Stormland is the new IP being created by Insomniac Games, the studio best known for the Ratchet & Clank series and the upcoming Spider-Man title. The title is meant to be a unique, virtual reality (VR) open-world experience, and Oculus is heavily involved in its development.
The Oculus VP of Content Jason Rubin spoke to Variety about what players might expect when Stormland comes to the Oculus Rift in 2019.
Stormland lets players take the role of an android caretaker on a strange alien planet. An entity called The Tempest arrives, breaking the body of the android and causing vast destruction to the planet. The player needs to repair itself and journey up through layers of cloud in order to find out exactly what happened.
Many commentators have mentioned the lack of a true ‘killer app’ for the Oculus Rift, and Rubin believes that Stormland might full that niche: “This is one title that could encourage people to come onto the platform,” Rubin said, “This is a title that could radically change their view of the platform.”
VR is still in its infancy in many ways, “We’ve been working three or four years to push the state of VR content forward,” Rubin said, noting that traditional video game developers have had about 10 times that amount to perfect their craft. “It takes a long time to learn about this new medium.”
Rubin said he believes there will be a tipping point for VR: “I think there is going to be a moment at which VR reaches the point where the general consumer base understands it is a long-term value proposition, an inevitable part of the future, an inevitable part of their future,” Rubin said.
“We have seen in the past year a radical change,” Rubin said. “People are not saying, ‘What’s the next thing? There’s nothing out there.’ Now they’re saying, ‘There is so much great stuff coming out, I don’t know what to do next.’”
For future coverage of new and upcoming VR titles, keep checking back with VRFocus.
Wir berichteten letzte Woche über die Ankündigung eines neuen VR-Projekts aus dem Hause Insomniac Games, welches vor allem durch seine frei begehbare Spielwelt bestechen soll. Nun gibt es neue Details und einen offiziellen Trailer zum 2019 erscheinenden Exklusivtitel für die Oculus Rift. Bei Stormland handelt es sich um einen Open-World-Shooter mit Singleplayer- und Koop-Modus, dessen Spielwelt kontinuierlich verändert und erweitert werden soll.
Stormland – VR-Coop-Action-Abenteuer von Insomniac Games
In Stormland übernehmt ihr die Rolle eines Androiden, dessen Aufgabe die Instandhaltung der Gartenanlagen eines Planeten war, bis ein gigantischer Sturm euren Körper in seine Einzelteile zerlegte. Nach unzähligen Jahren erwacht ihr aus eurem Tiefschlaf und beginnt die Erforschung der völlig veränderten Oberfläche eurer Heimat.
Zu Fuß, mit eingebautem Flugantrieb, und durch Klettereinheiten über Gebirge dürft ihr die frei begehbaren Passagen erkunden. Währenddessen begebt ihr euch auf die Suche nach euren Androiden-Freunden, um sie ebenfalls zu reaktivieren. Dabei stoßt ihr auf feindselige Roboter, die euch bei eurer Reise in die Quere kommen, weshalb ihr mit eingebauter Schildfunktion, ordentlich Feuerkraft und einschlagenden Granaten gegen die Widersacher vorgehen müsst. Während eurer Erkundungstour fasst ihr den Entschluss, zum heroischen Kämpfer zu werden und die eigene Heimat von den Eindringlingen zu befreien.
Der VR-Titel soll sowohl im Singleplayer-Modus in einer dramatischen Kampagne sowie im Koop-Modus mit Freunden spielbar sein. Während ihr euch in der offenen Spielwelt frei bewegt, findet ihr zahlreiche neue Ausrüstungsgegenstände und Waffen, die ihr in ein einer Art Crafting-System auch selbst herstellen könnt.
Dank der flüssigen Fortbewegung soll jedes Stückchen Erde erkundbar werden und zahlreiche versteckte Orte und Geheimnisse auffindbar sein. Die Entwickler wollen für stetige Veränderungen in der Spielwelt sorgen, die narrativ durch elementare Stürme erklärt werden. Dadurch sollen stets neue Spielelemente, wie unentdeckte Technologien, weitere Gebiete und gefährliche Dungeons, integriert werden.
Stormland soll 2019 exklusiv für Oculus Rifterscheinen.
Earlier this week Insomniac Games announced their next project was a virtual reality (VR) title called Stormland, which was described as an epic sci-fi adventure. Now, in a recent interview with Variety, Insomniac Games chief creative officer Chad Dezern gave some insights into the upcoming title.
“This is our fourth VR game at this point, we have been on a journey.” Dezern notes at the start of the interview. “Stormland is the culmination of all of that, ultimately, this is about taking components of the open world structure and gameplay from Ratchet & Clank, Sunset Overdrive, and Spider-Man and marrying that to what we’ve discovered in VR development.”
Stormland is being created in collaboration with Oculus Studios and will be an open world action-adventure experience in which players take on the role of a robot. With their history of developing exciting and engaging titles, the team is aiming to deliver another standout title with Stormland.
“It’s about creating a lot of player choice and not being constrained in any way by the medium,” Dezern explains. “We put you in a world where you can go anywhere with a set of traversal mechanics. On top of that, there is a combat model that is free form. You can steal weapons from an enemy, you can upgrade the android’s ability to shoot electricity from its arm, to cloak from enemies, or create a shield. You can use the environment to place traps or blow up enemy munitions. It’s how you want to play, how you want to engage.”
“We stay in first-person from start to finish,” Dezern adds, talking about what the team has learned from their other VR titles “As we have developed games in VR, we have learned to lean more on player agency. We do use some cinematic devices that send objects and set pieces to you, but we never do a hard cut.”
Lead designer on Stormland Mike Daly comments on the journey players can expect to experience in the title adding: ““When you travel up the Stormland, you enter in this cloud sea populated by islands, each island has new equipment, powerful enemy ambushes, something to discover about the world. As you go out and explore, you have to get this, ‘Just one more island’ hook. You are continually moving up. There are things you have to do on each layer of the cloud sea.”
“You’re not restricted to any one plane,” he adds. “The ability to move precisely in any direction opens up all sorts of new shapes to explore.”
Daly also mentioned during the interview that the title is being built to support multiplayer and is essentially perpetually playable. This means the title will be able to piece together elements of islands in order to create new levels for players to explore. “It is the culmination of so many things, a universe we love crafting, a story we love telling, building on systems we’ve been wanting to bring to the world,” Daly said. “It’s a world that changes every single week, so you have new playgrounds to get around in.”
Currently Insomniac Games have no released many more details on the title at this time other then it wil be exclusive to Oculus Rift. VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest on Stormland in the future, including any details on a possible release window.
Insomniac teased its next VR game recently, a then unnamed open world adventure that promised to let you “go wherever you want.” After revealing the game just prior to E3, dubbed Stormland, the studio just released a few choice bits of info on the game at the PC Gaming Show at E3 2018.
Update (06/11/18): Insomniac’s CCO Chad Dezern took the stage today at the PC Gaming Show to reveal a little more about to ‘Stormland’. On stage, Dezern talked a bit about locomotion, saying you can fly just above the cloud-like “slipstream” using your hands and shoot a laser in the cloud’s surface to create a sort of ramp to glide off of. You can also physically climb up a cliff side and glide back down. “It’s a set of mechanics that are designed to work together fluidly so that movement feels exhilarating,” Dezern said. Outside of climbing, it appears much of the locomotion is based on gliding.
Dezern also revealed that you can scavenge technology and integrate it into your arms, giving you abilities such as harnessing electricity, or cloaking.
The entity called ‘The Tempest’ is said to “rearrange everything every single week,” presenting the player with new playgrounds of movement, combat, and scavenging.
The original article follows below:
Original article (06/07/018): In Stormland, Oculus says in a blogpost, you play as a peaceful gardener until a mysterious storm called ‘The Tempest’ shatters your android body. After lying dormant for centuries, you must journey through an ever-changing cloudscape, augmenting yourself to become a heroic fighter, save your friends, and reclaim your world.
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
“In the game, you can explore an expansive environment with complete freedom—bound up cliffs, glide across chasms, and fly through the slipstream at near-terminal velocity. Then detonate explosives, harness electricity, and wield makeshift weapons to overcome titanium sentries and monolithic guardians. Play through a dramatic single-player campaign, or explore forgotten ruins with friends,” the company says.
Image courtesy Insomniac Games
There’s no precise release date yet, although the company says it should be out sometime in 2019. Like many of Insomniac’s past VR projects, which include Rift exclusives The Unspoken (2017), Edge of Nowhere (2016) and Feral Rites (2016), we suspect Insomniac’s relationship points to another Rift exclusive in the works.
Insomniac Games isn’t a developer to do things by half when it comes to virtual reality (VR) content. Having created titles such as Edge of Nowhere, Feral Rites and the hugely popular The Unspoken, Insomniac Games has announced its next VR experience, an epic sci-fi adventure called Stormland.
Created in collaboration with Oculus Studios, Stormland is an open world action‐adventure experience where you play a robot. “You’re an android gardener on a lush alien planet, but The Tempest shattered your android body,” the officail description explains. “Now you must journey through an ever-changing cloudscape to augment yourself and save your friends. Explore an expansive world with complete freedom—bound up cliffs, glide across chasms, and fly through the slipstream with velocity. Detonate explosives, harness electricity, and wield makeshift weapons to overcome titanium sentries and monolithic guardians. Play single-player, or explore forgotten ruins together.”
Stormland looks set to be Insominac’s biggest and most expansive VR title to date, offering players the chance to freely explore these cloud covered worlds, being able to freely ascend cliffs like you would in The Climb, or glide from ledge to ledge with both hands in front like Sprint Vector.
While the screenshots certainly paint an impressive image of what’s to come, the announcement trailer showcases a lot more of the videogame and the abilities of the android gardener. Scavenging the world will help to upgrade your body, adding boosters to your feet, shields to your arms and other abilities.
And Stormland isn’t a peaceful journey either. There are many dangers to face along the way, not only other robots but other alien creatures to. Luckily players will also be able to take a friend along to help them in some sort of co-op mode.
Other than that, Insomniac Games hasn’t released any other details. It’ll be exclusive to Oculus Rift but there’s no confirmed launch window just yet. When there is VRFocus will let you know.
When Oculus and Insomniac Games first teased this new game last week, I mostly just had questions. All we saw was the single teaser image in that article and some brief allusions to the fact that it will include movement systems that let you “go wherever you want.” But now, we know a lot more.
Specifically, the game is called Stormland and it’s being developed in partnership with Oculus Studios as a Rift exclusive, just like Insomniac’s Edge of Nowhere, The Unspoken, and Feral Rites.
The announcement trailer below is over three minutes long and packs in plenty of cinematics, actual gameplay footage, and a heaping dose of ominous world building. Then after getting a sneak preview of the trailer last week I got the chance to speak with Chad Dezern, Chief Creative Officer at Insomniac Games, and Mike Daly, Lead Designer on Stormland and they revealed just how ambitious and bold their plan is for this upcoming project really is.
In Stormland you play as an android that’s been beaten up and left for dead. Clinging just barely to life, you’ve got to travel around the world, exploring ruins and lush environments in search of gear and equipment to augment your body and abilities. It features a free-form movement system including climbing, leaping, smooth movement, gliding through the air, and flying along slipstreams at high speed. Harnessing the power of guns, explosive, electrical powers, and more you can fight back against an invasive sentry force and take down massive guardians in both single-player and multiplayer.
“We love experimenting with VR mechanics and Stormland represents the culmination of three VR projects at Insomniac,” explained Dezern. “That’s meant a lot of thinking about movement, combat, and structure that has gone into both our console and VR titles over the years.”
Few developers currently working in the VR space have the history, lineage, and sheer quality track record of Insomniac Games. From the original Spyro the Dragon trilogy, to a slew of excellent Ratchet & Clank games, the Resistance FPS trilogy, Sunset Overdrive, their trio of VR games, and even the upcoming PS4-exclusive Spider-Man game, this is a studio that’s had its hand in some of the biggest and best projects in the whole game industry. Channeling that wealth of knowledge and applying it to VR game design is an excellent boon for gamers.
With Stormland it’s truly shaping up to be a culmination of sorts. It’s got intense, fast-paced first-person combat like the Resistance games, a frenetic and dynamic world like Sunset Overdrive, a settign that’s teeming with life to see and areas to explore like Ratchet & Clank, and it’s got the years of iteration learned from three different VR titles.
But what makes Stormland truly special is how it’s constantly evolving. The Tempest is a powerful force of storms that ravages the land frequently (as in every week or two in real world time) causing it to shift and change and adapt, which creates new areas to explore, new loot to find, and new challenges to tackle. In this way, it’s a story that keeps going and keeps changing to keep players engaged.
“When a new game comes out it’s fun to talk to friends about the experiences you’ve had discovering things and the tricks you’ve found,” said Daly. “But we thought, ‘What if we had a game that could capture that feeling over and over again, every week?’ That’s sort of how Stormland was born. Each island on the horizon holds the potential for something amazing whether that be equipment, enemies, world history, exploration, or something else. So by the time you get a sense for the layout, come back day after day to master it, and then right as you feel you’re more or less done with it you get a whole new world again.”
If you think that sounds too ambitious to work, I don’t blame you. I’ve played MMOs that have tried to capture that “ever-changing world and story” concept, such as Guild Wars 2, and it never seems to really come together as well in action as it sounded on paper. EverQuest Next, which was canceled, was reportedly trying to capture a similar feeling. Perhaps being a non-MMO will help keep the scope in line.
“We are not going to ship with four quadrillion planets,” said Daly. “Everything you see in the game has been thoughtfully put together, but put together in a way that lends itself to artistic variation with our streamlined process.”
Even though Stormland is very much not an MMO, I can’t help but get vibes of other shared world games like Destiny. With a mixture of procedural and hand-crafted locales, Insomniac may be able to pull it off.
“We see all of this potential to make a world that has a bigger impact when you’ve got the headset on,” said Dezern. “All of these moments that create a sense of wonder feel more amazing with the ambiance of the world and the music and the undivided attention you get from VR. This was our way, coupling with a set of movement mechanics that we’ve made over a very long time, to achieve something that we just could not have made in the console space at all.”
The VR community is hungry for a game like this that can actually stay fresh and keep delivering interesting, quality content on a regular basis.
I don’t want over-hype things since I haven’t even gotten my hands on the game for myself yet, but Stormland is honestly sounding like the best bits of most other VR games, mashed together, and extrapolated across one of the most ambitious game premises I’ve heard in quite some time.
Fingers crossed.
Stormland does not currently have a firm release date, although Oculus has told us Insomniac aims to take its time and make this next game as good as it can be. That’s why they decided to hold off on media demos at the pre-E3 showcase and that’s why the game won’t be playable at E3 at all. Hopefully a playable version is on display at Oculus Connect 5 later this year. As of now, Stormland is slated for a 2019 release.
What do you think of Insomniac’s ambitious next project? Let us know down in the comments below!
