There are plenty of studios working on the PlayStation VR virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) for PlayStation 4. In fact, creator Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) has even released a list of 230 teams that are creating titles for the kit. One of the developers that doesn’t appear on the list, though, is Sony Santa Monica, the team behind the celebrated God of War franchise. Despite seemingly not working on anything official right now, the team has recently confirmed that VR is a ‘pretty heavy’ part of its dialogue at the moment.
Studio Head Shannon Studstill said as much in a recent interview with Kinda Funny Games. When asked if VR was something that the studio was keeping an eye on Studstill replied: “Absolutely, I mean this is the beginning of something big. And that’s our jobs, to make sure that we are– it doesn’t necessarily need to be an initiative and it’s not for us right now but the creatives at the studio are always out there looking at what’s going on.
“And we have people at the studio and [in] game jams and they’ll bring in VR into that game jam experience and start to really double down and show the team what they’re capable of, what they see as a potential experience on that peripheral. So, yeah, it’s part of our dialogue pretty heavy right now.”
Of course, it was Sony Santa Monica’s God of War III that helped introduce PlayStation VR to members of SIE internally, with Head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida often recalling his experience of stepping into the role of series protagonist Kratos in a short section of the videogame. There are heavy rumours that the developer is working on God of War IV right now, though none of these point to any possible VR integration with the franchise.
Check back with VRFocus for the latest on Sony Santa Monica’s work in VR.
