inXile's Brian Fargo Talks VR and Open World Survival RPG Plans
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"One of the things that we are all dealing with is that I find the sites that focus on VR really get what we're doing and what the trade offs are. And, oftentimes, these people who are not really VR sites, the reviewers are just shredding products because they're making comparisons to a PC experience. They don't really understand," he says. "Not even to pick my product... I've read some reviews of Arizona Sunshine that were horrible and I'm thinking, 'I play everything on VR. It has absolutely been one of the best fucking games out there and there's no way it should get a bad review.' But it is because they're not understanding what these trade-offs are of this stuff. And so I think there's a big education process on the critical review side on what these games can and cannot do."
"And sometimes they don't do it on purpose. It's like, if you're a PC game player, and you every once in a while throw on your VR headset and play a game and give it a review, you're probably going to have a different attitude than a guy that plays a lot of VR games. Because then you have a better spot to go from. That's just an education process that happens over time."
PC games in the AAA space can obviously cost tens of millions of dollars, whereas VR budgets on PC are in the single-digit millions at best. "I think budgets around the $5 million range seem to be towards the high end of the scale," Fargo informs me. "There's not a lot of those deals available, so certainly anyone who's been allowed to be financed at that level has been fortunate. On the PSVR though, I know budgets that are in excess of $10 million. So they're really stepping up on a whole other level on that side of the business. Again, not a lot of deals, but for the right ones, you can get in excess of $10 million."
So the budgets are lower, and to further complicate matters developers are having to relearn entire aspects of game development. In my numerous conversations with VR developers the common theme has always been to throw out what you thought you knew about game design. Fargo agrees.
"That's why I feel fortunate that we were able to do Mage's Tale because we learned a lot," he says. "The lessons you learn with VR are not intuitive. You have to jump in and do it. So when we do our next project, we'll be that much further ahead, having done the second one. So I'm glad that I won't be, 3 or 4 or 5 years out from now, saying, 'Now I want to do a VR game' because these 4 or 5 years of experience will really pay off for what we want to do."
Locomotion and proper hand tracking continue to be vital components that VR developers are grappling with: "There's a whole conversation about teleport, versus smooth movement, and how are we going to line that up if you're moving different than me, and handling all the inverse kinetics of things. There's also, just the way the hands work. Right now, with Mage's Tale, just taking off your headset and seeing are my hands where they are in the virtual world? Are they matching up here? And [devs are] spending the time on that. Little things like aim assist, when you're throwing the fireballs. If we just literally let you throw it just like you think you throw a baseball, turns out people are pretty bad throwers. So we need to make it feel like you do have control over the thing, but it isn't completely free-form. So sort of dialing in those little motion and throwing aspects is something that you have to experiment with.
