The Sony London-developed game gets its first drop of free DLC today. The team’s Stuart Whyte confirmed as much on Twitter. Headlining the drop is a New Game + mode which will allow you to replay the campaign with your progress from an existing playthrough intact. That means you’ll get to keep your new weapons and any customizations you might have made for them. Replaying earlier levels with heavier firepower could be a lot of fun. It’ll also remember the stars and targets you’ve already shot.
At 9am BST our first free DLC update drops – New Game +, leaderboards and new challenges! #BloodAndTruth
Also added in this update are new leaderboards and challenges. Blood & Truth’s challenges test your gun-fu by taking you back to previously visited areas to shoot targets as quickly and accurately as possible. And leaderboards are, well, pretty self-explanatory.
Sony London previously told us Blood & Truth would be getting several DLC drops, all of which will be free. We also know a new difficulty mode is on the way, but no word yet on when.
This is a good reason to jump back into one of PSVR’s best shooters.
“Sony’s London Studio should be proud of what they’ve accomplished here by turning the brief London Heist demo from PlayStation VR Worlds into a fully-fledged narrative that features some of the best performances we’ve seen in VR yet,” we said in our 8.5/10 review. “The action is pulse-pounding and so bombastic it rivals even the biggest summer blockbusters.”
London Studio, the British team behind PlayStation VR adventure Blood & Truth may have released a free demo last week to showcase the title but it has much greater plans in store. That announcement saw the studio tease details on a new update due to arrive later this week, so VRFocus caught up with Stuart Whyte, Director of VR Product Development to find out more.
Blood & Truth has been out for a couple of months now and London Studio has been working on several new updates which will help to extend the life of the experience, including a New Game + mode so that you can replay the entire storyline again and pick up the items you missed, getting 100% completion in the process.
Leaderboards will be introduced across all levels and Challenges so you can compete against your mates – or anyone else for that matter. Whyte also confirms that the team is working to expand the roster of Challenges with more due to arrive in the months to come.
The most interesting part of the interview comes when Whyte indicates that the Blood & Truth franchise may become bigger than just one videogame if fans love the experience. Seeing as the response to Blood & Truth has been overwhelmingly positive, then fans may see more of this gritty London narrative.
It was certainly one of VRFocus’ favourite PlayStation VR titles of 2019, giving 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.”
Whyte is also very positive about the VR videogame industry as a whole. Thanks to lots of experimentation over the last couple of years he expects to see ‘new genres and new types of games’ coming to VR systems in the future.
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
The PlayStation VR head-mounted display (HMD) launched a little over a year ago and with it changed the dynamic of console peripherals. Often considered an accessory to the PlayStation 4 itself and requiring further add-ons for use (PlayStation Camera, PlayStation Move motion controllers), the PlayStation VR was seen as an expensive step into a new way of playing videogames. But the success of the HMD has outweighed any fears of low adoption rates, with audiences who purchase the device also investing heavily in software to use it.
Speaking at Develop:VR, London, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Stuart Whyte, London Studio’s director of VR product development, suggested that the attachment rate of PlayStation VR videogames is impressive, especially when considering the financial investment required to even begin playing in VR.
“We’re currently sitting at five games sold per headset, so we’re seeing a really strong attach rate from our first year. Many of those games to date are smaller experiences, they’re experiences that we as developers get to know the platform [with], built around one or two mechanics.”
Whyte is currently working on Blood & Truth, an evolution of the gameplay seen in PlayStation VR launch title PlayStation VR Worlds’ The London Heist. In that lies a prime example of Whyte’s suggestion that the first generation of PlayStation VR software will be significantly inferior to what comes next.
“We feel that for VR to get to the next level, we need bigger, built from the ground up VR AAA experiences.”
SIE recently revealed a whole swathe of new PlayStation VR titles at the company’s Paris Games Week press conference, as can be seen in the video below, with 2018 looking set to be a year of heavy investment in the medium from both the platform holder and third-party developers. VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest details on every title heading to PlayStation VR.
Der ehemalige Leiter der Lionhead StudiosStuart Whyte wechselt zu Sony, um für das SCE London Studio zu arbeiten. Dort erhält er einen völlig neuen Job und wird hauptsächlich für VR-Projekte zuständig sein. Entsprechend ist er hoch motiviert die Triple-A-VR-Projekte, voranzubringen.
Von Lionhead Studios zu Sony
Stuart Whyte war bisher Leiter der in Großbritannien ansässigen Spielesoftwarefirma Lionhead Studios. Das Spielestudio war eine Tochtergesellschaft von Microsoft, löste sich jedoch letztlich auf. Nun wechselte der ehemalige Studiodirektor zu Sony, genauer in das SCE London Studio. Dort wird er die Entwicklung zukünftiger AAA PlayStation VR-Projekte leiten.
Herr Whyte ist ein bekannter Name in der Videospieleindustrie, da er an der Entwicklung bekannter Titel, wie Fable,Black & White oder anderen Spielen beteiligt war. Zudem ist er durchaus flexibel, da er innerhalb der Lionhead Studios über die Zeit hinweg unterschiedliche Positionen einnahm. So war er Produktionsleiter, Produktionsdirektor, ausführender Produzent und letztlich Studiodirektor. Die Rolle als Studiodirektor hielt er bis zum Ende des Studios im Jahr 2016. Zudem arbeitete er drei Jahre mit Xbox zusammen. Vor der Arbeit innerhalb der Lionhead Studios war er bereits an klassischen Titeln, wie Dungeon Keeper, Syndicate oder Civilization beteiligt als er für Bullfrog und Microsprose arbeitete.
Sein neuer Arbeitgeber – die London Studios – sind Sonys beständigstes Entwicklerstudio. Sie sind unter anderem beteiligt an Titeln, wie Singstar,The Playroom, Farpoint oder PlayStation VR Worlds. In letzerer Version befanden sich neben vielen anderen VR-Demos auch der Titel The London Heist oder Ocean Descent. Bei seinem neuen Arbeitgeber hat Herr Whyte große Ziele, denn er möchte mit dem neuen Team des Studios das weltweit führende AAA-VR-Team werden, wie er in einem kürzlichen Interview klarstellte. Welche Projekte das sind, ist bisher leider noch nicht klar. Whyte wird seine neue Stelle als Direktor der VR Produktentwicklung am 15. Mai antreten. Wir dürfen uns also auf zukünftige VR-Titel aus dem Hause Sony freuen.
Speaking at Develop:VR, London, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Stuart Whyte, London Studio’s director of VR product development, suggested that the attachment rate of PlayStation VR videogames is impressive, especially when considering the financial investment required to even begin playing in VR.
