This particular anxiety is a very strange sensation, slowly creeping up to a corner. You hear the sounds of the environment, but they’re muted. Your mind puts them in the distance. There is an immediacy to the task at hand, and your senses have gone appropriately tunnel-y. It’s a necessary response, some inherent survival mechanic, triggered here by the walker around that corner. Just ahead, you can see his limbs pop into view from behind the barrier as he shuffles about. You know time is short and you have to reach your destination. Lives may hang in the balance. You know what you must do.
So you psych yourself up. A few short, shallows breaths to get up your nerve, and you lunge at him. Only he was already motioning toward you. You weren’t so quiet as you thought, and he’s not alone. As he grabs onto you, you see four other walkers lumbering behind him. Slowly. They have all the time in the world to make their cold, deliberate march of certain death. It’s you who have panicked, you who have hurried into the spider’s web.
You flail violently, pushing off your assailant, and with a fresh wave of conviction, grab him by the head. You drop your hand savagely, plunging your rusty kitchen knife into the top of his head with a satisfying crunch, and cast the corpse aside. Now the knife is broken, but you are hardly helpless. Reaching over your shoulder, you grasp your own personal Lucille. It may not be the Objective, but in your heart you know, this is what you came for. A smile creeps across your lips. Negan ain’t got nothing on you.
Thirty minutes of obscenely gratifying gameplay at NYCC 2019 completely changed my conception of what immersion in a video game can be. I mentioned to Saints & Sinners Head of Community Amy Allison that when people had talked about VR previous, when Nintendo dropped the Virtual Boy and we were watching The Lawnmower Man and Johnny Mnemonic back in the 90s, this is where we though the games were going. Nobody thought it would take 25 years, but VR has been consistently brushed off, like 3D before it, as a gimmick unworthy of investment or development. I can say now without reservation, if this is the future of gaming, consider me on the bandwagon.
The product of exhaustive playtesting and revisions, Skydance Interactive’s The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners presents is an impressive world full of small touches. Little things like the act of physically selecting weapons or you flashlight based reaching for their location on your body and holding down triggers to keep them in your grip are surprisingly effective. Dual-wielding melee weapons and firearms made me feel like a badass until a walker spooked me and I dropped them both because I was too focused on shoving it backward. As someone who hasn’t played many VR games, I had a tendency to forget that I could just grab another weapon off my other hip, or reach around and pull my backpack in front of me to grab a crowbar I had stowed incase of an emergency.
And that’s just the combat. Whether versus walkers or bloodthirsty survivors, so many of these seemingly slight additions coalesce into an unbelievably immersive and entertaining experience. There is a strong and very deliberate tactile component to every interaction with the game world, as even mantling and traversal have demonstrative mechanics. Beyond that, the open world setting has all the hallmarks of a deeply engaging survival horror experience. Found weapons lose durability and break, but those crafted at your base from better materials are considerably more reliable. The narrative itself is as open as the environment, with any character subject to the player’s judicious or malicious inclinations. Entire quest chains, dependant on NPC interaction, can be cut off in a trigger happy fit, or by allying oneself with a rival faction.
While the mechanics and atmosphere are great for pulling the player into an insanely detailed and evocative game world, I will admit that I do have a few reservations overall. First, the build I demoed was running on a relatively beefy laptop. I was advised that the minimum recommended specifications for a smooth gameplay experience include a Gen 8 or later Intel i7 processor and an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070 with 8GB of RAM. Even as a mid-range system today, these specs may put the experience out of reach for a lot of prospective players. With VR, frame rate is king, and compromising on these components could severely degrade the gameplay quality depending on the rest of your hardware. The game demo and hardware that I played on set a very high bar for performance by presenting an extremely fluid and consistent experience. Anything less might not be consistent with this reporting.
I also found the combination of VR and headset and surround sound headphones to be both claustrophobic and a little disorienting for my spatial awareness. Those who play VR more consistently may not be affected by it, but I wouldn’t be inclined to play for more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time, which can be a turn off for a game with so much to do and explore. Exceeding that time resulted in the headset becoming uncomfortably warm and heavy. Any game survival horror game that can actually make me sweaty and tired gets mega points for immersion, but not so much for ease of use. In addition, I would definitely recommend having a relatively large area to play in with at least 3 feet of clearance on all sides. And that’s actual clearance from feet to shoulders or desks, chairs, coffee tables, and people will bear the brunt of your aggression.
Lastly, while I did appreciate that weapons included surprisingly detailed, mechanically accurate models that require nearly 1 to 1 manual reloading, I didn’t like the aiming for the firearms as there was no apparent way to calibrate the iron sights for rifles and pistols in the demo. This may be included in the final release, but unless you’re point blank, getting pinpoint accuracy for shooting at range may take a prohibitive degree of practice. Honestly, the melee weapons are way more fun, especially considering that you can grab and hold walkers by the head. In retrospect, I didn’t quite experiment with the blocking potential of that mechanic the way I should have. I had a tendency to panic when walkers got too close and I kept accidentally dropping weapons. It’s real out there.
After observing me flail my way through the demo, Amy sat down to go over some of the finer points of the development and what the objective was in terms of tone and quality in bringing this world to life in VR.
ComicAttack: So what can you tell me about the development cycle? How long have you guys been working on the game?
Amy Allison: We’ve been working on the game about two years. Actually, we’ve tried a lot of different things with it because VR is a new medium and there’s lots of things that you want to try that people haven’t done before. So we had to go back and reiterate a lot and be like, “Okay, we can’t do it this way.” So a lot of people will keep their VR cycle to 14 months because of the return on the investment. Because you can’t like, let people work on VR games for years. But Skydance is a great company that only wants to only put out the best products, especially in that space of sci-fi and horror and action because they really love it.
The owner of our company, David Ellison, strongly believes that games are one of the great mediums, especially with VR being such a new- Entertainment of the future. So we’re really proud of it and we’re really excited for it.
CA: It really is- Like, whenever you think of what VR should be, and how immersive it should be, it really just checks a lot of those boxes of what the expectation is in ways that some other software that I’ve tried really doesn’t.
AE: We don’t want you coming in here and getting disappointed. Like when you couldn’t pick that brick up off the floor, it’s so upsetting that that was the one thing you tried to do. Because you can go through everyone’s cabinets, you can open up the drawers their a house, you can scavenge everything. That one thing you had to pick up, I was like, “Ugh!” But you can find cigarettes, you can light them, you can just have a lit cigarette hanging- Which is not good. Kids, stay in school.
Yeah, but it’s little weird creative touches they like to put in because we have had good success with our Archangel mech shooter game, but I think bringing that into story and that large universe with exploration; everyone was very excited and just wanted to make it as real as possible.
CA: The exploration would probably be the most difficult part for people to adapt to if they’re not used to VR, but everything about the game is really so intuitive, how many people work on that aspect of the game? “If you see it, you should be able to pick it up, this is how we do movement, this is how we focus your attention so you look where you need to look.” How many people work on that degree of world building?
AE: First of all, it’s exhausting and second, there’s about 50 people at our studio that work on it. And to get this demo ready; and I’ll just talk about the end of this cycle, because it’s been interesting. We have done so much playtesting, where we just brought people in and let them go at the game. And for five weeks, we did that. Test it, revise it. Test it, revise it. “They can’t figure out how deeply they’ve got to put it (stabbing weapons). Why can’t we figure that out?” We’ve got to put that illustration to say it’s not about doing a Friday the Thirteenth (mimics short, rapid stabbing motion) it about going deeper (mimics a longer downward stroke from overhead). So we really wanted- We did want it to feel intuitive, but we also wanted to do things that you couldn’t do in reality.
There is no technical weight, but you saw those ghost hands from time to time? We call those physical haptics. So when you push and the ghost hands are kind of showing you, you’re not going that fast, you’ve got to go slow to give you the feeling of that weight, because there is no weight. So there’s probably stuff that people don’t even notice that we put in. Like that, and you noticed the snap-turning that’s really just for people who are entering VR who aren’t as used to it. We have a smooth mode in the options for streamers and everything.
CA: One thing that I will say, I found the aiming harder than I expected it to be. It’s the one thing that pulled me out a little bit, as someone who has spent time on the range.
AE: Well a lot of people will like that horde mode we put you in at the end, because in a stressful moment it’s very hard to do some practice shooting. But if we put you in horde mode and you’re just up on the car like, “Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom!” You really get the (feeling) it’s something that’s going to take practice.
CA: I imagine that people who have had time-
AE: Oh my gosh, our QA department do the craziest stuff. And because you can take the heads off, and like… They are sick people(laughs). Did I tell you this. And then we’re like, “Oh my god, can we make that an achievement?”
CA: What really drove the decision to go open world, versus something more linear and more focused, where you can focus on the scares.
AE: We had already done a linear project in VR with Archangel. It was on rails and it was a shooter. We believe in VR exploration is really key because people want to touch stuff and do stuff, it’s very tactile. You want to open the doors. So I think it’s always that one area in development when you get there and you’re like, ”We can either do this or we can do this. How does the team feel? What do the players want the most?” Sometimes you’ve gotta make that “art” choice. Because everybody in my office wants to do everything, all the time. It’s like a scope creep nightmare. But you can see, if we’re going to put it in, we’re going to make it awesome. It’s exhausting, but it’s fantastic. And the team is just great, and they’re all behind it.
CA: Well, what you’ve managed to put together was really surprising for me, and I’m definitely looking forward to it. It’s a trip.
AE: And then to start adding stories on top of it…
CA: The story part of it is going to draw you in. It’s going to motivate you to keep pushing forward.
AE: Right. And the factions come and go. If you kill everyone in the house and the Faction never knew about it, the faction is not going to find out. If you let one person escape, they’re now going to start hating you. And that might mean they start shooting at you on the street, like on sight, so you’ve got to be pretty stealthy. But if you help them out, then they won’t shoot you on sight and they might let you come in and get some food. Throughout the game, you can strengthen and weaken you alliances with each, or you can screw both of them over. It’s very dynamic that way.
CA: But that also brings to mind the possibility of multiplayer. Is that something that you guys are looking at?
AE: We’re not exploring it at this time, but if we have the chance we would love to do that…
CA: That strikes me as something that could be a very visceral addition.
AE: You know, we are maxing out every single little bit that computer can do with the game that we currently have. So adding multi-player on top of it, as you could imagine, is prohibitive in some ways because we were like, “We could do that or we could do more open world.” We chose open world. A lot of people don’t have- Well, they don’t have two VRs in their house and even that remote with it. It’s a dream we would love to do, but right now we have no plans.
As always, we at comicattack.net would like to that Amy Allison for taking the time to answer our questions about The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. The game is scheduled for a January 2020 release. For more information, please visit https://vrwalkingdead.com/.
Christian Davenport
cable201@comicattack.net
It really did take 25 years to get to the point where VR looks good and actually interactive. Having played the game a bit how do you think it compares to others like it? VR and/or horror games
It doesn’t come across as bleak or oppressive as many games in the genre, but that’s understandable with it being open world. The art direction could have gone much darker in tone, but then it might not be a place most players would want to be for extended period in VR. So I think it was designed with a broader appeal in mind. The story, gameplay mechanics, and exploration will be more of a draw that aesthetics. At least in my opinion.
And the only VR titles I’ve played have come across like very gimmicky “on rails” shooting galleries, or like polished up motion control demos. I did like the time I spent with their previous Valkyrie game, even if it was only a PSVR demo. Saints & Sinners requires an almost methodical attention to detail due to the the inventory management and combat mechanics. You need to know your enemies and be prepared for contingencies. It’s just a different animal to what I’ve been exposed to. Very immersive and engaging as a result.