Sony London Studio released its action blockbuster Blood & Truth a couple of months ago for PlayStation VR, to near-universal acclaim. If you happen to own the headset and have yet to buy the virtual reality (VR) title then you’re in luck, tomorrow a free demo will be arriving.
The demo will feature the first mission from Blood & Truth, giving players enough of a sample to tempt them into purchasing. Compatible with two PlayStation Move controllers (recommended) or a DualShock 4 controller, the first mission gives a good sense of the action movie-style the studio was aiming to deliver. Players are tasked with infiltrating an enemy compound, engaging in an intense rooftop shootout before taking part in a car chase.
Inspired by London Studio’s PlayStation VR Worlds mini-game The London Heist, Blood & Truth is set in the seedy underbelly of London’s criminal underworld. Players take the role of former Special Forces soldier Ryan Marks who returns to find his family has become involved with a ruthless syndicate and he needs to save them.
Blood & Truth was that good VRFocus gave the videogame a full five star review, commenting: “While you don’t have the freedom of Borderlands 2 VR for example, with Blood & Truth you have a far more focused videogame that knows what it wants to achieve, and that’s put a smile on your face. From start to finish Blood & Truth is one hell of a ride, a finely choreographed John Woo movie that’s all about sheer entertainment.”
It seems the studio also has another surprise in store this month, preparing a new update due to arrive on 25th July that includes some fun post-game extras.
At present Blood & Truth is the biggest exclusive PlayStation VR release of 2019 but there’s plenty more to come, with Iron Man VRand Concrete Genie expected at some point later this year. VRFocus will continue its coverage of PlayStation VR and Sony London Studio, reporting back with the latest updates and announcements.
Last week’s VR Job Hub was all about the US west coast and gaming giant Valve. So for today’s job listings, VRFocus has gone for a more European flavour, sampling some Spanish and British job roles.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on VRFocus at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
One of the biggest PlayStation VR videogame releases in 2019 occurred at the end of May, with the arrival of Blood & Truth. This was the creation of London Studio, part of Sony Worldwide Studios. Today, Sony London Studio has launched a dedicated website for fans to check out what the team is up to.
The studio has a long and illustrious history dating all the way back to its foundation in 2002, with highs and lows along the way. That year saw the launch of The Getaway for PlayStation 2 with the team going onto support the EyeToy digital camera, release the SingStar franchise (2004); begin work on PlayStation Portable content (2005), launch the EyePet franchise (2009) and then augmented reality (AR) book Wonderbook for PlayStation Move and PlayStation Eye.
London Studio has always been at the forefront of PlayStation technology, so it’s no surprise that the team were tasked with creating one of the launch titles for PlayStation VR in 2016, PlayStation VR Worlds. This compilation for five mini-games allowed players to dive beneath the waves in Ocean Descent, take part in illegal street racing in VR Luge, or step into London’s gritty underworld in The London Heist.
It was after the release of PlayStation VR Worlds that the studio hit the gaming headlines, laying off staff as the studio restructured due to the project finishing. But that wasn’t the end of London Studios’ dance with VR as is well known, taking the inspiration behind The London Heist and greatly expanding upon the experience with the rather superb Blood & Truth. A title VRFocus awarded a full five stars to, the review saying: From start to finish Blood & Truth is one hell of a ride, a finely choreographed John Woo movie that’s all about sheer entertainment.
With the new website, fans will be able to connect more directly to the studio, learning about its history, staff, and the behind the scenes work they do. Check out the fancy new video to see the team in action.
There’s nothing juicy on the website at the moment regarding future plans. If there’s no news on there then, of course, don’t forget to return to VRFocus for the latest VR updates.
As the studio behind the excellent PlayStation VR Worlds, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s London Studio has been at the forefront of VR game design since before PSVR even shipped back in 2016. With their latest title, Blood & Truth, the studio sought to deliver its first full-length VR title, and the result is an impressive action-filled journey that delivers the most convincing virtual characters we’ve seen in a VR game to date. To learn from the studio’s approach to VR game design—and to get a glimpse at the artwork that drove and resulted from the game’s development—we spoke with Stuart Whyte, Director of VR Product Development, and Anthony Filice, Art Director, both from Sony’s London Studio.
Editor’s Note: The big, beautiful pictures and exclusive artwork in this article are best viewed on a desktop browser with a large screen, or in landscape orientation on your phone. All images courtesy SIE London Studio.
Although, superficially, making VR games doesn’t seem far removed from making traditional games, truly native VR games aren’t so easily categorized among the non-VR game genres we think of today. You might be tempted to call Blood & Truth a ‘shooter’, but that really wouldn’t do the experience justice.
“I think there are genres and experiences that we have in our minds born out of decades of playing videogames in non-VR scenarios. When you move into VR, you’re effectively creating new genres,” said Stuart Whyte, Director of VR Product Development at Sony’s London studio. “I think we’re closest, in non-VR terms, to the ‘Action Narrative’ genre, but I also think that Blood & Truth, by the nature of the incredible immersiveness you get from PSVR, is much more an experiential game where you get to feel like an Action Hero.”
Image courtesy Sony London Studio
Delivering those action hero moments—like leaping from a collapsing building onto a crane, or paragliding into a restricted area—requires significant planning well before the first geometry of a level even gets modeled. The studio found that storyboarding ideas—creating thumbnail sketches of key moments—for major setpiece was “doubly important” for VR development; the team went so far as to use immersive storyboards which were drawn to be viewed in a VR headset.
“The storyboard allows us to rapidly iterate and test new ideas and angles without burning through lots of time and money. We actually created 360-degree storyboards which helped us place the player in the space and in the headset, and we were able to test things like composition, lighting and colour all in VR,” said Anthony Filice, Art Director at Sony’s London Studio. “Storyboarding [in game development] isn’t anything new, but being able to storyboard in VR is where it’s at. We’re exploring more and more ways to be able to visualize & test our ideas in VR before we actually commit to building. It’s super important to see how things are perceived from the point of view of the player, this way we can see and feel for ourselves what type of senses and emotions are triggered by what we’re creating first hand.”
“Understanding where characters are standing in the scene (rather than in the shot [as would be the case with non-VR]) is super important when the player is the camera,” Whyte said. “Typically, once we had finished the storyboarding stage, we would ‘block out’ using ‘grey box’ (simple basic geometry) the space, level, or scene within our engine so that we could get an early feel as to what the challenges would be and how best to approach.”
In VR, however, the little moments can be just as important as the big moments—interaction drives immersion, but it’s challenging to make a completely interactive world. Blood & Truth uses a node-based locomotion system which lets players move between predetermined points. As well as streamlining player movement, this smartly limits the scope of the objects which the player can potentially interact with. Instead of making every single object in the world interactive, London Studio thus only had to consider interactions of objects within arm’s reach of each node, allowing the studio to pay greater attention to a more tractable number of objects and interactions.
“Setting the visual pillars early on was super important. Those pillars were realism, storytelling and VR immersion. It’s true that the headset will give you some of the VR immersion for free, however to take the immersion to the next level, we had to make some tough calls on where to spend our [development time] for maximum user experience,” said Filice.
As early as the storyboarding phase, London Studio was considering specific object interactions (and how they would drive gameplay moments). | Image courtesy Sony London Studio
“Anything that the player interacts with in a meaningful way—like weapons, ‘box of delights’, and (intractable) clues—all have to be modeled and animated to the highest level. For example, we know the player will scrutinize the guns close up, so we decided to fully articulate and model them down to the screws. In addition to this, we pay particular attention and placed details as easter eggs for the player to find. In one scene, we placed chewing gum under a desk because we know that the player will probably want to look under the desk. There are lots of desks in the game, so I challenge you to find it!”
Weapons in Blood & Truth are finely detailed, right down to custom two-handed grip poses when the player brings both hands together to grip smaller weapons like pistols. Some weapons have easter eggs to discover too, like how the revolver can be ‘fan-fired’ by using a second hand held against the weapon’s hammer. | Image courtesy Sony London Studio
Blood & Truth is set to launch tomorrow, May 28th. As Sony’s next big title after the hit platformer Astro Bot Rescue Mission (2018), the company is putting its best foot forward by featuring the action game in its own PSVR hardware bundle.
At $350, the bundle includes everything you need (minus PS4 or PS4 Pro) to get fully into VR. In the box you’ll find the PSVR headset, PS Camera, two PS Move controllers, Demo Disc 3.0 Disc, and both Blood & Truth Disc and Everybody’s Golf VR game voucher.
We’ve seen quite a bit of Blood & Truth over the past two years. Getting our first taste of the game in late 2017, it was immediately apparent Sony was throwing a good amount of time and money at the project in effort to approach AAA territory. As an outgrowth of the successful demo The London Heist, Blood & Truth is aiming to essentially bring the player into an action movie, replete with guns, explosives, and high octane chase sequences. We have our full review of Blood & Truth coming tomorrow, but it’s safe to say (based on our time with previous demos) that Sony’s London Studio has put a lot of love and polish into the game.
If you’re not fully sold on Blood & Truth (or the strangely positioned Everybody’s Golf VR), there is a cheaper PSVR+ Trover Saves the Universe & Five Nights at Freddy’s VR bundle launching on May 31st, although it doesn’t include PS Move controllers—something that costs around $100 if you buy them separately.
There are still a few older hardware bundles out there if you’re looking for a PSVR on the cheap, although make sure to check whether they include PS Move or not so you’re not stuck having to grab a pair after the fact.
The lead game designer for the studio behind Blood & Truth, Sony London, has been speaking at the Develop: Brighton conference. Michael Hampden addressed attendees on the topic of virtual reality (VR) and what the next few years will bring.
During a talk for the first day of the conference, Hampden said that he expected the future to be bright for VR, with new genres of games emerging from VR, and new development tools being created.
As reported by MCV UK, Hampden said he expected VR to birth entirely new types of videogame, stating: “In the next five years, I think we’ll see some VR killer apps emerge and we’re going to have established a design language. I think we’re going to see some growth in mobile VR as well and medical applications. And one new genre of game will be born, one that will only be possible in VR.”
Looking further ahead, Hampden said he expected that accessories that provided more realism, such as haptic feedback, would make an impact on the VR space: “I think one of the missing key for everyone is haptic feedback. It should makes a giant leap forward and will be a game changer. Feeling an object, the texture, will change the game, it will make things much more immersive and it will allow new genres of VR games to emerge.”
The rise of location-based VR centres was something Hampden also pinpointed as an ongoing trend: “We’ve seen developers switching from doing room scale environment to do location-based experiences. These are things like the Star Wars Secrets of the Empire and stuff like that and it’s pretty interesting to see the ability that this technology brings to users. You can have the ground shaking as the user is walking through the space or you can have wind or temperature changes. These are very powerful and profound experiences that people love and are willing to spend money for, to try something like that. We have a limited number of these experiences out there so far but I think this trend is here to stay and we’ll see more and more location based VR coming in the future.”
For future coverage of developments in the VR industry, keep checking back with VRFocus.
It looks like creative agencies are being asked to find new and innovative ways to incorporate new technologies in order to interact with audiences and customers for brands. This is exactly how Chainsmokers Paris.VR was conceived. Chris Hassell, the founder of Ralph Creative discusses how they dipped their toes in virtual reality (VR) and teases on future augmented reality (AR) and VR projects they’re working on.
Ralph Creative started twelve years ago as a digital agency which, most recently, started to get involved with live events. This led them to nabbing Sony Corporation as one of their clients. With Sony’s involvement not just in the PlayStation VR, but within the music and audio hardware industries, Ralph Creative set out to find a new way of experiencing music through VR as part of Sony’s LostInMusic event.
Hassell explains how the concept of Chainsmokers Paris.VR came from a brand campaign perspective. One thing they did know was that they specifically wanted developers to help them build the experience rather than developers who could build 3D and bring it into VR. They were looking for videogame developers who would be able to build a solid engine for the experience. They soon found Brynley Gibson who had recently left Sony’s London Studio for Kuju and approached him on working on the project. With Kuju on board and Gibson’s knowledge of VR Chainsmokers Paris.VR came out as a well-polished final product. It went on to win Best Branded VR Experience at the Raindance Festival VRX Awards and has been downloaded around the world through the PlayStation Store.
“I remember showing them a preview build and it kinda clicked with them, and they’re like oh right.” Hassell explains, “So it’s remixing as I’m looking around and depending on what I’m looking at and what choices I’m making as we go through the different routes, and I was like yeah! That’s what it was always supposed to be!”.
He adds that the moment they realised what the experience was, they wanted to add more remix stems in order to create more variations of the music. Hassell also says that even though users might not like the music or musicians, there was a lot of appreciation for the experience because it was a new way of experiencing music. VR had truly enhanced the way of listening to music. VRFocus previously discussed the Chainsmokers Paris.VR experience with Gibson and the importance of videogame knowledge when building VR experiences.
When asked about using VR for branded content, Hassell points out that asking a brand to creative a VR experience is difficult. Not only do you have to build a world from the ground up, but it’s a big investment. Why would a brand do that? For Sony it makes sense because the experiences promote their technology and platform. However, for a soft drinks brand it would not. In turn, when it comes to AR there’s no sealed off bubble. It’s adding information on top of an existing world, which would make more sense for a product. He explains that Ralph Creative are currently working with a UK high street restaurant chain that is using AR to enhance the dining experience – avoiding the dragging of taking children away from their parents.
It also looks like Ralph Creative might be doing something with previously shot footage of hit television show Breaking Bad, at least based on one particular tease dropped in the interview.
“There’s a big show, a show that was big a few years ago that was about a chemistry teacher that may turn ‘bad’, in some ways. I can’t possibly say which show it is, but it is set in Alberque. We did some great work for that a few years ago that was world expanding stuff and that we did online episodes that we did interactive, personalised experiences with the lead character. And so, we’re looking at potentially re-using some of that footage in a more modern 360 degree way, so we’re playing with that at the moment.”
It is not confirmed whether this is a new, separate experience or the Breaking Bad experience mentioned last summer as being in the works for PlayStation VR. VRFocus will keep you informed. To find out more about Ralph Creative, watch the video below.
Sony’s London Studio is behind PlayStation VR Worlds (2016), a collection of VR vignettes for PSVR—including the lauded ‘London Heist’—which was included in some of the headset’s launch bundles. With the success of VR Worlds, Sony’s London Studio is doubling down; now in development of Blood & Truth, the spiritual successor to ‘London Heist’, the studio says VR is its top priority.
Since its formation in 2001, London Studio is responsible for a long string of PlayStation titles, including the SingStar franchise, several titles for 2003’s PlayStation EyeToy camera, the ahead-of-its-time PlayStation Home (2008), the augmented reality Wonderbook peripheral, and plenty more.
The studio’s experience in natural input game design culminated in VR Worlds, which the title’s Senior Producer, James Oates, told me is the best selling PSVR title to date (likely including bundled sales). VR Worlds contains a series of five disparate but very well produced VR mini-games. It’s effectively a collection of VR experiences which paint a detailed picture of what kinds of games are possible with VR, and still stands as one of the top rated PSVR titles on the PlayStation store.
The VR Worlds team celebrates the launch of the game along with the President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida. | Image courtesy Sony London Studio
Among the five experiences on VR Worlds—’London Heist’, ‘Ocean Descent’, ‘Scavengers Odyssey’, ‘VR Luge,’ and ‘Dangerball’—its ‘London Heist’ which has turned out to be the single most played experience of the bunch, with around twice as many plays as all of the others combined, Oates told me.
Clearly proud of their work, London Studio celebrates the launch anniversary of VR Worlds | Image courtesy Sony London Studio
It’s no wonder then that London Studio’s next project is Blood & Truth, a new PSVR game bearing many of the hallmarks of ‘London Heist’, but which Oates says will be a “full game” with a much larger scope. “AAA game, AAA production, high quality mocap, proper script, full length,” Oates, who is also Senior Producer on Blood & Truth, rattled off to convey the scope of what the studio is aiming for.
Through smart design in both locomotion and agency, Sony’s London Studio is clearly onto something with big potential. From shooting to exploring, I felt engaged with the world of Blood & Truth, which deeply solidified it in my head as a physical place around me. I began to forget about the Move controllers in my hands and instead thought about lock picking, C4 placement, and how many bullets were left in my magazine. Throughout it all, the Move’s limited tracking performance didn’t once rear its head (an issue I’ve had with other PSVR titles). The real world begins to fade away; immersion takes over. This is what VR is for.
Although Blood & Truth—as an action game set in London—most resembles ‘London Heist’ from VR Worlds, Oates told me that the studio is taking lessons learned about VR game design from across the entire spectrum of the VR Worlds experiences, and is bringing it all to Blood & Truth. The studio’s in-house engine—which is clearly capable of delivering some of the best looking PSVR content to date—is also getting tweaked, tuned, and upgraded for Blood & Truth, and other future VR content from the studio.
‘Blood & Truth’ promises to turn the action up to 11. | Image courtesy Sony
To deliver on that scope and ambition, Oates says London Studio is ramping up in size, and although there’s some other projects in the works, “the bulk of the studio is purely about VR,” he said.
The [London Studio] team’s mission is to lead the way in virtual reality gaming and to continue to grow the PlayStation audience across the platform.
So too do the studio’s latest job listings, currently seeking a broad spectrum of game developers from art, to programming, to Q&A and more.
Though Oates wasn’t ready to talk about what comes next, with VR Worlds under its belt and Blood & Truth on the horizon, he was bullish about the studio’s commitment to VR, calling it London Studio’s “primary focus.”
Yesterday certainly held plenty of surprises for fans of PlayStation VR with Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) releasing a barrage of info on new videogames. As part of its Paris Games Week press conference SIE announced that Sony London Studio is working on a new virtual reality (VR) called Blood & Truth with a short teasing trailer. For those that want to know more about the title a new video has been released interviewing the dev team.
Blood & Truth is the spiritual successor to Sony London Studio’s The London Heist, which featured as part of launch compendium PlayStation VR Worlds. Set in the underground world of London’s organised crime, The London Heist featured a mixture of gameplay mainly revolving around a first-person shooter mechanic, with players involved with car chases and more.
With Blood & Truth this idea has now been expanded with players cast as Ryan Marks, who leaves London for a stint in the army, only to return to find his family has been murdered. Now out for revenge, Marks’ quest will take him through the city’s seedy underbelly, breaking and entering his way into enemy hideouts, casinos and all manner of mayhem.
Players will dual wield pistols and automatic weapons as they gun down enemies as well as finding secret routes and picking locks in order to gain entry to enemy hideouts. As Stuart Whyte, Blood & Truth’s Director explains in the video: “[We wanted to] dial it up to 11, and really just amp up the action.”
In The London Heist players were static for each sequence, so for Blood & Truth they can now move about far more freely, reload, plant explosives while taking enemies out, crawl through vents and loads more, making for a far more interactive and immersive experience.
Exclusive to PlayStation VR, Blood & Truth will require two PlayStation Move motion controllers to play and while no release date has yet been confirmed it’s expected to arrive at some point in 2018.
Check out the interview below and as development continues VRFocus will keep you updated.
Paris Games Week hasn’t officially started yet, but Sony’s pre-PGW keynote saw a number of announcements including Sony London Studio’s spiritual continuation of the highly popular (and all too short) The London Heist, a demo in the VR Worlds demo disc that came along with many PSVR headsets.
Called Blood & Truth, not much is known about the game besides what we’ve seen in the trailer. Like The London Heist, it looks to be heavy on the gunplay, a bit lighter on elements like lock-picking, setting time bombs, and engaging in quick narrative elements like smack talking a sleazy club owner—all of course with the Guy Ritchie-style Cockney swagger that fans have craved ever since playing The London Heist the first time around.
According to the developers, the game will be far beyond the length of a demo. In the game, you can move, dual-wield, reload, plant C4, crawl through vents, and do almost anything you would in an action movie, says Design Director Iain Wright.
There’s only one location for now, although Director Stuart Whyte say there’s “a load more levels to showcase the glamour and grit of modern day London. We’re just scratching the surface of what we’ve got and what we’re working on behind the scenes, and there’s definitely more to come in the future.”
There’s still no release date yet, but we’ll be following Blood & Truth closely in the coming months to see if it truly holds up to the promise of The London Heist, or becomes a glorified shooting gallery like so many others.
