Crytek just announced its new virtual reality rock climbing game The Climb, coming exclusively to the Oculus Rift platform next year. We sat down with Crytek and Oculus to discuss the new title.
At a special event in California this week, Crytek and Oculus unveiled their second exclusive title on its way for the Oculus Rift. The game is called The Climb and Road to VR‘s roving reporter Brian Hart went hands on the the VR rock climbing title and, after he’d recovered, sat down with Jason Rubin, head of Oculus Studios, David Bowman, Director of Production at Crytek, and Rok Erjavec, Technical Director at Crytek, to talk about The Climb and Crytek’s VR plans for virtual reality.
See Also: Hands On: Crytek Unveils Oculus Rift Exclusive Title ‘The Climb’
Road to VR: How important is VR to Crytek’s strategy?
David: Well, we’re going to continue to make AAA, top-of-the-line games. We don’t see that going away. But we are super excited by VR. We’re committing great resources to this. This is a significant financial investment on our part. We’re partnering with all the leaders in the space.
We started off a little more than a year ago. We’ll get the CryEngine, which is a fantastic engine… let’s get [CryEngine] ready for VR. That was our commitment then. We’ll get three engineers, we’ll have them all working on it, we’ll have VR up and running no problem. We started doing that and we went ‘Oh, this is more than we thought, but it’s also more interesting than we thought’. We started getting the hardware in, and actually testing it and using it and getting experience on it, and this is actually pretty compelling. So our developers started demanding to work on VR.
[VR hardware] enables things like The Climb. You can’t make that game without VR. In VR it’s real and visceral and plays to all the strengths of VR.
Road to VR: Do you call it a game or is it an experience or a simulation? I mean, you’re billing it as a game.
David: It’s a game. So it’s about fun first, but I am surprised at how much it thrills me, that it reminds me of really climbing and I’m happy because my children will be able to go free solo rock climbing and I don’t have to risk losing them, right? That’s a really great thing.
Jason: NFL players like playing Madden, but none of them would say, “Oh, if you just play this, you get what it is to be me.” Race car drivers generally like playing racing games. In my experience, they really like it, better than other games. [But] it’s not racing. And probably a half-decent kid off the street is better than them at a racing game and wouldn’t have a shot in hell at them on the track. So it’s balanced for fun, not simulation.
Road to VR: Is this part of a Wii Sports for Oculus kind of package?
Jason: No. There are a lot of input devices that have come out and people are looking at Oculus and saying it’s kind of like Wii or it’s kind of like another one of these inputs… Oculus is a reinvention of the display, which gives you a totally different way of perceiving the games that you’re in, and it’s a reinvention of the control scheme with Touch and it opens up an infinite number of possibilities of simulations of things that exist, like sports, and things that don’t exist.
We had demos of cartoon worlds you were walking around in, or people have done things where you’re an amoeba floating around and pushing yourself through with a thrust of your [flagella]. But there’s an infinite number of things you can do and generally when faced with the infinite, people start with the things they know and since VR is new, they’re saying, ‘Oh, there’s no sports,’ so we have a sports game. Oculus has one. Here’s something no one’s ever done before—climbing—let’s do that. It at least gives you something that you know about that’s never been done before in a game successfully, but at least gives you a real world reference point.
Road to VR: [The game] seemed very approachable. After I got past those first few minutes…
Jason: Well, and if you want to go through it slowly, you can do that. It’s hard to play a first-person shooter and say, ‘I’m going to take my time here,’ because the enemy is—whether they’re a non-player character or someone else—they’re going to shoot you, you’re going to die, you’re not going to have fun. But in this, if you want to just hang out and just look around, you can do that and if you want to go slow or do whatever that’s totally fine. So in that way, it is much more casual.
Rok: And I guess there is an element to the whole social aspect of the game where people can watch you climb. When we are watching you and if you’re going to succeed on [your] first grips, it’s actually kind of intense.
David: It really is. I was starting to feel for you. Like, ‘Wow, is he going to make this jump or not?’ I want you to make that jump.
Rok: So there is definitely this aspect that VR can be very social if it’s done right, at least with these kind of experiences.
The Climb is due to ship some time next year, with the Oculus Rift consumer edition arriving in Q1 2016.