Our series Inside XR Design highlights and unpacks examples of great XR design. Today we’re looking at Beat Saber (2019) and why its most essential design element can be used to make great VR games that have nothing to do with music or rhythm.
You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.
More Than Music
Welcome back to another episode of Inside XR Design. Now listen, I’m going to say something that doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. But by the end of this article, I guarantee you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.
Beat Saber… is not a rhythm game.
Now just wait a second before you call me insane.
Beat Saber has music, and it has rhythm, yes. But the defining characteristic of a rhythm game is not just music, but also a scoring system that’s based on timing. The better your timing, the higher your score.
Now here’s the part most people don’t actually realize. Beat Saber doesn’t have any timing component to its scoring system.
That’s right. You could reach forward and chop a block right as it comes into range. Or you could hit it at the last second before it goes completely behind you, and in both cases you could earn the same number of points.
So if Beat Saber scoring isn’t about timing, then how does it work? The scoring system is actually based on motion. In fact, it’s actually designed to make you move in specific ways if you want the highest score.
The key scoring factors are how broad your swing is and how even your cut is through the center of the block. So Beat Saber throws these cubes at you and challenges you to swing broadly and precisely.
And while Beat Saber has music that certain helps you know when to move, more than a rhythm game… it’s a motion game.
Specifically, Beat Saber is built around a VR design concept that I like to call ‘Instructed Motion’, which is when a game asks you to move your body in specific ways.
And I’m going to make the case that Instructed Motion is a design concept that can be completely separated from games with music. That is to say: the thing that makes Beat Saber so fun can be used to design great VR games that have nothing to do with music or rhythm.
Instructed Motion
Ok so to understand how you can use Instructed Motion in a game that’s not music-based let’s take a look at Until You Fall (2020) from developer Schell Games. This is not remotely a rhythm game—although it has an awesome soundtrack—but it uses the same Instruction Motion concept that makes Beat Saber so much fun.
While many VR combat games use physics-based systems that allow players to approach combat with arbitrary motions, Until You Fall is built from the ground up with a notion of how it wants players to move.
And before you say that physics-based VR combat is objectively the better choice in all cases, I want you to consider what Beat Saber would be like if players could cut blocks in any direction they wanted at all times.
Sure, you would still be cutting blocks to music, and yet, it would be significantly harder to find the fun and flow that makes the game feel so great. Beat Saber uses intentional patterns that cause players to move in ways that are fluid and enjoyable. Without the arrows, player movements would be chaotic and they’d be flailing randomly.
So just like Beat Saber benefits by guiding a player to make motions that are particularly satisfying, combat in VR can benefit too. In the case of Until You Fall, the game uses Instructed Motion not only to make players move a certain way, but also to make them feel a certain way.
When it comes to blocking, players feel vulnerable because they are forced into a defensive position. Unlike a physics-based combat game where you can always decide when to hit back, enemies in Until You Fall have specific attack phases, and the player must block while it happens, otherwise you risk taking a hit and losing one of just three hit points.
Thanks to this approach, the game can adjust the intensity the player feels by varying the number, position, and speed of blocks that must be made. Weak enemies might hit slowly and without much variation in their attacks. While strong enemies will send a flurry of attacks that make the player really feel like they’re under pressure.
This gives the developer very precise control over the intensity, challenge, and feeling of each encounter. And it’s that control that makes Instructed Motion such a useful tool.
Dodging is similar to blocking, but instead of raising your weapon to the indicated position, you need to move your whole body out of the way. And this feels completely different from just blocking.
While some VR combat games would let the player ‘dodge’ just by moving their thumbstick to slide out of the way, Until You Fall uses Instructed Motion to make the act of dodging much more physically engaging.
And when it comes to attacking, players can squeeze in hits wherever they can until an enemy’s shield is broken, which then opens an opportunity to deal a bunch of damage.
And while another VR game might have just left this opening for players to hit the enemy as many times as they can, Until You Fall uses Instruced Motion to ask players to swing in specific ways.
Swinging in wide arcs and along particular angles deals the most damage and makes you move in a way that feels really powerful and confident. It’s like the opposite feeling of when you’re under attack. It really feels great when you land all the combo hits.
Viveport Infinity, HTC’s Netflix-style game membership, used to be pretty groan-worthy, offering up only a few really great titles and filling out the rest with a shovel-full of either mediocre or downright bad games. A lot has changed in the past few years though, and to celebrate Viveport’s 7th anniversary HTC is sweetening the pot with three games that are worth playing (and keeping).
For annual subscribers, the deal includes keepable copies of Primal Hunt, Until You Fall, and Fracked—available to both new members joining Viveport Infinity or existing members looking to extend their subscription.
The three-game giveaway deal is only available for annual subscribers; monthly subscribers re-upping or joining for the first time only get Fracked for free. Both offers are available from today until October 8th.
Here’s a look at all three games:
Until You Fall
Released by Schell Games in 2020, this stylish roguelite features a refreshingly unique approach to VR sword fighting, combining the satisfaction of a hack-and-slash game with the depth of RPG combat, all wrapped up in a VR-native design. We liked it so much, we gave Until You Fall an [8/10] in our review and also honored it with our Design Award for Excellence in User Interface in 2019, back when it was still just in Early Access on Steam.
Fracked
nDreams released Fracked initially as a PSVR exclusive in 2021, but brought the andrenaline-soaked shooter to PC VR headset a year later. The game’s undeniable good looks, unique cover system and satisfyingly tactile combat all are highlights to the underlying adventure that tasks you with blasting your way out of danger, and also a handful of side activities too, such as skiing, climbing, and light puzzling.
Primal Hunt
Hunt the most dangerous creatures ever to walk the earth – DINOSAURS! Created by Phaser Lock Interactive, this Turok-inspired VR Dinosaur Hunting Game lets you face Raptors, Triceratops, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, all of which get deadlier with cyber enhancements and weapons. Originally released on Quest and Pico earlier this year, the game has since been ported to PC VR headsets. It’s still a bit on the ‘mobile’ side of things, but who can argue with laser-wielding, cybernetic dinosaurs?
Until You Fall (2020), the critically acclaimed VR sword fighting game, is now available for PSVR 2.
The hack and slash rogue-lite has been available on SteamVR, Quest and the original PSVR since late 2020, however now its fun and lively sword fighting comes to PSVR 2.
Take note, the PSVR 2 port isn’t a free upgrade from the original PSVR version, but rather priced separately at $25 in the PlayStation Store.
Schell Games says its two-handed weapon update, which brings three two-handed weapons to the game, is also not supported on the older version of the game. Check out the guide below to see what’s changed in the new PSVR 2 version.
Image courtesy Schell Games
Until You Fall offers a unique approach to VR sword fighting which notably combines the physicality and satisfaction of a proper hack & slash title with the depth of RPG combat. Just make sure to clear some space because you’ll need it.
If you haven’t played before, also make sure to check out our full review on Quest to see why we gave it a strong [8/10].
VR drumming game Drums Rock is getting a collaboration with Schell Games’ Until You Fall this week.
A free update for the game will add a cover version of Kneon Knightmare from Until You Fall’s soundtrack. It’ll be a heavier take on the track in step with the rest of the game’s tracklist and also include several cosmetic overhauls such as a drum set inspired by the game, sticks in the shape of blades and hands identical to those of the player character in Until You Fall.
Check out the track itself in the video below.
Drums Rock Meets Until You Fall
Drums Rock is akin to using the drum kit peripheral in Rock Band and later Guitar Hero games; notes stream towards you and you have to match them to the corresponding instrument by hitting it on time. The only difference is that, with this being VR, you don’t actually have a plastic kit yourself.
Until You Fall, meanwhile, is Schell’s roguelite action game in which you take on runs of a dungeon, facing down monsters with swords. To this day it remains one of our favorite VR games and sits on our list of the 25 best VR games out there.
This isn’t the first collaboration between two VR developers we’ve seen. Earlier this month Resolution Games announced it was teaming up with Fast Travel Games to bring weapons from the latter’s debut title, Apex Construct, over to Blaston.
Currently the game’s available on Quest via App Lab. Are you going to be checking out the Drums Rock and Until You Fall collaboration? Let us know in the comments below!
The previously-teased Until You Fall update has now been revealed, and it includes new weapons and more.
Version 1.3 will launch on March 17 and is headlined by three new weapons. The Cold Iron Greataxe, Captain’s Warhammer and Fate’s End are all two-handed weapons, meaning they’ll change up the game’s regular dual-wielding combat. Check them out below.
New Until you Fall Update Revealed
The Greataxe will increase in damage as players take more hits, and features a Super that trades health for yet more attack power. The Warhammer, meanwhile, hits hard and can have its defensive abilities boosted, whilst Fate’s End is a greatsword that can occasionally be used with just one hand.
If you’re starting the game fresh then these items will have to be unlocked, but if you’ve already beaten a run of the game they’ll be automatically unlocked.
Elsewhere, 1.3 brings a lot of quality of life improvements to Until You Fall, including localization for Chinese, French, German and more, smooth turning options and more volume settings.
These updates mark the first significant changes to Until You Fall in over a year and will no doubt be welcomed by fans of the game. In our review, we said the roguelite game offered a great melee combat experience with a moreish hook and fantastic arcade-inspired combat.
Developer Schell Games, meanwhile, is now working on a VR version of Among Us. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for yet more Until You Fall updates in the future, though, as Schell recently told us it had plans for the game’s future.
Rejoice! Schell Games’ ace VR roguelite, Until You Fall, is getting its first update in well over a year very soon.
The studio just teased version 1.3 of the game with the phrase “The future is Kneon” via Twitter. Nothing else was confirmed but the stylization of the message hints that we might be getting a bit of a visual makeover for the game. Hopefully we might see some new levels, enemies and weapons, too.
New Until You Fall Update Incoming
Prepare yourself, Champion.
An exciting, new update is coming…
Until You Fall remains one of our favorte VR melee combat games on practically any platform right now. The game sees you taking on repeated runs of a dungeon, taking down enemies by blocking telegraphed strikes and attacking weak points. The finely tuned upgrade system rewarded constant play.
We interviewed Schell boss Jesse Schell last year, who revealed that the developer had new content planned for the game, but was looking for the right way to introduce it. It’ll be interesting to see why the company decided now was the right time for further content.
Schell Games has a lot on its plate at the moment. Next week sees it release a VR cooking game named Lost Recipes and, last year, it confirmed it was working on a VR version of Among Us.
What are you hoping to see out of the next Until You Fall update? Let us know in the comments below!
If you’re a PS Plus member, you’ll be able to nab three top PSVR titles for free this November that will have you playing from now until the Holiday season.
October was a bit of a bust for PSVR owners, as PS Plus only gave out flatscreen titles Hell Let Loose, PGA Tour 2K21, and Mortal Kombat X. You can still get those until November 1st, although you might want to save some room on your SSD for these top-rated titles.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
This physics-based zombie slasher from Skydance Interactive is super immersive and offers up a substantial campaign that pits you against hordes of walkers and human gangs alike across post-apocalyptic neighborhoods of New Orleans.
You might think of it as a pared down RPG with open world elements, which was totally built from the ground-up for VR. We liked it so much we gave The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners our Oculus Quest Game of the Year in 2020, and it’s only gotten better since thanks to some choice DLC drops since launch.
Until You Fall
Until You Fall is a roguelite adventure from VR veteran studio Schell Games that offers up challenging combat which will have to itching to enhance your weapons as you fight, fall and rise again. Every time you’ll grow a bit stronger as you battle through the stylized neon environment and strike down hordes of magic-infused monstrosities.
We gave it a solid [8/10] in our full review on Quest when it came in late 2020 for its deep combat systems that makes for meaningful strategic choices about the weapons you bring to the battlefield and the way that you use them.
The Persistence
The Persistence (2018) is another roguelike, this time serving up a sci-fi horror-themed environment full of zombies. Created by Firesprite Games, this PSVR exclusive offers asymmetrical gameplay by allowing a single VR player to haunt the procedurally generated levels while a friend connects via their phone or tablet to disable (or enable) traps, baddies, and scavenge for goodies.
Don’t forget to pick up standard PS4 and PS5 titles First Class Trouble,Knockout City, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning for free starting November 1st.
Three of PSVR’s very best games are being given away at no extra charge for PlayStation Plus members next month.
As part of the headset’s fifth-anniversary celebrations, Sony is giving away The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, The Persistence and Until You Fall from November 2nd. As long as you’re signed up to Plus, which you need to play online and get access to other PlayStation giveaways too, you’ll be able to download them with no trouble.
Each of these three titles features in our current list of the 25 best PSVR games. In fact, Saints & Sinners is currently in our #2 spot (and tops our list of the best games on Oculus Quest, too). We love it for its visceral, physical zombie action that takes full advantage of the platform, and developer Skydance Interactive recently launched a huge free update for the game, too.
Until You Fall, meanwhile, is a fantastic roguelite from Schell Games with thrilling arcade melee combat. Finally, The Persistence is a great gamepad-based, procedurally generated horror title. It’s developed by Firesprite Games, the UK-based studio that Sony itself recently acquired to make exclusive PlayStation titles in the future. We already know the studio is working on a new VR game, too.
These free PS Plus games also make for a good reason to plug PSVR back in towards the end of its lifecycle. 2022 is approaching and we’re expecting Sony to soon share more on its PS5 VR headset. You can check out everything we know about that device right here.
2020’s Humble Bundle Fall virtual reality (VR) offer arrived a little late in the season but that’s not the case in 2021, a little early in fact. The Fall VR Emporium Bundle has just gone live where you can get up to seven titles for an incredibly low price for a limited time.
This year’s VR bundle features quite the crop of VR videogames with Arizona Sunshine, House Flipper VR, Until You Fall, Zero Caliber VR, A Fisherman’s Tale, Paper Beast and Wands all featuring. As always there are various options depending on how much you want to spend and which titles take your fancy, it isn’t quite pick ‘n’ mix but it is close.
You can go for the one item bundle which is Wands, where you have to pay at least £0.72 GBP. Then there’s the four-item bundle with Zero Caliber VR, A Fisherman’s Tale, Paper Beast and Wands for a minimum of £10.64, But is you don’t have any of these titles then you may as well go for all seven at the minimum purchase price of £10.83.
If you’re new to Humble Bundle the whole point is that this is a charitable offer, encouraging you to pay a little more – why not round up to £20 for example? – for a good cause. It’s not a solitary cause you might not be interested in either, you can select which organisation receives your funds (there’s GamesAid, Women in Games International and many more) and how much is split between the publisher, Humble Bundle and the charity.
There are definitely some choice titles in the selection such as Schell Games’ roguelike sword fighter Until You Fall and Pixel Reef’s delightfully out there puzzler Paper Beast. Both are VR experiences everyone should have a go at.
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.”
