Earlier today Insomniac, the studio to bring Edge of Nowhere in the next couple of months, announced it will be releasing two new virtual reality (VR) titles on top of the aforementioned development, one of which will be the narrative-led brawler, Feral Rites.
VRFocus spoke to Cameron Christian, Lead Designer of Feral Rites at Insomniac, who gives us a detailed outline on what the videogame is all about, what we can expect of the gameplay, and how he tackled motion sickness through camera techniques
VRFocus: Could you tell us what Feral Rites is all about and what the main features are?
Cameron Christian (CC): Feral Rites is what we’re calling an adventure brawler. It’s trying to combine the feel of adventure of Zelda with the brutal combat of God of War. It takes place on kind of a lush exotic jungle island which is a very dangerous world.
The big premise pushing it along narratively is you’re the young son of a Chieftain who was slain and you’re trying to find and get revenge on the killer of your father, and so you’re travelling through different parts of this island in different exotic island to find who is your father’s killer and to enact revenge on them.
For us, we are doing a kind of twist on the brawler. In the last scene on the trailer it shows the guy transforming into a beast, and you play as both that human and that beast character. And part of our combat is about intertwining both those forms into kind of a combo system and combo chain which will allow you to do ferocious finishers.
We have a large upgrade in gear selection, lots of quests and side-missions, and really pushing that adventure-exploration game while driving you with compelling combat.
I think for us doing this game in VR really gives us an opportunity to showcase Insomniac’s worlds in an immersive 360 environment, really trying to get the presence of being in the jungle, having that jungle surround you so you feel like you’re really inside of it. Also it being in VR it gives us really cool and very present shots of when you’re doing these finisher of up-close combat moves.
VRFocus: What is most prominent, the narrative or combat?
CC: I would say that it is probably the combat, I mean the story is part of your motivation for exploring. But also adventure because we want the world to pull you in every direction. We want to create a space that you just want to look around and go down the paths – the combat helps lead you and some of the progression helps lead you, but really the world is the big push for us.
VRFocus: From what point of view can the players experience Feral Rites?
CC: This is a third-person game. The way that we’re treating this is – I’m not sure if you’ve seen some of these other VR third-person games but they tend to have a follow cam. For us, we’re trying to stick with a fixed-camera kind of style game. So, if you’re familiar with Chronos or maybe the old-school Resident Evil, but we’re trying to keep it fixed so one: we can really build a scene out of the lush jungle around the camera, and two: it gives us the ability to backtrack and move in multiple directions and keep motion sickness low so people can play our game for extended amounts of time.
VRFocus: What type of controller can the player use?
CC: We’re using the Xbox controller, it’s a kind of standard brawler multiple button combo combat.
