we spinning up a new title because maybe that’s going to be a better way to have a little more success because Until You Fall has been successful, but it hasn’t been through the roof successful.”
As part of its decision-making process, Schell revealed that the team has been watching the performance of expansions and updates to similar titles, and how the small but temporary spike in sales might not be enough to justify releasing content at VR’s current size.
“And so as an independent studio where we have to watch every penny, we have to be really careful,” he said. “We want to expand Until You Fall, I’m dying to expand Until You Fall, but we’re not sure the market is quite big enough for that to make economic sense right at the moment. And then we’ve got stuff in the pipe, almost ready to go, but we want to release it at the right time. We’re very much we’re working on those plans right now.”
Until You Fall remains one of our favorite VR titles, with fast-paced, addictive arcade action and a satisfying gameplay loop. Even in its current form, we give it our full recommendation.
“I think as each day goes by and the VR market gets bigger and bigger, we’re gonna have more and more pressure to like, yeah, get those expansions out that start to grow this thing,” Schell concluded. “So that’s just the tension we have internally. Should we be spinning up new titles for the future or should we be growing up what we’ve already got, and it’s something we think about every day.”
Fingers crossed we see some Until You Fall DLC sooner rather than later, then.
I ExpectYou To Die 2: The Spy and the Liar is launching on August 24th for all major headsets and is shaping up to be a must-buy sequel.
Earlier this summer Jamie Feltham tried out a tiny slice of the title from Pittsburgh-based Schell Games and now we’ve played through half of its six mission story arc. We’re going to avoid spoilers, but we’ve tried enough of this seated experience to say that if you enjoyed the first I Expect You To Die, this is looking like exactly what you’d want out of a sequel to its inventive escape room-like puzzles.
The game is priced $24.99 on SteamVR, Oculus Quest and PlayStation VR with a 10% discount on PSVR and Quest if you pre-order. Schell released a new mixed reality trailer with the launch date announcement today that you can check out below:
The title includes the voice talent of Wil Wheaton and the studio released a video last month showing the opening credits with a song performed by Puddles Pity Party.
The developers of I Expect You To Die 2 have a remarkable knack for puzzles that can be both frustrating and rewarding, requiring you to think creatively about your surroundings and alternating between periods of long contemplation and suddenly rushed panic. For about 15 minutes I found myself going through a pile of items on the floor in one of the missions and afraid to open a drawer that led to my death previously — only to realize the solution was right where I expected it to be all along. It is incredible how VR can test patience in unexpected ways — if you die in this game you go back to the beginning of the puzzle. If it took you 20 minutes and 10 tries to get through a section, once you know the path the correct steps will get you back in mere seconds. But your brain still has a stinging memory of those failed attempts and it might feel impossible to fight off the anger of needing to go through it all again, even if it just takes a few seconds.
That’s what to expect from I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy And The Liar. We can’t wait to finish off the rest of the story and will have a full review for you when the game launches on August 24th!
Yes, the Pittsburgh-based studio puts out games to please the masses but, for Schell, that’s only one small part of a wider VR strategy. Educational VR content is a big focus for the team which, for example, and a long history of working with the tech helps CEO Jesse Schell speak from a place of authority when he surveys the future of the industry. It’s also now working on that almost-unheard of thing; a sequel to a very successful VR game.
In another words, Schell has a lot to talk about.
So we sat down with Schell and IEYTD2 project director, Charlie Amis, over a webcall. Below is our full transcript covering the origins of the new game, the direction Quest 2 is taking VR, and where we might be in the next five years.
Upload: Hi both, great to be talking with you. How are you holding up with the current state of things?
Charlie Amis: I’m glad the pandemic happened back March and not now. Because now we’ve got some good systems, we’re all a little bit more used to it and we needed some stability.
I know it’s a weird time, but at least it’s a little bit expected as to what’s happening and how people are running their lives these days.
Upload: Has all of I Expect You To Die 2 been developed under the pandemic then?
Amis: Just about, we went through a concept phase beforehand in kind of the fall of 2019. And then we went into alpha on our first level the day we all headed home
Upload: This is very interesting because I just realized, I had been thinking about this completely obliviously. My first question was going to be – did you build physical sets again, like you did for the first one, but then I’ve just remembered that you were all isolating and that can’t of happened.
Amis: There’s a couple of pieces. One is because of the first game, we had a lot more in-engine, ready to go prototyping abilities. So if we wanted to make something quick, we could just use a lot of those systems we already had.
However, in cases of wanting to rapidly and cooperatively make a level design — a set — especially one that’s in a first-person VR perspective, we used a couple of other tools like SculptrVR. We were using ScluptrVR a little bit while still at the studio. Kind of just as an experiment to see what it would feel like to cooperatively build some things and found that– well, obviously we didn’t make anything we would then be able to like import it into Unity or even want to do that.
But it did get us very quickly to realize we were thinking of different spaces or the scale of spaces was often in our imaginations and by all being in there and like the sitting in the seats like: “Oh yeah, I see it. We should see a little bit of the wing over to our left and if the cabin’s this big, like that could work.” So it got us to like a vision alignment way, way faster.
Upload: It does sound like something that wouldn’t have been possible had the pandemic happened back in 2016, 2015, when you were working on the first game. It’s very fortunate that more of this VR technology had moved forward and I guess some of your own development techniques as well would have helped with that, right?
Jesse Schell: Yeah. I think in general, we’ve found that during the pandemic, working from home is really hard when you’re trying to spin something new up. But when you got momentum on something and everybody can kind of go home and do it, and everybody’s already on the same page and everybody already has a sense of best practices? Those are the projects that have been easier to do during the pandemic.
So yeah, if we were trying to birth this thing in this sort of separated from home world, I think we would have struggled a lot. And so we feel very blessed to be able to work on something that already has such strong momentum
Upload: So would it be fair to say that, because of the pandemic, I Expect You To Die 2 exists, would it have been maybe another product that we’d be talking about right now if you’d all been in the office for the past year?
Schell: I don’t think so. We’d started that beforehand, right Charlie?,
Amis: We had, we started it right after we finished with the last level of the first game. And that was still in the like September of 2019, when we had a few months of just a very small team putting together the idea for this. And then we’re like, “All right, we’re ready to build it!” Then it was: “Everybody go home.”
Schell: And I think a better way to put it as I Expect You To Die is an unstoppable force that even a pandemic can’t shut down.
Upload: Talking about those new development techniques and everything, then, so much has happened in VR in the past, four years. Things like Boneworks have come along and really kind of pushed forward physics. I’d love to know– obviously you guys, kept iterating on that first game and kept adding those new levels, but is there stuff in this game that you’re tapping into? Development techniques that we’ve seen in the past, like two or three years coming about that we didn’t really know about in 2016?
Schell: Well, I mean, I guess I’d put out there, one of the big changes for us is the presence of the Quest, right? It used to be, we went on in this assuming “Oh yeah. PC VR is going to be– that’s where you start, and maybe you do something else.” And the Quest is the center of the VR universe right now, and it has certain limitations.
And so definitely, in terms of what’s had an effect on our development is making things that can excel and be excellent within the constraints of the Quest. That’s something that is very different than when we started the original game.
Upload: That’s gonna happen a big impact on it, for sure. But you can also go the other way then with Quest and say, “Well, at the same time, players won’t have a wire, so maybe our design can be a little freer.” Is that something that you guys considered? Or was it because you’re also potentially coming to PC and PSVR, you have to keep within those constraints as well.
Amis: Yeah, we certainly want the largest group of people to be able to play this. So it was important to us to support even still wired headsets. At the same time, we know that Quest players love to explore the space, and for the original game, if you get up out your seat and walk around it wasn’t really designed to do that.
So we’ve tried to keep that in mind. How will we handle that? Well, how can we create scenarios that are fun in Quests but don’t break for wired devices or front-facing devices like the PSVR? I think we’ve found a good space where if you loved the original, you’re really gonna love the second one, but there are a lot of iterative improvements; new things, quality of life features that make it even better.
Schell: And as much as moving around is fun, like Charlie says it can be limiting for some people. Like I know I have a hard time in the way my house is set up finding a space that’s 10 foot by 10 foot clear space. That’s a real challenge.
And so there are games I ended up shying away from because I don’t really have that space. So we know that the less space required the more likely people are going to drop in and try it. And then further, the nature of a puzzle game in some ways is better suited to a seated experience because something that happens in puzzle games is there are times you have to stop and think. And you just have to be kind of “Ooh, what am I going to do?”
And if you have to stand up while you’re doing that, you start to become a little conscious of it. You start to get fidgety, you start to feel like– you just don’t feel great about yourself. But if you’re kind of seated and you can kind of lean back and play with some of the virtual toys in the environment. It’s almost like you cozy into the world.
I know that sounds a little weird. And so it’s a thing we think about. So like for us, the big contrast is I Expect You To Die versus Until You Fall, our sword fighting game, which that one’s very, very much being about on your feet and taking advantage of the energy that you have on your feet.
This is much more about playing with the contrast of sometimes on relaxing, but then sometimes a tense moment, but now back to relaxing again. It’s interesting, but we questioned do we want to stay seated for the second game, but after kind of going through it, we felt now that feels like part of what this is about.
Upload: And what was it about the response to the first game that led you to greenlight this game, essentially? I mean, obviously we know from your stories in the past that it’s made a bunch of money, but apart from that– stuff like player retention or any kinds of interesting stats there that you might have found were like unique to your game in VR, perhaps that really showed the encouraging signs for a sequel.
Schell: Well we were seeing that people loved it. Because when the game first came out, it only had four levels. And we started just dropping free levels onto it. We added level five, level six, level seven onto it, one by one, not paid DLC, just free to keep people interested, keep people talking. And then further, we always just try to help the game find its right size, you know, and doing that– that game came out four years ago and it’s kept people’s interests. It’s kept people excited about it.
And sort of seeing that we could add levels and it would work gave us huge confidence that adding a sequel could work well.
Upload: Take me through some of the stats for this one. How many levels are you guys expecting there to be at launch and are there plans for post-launch drops again and whatnot?
Schell: So yeah we’re not quite ready to talk about exactly what all is going to be in the new game, but that we’ll be talking about that soon. As for post-launch levels, I think that’s a thing we’re still trying to decide and trying to figure out.
Because previously we were dropping those levels just because, you know, we were sort of spinning the thing up from nothing and here we’re able to do things a little differently than we were had done before.
So I think we’re going to wait and see, and a lot depends on what happens with the Quest market over the coming year, how are things going.
Amis: One of the goals for the project was for it to have kind of a cinematic feeling of like being in a spy movie. And so it was less about number of levels and the way the first one was where it was really easy to add a new scenario. This one was really built from the beginning as a single whole to feel like one experience, as opposed to episodic. And I think that’s really gonna come through and be part of what makes it feel like a sequel too.
Upload: Were there any kind of comments, criticisms about the first one that you’re trying to improve on here? I mean the first one is very much a trial and error based thing, but that sounds like that really resonated with players the first time round.
Amis: So a lot of experimentation went into the first one and we have some levels that stress certain kind of puzzle-solving or kind of action like our submarine level has a lot more time-based actions, really close interactions. And the lodge level is much more kind of role-playing and spatial. The puzzles are a bit easier and they kind of tell a story.
And we found in asking people, what’s your favorite level from the first game? There was some camps of people who love the lodge and maybe they never died, they beat it first try, but had a great experience and really dislike the submarine because they had to keep playing it over and over again.
And then the opposite – people that loved the challenge of submarine and if they don’t die in a level it’s too easy, not interested.
This time around, we tried to smooth that out a bit so that it appeals to both of those camps in different ways. It’s really important to me that people don’t get stuck and frustrated, put the game down for a while and maybe never come back. I’d rather them all finish even if one or two puzzles are a little easy but the solve was clever, it was cool, it resulted in a big explosion or fun moment and they get all the way through and have that experience that they can share with their friends rather than I was fine until I got stuck and I gave up.
Upload: Yeah. I mean that’s interesting because one of the great challenges with VR puzzle games, I think is– we were talking earlier about how you get stuck, you need to think, and you’re standing up and you get fidgety. I get immensely frustrated. And actually one of the biggest drivers of VR nausea for me is confusion.
And when I’m in a VR puzzle experience and I don’t know what I’m doing I just get hot headed and I immediately don’t want to be there essentially. So it’s good to hear you talk about that because I do think the first game was actually pretty successful when navigating some of those issues in the first place, but it’s something to really think about, isn’t it?
Schell: Oh yeah definitely. And what we’ve tried, all along through the whole cycle of all these games, is constantly looking for what do people actually like? What do they actually enjoy? And you can’t just go in with preconceived notions about it. You have to have people play and you watch it and you see what they like.
And it’s often things that don’t seem important, like the sandwich and the fact that you know, that you bring it to your mouth and you can eat the sandwich. Like that wasn’t a thing that we came in with. What happened was we put a sandwich in as a prop because it seemed appropriate.
And then we saw people would try and eat it. And when they couldn’t, they would be disappointed. So, “Oh, okay. What if we add that?” And, and so, so much of the game happens that way. What do people want to do? What are they trying to do in here? And let’s see if we can support that as we, as we learn about it.
And it doesn’t always mean that it’s what we thought it was going to be. But by doing that over and over and over, eventually you get something where people are very comfortable because all the things they try and do are supported.
Amis: That’s the primary design direction for our alternate solves, our souvenirs, for some of the extra ways you can solve things. We try not to design those and instead have the playtesters, you know, try out things. And then when they try something that we don’t support, we go “Oh, let’s support that one.” The likelihood that someone else is going to try that is so much more likely than if we designed a thing that we thought was clever.
Schell: And it takes so much patience. Like I remember on the first game we put in a champagne bottle as a prop and people were like, “Oh, great. I want to open it!” Oh, of course you do. Okay. Now it’s got a cork and you can open it. “Now I want to pour out the liquid into a glass!” Of course you do, now we’ve got to support liquid. Okay. All right. We’re supporting liquid now and “Great I poured it out and I can drink this champagne and that’s so cool. Now I’ve got an empty bottle. I want to break it.” Oh, of course you do. Okay. So now there’s a broken glass. “Oh, okay, I want to take this broken glass, use it as a knife and cut this wire.” Oh, of course you do. Now this is impacting our puzzles, but oh, okay, actually, that’s kind of an interesting side solve that maybe we didn’t think of and think about.
And so you just keep going and going and going down this road and you do enough of that and things feel really good.
Upload: That’s what VR development is though, especially for guys like you, that started at the very beginning. You’re building almost an encyclopedia of reality and the next time someone wants to interact with glass, you’ve already gone and done that work. If you wanted to, you can make a whole game around smashing glass now or whatever.
Schell: And I would say it’s so it’s funny. You can point quite directly. The submarine level, which we did later. That was one of the last ones that we did that we initially did, but it has a lot of fluids in it. It’s got fuel and you’re getting flooded and all of that. And that all came from the champagne bottle in the first level. Because we start realized we needed fluids to support that champagne play and that opened up a door for fluid puzzles in the later levels. So yeah, I think exactly what you described is true. That as we develop these new modules and ways of working, we can kind of– we look at them and say, “Oh, well, how can we, how can we make use of that?”
Upload: Let’s move on to some of the kind of more industry-focused topics then. I mean, sticking with the game, would it exist if it wasn’t for Quest and Quest 2? Would you be making this or would you have packed your bags and left VR by now, do you think?
Schell: Oh man, there’s a question. I don’t know if we would have made the level of investment that we’re making into the sequel if Quest wasn’t where it is. It’s an interesting question. Where would VR be right now if that hadn’t happened? And that’s actually a little hard to know for certain.
I certainly think it would have made us more conservative. I think we might’ve taken a slower path with this or looked for publisher support instead of doing it independently. Or maybe we would have waited to see a little longer. I’m not sure, but without a doubt, I think this title coming out, the amount of investment we’re putting into it and the timeline that it’s on, that wouldn’t be happening without the Quest.
Upload: I was going back over some of the interviews we’ve had with you in the past today. And there were things like you predicted maybe Quests would sell a million units in 2019, that VR uptake hadn’t perhaps quite been what you would have expected that to have been at that point in 2019.
And now it seems to potentially maybe even gone almost the other way with the release, especially of the Quest 2, which is such almost an unnaturally good bit of value as a piece of hardware, right that it’s, single-handedly moving the curve like that.
Schell: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I made some predictions a few years ago about how VR was going to play out and it’s been going more slowly than I had predicted. But then at the same time, the Quest has taken it the other direction and the growth that is happening due to that platform is going faster than what I predicted.
So while we all– I’ve always referred to the PC VR console VR, I refer to that stuff as parasite VR. Even when you had the Google Cardboard, those are all devices, PCs, and phones and game consoles, none of those were designed for VR and VR is kind of parasiting onto them.
But the Quest is different. It was designed for VR. This is designed for this specific purpose and is meeting that purpose really, really well. And so while I predicted that that was the future, that that’s where things were going, I didn’t think it would be adopted this fast. I didn’t think the price point would be this low. And I certainly didn’t think we’d see such a change in the buying and playing behavior because that’s, this is something that I think a lot of people aren’t aware of.
It’s not just that a lot of Quest units, a lot of Quest headsets are being sold. The people who have a Quest buy more games and play more games than people on PSVR or on PC VR and as a result that makes it just a great environment for developers because you move more units and people are engaging with your game more.
Upload: And I feel like along with the hardware and the price point, that’s also, a result of some potentially controversial policies like, you know, curation on, on Quest was especially tight right out the door for the store. It’s something I wanted to ask you about — as great as it is with Quest out the door and doing so well, I don’t know where to look for competition at the moment in the VR market. A couple of days ago, I was thinking about if Google would have hung in there for another year or two, they might have been, you know, up there competing with Quest 2 right now.
I want to ask how much of a concern that is for you guys at this point. And, I guess maybe where you think– if you think competition’s coming in the next year or two and how important it is to you.
Schell: Man this is a great question. We would love competition in this space. Because as a developer, when there’s competing console makers or platform holders, you basically have an opportunity to kind of pit them against each other a little bit and kind of figure out “Which one’s better for me.” And the market starts to segment and all of that happens.
That is definitely not where we are right now. We’re in a place where Oculus is kind of the dominant– the only force in this situation. And it’s a great platform and they’re managing it super well and you mentioned how they curated very strongly. And honestly, as a developer, that’s spectacular because when you throw the gates wide, suddenly you’ve got games sold for 20 cents and it becomes this bloodbath.
Whereas when it’s well-curated, if you’re in the store with high-quality stuff, you can make clearer predictions about how your title’s going to do, and it gives you a lot more confidence. And so you can build higher quality titles because you can invest more because you have a better chance of knowing you’re going to do well.
So for this time, that part’s really great. We all hope the competition’s coming. It seems like it has to, because other people are going to see what’s happening here. They’re going to see how successful this is. Where it’s going to come from is not clear. We just had CES go by and we haven’t really seen, nobody showed up and said “Ta-da! Here we are with the new thing, that’s going to really compete with it strongly.”
Because I think it kind of caught a lot of people in their back foot. They watched the Oculus Go and then watched it go. And they said, “Well, there it goes.” And it didn’t impress anybody. And then the Quest came after that people thought this is going to be another Go.
Nope, it’s something else. So it’ll be really interesting to see, but it feels like Oculus has, I don’t know, at least a year in order to kind of take hold of this market. It’ll be very interesting to see who shows up in a strong way. Everyone’s speculating, like is Sony going to make a move? Is Apple gonna make a move? Is it going to be some Asian company is going to suddenly appear with a headset that’s really going to catch people’s interest?
Because it’s not trivial, you have to show up with a headset that works great, but then you also have to have the store and then you have to have relationships with developers and there’s a lot to it. So we’re all very excited to see what happens next.
Upload: I mean, something I’m looking forward to, as you know, as the industry grows is moving beyond gaming and the other types of VR content out there can really start to flourish, hopefully. And obviously that’s something that you guys are interested in with your education apps and whatnot. You put one out recently and I’d love to know, you know, where your headspace is with that kind of content right now. Like, do you have expectations for that kind of software you put out there? Is it meeting those expectations? Do you again, do you want that to go faster? Is it going faster than you expected or is it going slower than you expected?
Schell: Yeah VR is a tool for education. It’s an incredible tool for that. However, practically, so far that’s been in the realm of experimentation, the platforms that have been out, the PSVR and the Vive, the Quest, none of them are particularly friendly to educational institutions. None of them are designed for that. So that’s a little bit of an uphill battle market-wise to figure that out, but that’s going to come, that’s going to happen.
Our focus has been on let’s figure out what’s actually possible and let’s find ways to make stuff that’s good and see how that– does it work? We have looked at this less as let’s go in on educational stuff cause we know it’s going to make money now, but rather let’s figure out the right way to do this so when the market is there, we’re already experts in the space and we’re ready to go and able to just start making great content.
So we already did Hololab Champions, which is our chemistry lab VR experience. And then we did History Makers where you get to become these historical personages and then you make speeches.
Now it doesn’t sound very exciting because it’s not a game, really it’s a creative tool. It basically lets you become these animated characters and make speeches and pop them out to YouTube. So again, just more of a creative tool to use. So for us, the educational stuff is more experimental, but educational games has always been a really important part of what we do at Schell Games.
We think there’s a huge future in it. So we’re not too concerned that that’s just not the hottest part of the industry right now.
Upload: Just summing up then it it’d be great to hear from the both of you in, let’s say let’s look five years out, considering everything that’s happened in the past two years, the way that Quest has changed the game. Are you positive about the outlook for VR in the next five years? Do you have predictions about where we might be? Are you concerned about pitfalls that we might fall into in the next 12 or so months? Or what, what are you looking forward to essentially?
Amis: I’m excited for more people getting into it. Like, I feel like the Quest 2 already is an amazing piece of magical hardware that most people don’t even know exists. And if they just get it on their head, they will have that eye-opening moment that, you know, I had playing an early, wired Rift. So I think that’s likely the biggest change that’ll happen in the coming years is obviously the hardware will get better, the prices will be great, and there’ll be more and more compelling games in the library.
But the biggest change that I want to see and I think will happen is having it become ubiquitous having it be just about everywhere and for sites that cover games to always have a VR section. Then it’s just, “Oh yeah, that’s another way of playing games now.”
Or it’s another way of hanging out socially or it’s another way of working. There’s some really good telecommuting software in VR. I think that’s, that’s, what’s likely to happen that doesn’t require some like massive advancement in technology.
Schell: One thing I think about, I often think about the number of 10 million as being a really important number because when there’s 10 million of something out in the world, Probably one of your friends has it. And when there’s less than 10 million, probably none of your friends has it. And VR is in that less than 10 million zone right now. So even if you get a headset, probably none of your friends has it. And what that means is your ability to use it in a social way is really limited. You can interact with people, but it’s going to be with people you don’t know they’re going to be strangers and you can do that.
But as we’ve seen with social media, et cetera, most of the powerful interactions happen with people you know. So when VR can cross that 10 million mark so that anytime somebody buys it, some of their friends already have it, you get this snowball effect and we’ve seen it in PC. We’ve seen it in mobile.
Like this is a real phenomenon and it’s going to be coming within the next five years. That’s certainly true. It’s just the debate, is that four years from now? Is it two years from now? When is it? Because once that happens, then you start to get powerful multiplayer experiences that people really engage with.
And that’s important because we talk about spatial immersion in VR, I really feel like I’m in a space, and we talked about hand immersion, I really feel like I’m manipulating things with my hands, but then there’s also a really powerful social immersion, when you feel like someone else is in the space with you. And it’s a stronger, more intimate connection than we’ve had in any other media.
It’s stronger than the connection you have playing flat screen games. It’s stronger than just having a zoom phone call. There’s something really special in it. And I think it’s really going to stick with people. And one of the things I always think about is the people who own a technology are the people who are teenagers when it comes out.
They’re the ones that are going to own that technology for the rest of their life. People who are older than that, they can kind of start to use it but they don’t own it in the same way. And just like we watch Roblox right now. You watch these kids doing Roblox. Most adult gamers have no concept of Roblox.
And when they see it, they’re like, that looks ugly and weird, but it is this force, right? People say, “Oh, the metaverse one day, we’re going to have these social things happening online and people building worlds.” Like, it’s happening now in there.
So what I feel like we’re seeing is you’ve got these 10 to 15 year olds who were in there playing Roblox in a couple of years they’re going to start to be able to afford and start to try VR. And when that 10 million markets crossed, they’re going to be like, “Where’s my VR Roblox?” And we’re going to start to see these user-generated content societies start to kind of form and become really solid and really powerful because of the way people will be able to interact and connect.
In 2019, VR wasn’t where Jesse Schell thought it would be.
We all know this story; slow uptake of PC VR headsets and the modest launch of Sony’s PSVR didn’t measure up to the analyst projections and business bets. Even decades of experience in VR — spanning all the way back to his time at Disney Imagineering in the mid-90’s — hadn’t given the Schell Games CEO the insight to buck that trend. He admitted as much to Upload when we spoke in January 2019.
In that same interview, though, Schell cited a new hope in Facebook’s Oculus Quest. The then-soon-to-launch standalone headset represented a turning point for the VR industry, doing away with the need for PCs and consoles. And so Schell once again made a bet on the speed of VR’s growth.
Today he says he was wrong again – this time in a good way.
“I made some predictions a few years ago about how VR was going to play out and it’s been going more slowly than I had predicted,” Schell says over a web call. “But then at the same time, the Quest has taken it the other direction and the growth that is happening due to that platform is going faster than what I predicted.”
Sales stats for Quest and the recently-launched Quest 2 aren’t known, though Schell Games’ Until You Fall and I Expect You To Die have both generated more than $1 million in revenue on the platform. It’s encouraging enough that Schell is investing in a sequel to the latter, due to hit headsets later this year. That’s something the company isn’t sure it would have done so boldly were it not for the new platform.
“[Quest] is designed for this specific purpose and is meeting that purpose really, really well,” the developer continued. “And so while I predicted that that was the future, that that’s where things were going, I didn’t think it would be adopted this fast. I didn’t think the price point would be this low. And I certainly didn’t think we’d see such a change in the buying and playing behavior because that’s, this is something that I think a lot of people aren’t aware of.”
This is key. Much of the focus behind VR developer success stories has been paid to how well Quest is selling. But it’s not just that there are lots of units out there, Schell says, its also that owners are buying lots of content. “The people who have a Quest buy more games and play more games than people on PSVR or on PC VR and as a result that makes it just a great environment for developers because you move more units and people are engaging with your game more.”
Schell’s also supportive of Facebook’s strict curation policy for the platform, which he says has helped drive those strong sales, but expresses concern about the company being “the only force” in VR right now. Quest, he says, caught people on the backfoot after other headsets failed to capture the market. “They watched the Oculus Go and then watched it go. And they said, ‘Well, there it goes.’ And it didn’t impress anybody. And then the Quest came after that people thought this is going to be another Go.”
It’s a sequence of events that Schell thinks has bought Facebook “at least a year” to take hold of the market.
One thing Schell is sure of now, though, is that VR will make it to mainstream. It might be three years, it might be five, but he’s certain headsets like Quest will get to a point that they sell 10 million units. Why such a specific number? “When there’s 10 million of something out in the world, probably one of your friends has it,” Schell reasons. “And when there’s less than 10 million, probably none of your friends has it. And VR is in that less than 10 million zone right now.”
Reaching the milestone is critical for where Schell sees VR going next. “One of the things I always think about is the people who own a technology are the people who are teenagers when it comes out,” he says. “They’re the ones that are going to own that technology for the rest of their life. People who are older than that, they can kind of start to use it but they don’t own it in the same way.”
One day, Schell reasons, it’s that audience that will popularize the content that will really set VR apart. “You watch these kids doing Roblox. Most adult gamers have no concept of Roblox and when they see it, they’re like, that looks ugly and weird, but it is this force, right? People say, ‘Oh, the metaverse. One day, we’re going to have these social things happening online and people building worlds.’ Like, it’s happening now in there.”
“So what I feel like we’re seeing is you’ve got these 10 to 15 year olds who were in there playing Roblox in a couple of years they’re going to start to be able to afford and start to try VR. And when that 10 million mark gets crossed, they’re going to be like, ‘Where’s my VR Roblox?’ And we’re going to start to see these user-generated content societies start to kind of form and become really solid and really powerful because of the way people will be able to interact and connect.”
Before Schell Games’ I Expect You To Die came to virtual reality, it was first realized in CR – cardboard reality.
The team constructed crude physical versions of its levels out of old boxes. Scribbled labels turned leftover Amazon parcels into complex machinery, with bottle tops becoming the dials and buttons to operate them. It’s not unlike how Hideo Kojima made Lego dioramas to plan out levels of Metal Gear Solid 2, only Schell’s sets were life-size.
This process helped the team map out space and interactions for some of the most inventive puzzles VR has yet seen, highlighting just how different the medium is to traditional games.
I was eager to know if Schell had repeated the process for its sequel, I Expect You To Die 2: The Spy And The Liar, which has been in development for the past year and a bit. But, as I open my mouth to ask that question of Project Director Charlie Amis, I’m reminded a global pandemic would have made that impossible. Fortunately, Schell was already kitted out with the latest gadgets when COVID-19 took hold.
“In cases of wanting to rapidly and cooperatively make a level design — a set — especially one that’s in a first-person VR perspective, we used a couple of other tools like SculptrVR,” Amis explains.
SculptrVR is a VR creation app similar to Tilt Brush or Quill with a specific focus on making 3D models like game assets or even entire environments. Crucially, the platform allows multiple people to explore creations. Schell was essentially trading in cardboard sets for virtual ones.
“It did get us very quickly to realize [different team members] were thinking of different spaces or the scale of spaces was often in our imaginations and by all being in there and sitting in the seats like: “Oh yeah, I see it. We should see a little bit of the wing over to our left and if the cabin’s this big, that could work.” So it got us to like a vision alignment way, way faster,” Amis says.
Like countless other developers around the world, Schell faced several challenges when it moved to remote work in the early months of 2020. But both Amis and studio CEO Jesse Schell count themselves lucky they A. started work on the sequel before lockdown and B. were working on a previously-established foundation instead of an all-new property.
“I think in general, we’ve found that during the pandemic, working from home is really hard when you’re trying to spin something new up,” Schell explains. “But when you got momentum on something and everybody can kind of go home and do it, and everybody’s already on the same page and everybody already has a sense of best practices? Those are the projects that have been easier to do during the pandemic.”
Work on I Expect You To Die 2 started up right after Schell released the final bonus level of the original game in late 2019. Amis wants the sequel to feel more “cinematic” than the original. It aims to be less a collection of levels released far apart (the first game released with four missions and released three free ones over the next three years) and more something that was “built from the beginning as a single whole to feel like one experience, as opposed to episodic.”
Amis hopes that’s what makes the game feel like a sequel. Schell is coy on the number of levels and what’s contained within them, though the trailer above shows a clipboard stopping an arrow dead in its tracks, and one puzzle seems to involve an inviting selection of cheeses.
Another perhaps more ambitious aim for the sequel is to unite the two warring factions behind any puzzle game – those that want hard puzzles and those that don’t. Amis says it’s “really important” that people aren’t hitting roadblocks but also ensuring that solutions are satisfying to appease hardened problem-solvers. That means building worlds, interactions and challenges that are intricate, immersive and feel organic to navigate. In VR, that’s no easy thing.
“I remember on the first game we put in a champagne bottle as a prop and people were like, “Oh, great. I want to open it!” Oh, of course you do. Okay,” Schell says. “Now it’s got a cork and you can open it. “Now I want to pour out the liquid into a glass!” Of course you do, now we’ve got to support liquid. Okay. All right. We’re supporting liquid now and “Great I poured it out and I can drink this champagne and that’s so cool. Now I’ve got an empty bottle. I want to break it.” Oh, of course you do. Okay. So now there’s a broken glass. “Oh, okay, I want to take this broken glass, use it as a knife and cut this wire.” Oh, of course you do. Now this is impacting our puzzles, but oh, okay, actually, that’s kind of an interesting side solve that maybe we didn’t think of and think about.”
And that’s perhaps the most fascinating thing about VR development and the reason I’m looking forward to Schell’s sequel. It’s a journey of discovery as much for the developer as it is the player. Amis says the game isn’t just about certain scenarios that the team internally thought would be cool but the alternate solutions that handing agency over the players results in.
The more you make, the more problems you solve, the more interactions you discover, the closer you’re pushing virtual reality toward our reality. Schell notes that the first game’s submarine level was made possible by the coincidental work it had done on liquids, for example.
Now it’s building an entire game on the rules and breakthroughs that have come before. Here’s hoping it’ll make for Schell’s best mission yet. I Expect You To Die 2 hits VR platforms later on this year.
Schell Games’ upcoming VR puzzle sequel, I Expect You To Die 2, may not have been the game it’s shaping up to be right now if it weren’t for the Oculus Quest.
Speaking to Upload in an interview we’ll have more on this week, CEO Jesse Schell said he wasn’t sure the studio “would have made the level of investment that we’re making into the sequel if Quest wasn’t where it is.”
The original I Expect You To Die, a spy-themed escape room-style VR game, launched for Oculus Rift in November 2016 before coming to SteamVR and PSVR. Nearly two years later in September 2018 it had made $3 million in revenue across those platforms. The game then came to the standalone Quest platform shortly after launch in May 2019 and, in just over a year, had generated $2 million on Quest alone, suggesting this version’s performance was outpacing the other platform’s sales combined. It’s now one of over 60 titles that has generated more than $1 million in revenue on Quest, which also includes Schell’s Until You Fall.
In early 2020, Schell himself said that if Quest couldn’t succeed then the industry should “just all hang it up.” So, with the platform evidently growing in the way he’d hoped, I asked Schell if I Expect You To Die 2 would exist without Quest and Quest 2.
“I certainly think it would have made us more conservative [without Quest],” Schell said. “I think we might’ve taken a slower path with this or looked for publisher support instead of doing it independently. Or maybe we would have waited to see a little longer. I’m not sure, but without a doubt, I think this title coming out, the amount of investment we’re putting into it and the timeline that it’s on, that wouldn’t be happening without the Quest.”
Schell Games hasn’t officially announced release platforms for I Expect You To Die 2 yet but, based on these comments, it’s a good bet it’ll at least come to Quest. The sequel is due out later this year.
Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell thinks that, if Facebook’s Oculus Quest can’t succeed, the VR industry might have to “hang it up.”
Schell said as much in an interview with The Gamer published earlier this month. He reasoned that, in 2020, it was up to Quest to determine if VR could really become a viable market.
“The main thing that we’re all staring at is how is the Quest going to do,” Schell said. “I’ll just be blunt: if the Quest can’t succeed, we should just all hang it up.”
Schell Games remains one of VR’s biggest advocates, having released several titles since the launch of PC VR headsets in 2016. Its VR escape room game, I Expect You To Die, is one of the most popular puzzlers in the medium and came to Oculus Quest last year. Currently the team is working on a PC VR title, Until You Fall, which is due to come to Quest later down the line. It’s fair to say that Schell knows what he’s talking about, then.
“You’re talking about a price point competitive with consoles, excellent tracking, wireless, if this isn’t enough to take VR mainstream VR will never go mainstream, and we should probably all just move on and do something else,” the developer continued. “That said, we’re big believers that this is the time this is going to happen. 2020 is going to be the real proving year.”
In fact, this time last year Schell gave UploadVR a “wild” guess that Quest might sell one million units in 2019. Facebook doesn’t release headset sales figures, so there’s no way of telling if that really happened. That said, the company continues to state that the device is performing well, and it’s been backordered online for some time now.
Do you agree with Schell’s commnts, or do you think VR has more chances in it beyond Quest? Let us know in the comments below!
