hey everybody its norm from tested and welcome to a special on location episode
of projections we are of course covering virtual reality content a lot of games
announced at this year's e3 and a lot of first hands-on time with a bunch of
games as well one of the games previously announced I got a chance to
play is lone echo 2 the sequel to ready at Dawn's expansive narrative zero-g
story where you play Jack robot who's stranded with your human companion live
it's an amazing game you haven't played it yet and no echo 2 looks like it's
gonna take it even further not had a chance to chat with ready at dawn
develop or Nathan this game director about the game let's go hear that first
so I just played a little bit of lone echo 2 and I'm here chatting with Nathan
is the game directed the first game obviously massive single-player
experience of course with very interesting now multiple multiplayer
experiences you guys are focusing on a southern long single-player games
alright with what I put - yeah we are and definitely the heart and soul of
kind of lone echo and Logan lone echo - it's nearly it's actually really a very
personal story about two characters that said in this kind of inspiring backdrop
that uses compelling locomotion to be able to have agency and exploring this
cool futuristic world well what struck me jumping in is like you said in the
first game you have a very intimate store between you the robot and then the
human live and you don't double down on like have more characters like like
looking into other one person's eyes and the interaction with an NPC was so
powerful but at least what I've seen so far you kind of still have that it's
rapport it absolutely is the core however we're
not talking about right now but there are more characters in this game
and that's something I'm really interested in it's like Dr is such a
powerful medium for storytelling and emotion and so we explored certain range
of emotions in low Necco and we want to kind of expand that and really see what
else we can kind of just like convey to people on a very you know personal like
level what were you finding in terms of the
types of characters you can design that we as players react or have the most
emotional response so obviously human avatars with icons happy of robots there
are more piss you know preacher there isn't so what what are you finding well
the interesting thing is the player character like it was very deliberate
the kind of performance calibration of Jack as a character because in some ways
he needs to be a vessel that kind of responds to the player's own emotions
without kind of stepping over them and so that's like an interesting aspect in
building a protagonist of the are where you really really have to design it in a
way that you're not conveying an emotion that the player is not experiencing even
though you're scripting out the responses that Jack might have yeah well
we have to be careful like if he certainly has this like strongly
emotional moment of like shock or disbelief or what have you if that if
that's not in line with what the players experiencing in a personal level there's
a disconnect there and it's actually presence breaking so in some ways like
Jack is sort of the empty vessel that we kind of like make sure we calibrate his
interplay with other characters that we kind of explore the emotional range on
the other characters in the world and at the same kind of award the players own
kind of presence and emotion in that storyteller and of course the other big
breakthrough the first game was the locomotion how you get around that
zero-g environment which you've double down on it with echo Kombat Echo Arena
those players are very well versed in that movement
you allow them to duel a lot more in those that version of the game that you
doing that a single player to clear is a different that's intentional yeah
absolutely that said we are looking at kind of expanding kind of the gameplay
kind of repertoire in this game because VR has been around a little longer you
have more people in it so fundamentally it's still you know a very narrative
driven adventure and exploration game but as you saw today we're starting to
kind of escalate some of the gameplay systems that really double down on the
magic of like hands and body presence and so a lot of the new things many we
have a few more in reserve but they really kind of accentuate what's
powerful about the core locomotion model of the game a lot of grabbing a lot of
pull lever or more tools more tools that kind of reward hand presence I mean
bigger game longer storyline more exploratory content more characters so
in many ways it's kind of like taking the foundation we establish from the
first game and seeing like oh all the little envelopes where we can push it
even more and kind of run with what was magical about the first experience do
you think of the game as a series of environmental puzzles moving from space
to space room-to-room is that how it's designed not necessarily I think for the
section you've played we were kind of building up mechanic of introducing to
these like biothreat ticks and so some ways you have to understand sort of
power ecosystem and like how we can leverage larger scale spin around
physical interactions in the world so in some ways that is designed
on board you to that but in some ways like loan echoes about sort of the sum
of the parts like it's kind of this just Orchestra where you're you're really at
the part of it trying to convey this very powerful personal emotional
experience and have a high degree of agency in the player and so this game
will very much have that as well very cool and then the thing I like also
interactions levers and things are you find populating the worlds pull those
things yeah and like making sure we're honoring the affordances of that that if
you see something it should behave as you expect it to behave and you saw some
new mechanics today where a lone echo a lot of physical interactions was we're
smaller in terms of like pulling a lever or switch but here we're introducing
kind of larger layered physical interactions like the the crane the
gantry the gantry where it's like you kind of you can kind of look around and
puzzle out how you would expect it to work and it should work that way and
just the feeling of being able to operate these like larger kind of cooler
physical devices that has this futuristic Android you're equipped to do
that's part of the fantasy for sure that we want in terms of the environment the
first game took you from a pretty big ship to just like a really big out store
in the space environment is that something that players can expect as
well will be even bigger in this game yeah so you saw about 40 minutes in and
so it's still kind of ramping up to the story and building up the mysteries of
live and Jack kind of trying to figure out what's going on in this new
mysterious world they find themselves in but the training wheels will absolutely
come off and you have this really large open world again with even more kind of
diverse environments more diverse narrative and storytelling and gameplay
as well a lot of new mechanic what are the kind of emotions that you want the
gamers to feel because it is set in space and you know is it claustrophobia
is an isolation is it I mean those can come into play but I think was magical
with the first game it's just the joy and freedom of being in the vastness of
space like that first airlock moment alone echo where it's a moment of like
terror and exhilaration but it's very uplifting too it's incredibly powerful
it kind of lets you want a virtual level experience something that most of us
unfortunately will not be able to do in our lifetimes and so yeah lo necklace at
as heart is like optimistic futurism so it's definitely not about imparting
like fear of claustrophobia for comfort reasons as well yeah but I mean a full
full spectrum of emotions in that space I can't wait to play movie and thank you
so much to protect you so much my pleasure so what I got to play was a
short segment of the game and as you heard Nathan say was really more of an
onboarding for some of the new mechanics it is of course a zero-g bass game you
are on an abandoned ship or space station and you as a robot can tell
yourself with rockets as you may know from things like ocarina or Echo combat
but like the first moan echo it is a little more of a slower paced game
you're grabbing parts and environment pulling yourself across and really
exploring into space looking around and here you're interacting with some
enemies and these enemies come with this these the form of these amorphous bugs
that float around and to get attracted to energy sources like you or to live
and you have to go basically navigate them away from the doors away from the
panel's away from levers so you can make your way through the world really felt
like a series of puzzles and interesting enough there were different ways of
solve those puzzles so for example in one of the segments I enter a room I
could see it I needed to get past some doors and it had these floating enemies
attached to the panels I need to get them away from the panels and drawn to
other electrical sources so I could either use my body to attract them or I
could find things like a charged up battery to use it's almost like a magnet
to pull them away or they head there were these cranes in the room that I
could then move along with a gantry it's get in place and pull the enemies into
them it was really more like puzzles and as the level progressed the puzzles got
a little more complicated and to think about the ways to interact with the room
and in Iraq with my hair human character because you can solve them a bunch of
different ways I'm looking forward to seeing what other might
next I'm gonna put in this game and like Nathan said the game's gonna really open
up and one of my favorite parts about the first game was when he went out into
space I hope there's a lot more of that in this game as well the other game I
got to play at oculus is booth was beat saver now you know beat saber is already
out it's on the quest it's on desktop VR but they didn't announce and launch a
new music packs a partnership with imagine dragons and when I got to play
was beat saber in 360 that's right so beat saber as you know it the blocks are
coming on a single rail down the center but as I got to play it the rails could
come in any direction it was super interesting actually made the game feel
more immersive my body got more into it and it's a little testament to the level
design essentially of these songs because their programmers can stack up
beats that drag you and pull your attention in a certain part certain
directions and also there's a now a new arrow that floats above you that swings
left and right so you get a sense a cue as to what direction should we look at
next the levels are definitely more
complicated that way but even on Normal difficulty it was a ton of fun and if
the idea is that they're gonna design levels to be both the single one
directional rail and also 360 that's a lot more work for them but I think as
beat sabre fans you've got a lot more contact can't wait to see what they do
with beat saber going forward I'll have more coverage of the games I'm playing
here at e3 in future episodes we've other questions post them in the
comments below and I'll see you next time
you