In an interesting twist to Insomniac’s VR brawler Feral Rites‘ recent release, Oculus have slashed the price of the game to $29.99 from $49.99 stating the price was “too high”.
In an unusual move, Oculus have seemingly taken on board the critical and fan reaction to Incomniac Games’ recently released fantasy brawler Feral Rites. The title received a lukewarm critical reception on release and it seems those gamers who bought were none too happy with the product they received for the original price of $49.99.
In response however, not only have Oculus slashed the price of the game on the Oculus Store to $29.99, they’ve also emailed all of those who purchased the game at full price informing them that they have been gifted 6 free games as compensation. Those customer also have an option to a full refund as well.
Oculus Studios, its developers, and its players are all pioneers in the new world of VR content. As such, we’re all learning as we go.
As you know, Oculus Studios and Insomniac Games recently released a game called Feral Rites. Our teams felt the product was of high quality and, due to the depth and length of play, a price of $49.99 was chosen. You were one of the dedicated VR enthusiasts that tried the game at that price. For that, we thank you!
After listening to the community the last few days, it has become evident to us that this price was too high. So we’ve decided to drop the price.
Today you’ll find Feral Rites for $29.99 on the Oculus store. We’ve also added the title to our Fall Sale at $9.99.
For pioneers like you, who gave the game a chance at the original price and gave us the valuable feedback we need, we’ve decided to add six Oculus Studios’ games to your account at no cost:
AirMech Command
Damaged Core
Defense Grid 2: Enhanced VR Edition
Chronos
Edge of Nowhere
The Climb
The games should automatically appear in your library by Sunday, September 18. If you have questions, or if you’d rather have a refund of the purchase price, please contact the Oculus support team at support.oculus.com and click “Contact Us”.
We thank you for your trust in Oculus Studios and Insomniac Games, and appreciate your continued help as we bring VR to the world. — Oculus Studios
Developers of Feral Rites, Insomniac Games, have posted an update to their website announcing the price change and compensation stating:
As we do with all our games, we’ve paid careful attention and responded to player feedback so far. We appreciate the support from everyone who has experienced Feral Rites, and we understand the concerns as well — especially about the game’s price. Effective immediately, the price of Feral Rites is $29.99. The game’s original price was largely based on all the work that went into it. We’re proud that Feral Rites is among the largest VR games of its kind available today.
It’s heartening to see Oculus, who are slowly but carefully building up a valuable user base for their Oculus Store content portal, to not only listen but react so swiftly to a game’s reception. Feral Rites was one of Oculus Studios’ key exclusive titles for the Rift and acknowledging there were issues with the way it was sold and taking action hopefully bodes well for the future.
I took a short break during my time at PAX West this year to checkout VREAL’s new streaming platform at their office in downtown Seattle. At the office, I strapped on a Vive and jumped into VREAL’s virtual lobby with a couple of others to try things out. After a quick tutorial on how teleportation and avatar controls worked, we moved our characters over to a small floating island depicting a scene from Cloudlands VR Minigolf and teleported in to launch the game.
As a spectator, I was able to teleport around the golf course and view the action from wherever I decided to point my headset. Cloudlands already supported multiplayer so that concept wasn’t particularly ground-breaking by itself, but the important part is that VREAL says this same experience can be viewed by an endless audience of viewers in VR.
After the golf demo we went back to the lobby and then hopped into a tower defense game. In this game I was able to see some of the neat perspective features that VREAL offers developers. Depending on where in the map I teleported, the scale of the entire scene would change to fit the action. Teleporting near the lanes brought me down to a frontline perspective while teleporting away towards the edges brought me back up to a more strategic overview perspective.
During the demo, I was also introduced to VREAL’s new virtual camera feature. By placing virtual cameras in the world, VREAL streamers can broadcast their gameplay from a fixed point of view. So while I was viewing from within a Vive, people in the lobby were watching on a 2D screen, but without the shaky perspective view that most streamers are currently stuck with.
After the demo, I sat down with VREAL CEO, Todd Hooper, to ask some quick developer-oriented questions about their platform.
Todd Hooper, CEO at VREAL
Road to VR: What is the performance impact to the streamer? Todd Hooper: Most of the VREAL tech actually runs on the CPU, not the GPU. We have not seen a massive performance hit on games. It seems to be in the region of a couple percent. Basically we are capturing the game state and sending up to the cloud so that’s not something that touches the GPU at all. Most games are GPU-bound not CPU-bound so so far that hasn’t been a challenge.
Road to VR: How does a developer make a game work with VREAL? Todd Hooper: We have an SDK for Unity and Unreal 4. When we identify a developer that we want on the platform we give them the SDK. Our goal is to be able to have VREAL up and running for them in a day. We are not there yet, but for the beta at the end of the year, we should be able to get a new developer up and running on the SDK pretty quickly. It’s one of the design considerations for the system because there’s lots of ways you might be able to build something like this but would require the developer to do a lot of work. If you can’t get developers on board a system like this fairly quickly, it’s going to be challenging to get a lot of traction.
Road to VR: How would an interested developer get started? Todd Hooper: We are happy to talk to all VR developers so visit our website, there is an address for the developer relations team there or hit us up on twitter, we’ve got a full time team that is talking to developers. We’ve had a lot of interested developers. I think they’ve seen that a way to stream VR games now doesn’t really exist, you just stream the headset. Once developers have that streaming experience they get really passionate about it.
Road to VR: How many developers are on the platform so far? Todd Hooper: We haven’t announced any of the titles yet. We are going to be announcing titles at the end of the year.
Road to VR: What platforms will VREAL support? Todd Hooper: The Vive and the Rift are the launch platforms. We are Sony partner and will be talking more about Sony later. We also have a way to do 360 video capture so you can render that and consume it on a mobile VR device as well.
In an age where people rarely buy physical albums anymore, music videos are today’s cover art; they connect memorable imagery to sound, and function as vehicles to spread songs beyond where they would go on their own. As a testament to their power, music videos sometimes becomes as iconic (or even more so) than the music they’re tied to (think Gangnam Style).
The music video genre has always been about spectacle and pushing creative boundaries; in some cases, music videos transcend their role as a marketing vehicle and push into the territory of art.
What better place to engage viewers with powerful and memorable imagery than the immersive medium of VR?
Google, through a collaboration with Queen, has given us an excellent case study in the future of the music video and just how well the genre can work in virtual reality.
The experience, which “offers a journey through frontman Freddie Mercury’s subconscious mind,” is filled with diverse imagery from hand-drawn animation to motion capture to CGI. The changing visuals reflect the song’s distinct stylistic segments, which range from opera to rock. It isn’t just a 360 video either, it’s a fully 3D experience rendered in real-time, with 3D audio, and has subtle interactive elements depending upon where the user is looking.
Google, Queen, and Enosis VR, a production studio heavily involved in the development of the experience, talk about creating the Bohemian Rhapsody Experience:
The impressively crafted visual journey, created in large part by Enosis VR, employs lots of impressive hand-drawn animation. This at first seems out of place (flat, 2D animation in an immersive 3D experience?), but it turns out to be so well executed that the Bohemian Rhapsody Experience serves not just as proof for the future of VR music videos, but secondarily as a showcase for how such animation can not only survive, but thrive in virtual reality.
I recently got the chance to go hands-on with Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality on the HTC Vive from Adult Swim and Owlchemy Labs. The first thing I noticed about the game is that seeing 2D characters in 3D is weird.
If you’ve ever played one of the Simpsons console games you’ll know exactly what I mean. But that weirdness took a back seat as soon as virtual Rick opened his mouth and I heard that iconic alcoholic voice. Without spoiling too much, the game is full of the same absurdist sci-fi humor that fans of the acclaimed Rick and Morty show know and love.
The game starts off inside of Rick’s garage, complete with a large collection of props on the shelves and workbenches. Super-fans of the show will notice that some of the props are even in the exact same position as they are in the animated series. In order move around the garage, players can teleport between predefined regions outlined in a blue square on the floor. The real-world play space that I tried the demo in was fairly large, but developer Owlchemy Labs says that those blue boundaries will be adaptable to fit the size of the space you have at home.
In the game, you take control of a Morty clone, ostensibly created for the sole purpose of doing chores for Rick. The first task Rick gives you is to wash his dirty laundry by placing it in the washing machine and turning it on. It’s a very simple task, but everything about it, from placing the dirty underwear in the machine to turning the knobs, felt like a activity in Job Simulator. The reason for the similarity is that Owlchemy built the game using version 2 of their VR interaction system and so they were able reuse a lot of the same technology that powered Job Simulator.
After you finish the laundry task, Rick says that your poor performance indicates that you are a defective clone and so he summarily executes you. You spend a brief moment in purgatory only to be immediately brought back and told by Rick not touch any of his stuff while he and not-clone Morty are away. This of course is a fantastic opportunity to spend some time playing our with all of the interesting props positioned throughout the garage.
At the end of the demo, Rick comes back and instructs you to activate a blast shield so he can open a portal on it. I admit I hesitated before hopping through the portal when it first opened, but that’s a good thing. I was immersed enough in the Rick and Morty Universe to genuinely have a tiny bit of fear about what crazy danger I would find on the other side of the portal.
While it was a quick demo, I was pleased with the quality of what I saw, and I am looking forward to picking up the full experience when it is released. Rick and Morty Simulator is exactly what you would expect from placing the Rick and Morty universe in the hands of Owlchemy Labs.
I didn’t get a direct answer when I asked about the expected length of the final game, but Owlchemy Labs producer Andrew Eiche said that they were being “very conscious of how the gamer’s dollar is being spent.” The demo I tried was on an HTC Vive, but there is currently no word yet on the final platform list or release date (though Job Simulator is soon to launch on Oculus Touch and PSVR in addition to its current HTC Vive support).
What’s better than Justin Roiland making a VR game? Justin Roiland making a VR game and releasing it for free. That’s right, newly formed VR studio Squanchtendo’s first game, Accounting, will be completely free.
Road to VR got a brief sneak peak at Accounting while at this year’s PAX West in Seattle, and it is as hilarious as you would expect. Fair warning however, This article contains some minor spoilers from the first 15 minutes of the game, so skip it for now if that’s not for you. Also, despite what you may think about the field of number crunching, Accounting is not safe for work or children.
Accounting starts off in the messy, windowless office of an accounting firm named Smith & Smitherson. The accounting firm has brought you onboard in order to balance the books with the power of virtual reality. Your first task, shouted to you over the phone by your dubiously qualified coworkers, is to use your Windows 95 pointer hands to riffle through the mess and find a virtual reality headset.
After putting the virtual headset on, I was transported to an idyllic forest where a tree-dwelling cloud-person began shouting obscenities at me. It was surprising because not only was it the first time I can recall hearing an F-bomb dropped in a VR game, but it was directed at me with such visceral hatred. This angry little character (voice acted by Justin Roiland), and many others throughout the demo underscored how big of a role dialogue plays in Accounting. The voice acting is so engaging that it got to the point where I would deliberately stop moving the story forward just so I could listen to everything the characters had to say.
I got the chance to got through two additional worlds during my time in Accounting. The first scene was a dungeon occupied by a horribly obese king. Eventually I found a knife and it quickly became clear that the only way to advance was to stab the king, pull another virtual headset out of his entrails, and put it on my face. Everything about it was delightfully absurd, and I wouldn’t expect any less from Squanchtendo and collaborator Crows Crows Crows.
Continuing on the theme of absurdity, the third room of them demo contained a xylophone made out of a human skeleton and two talking skulls. The skulls asked me to play them and to my surprise, their bones seemed to function as a fully capable xylophone. As I played their bones, their pleas to keep going became increasingly salacious. Just as the weirdness of the whole situation came to a crescendo, Justin tapped me out of the game and ended my brief tour of the varied and intricate world of Accounting.
After the demo, I sat down with the dangerously competent trio of Roiland, Pugh, and Tanya Watson, the studio director and co-founder of Squanchtendo, to talk about what they had created. In the interview the team walk about what drove the creation of Accounting and reveals that Squanchtendo’s collaboration with Crows Crows Crows came about through a happy mix of tactical subterfuge and chance.
Squanchtendo is directing those interested in the game to visit the VR accounting web page here. At the time of this writing, the page simply has placeholder text, but Roiland says to watch this page, the Squanchtendo Twitter, and sign up for the Crows Crows Crows mailing list to be the first to know when the game will be released on Steam for the HTC Vive “very soon”.
Feral Rites is a third-person VR adventure-brawler from Insomniac Games released for the Oculus Rift. Set on a mystical island, you play as a beefed-out warrior trying to avenge your father’s death by kicking, punching and slashing everyone in your way.
Feral Rites Details:
Official Site
Developer:Insomniac Games Publisher: Oculus Studios Available On: Oculus Home (Rift) Reviewed On:Oculus Rift Release Date: September 13th, 2016
Gameplay
At the beginning of the game, you’re introduced to Bokor, a powerful shaman from your tribe who leads you on your way to avenge your father’s death, an act perpetrated by the evil Sombro. Blinded with rage and taunted by Sombro along the way, you tear through each sector of the island, killing everyone with your newly acquired beast powers, which lets you turn into a slow and hulking man-jaguar—the tank of the game—or an actual jaguar that is faster at (but has no combat abilities) moving and auto-smashing the world’s inexplicable surplus of terracotta vases.
slashing an enemy in beast form
Much like Insomniac’s Spyro the Dragon or Ratchet and Clank series, Feral Rites is jam-packed with collectibles of all sorts spread out through the game’s maze-like map. Raw material for armor upgrades, gold, journals, and talismans used to increase the number of moves you can do, are to be found in every nook and cranny of the complex map set out before you.
With multiple temples in a single level, it’s easy to get lost, which is probably why the developers included a ‘spirit sense’ mechanic that lets you find the most direct route to your objective by tracing a temporary line to wherever it is you need to go. While this is arguably better than quest markers or mini-maps, which can spoil the fun of real exploration, I (predictably) ended up abusing it. Since there’s no penalty for using the mechanic to your heart’s content, it personally became a part of the game’s natural flow, where I would enter an area with a fork, pound the ‘spirit sense’ button, and go on my merry way. In terms of real exploration, your mileage may very depending on how much you use (or abuse) the ability.
So maybe exploration isn’t your thing anyway and you just want to smash some shit up? Feral Rites has you covered.
Combat is high-energy, visceral and extremely gratifying in Feral Rites, featuring a large enough array of moves to make fighting any of the world’s dozen-or-so bad guys an interesting and challenging affair. You can’t just tank through fights and button mash your way to success, because your beast form can only take so many hits before you’re turned back into a human; your human form, while agile, deals less damage to your foes—making the game’s combat system a real study in balance. You can change the game’s difficulty level at any time though, even in the middle of a fight, which increases bad guy skill and HP, and decreases the chances of getting a power up in one of the aforementioned vases that litter the game world.
My two favorite moves were throwing bad guys off high cliffs and throwing bad guys into piranha-infested streams (I really liked throwing guys)—two moves that are worth a relatively meager hazard bonus on your constantly building combo meter, but really effective at eliminating high numbers of baddies.
Puzzles are on the easy side, but hey, this is an adventure-brawler and not an adventure puzzler like Obduction.
Immersion
Like Insomniac’s Edge of Nowhere (2016), your third-person point of view makes you essentially a floating security camera that automatically switches positions as you control your character below. This sort of fixed-point teleportation isn’t really jarring because you can anticipate the camera switch pretty reliably, an event triggered by your character crossing a blue line in any given area of the map.
‘spirit sense’ activated, heading for a new area
So what does VR add to a decidedly traditional game like Feral Rites? A few things actually, the most important being the grandiosity of seeing it all in virtual reality.
The game’s Aztec-inspired scenery is vast and megalithic, something only a VR headset can correctly translate to the viewer. If you can resist using the ‘spirit sense’ ability and really take your time, you’ll be able to appreciate some of the most well-made environments currently available to VR headsets. Perched over a seemingly infinite drop, you can really get the sense of vertigo, even if you’re an invisible set of eyeballs in the sky.
To help you appreciate and take in the scenery, the developers added a unique rune-searching system so that every once in a while you can stop in your tracks and search for a rune symbol hidden somewhere in the scenery. When you find it, you’re given a little reward of coins for your effort, and you also get a chance to better scope out your surroundings.
Your shaman guide, Bokor
One of my least favorite things about Feral Ritesis that the storyline relies heavily on narrator-driven cut scenes; that and the helpful, if not incessant, image of your mysterious shaman buddy Bokor constantly appearing out of nowhere to tell you what to do. These are both (un)necessary evils to push the narrative forward, but dammit if it just doesn’t feel so gamey when you play it in a VR headset. Maybe it’s trying to hearken back to an earlier age, but the storyline was just too simplistic and just too obvious for me to really be engaged. Then again, it may be that I’ve grown out of these sorts of games, but I desperately want a game that feels more clever than me. I had to slog through it to get to combat, which proved to be much more engaging.
Something that often takes a backseat to the story is the soundtrack, an intensely cool mix of chill hiphop vibes when exploring (something like Samurai Champloo), and a much more arcade-like drum and bass track when in fights.
Comfort
Third-person games with a fixed POV like Feral Rites are always supremely comfortable simply because they don’t have any stomach-churning artificial locomotion to contend with.
It’s no surprise Oculus is pushing games like this on their platform, which up until Oculus Touch launches later this year, makes playing a game in a Rift necessarily a seated experience. That said, using the gamepad and sitting down is a familiar way to game, and scenery is usually splayed out in a comfortable, forward-facing way so you don’t have to swivel too much.
I can’t always play VR games for long, but this time I had a full day to beat it from beginning to end. Topping out at 10 hours for me personally,I can attest that Feral Rites is just as comfortable as you would expect it to be.
Conclusion
Feral Rites proves to be a fairly fun, well-balanced brawler that offers around 10 hours of gameplay if you follow the story alone. Collectibles are everywhere, giving you extra incentive to explore the entire island, which is a massive and beautiful place worth more than a cursory glance. The storyline is predictable and dialogue feels wooden however, and relies heavily on cut scenes and helpful narrators to push things forward, making it much less interesting than we would have hoped.
Scores
Gameplay: 6
Immersion: 8
Comfort: 9
Overall: 6.5
We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.
Cloudlands: VR Minigolf’s new level editor makes creating and sharing new courses a snap.
Level editors in videogames can greatly expand available content thanks to community-made creations, but actually learning how to use them can involve a steep learning curve, often leaving only a small number of dedicated creators to the task of making new content. Thanks to the intuitive nature of VR motion controls, that’s all about to change.
Cloudlands: VR Minigolf has launched a level editor in their latest update, allowing users to pick, place, and snap together course segments with incredible ease. Even more advanced components, like the game’s frequent cannons (which shoot your ball to a predefined location) can be placed and aimed as easily as a toy. You can add scenery just as easily by dragging and dropping props into position.
The trailer above shows the level editor in action and some of the inventive courses players have already created.
Once your level is built, the game allows you to share courses with the community directly through Steam and there’s already more than 200 player-made courses. Players can rate and favorite courses, allowing the best to float to the top.
The latest update also upgrades the game to Unity 5.4, which developer Futuretown says increases performance on some systems. Later updates are planned to expand the level editor further with more pieces.
Cloudlands: VR Minigolf, which currently run $20, is well rated on Steam (80% positive) and I also found it quite enjoyable in my hands-on preview earlier this year.
An environmental artist with a passion for Star Wars has realised the iconic location of Star Wars’ Mos Eisley space port in jaw-dropping detail via Unreal Engine 4. What’s more, it’s coming to VR soon and you can download the demo now.
John Lewis is an Environmental Artist for Obsidian Entertainment, developers behind games such as Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas. On a whim and as a Star Wars fan, he decided it’d be cool if he could a virtual build the docking bay (No. 94 as any Star Wars fan should know) located in Mos Eisley, Tatooine, the “hive of scum and villainy” from the original (sorry, ‘fourth’) Star Wars instalment. That’s how it began.
However, Lewis’ his ambitions for the project soon expanded, and eventually he realised that he really wanted to wander beyond the docking bay into the rest of Mos Eisley and visit the other iconic movie set, the Cantina where Luke Skywalker, Obi-wan Kenobi meet the Falcon’s owners, Han Solo and Chewbacca, for the first time. He needed help, so he enlisted his co-workers from Obsidian, quite rightly all Star Wars super-fans too, to the point where up to 17 people have now contributed.
“In addition to myself, the other artists working with me on this project all currently work for Obsidian as well, from additional senior artists, to mid-range and junior artists as well, ” says Lewis, writing for 80.lv, “We even have someone on the QA team contributing some artwork as well. In total there are 17 people contributing to this project in varying capacities. This is a just-for-fun personal project that we are all contributing to for no reason other than we are all a bunch of super Star Wars fans and with all the Star Wars awesomeness going on these days, we all thought it would be a good time to jump in and produce a quality fan art project. In addition to just being a bunch of super Star Wars nerds, several of us have been wanting an excuse to learn Unreal 4 for some time now, so we figured that this was a perfect opportunity.”
The resulting environments, rendered capably using Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, are some of the most detailed and realistic recreations I’ve ever seen. Indeed, Lewis admits that his ambitions were lofty on this front. “… my goal was to build the most highly detailed real-time Falcon that anyone has ever seen, and I think I have pulled it off, except for maybe the Falcon model from the recent ILM X-Labs VR demo …”. Tie fighters, X-Wing fighters and an Imperial Shuttle are all to be found whilst wandering around the environments.
The icing on the cake of course is that, being built in UE4, the demo should be relatively easy to add virtual reality support to, and indeed this is next on the horizon for the team. “We are also working on a VR version as well as several people in the group have been playing around with Occulus and Vive VR kits,” says Lewis, “and we thought it would be cool to have a version that runs in VR, so we are currently trying to get that finished as well.”
The team have made the demo available to the public to download now. Although be quick, this kind of super-high quality work will likely draw the eye of new Lucasfilm (and therefore Star Wars) owners Disney. In the mean time, checking out Lewis’ full blog on the project is highly recommended.
Gnomes & Goblins is a real-time interactive experience currently in development by VR production company Wevr and created by film director Jon Favreau, an industry professional known for his work on films such as the Iron Man franchise, Chef (2014) and The Jungle Book (2016). Releasing yesterday on Steam for the HTC Vive, I curiously popped my head into the fantasy realm and was immediately entranced by the solidity of the world set in front of me.
Spoiler Alert: This preview will likely ruin some of the magic of playing through the 5-minute experience for the first time. It’s highly suggested if you own a Vive, that you download it here and play it once through before reading.
Entering the main menu, you’re confronted with a lone sign post. There are no instructions, no helpful voices to tell you where to go or what to do, only a lit candle sitting atop a tree stump and a number of unlit candles appended to the various directions. It’s simple, clever things like this that spark something deeper inside you, that drive you to look, touch and experiment with the world of Gnomes & Goblins.
Lighting the ‘Goblin’ signpost with my candle (‘Gnomes’ was unavailable in this build), I was instantly transported to an enchanted forest filled with tiny rope bridges and homes carved into the trunks of living trees, all cast in an autumnal hue like some sort of beautiful dream. Fireflies buzzed as I playfully opened window sills to peak into the little village’s various homes, and even stuck my giant head down into a hollowed out tree trunk to find an archetypal medieval pub with beer flagons and wooden barrels.
Since locomotion is 1:1, meaning you have to actually walk around to move in the space, the experience is only so large, but the density of the village diorama and interactive items like acorns and apricots that you can pick from the trees had me exploring and playing around for a while before a certain rustling near my feet piqued my interest.
Wide-eyed little goblins peaked out of doors, ran on the tiny suspension bridges, and scurried around my feet. A curious little goblin inched closer to me as I beckoned him with an acorn in hand to lure him in. Snatching it from my grasp, he ran away behind the hollow stump, lurking back at me distrustfully and following me with his big, orb-like eyes.
Deciding that I could be trusted not to smash up their village (they are less likely to approach if you make sudden movements), another goblin wandered out of a tunnel at the base of one of the tree homes, toting a brass bell—giant for him, but normal-sized for me—and placed it at my feet.
No words were exchanged between us, me and the goblin as he plopped down at the base of the tree, expectantly waiting for me to pick up the bell.
Grasping it, I started swinging it slowly like an old timey town crier as each ring of the bell awakened the a swath of different-colored fireflies around me. The more it rang, the more fireflies obscured my vision until the whole world was glowing in an ethereal light. My vision returned, I looked up to see that I was now the size of a goblin, standing in the center of the village.
With the bell still in hand, I rang it again to find that I could tour the village from the inside to see goblins drinking, sleeping, and staring at me with their large, expectant eyes.
And that, sadly, was the end. It’s a world I desperately didn’t want to leave, although according to director Jon Favreau “[e]ven in this limited preview experience, I wanted it to be very rich. Where you felt like every time you went back into it you felt like you could find more.”
According to Wevr and production partner Reality One, there is much more in store for the goblin’s fantasy world.
“As we look ahead to building out the full scope of the experience, we are engaging Doug Church, a veteran game designer and interactive story pioneer, to flesh out the game systems and design the interactions and activities – increase player agency and the range of possibilities you will be able to experience in this expanded world. We are already down the path of designing the expanded Gnomes & Goblins universe.”
No release date has been established yet for Gnomes & Goblins, but we’ll be following it closely.
