Hello everyone! I’m excited to reveal more details about our debut game, Receptionan immersive action adventure game built from the ground up for next-generation virtual reality.
Reach launches on PS VR2 next week puts you in the role of a reluctant hero drawn deep into a world of clashing realities. What begins as a quest for escape quickly becomes a high-stakes journey of survival, discovery, and action – where your movements, decisions, and tools directly impact your in-game adventure.
We set out to create a VR experience that would provide the scale, depth and spectacle of a blockbuster action game, while staying true to what makes VR unique: presence, freedom and physicality. Here’s a deeper look at what makes the game tick, the journey we’ve taken to get here, and how we’re harnessing the power of PS VR2 to make every moment matter more.
Become an action hero
Embodiment is one of the greatest benefits of VR, allowing for unparalleled, expressive role play as you enter a virtual body and experience the world through it. One of our main goals for Reach was to take embodiment further than ever before through a responsive, full-body avatar that gives a true sense of presence in the world in a way only possible in virtual reality. Whether you’re reaching for a ledge, hanging over a risky precipice, or dodging an enemy attack, your actions feel natural and fully grounded in the world.
In Reach, your physical actions truly have a direct impact on the world around you. We want you to have the power to create amazing moments and experience those thrilling action sequences, not just watch them. The key to this is how you traverse – or move – through the world.
Traversal in Reach is much more than just a way to get from point A to point B. From deadly jumps over chasms to scaling breathtaking and sweeping environments while making acrobatic escapes from the overlapping threats that lie within, you’ll feel like a real badass. No rails, no teleportation, it’s just you, your instincts and the environment.
We’re incredibly proud of this combination of physicality and responsiveness that makes every action – no matter how subtle – feel immersive and real.
Full freedom of choice
One of our main goals, from the very beginning of the prototype phase of Reach’s development, was to put player agency at the heart of the game. We want to give you complete freedom to choose how to approach each situation and reward you for experimenting with different strategies.
We built on it with our tools and weapons. They are multi-functional and designed to adapt to any situation you find yourself in, from parkour to puzzle solving. Mastering these tools will make you feel like you have superhuman abilities as you traverse the unpredictable and diverse game world.
A great example is how you can go from traversing to fighting. You can start by using your grappling hook to jump from grapple point to grapple point, then fire arrows at the wall with your trusty bow, climb up the arrows to the vantage point, pull them out of the wall, and then fire them at the enemy from a distance. We encourage this kind of versatility and improvisation.
This philosophy also shaped the way we built levels in the game. Areas can be scaled in different ways and approached from multiple directions, and the game rewards experimentation and exploration. We found that people start out leisurely and steady, but quickly become more adventurous and confident, making deadly jumps to access hidden paths and viewpoints.
Harness the power of PS VR2
Our ethos as a team has always been to continually advance VR through groundbreaking gameplay and boundary-pushing technology. Every system, animation and interaction has been designed to deliver immersion, presence and role-playing, and we’ve tried to exploit every ounce of power in PS VR2 to make moment-to-moment gameplay as impactful as possible.
With Sense PS VR2 controllers, every interaction is affluent and physical. With haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, you’ll feel the weight and resistance of objects and surfaces as you interact with the world around you: doors push back as you open them, your hands adjust as they grip uneven surfaces, and your limbs react realistically as you brush against walls or crouch under obstacles. Feeling this feedback when you land on a ledge after desperately throwing yourself against a cliff face, your legs swinging beneath you, adds an incredible additional depth to the sense of embodying an action hero.
Visually, we also leverage the 4K capabilities of PS VR2 to bring our intricate world to life in a spectacular way. Higher resolution textures assist tell the story of the immense scale and minute details that fill every area of the game, from immense caves to crumbling underground architecture.
This is just a taste of what you can expect in Reach. If you like what you read, you can pre-order Reach on PlayStation Store today ahead of its release next week. We can’t wait for you to experience this electrifying VR adventure for yourself.
