Did seeing the world you created through VR provide you with any fresh insights into how the characters who live there might feel living amongst massive machine predators?īM: Wow, that’s a great question. As the game opens, we’re gliding along a stream with machines everywhere, encouraging us to twist our heads and crane our necks. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. When you’re actually confronted with one of the machines and you’re doing it in first-person at scale in VR it feels like the machine is looming over you in a way that is just incredible. You could be hanging from a cliff and looking down and seeing the world from a totally different perspective than you ever could in Horizon Forbidden West. There was this amazing sense of verticality and scale that you get when you play. There’s something about the visual spectacle of the franchise, the contrast between beautiful nature and the awe-inspiring machines that we felt would be a natural fit for VR.Īnd we were thrilled when we got hold of the hardware and saw the potential.

We felt like Horizon would fit really well into VR.

Post Arcade: Did Sony come to you about doing a PS VR2 game or did you approach them?īen McCaw: It was an ambition we had. The pair were excited to discuss their work, ranging from what virtual reality helped teach them about a world they already thought they knew (the machines are really, really big) to whether they prefer using VR’s gesture controls or traditional thumb sticks for movement. Post Arcade had a chance to chat with two of the game’s key developers: Ben McCaw, studio narrative director at Guerrilla Games, and Alex Barnes, game director at Firesprite, a British studio brought in to help develop the franchise’s first foray into virtual reality.

Horizon vr call of the mountain