PlayStation VR Worlds is a collection of VR mini-games created by Sony’s talented London Studio. The studio has detailed new features designed to improve first-time VR experiences for those showing VR to their friends and family, and competitive features to keep gamers coming back for more.
Bundled with the PlayStation VR Launch Bundle (or available separately for $40), PlayStation VR Worlds players will be able to step into five different experiences: The London Heist, Ocean Desert, Scavengers Odyssey, VR Luge and Danger Ball.
Today via the Official PlayStation Blog, PlayStation VR Worlds Lead Designer Simon Hermitage detailed new features of the experiences that expands replayability and improves the game’s effectiveness as a introductory experience for players who are new to VR (and even gaming in general).
Casual
The London Heist, for instance, has a casual mode that adds laser sights to the guns and reduces difficulty by increasing with aim-assist and reducing enemy damage to the player.
“With this mode enabled, you can experience The London Heist as more of an interactive story and still get to the dramatic finale,” Hermitage writes.
Further on the casual end, Ocean Desert, which has the player being submersed in a diving cage, has three selectable dives which vary in length and intensity (the final one including the not-so-unexpected shark attack). Hermitage says that the longest of the three dives has a mystery story running throughout it for players to ponder.
Competitive
On the competitive side, there’s now leaderboards pretty much anywhere that it makes sense, giving players a ranking against which to measure themselves and strive to beat records of friends and nemeses alike.
The London Heist now has four shooting ranges which will test your meddle with the game’s various weaponry, and record your score separately for both laser-sighted and unassisted modes.
Dangerball also gets a scoring leaderboard in the Score Attack Mode. “Dangerball’s Score Attack is an endurance VR game where players must hit the highest scoring tiles and maintain combos to push for the high score.” There’s also Tournament and Quick play modes with special modes like “power shots, swerve balls, and ball splitting.”
VR Luge naturally gets timed leaderboards for seeing who is able to race to the bottom the fastest, and players will be able to race against the ‘ghosts’ of others. “We also have a fiendishly difficult VR Luge Tour, where players must complete all four tracks consecutively within a difficult target time before they can post their time to the exclusive Champion’s leaderboard,” Hermitage explains.
To round out the total experience of PlayStation VR Worlds, Hermitage says that there’s carefully crafted trophy challenges which will “give you tricky gameplay targets to achieve, special actions to perform, and new places to visit.”
From what we’ve seen of PlayStation VR Worlds previously, the game is wrapping up to be a great package of starting experiences for PSVR. Combined with the excellent looking Playroom VR, which comes for free with every PlayStation VR, those who pick up the headset’s bundle are going to have a solid amount of out-of-the-box VR content to play before they hunger for more.