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A new Horizon has dawned for the Horizon franchise with the new PlayStation VR2 spin-off game Horizon Call of The Mountain, and we’ve spoken with the game’s Narrative Director Ben McCaw in this new interview about how the team has adapted Horizon to the VR hardware.
Ben McCaw was the writer of the original Horizon Zero Dawn as well as the Narrative Director for its sequel Horizon Forbbiden West. Even before joining Guerilla Games, he was a freelance writer who worked on Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor with Warner Bros Interactive and the Prince of Persia series with Ubisoft.
In this interview, he went more in-depth about the challenges of bringing the Horizon series to the new PlayStation VR 2, particularly when it came to narrative and world-building.
When developing the game, how did the devs optimize the design for PS VR2?
I think what we really wanted to achieve was an incredible sense of verticality and scale. Verticality is pretty obvious in the game, you’re climbing a lot, and your ability to take in the Horizon landscape, the beautiful nature, the vistas, to kind of get that sense of really being there on the mountain was really important to us.
Also, the sense of scale, a sense of the scale of the mountain that you’re climbing in the environment and also the scale of the machines, because that’s a really amazing opportunity for VR to see the machines at the scale as if you were really, really there.
So, as far as PS VR2 is concerned, a lot went into this. Obviously, there are incredible new visual features including gaze tracking, and a foveated rendering which is a big deal for us, and also the haptics is a really big deal for us in terms of getting the tension out of the bow or climbing hand holds and a lot of other features. If I had to sort of sum it up in two words, I would say verticality and scale.
Designing the game for VR comes with its own set of challenges for the team. Are there any important lessons Guerilla and Firesprite have learned through the process?
Part of the wonder of VR is getting to experience the world in an up close and tactile way. When people are playing the game, we notice that different players enjoy different things and do them at their own pace.
But a lot of people really enjoy this kind of visual and tactile exploration. They like to pick up different objects and throw them or look really, really closely at things that you can’t do as well in a third-person game or they really want to examine the environment or play sometimes with various objects in the environment.
So as we were developing the game, we started to kind of realize that and just kind of add more and more to it to the game. Me, when I watch people play, what I enjoy the most is how they each get their own kind of individual experience out of it.
When you designed and created the Ryas character, were they specially made with VR in mind?
Absolutely. When we set about to make this game, we knew that VR and PS VR2 were going to provide a new perspective on the world of Horizon and we thought along with a new perspective, we needed a new protagonist and that’s kind of where Ryas came from.
We wanted him to be a master climber which was critical to us to explain his skill and to give you that sense of being a strong climber in the game. Then we also wanted him to be a master Archer because that’s another huge aspect of the gameplay.
The story was kind of born from there and in all of the different aspects we want to make sure that also contains key aspects of Horizon. I mean obviously, this includes the visuals and the machines but also we have some returning characters.
You introduce Ryas along with the new characters and some familiar faces like Aloy in Call of the Mountain. What was the thinking behind this choice narrative?
We’re excited to see the world of Horizon from a new perspective. There are people experiencing some aspects of the world for the first time and that’s not really possible for Aloy after all the others games and also because Aloy has a deep understanding of the world that she lives in.
But Ryas has a different understanding of the world and has to learn along the way and that felt like a really good match for PS VR2. Call of the Mountain is a standalone experience. It’s like a standalone story. No experience with Horizon is required. Super fans are going to love it and they’re going to find little details that they’ll love but it is definitely a standalone story. This relates to Ryas as a protagonist and is definitely a story you can pick up and play without any previous Horizon experience.
One thing that really stood out to me was how simple the combat controls were considering all the different things there are to do. How did the developers design the controls while still keeping them accessible?
One of the things we wanted to do in combat was to make sure the focus was always on the machine.
One of the reasons why we wanted to do that was because of the amazing scale. So getting to experience the scale of the machine with PS VR2 but also being there in the third person is a little bit different. You want to make sure you really felt right there in that you were sort of locked in on the machine.
A lot of our decisions really came from there because that’s what makes all of the really tactile things easier. Like you’re thinking more about pulling your bowstring back in the field of view of the machine.
How did you take full advantage of the PS VR2 visuals to depict the world of Horizon?
Okay, so two answers: one is about the way the game is rendered. The foveated rendering allows us to concentrate specifically on what the players actually looking at and to render that in extreme detail with things are in outside the field of view. That enables a whole lot of things. It enables us to render at a really cool level of detail. To make sure that the player feels like it’s as immersive as possible. So, you know, it’s taking advantage of features like that to just make sure that the world feels as immersive as possible.
Another thing that really helps about the headset is that the field of view which is larger than most VR headsets really gives you that sweeping vista when you’re looking out on the world.
VR allows for storytelling to be a more immersive experience. For your role as narrative director, how did you build the technology in terms of what you do and how does the PS VR2 assist you in crafting a tale that is more unique in Call of the Mountain?
One of the things that make the PS VR2 so cool is what happens when you’re actually talking to another character, you can actually see their eyes following you which is such a cool aspect when you’re there up close. It really brings a lot of expressiveness and detail when other characters interact with you. On a narrative design level, the challenge with it is that you don’t take the camera away in VR, the player is the camera at all times.
So that is a different type of storytelling that I wound up really enjoying because it forces you to put the gameplay in that which I think turned out really well in the game. There are some really cool moments that I feel are highly cinematic when you control the camera. So I think that stuff worked out really well.
Since VR enables storytelling from many angles, was the story scripting process any different than how you would normally do it for usual games?
Storytelling is broad. There is a mission in the game where you’re not just fighting the Thunderjaw, you’re essentially kind of being hunted by a Thunderjaw.
In VR, it’s so immersive and so tactile because it’s [the Thunderjaw] literally crashing through the environment. It gets pretty up close and personal when you’re in VR so that’s the kind of experience that is really very specific to VR. The emphasis is on making sure that story moments feel like they’re in the player’s field of view; they feel like they’re happening there, that they’re going to catch your attention, that’s exciting and fun to do that in VR because that’s what has to happen.
It has to be in your field of view or make you want to look. A minor but it’s awe-inspiring example; in the opening on the riverboat ride when the Tallneck walks over you or when the Stormbird flies over you, that’s just going to grab your attention and that’s how you have to think when you’re visually designing in terms of Storytelling. It’s not about cinematics in the traditional sense.
What is the hardest part of the Horizon features that you had to rework to VR – like exploration or combat? And how did you overcome it?
Combat is a challenge in VR but there were so many things that helped. So again, that experience of getting to really feel like you’re fighting a Thunderjaw or the other machines is just such an immersive experience, that you kind of want to build the experience around that.
The haptics really, really help with that as well because there’s just a more tactile, more immersive feel that you get from that.
Can you describe the work that went into making a game that wasn’t originally designed for VR to feel more interactive and tactile? Examples include the addition of interactable objects, ropes for us to climb and glide across, and puzzles that have been redesigned with VR in mind.
I think whenever you’re trying to do that, try to look at what’s in your world that you already have and how that’s going to work with the new hardware or the new platform. For us, two things that were right there from the beginning were immersion and having it be more tactile in the traversal of the game.
That came to us pretty early on. It felt like a great way to experience Horizon because of the kind of vistas that you could get from this new vertical perspective. I think that was really leading the way for us a lot and ultimately I think it is like a cool different take on the world from all of these mountaintops. Then you kind of, start designing the whole game for that level of verticality.
There are some great, great moments in the game where you can look down at a waterfall that’s pouring in the valley or some of the machines from the Old World that you can see off to the side or below you, things like that. So it really worked out well for us.
Could you tell us more about the accessibility options available in the game?
There are a couple of things. PS VR2 is so robust and has so much ability to keep customizing the experience. For the player, there is a strong overlap between comfort and accessibility, so we’re always looking at both of those things and we wound up coming up with a lot of great features.
You know, simple things like being able to enable or disable falling or all kinds of different combat settings like autoloading of the arrows or the ability to do different amounts of damage.
I think there’s just something about PS VR2 and it’s an amazing feature set that you have the ability to customize so much, so why not take advantage of that?
New Horizons
We thank Ben McCaw for speaking to us in this interview about Horizon Call of The Mountain just as the series sets into a whole new form of play with the PlayStation VR2. You certainly know your series has made it when you’ve got spin-offs coming out as well.
Horizon Call of The Mountain will launch on the 22nd of February 2023 for the PS5 with PlayStation VR2.
