After years of making some of the most impressive VR tech demos of their time, Epic's Robo Recall is not only the company's first VR game proper, but a culmination of what the company has learned about VR game and engine design since the beginning. We speak with Epic's Technical Director of VR & AR, Nick Whiting, about how the game came to fruition. “It actually turned out pretty great. It exceeded my expectations,” a relieved sounding Nick Whiting, tells me two days before the release of Robo Recall, the company’s first full VR game. He’s taking my call as he pounds the pavements in San Francisco between meetings at an industry conference, so I have to contend with traffic and street sounds in the background. He has to contend with my British accent, however, so we’ll call it even. “There’s a point in every game development project where everything finally comes together,” he tells me. “[We’ve] been focussing on the individual systems so much that you play it—and usually it’s about a month before it ships—and it’s ‘oh wow, this is actually a good game, we actually pulled this thing off’, and that kinda came to me about two or three weeks ago when I first played it from start to finish.” I’d also played the game from start to finish and felt inclined to agree. As we cover in our review, Robo Recall is a phenomenal arcade blast from the past, brought bang up to date and vividly rendered inside VR. At this point, however, Nick Whiting can’t be sure that’s how the game will be received, and he informs me that I’m the first person outside of the core Epic group he’s spoken to that has finished the game. He asks what I liked and disliked about my experience, and accepts my feedback—both positive and negative—with equanimity. A Long Time Coming [vc_tta_accordion style="flat" shape="square" color="black" c_icon="triangle" active_section="0" collapsible_all="true" css=".vc_custom_1489646562301{margin-right: 8% ; margin-left: 8% ;}"][vc_tta_section title="A Brief History of Epic's VR Tech Demos (click to expand)" tab_id="1489613949813-4fd5cf41-cfc5"] ElementalVR – E3 2013 Shown on the Rift 'HD Prototype' that followed the DK1, Epic adapted their 'Elemental' tech demo to be viewed through a VR headset. With no motion controls or positional tracking—and VR locomotion hardly worked out at the time—this was primarily a visual demo. StrategyVR – CES 2014 Making its debut on the Rift 'Crystal Cove' prototype—the first with positional tracking—Epic combined their 'Elemental' and 'StrategyGame' tech demos into a VR demo which had a player sitting on a stone throne in front of a fiery demon. Between the two was a table of miniature enemies running around a cave-like environment. For the first time, thanks to the new hardware, players could lean into the table to see the tiny characters up close. Couch Knights – GDC 2014 | Read More Shown during the debut of the Oculus Rift DK2, Couch Knights put players in the body of an avatar sitting in a contemporary room. The player then controls a tiny cartoonish night who can run around the room and do battle with an opposing player’s knight, or even jump in the lap of the enemy’s avatar. Showdown – Oculus Connect 2014 | Read More Shown alongside the first reveal of the Oculus Rift ‘Crescent Bay’ prototype, Showdown adapted elements of a non-VR UE4 tech demo into an epic slow motion scene with bullets, debris, and explosions aplenty. Thief in the Shadows – GDC 2015 | Read More This collaboration between Weta Digital, the VFX studio behind Lord of the Rings, and Epic adapted assets from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) to transport you players deep into the halls of Erebor to face the mighty dragon himself. [caption id="attachment_37610" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Bullet Train[/caption] Bullet Train – Oculus Connect 2015 | Read More Epic’s first public tech demo to accompany the Oculus Touch controllers, Bullet Train introduces teleportation and weapon wielding mechanics. Players zoom around the battlefield by teleporting from one node to a next with the ability to shoot in slow motion and even grab bullets out of the air to throw them back at their originators, like a badass superhero.[/vc_tta_section][/vc_tta_accordion] But let’s take a detour for a moment, back to 2014 at the inaugural Oculus Connect developer conference. Showdown, one of several VR demos created by Epic over the years, makes its debut alongside the Rift ‘Crescent Bay’ prototype, the first version of the headset to be glimpsed after the DK2 development kit. Remember that this is the first time many people will have seen an experience of this quality, running at 90fps. This is the tech that would go on to form the basis of the first consumer Rift headset. [caption id="attachment_17175" align="aligncenter" width="1499"] 'Showdown', one of Epic's VR tech demos build on Unreal Engine[/caption] It was a memorable scene, its impact increased due to the decision to play it out in slow motion. This allowed people to comfortably absorb every aspect of the action, and neatly ensured nobody panicked as exploding cars flew through the air at them. Surely this slow-motion feature, this genesis of an idea that later played out so well in Bullet Train and Robo Recall, was planned? Apparently not. The motion captures of the soldiers they had lifted from another project only had six seconds worth of data at most. Running the scene in slow motion was a necessity so that it could reach a conclusion before the mo-cap data ran out. Strange how fate works sometimes—an elegant solution to a messy problem became a signature feature of this demo and the work that followed. Fast forward to 2015, the Oculus Connect 2 developer conference. A slightly larger, but still modestly staffed team from Epic had the opportunity to once again supply the defining demo for new Oculus tech, this time the Touch controllers. It did not disappoint; Bullet Train saw universal praise by those that played the demo. A year later when it was made available to the general public they were no less effusive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtJGQ3ruV0I Bullet Train captured the imagination. It was in the vanguard of titles pointing the way to a VR future replete with polished, high production value, inventive, and unique gameplay experiences. It delivered on the fantasy of being Neo from The Matrix inside VR, and set the bar quite high for other developers wanting to build experiences in that same vein. Funded After two Oculus Connects and two well received demos in a row, what was next for Nick Whiting and the team behind Epic’s VR demos? “After we finished Bullet Train for Oculus Connect 2 we were funded a little bit for GDC,” he tells me. “At the same time Oculus said ‘hey we’ve got these Touch controllers and everybody loves Bullet Train, how would you like to spin it up into a full game?’, and they offered to fund it for us.” Music to the ears of every accountant working at Epic, no doubt. Having Oculus backing definitely helps, Whiting tells me. “It makes it less risky for everyone. The biggest thing, for all these companies, is that people need to put food on the table at the end of the day. As much as we try to do it from an enthusiast perspective there’s still an economic proposition to the whole thing. It certainly makes it easier asking [management at Epic] for a 15 person team if you’ve got funding to back it.” He got what he asked for, and it was this group of 15—pulled from other projects around Epic —that have worked on Robo Recall from that point until now. “We actually built up a VR team at Epic for the first time—a proper, dedicated, team—rather than begging and borrowing and stealing people’s time. So that was really kind of a watershed moment for us.” Continue Reading on Page 2 >> Comments made by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney late last year seemed to suggest that the project was funded to a level close to the $9 or $10 million of the original Gears of War (2006). "I'd have to check with Tim on that," Whiting said. "He may have been referring to something other than the $10 million Gears budget that some people inferred from another interview." He elaborated further, leading to our own estimate of a much more conservative budget. Maybe not as high budget as Gear of War, but now armed with a more substantial team and with the backing of a major VR platform holder, attention turned to the task of building on what they had. “The genesis of Robo Recall was all the stuff that we didn’t do in Bullet Train. We decided to make that into a full game. One of the things we noticed was that everyone had a great time shooting things, but they couldn’t reach out and grab anything and interact with it. Everybody was a little disappointed that they couldn’t and so that’s the first thing we did for Robo Recall.” One thing that didn’t change between the two was the choice to go with teleportation for movement. “We really started with comfort. That was one of the big things, we said nobody can get sick on this;” as a serious sufferer of simulator sickness I’m grateful for that, and it seems I’m not alone: “fortunately we have a few people that are very susceptible to motion sickness in the office, so they were our guinea pigs.” Poor fellows. As laudable as this commitment to comfort is, there is a vocal portion of the VR community that want to see full locomotion options in all games. Would it be possible to drop the teleportation and implement direct locomotion? “No, it’s a central tenet of the game. The slow-mo is tied to that, getting up [close] and tearing the bots apart is tied to that. I just don’t think you could do that in a traditional locomotion game. You couldn’t move around as fast. We wanted to make sure that teleporting didn’t feel like a way to cheat, it was integral to the gameplay.” Interestingly, writing this just a few days after release, modders have added exactly this type of functionality to the game, thanks to official mod support built into Robo Recall. While it doesn’t appeal to me personally, there are those out there hailing the modder as a hero and claiming to enjoy the game a lot more without the teleporting. From my perspective they’re not playing Robo Recall any more; as I made clear in my review, I’m a huge fan of the speed at which the game plays out and full locomotion doesn’t have that same hyper-kinetic feel. With a button to trigger slow-motion it loses a lot of the rhythm that made the game fun for me personally, and literally breaks the design of the gameplay and all of the balancing work that was done. That said, at least with mod support, Epic are allowing for people to take their creation in different directions even if they have no interest in taking it there themselves, and the community at large get the choice as to how they want to play. I can’t help but wonder if this is a route more developers might take going forward to avoid what seems to be an increasing schism amongst VR players. Room to Grow Leaving the locomotion aside, another potentially contentious point is the length of the game. It’s something that many other VR releases have been taken to task for, so clocking in at two hours for a run through the nine missions there’s an argument to be made that Robo Recall is a little light on content. “The interesting thing,” Whiting says, “is that now we have to do two markets: those that have been using VR for a little bit, and those [for whom it’s] still their first or second experience. Two hours for a seasoned pro seemed reasonable—we’ve seen some people take upwards of three hours—but then on top of that the thing that really keeps it going is the stars and the unlocks.” He’s not wrong. I spent a whole hour completing all the challenges for just one of the missions. [caption id="attachment_60726" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] 'Flying Bot' concept art[/caption] “We have a full modding system in there so people can go and make new bots, new weapons, new levels and all those classic mod things. We’re hoping that through seeding that community with a few Epic Games collaborations in there and then a few external partners can add a little more longevity to it.” That seeding, it seems, will include content from Epic’s properties such as Fortnite, Paragon, and Unreal Tournament. “We also have some collaborations that we haven’t announced yet with some external studios that use Unreal technology to bring their game content. So we’ve got bigger plans that are rolling out after [launch], but initially a bunch of exemplar content from Epic’s internal games.” Something else I point out in the review is that the world itself can seem a little lifeless and static—especially compared to Showdown. I mention this and the response, while predictable, is reasonable. [caption id="attachment_60700" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] The streets of 'Robo Recall' lead to a building with unique architecture[/caption] “That’s mostly just a content creation time issue,” Whiting says. “There’s no reason we couldn’t add more of that sort of stuff to it but we had a limited art budget so we focussed on making the city look cool, and focussed a lot on real time reflections in the little pools of water and stuff that we couldn’t actually pull off in Showdown. So we went for a more static environment but we tried to pack more stuff into it. A nice next step for the next project would be to add some more dynamism into it. We definitely had more plans for it but the time budgets always get in the way of such things.” Continue Reading on Page 3 >> A Throwback to the Future So there are questions over the locomotion from some quarters, and somewhat fewer concerns over the length of the game, but something that we can all agree on is that the game is a wonderful throwback to the arcade era. If this had a Sega or Namco badge on it, people could easily believe that it came from those companies. Whiting leaps on this, “that’s a very deliberate decision. We wanted something where people could feel like they’re having a good time, and not taking itself too seriously.” [caption id="attachment_60698" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] 'Big Bot' concept art[/caption] With me being of a certain vintage, the announcer at the start of the game took me right back to my arcade days in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and even into the ‘00s with the Dreamcast console. That call out at the start of the game nearly didn’t make it, says Whiting. “Funny enough that was a very controversial thing, and we nearly cut that from the initial trailer, because people thought it would be too cheesy. I’m really glad we stuck with it though.” I can’t help but echo the sentiment. That arcade ethos extends to every facet of the game, as it invites you to utilise all the aspects of your VR presence in the name of robo-slaughter. [gallery size="full" columns="2" ids="60710,60708"] “That was one of those things that’s cool and unique to the medium,” he tells me. “You have motion control so your actions are directly one-to-one translated into the game, so teleporting up to something and tearing it apart, swinging it around, is just viscerally fun so it’s something that we really wanted to focus on. In large part due to the feedback of people playing on Bullet Train.” Encouraging Destruction All of which has led to Robo Recall being an absolute blast. Visceral is the word. I remember striking poses that would shame Freddie Mercury on a Queen album cover while throwing live robots into the vortex, and liberating their limbs for laughs. For developers, however, one of the bigger VR problems is how to get players to interact fully with the game; how to let them know what was possible. Whiting picks up this theme eagerly. [caption id="attachment_60696" align="alignright" width="490"] Bobble-head bots found in the 'Robo Ready' office[/caption] “A lot of it was trying to inform players and get them to do what you intend them to do. A lot of people don’t realise that every bot in the game can be weaponised some way; you can rip the limbs off the biped bot and use them to melee with, but you can also grab the flying bots and shoot their laser cannon; take control of the big bot,” and plenty more besides, I recall from my own time with the game. “But trying to get people to do that—because people aren’t used to actually feeling like they’re in a gunfight, and they kinda hunker down a little bit—so trying to get them to engage with the robots that can be slightly intimidating.” This comment takes me back to my vivid recollections of the Showdown demo. The roaring at the end really did cause me to take a literal step back the first time it happened, followed shortly by relieved self-conscious laughing. Similar reactions can be seen with people viewing things like the Oculus Dreamdeck ‘Dinosaur’ scene for the first time. “It’s an interesting design challenge that we didn’t consider at the very beginning: trying to make them not appear super threatening,” says Whiting. “The whole motif of the game being an arcade action game that doesn’t take itself too seriously is all a very conscious effort to try and drive people to feel comfortable in the environment and [know] that they can play around with it. We want them to feel like it’s a sandbox rather than a game where you do A and then get B. We want them to start exploring.” Accessible by Novices and Pros Alike Exploration—of the game mechanics more than the world—was something that ate a lot of my initial time with the game. When I was turning in scores of 100,000 or less in a mission with a challenge to get 3,000,000 it was obvious that something was amiss with my approach. I started to realise that each encounter was akin to a puzzle that I needed to unravel. Whiting had the Epic perspective on this voyage of discovery. [gallery columns="2" size="full" ids="60711,60704"] “We made a lot of conscious effort for people that have never tried it before—especially people that haven’t really played shooters or anything like that you can imagine the learning curve—so we tried to kinda ease them in with the training mission. Make it so that failing is very hard, like abjectly failing is very hard in the game. You can die but you can get right back into the action.” This is true, but getting ‘back into the action’ at the expense of 10% of your score total is—and please excuse my male-oriented pivot to the gutter—a kick in the balls. Especially when I was clocking 2,900,000 scores toward my goal of three million “A lot of it was like trying to make sure that everything was a gentle slope as much as possible, but leaving room for progression at the top end so you have skills that you actually master and get good at when you dedicate the time to it.” [gallery columns="2" size="full" ids="60703,60784"] This, for me, is the draw of the game’s ‘All Star’ mode. This is something that people new to shooters, or content tourists just soaking up the latest and greatest in VR, are never going to see. This is the real game. It ups the ante on enemy numbers, and massively reduces the delay on robots reacting to your moves in the world, which in many ways forces the player back to square one to re-acquire the skills necessary to succeed in this new environment. The feeling for me was very much like that when approaching a new Dark Souls game—I had the will, but lacked the skill. I share my experience with All Star mode with Whiting, who seems pleased at my suffering. “I’m glad it provided a legitimate challenge. That was the hope, to give you something that’s still hard to master in a traditional arcade game way. In games today it’s easy to get all the way through it but then it doesn’t necessarily provide a challenge, and I think it’s one thing people love about the Souls games is they don’t coddle you once you get to a certain point; it’s brutal but it’s fun because you feel like if you master it you’ve really accomplished something.” Continue Reading on Page 4 >> Shared Sociopathy Speaking of the Souls games they had an interesting take on multiplayer, something conspicuous by its absence in Robo Recall. Another casualty of the slow motion which, of course, would be incredibly tough to pull of in a multiplayer context. Over to Whiting: “We have some ideas in that regard but it’s one of those things that we didn’t have time to do because the team was still only 15 people, so multiplayer was one of the complexities that didn’t make it. You want to be able to teleport up to a bot and then each person grab a limb…” At this point I suggest this might sound weird to say to someone not familiar with the game. Co-op dismemberment. He laughs, and quips “it’s a great feature of VR, shared sociopathy.” [gallery columns="2" size="full" ids="60705,60697"] - - — - - All of which which brings us, finally, back to the launch of the game. With the release of the game imminent (at the time of the interview), and the reaction of the public soon to be known, surely Whiting must be feeling some trepidation? Not so much. “When we got word that it was finally certified and locked down there was a wave of relief. There’s always that very nervous moment when things are wrapping up and you’re looking at all the critical bugs coming through. That moment when everything’s actually pinned down and certified shippable is a great relief.” So no sleepless nights then? “I slept like a baby.” As did I, after spending five straight hours with the game. More from this series: Stormland – Insomniac Games Asgard's Wrath – Sanzaru Games Blood & Truth – Sony’s London Studio ASTRO BOT – Sony’s JAPAN Studio Lone Echo – Ready At Dawn ARKTIKA.1 – 4A Games