Insomniac Games revealed that it’s working on new titles for the Oculus Rift – Edge of Nowhere, The Unspoken and Feral Rights. This is part of the company’s move to explore other horizons in the gaming world.
From directly being tied to PlayStation, since the company was founded in 1994, the game developer is getting behind virtual reality (VR). According to founder and CEO Ted Price, the move into VR is no different from when they experimented with other burgeoning platforms like Facebook and mobile.
But the move from just being a PlayStation studio was purely practical, what with the gaming industry shifting away from PC and console games. Tech adviser Digi-Capital said augmented and virtual reality could become a multi-billion dollar market by 2020. So it’s not a surprise that one of the best-known console developers would jump on the new technology.
Insomniac is not too worried about the less impressive fan base of VR either, as it strongly believes the platform is here to stay. Price admits that it is difficult to predict the future of VR, whether or not it becomes culturally important. But based on the support it is getting, it is going no place else but up.
The ever-changing landscape of the industry made everyone in Insomniac rethink the future of traditional game development. “It certainly opened our eyes to look into all the games that we had been making and gave us the impetus to start experimenting”, Price added.
The virtual reality game Feral Rights is described by the company as a VR adventure-brawler, set on a mystical island. The mission is to avenge a father’s death, and gain the power to transform into a feral beast, in the process.
The Oculus Rift title The Unspoken is a touch-enabled VR action game. According to Insomniac, “it pulls players into the hidden world of spell casting and magician’s duels”. Players can obtain powerful arcane forces that allow them to manipulate the environment, summon monstrosities, and go up the ranks of magic fighters through supernatural player-versus-player combat.
Oculus Rift’s Edge of Nowhere is a third-person action adventure game set in the harsh cold environment of Antarctica. It will be released in June 6.
Apart from these virtual reality games, Insomniac is also developing games for PlayStation 4 PC and Xbox One. Song of the Deep is a small 2D adventure that will be published by GameStop, the first game Insomniac will release in partnership with GameStop.
Just recently, the company also released a new Ratchet & Clank for PS4, a CG movie to be released in theaters later in April.
