Hi everyone, this is Eric from Winking Entertainment, a company name probably not many of you are familiar with. This is our first outing on the Playstation platform, and we’re really excited to bring our PS VR sci-fi adventure Unearthing Mars to Europe.
Let me start off with this: I’m happy to announce that Unearthing Mars will be released digitally on PSN stores globally on 7th March! That’s right, you guys heard it here first!
So what is Unearthing Mars? Is it a shooter, a puzzler, or some sort of space sim? To be honest, it is all and none of these at the same time. Let me explain while sharing some concept art we made in production with you.
The Unearthing Mars experience comprises of 10 different stages, each with its own unique gameplay mechanic, while advancing the story of a space expedition team trying to unravel the secrets of Mars. Players will be taking the role of the co-pilot, a member of the retrieval team sent to recover fragments of the mysterious Phobos satellite, believed to hold clues to the possibility of an ancient civilization on Mars.
As you can tell, this isn’t a documentary-type VR experience, but really something that plays more like a good science fiction novel (or novella, as Unearthing Mars has an average playthrough length of 2 hours).
In the first half of the game, players will experience operating a Mars landing craft vehicle firsthand, as well as explore the surface of Mars on foot and via a rover vehicle. In the latter half, there is a lot more cross-genre gameplay as players discover a more esoteric side to the Red Planet, solving puzzles along the way and culminating in a first-person shootout that… well, I’ll let you guys experience that for yourselves.
With such a wide variety of gameplay mechanics in the game, production was quite a challenge. Production staff were split into 4 smaller teams, each responsible for a different game genre, or gameplay mechanic.
Traditionally at Winking, a single product is worked up on by a single team, but to tackle the challenges posed by making a new VR product, 4 different teams were necessary in the end. One team was responsible for the landing craft cockpit simulation, another for the driving mechanics of the rover vehicle, and yet another for the adventure parts in the underground and on surface of Mars, as well as the puzzle areas. Finally a team was brought in to execute the shooting stage.
The team also invested in facial and body motion capture equipment in order to make movements as fluid as possible. Unlike traditional console games, in VR everything holds an additional factor of realism, and in order to get the amount of detail required, adjustments were added by hand post-motion capture.
In order to ensure players experience the fullest immersion in the VR environment, the decision was made early on to have leave minimal on-screen UI, use full voiceovers to guide the player and tell the story. The team flew to record on-location in Europe, Japan and Korea to provide natural-sounding native voiceovers, as poor voiceovers really do kill the atmosphere of a game.
We had the help of some very talented voice actors, and having been involved in the recording personally I recommend playing through the game in different languages!
To wrap things up, Unearthing Mars, a sci-fi PS VR game set on the Red Planet, will be available digitally on PlayStation Store 7th March. It’s a smörgåsbord of game genres and mechanics that should be enjoyable for all players: it really has something for everyone.
The post Sci-fi adventure Unearthing Mars launches on PlayStation VR 7th March appeared first on PlayStation.Blog.Europe.
from PlayStation.Blog.Europe http://ift.tt/2lkJ85M
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