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Crisis on the Planet of the Apes

Creating a Crisis: Foxnext on Planet of the Apes in VR

Designer Scott Stephen answered our questions about the studio's recently released VR adventure, Crisis on the Planet of the Apes.

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Imaginati Studio and Foxnext VR Studio's Crisis of the Planet of the Apes takes the darker tone of the rebooted series and shifts it effectively to the medium of VR, putting you in the shoes of an ape in a world where you're both feared and hated. Through a tight and focused experience, you escape the confines of a facility you're imprisoned in while also enacting vengeance on your captors, all the while using clever techniques like arm swinging to move and grabbing to climb in order to mimic the movements of an ape.

We recently got the chance to talk with designer Scott Stephen about the different facets of the experience. While there was a handful of issues that affected our experience (you can read our review here), we were still suitably impressed by the implementation of certain mechanics and the atmosphere the studio was able to build. Take a look at the whole Q&A below.

Crisis on the Planet of the Apes

To start with, what was your motive going into this game - what did you want to create?

For FoxNext VR Studio, the goal is always to keep doing what Fox has been doing all along - tell great stories. It just so happens that the medium now is VR and not film or television. The way we think about it is that you watch movies and you play games, but you live VR. The goal with Crisis was to explore what it meant to live as an ape in the POTA franchise. For us, that meant doing more than just stringing a couple of mini-games together; it meant creating a whole world to support the story we were telling so that you could truly be there.

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A great example of this is that in the game you're shorter than you would be in real life - around 5 feet tall. The result is that all of the humans in the game tower over you. Feeling that kind of physical intimidation is a very VR-only kind of storytelling. You don't just feel emotionally small, but physically small, too!

What was it like transferring the world of the new Planet of the Apes series into the films, especially in terms of tone?

I think the tone of POTA gave us a lot to work with. It's this world in transition, where humans are finding themselves on the way out. The anxiety around that is a really fertile ground to tell a story - especially one where at the same time as something really dark is happening, there's still this sliver of hope.

We ended the game at sunrise on purpose. You just had this - and this is an understatement - really terrible night, but something new, something more positive is coming. The films have demonstrated that that's a powerful message, but I also think it really lends itself to the structure of a game.

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Crisis on the Planet of the ApesCrisis on the Planet of the Apes

There are a lot of questions surrounding movement and how you move around in VR. How did you approach this?

We started from the goal of making the player feel like an ape. Ironically, that's almost easier than making you feel like a human in VR. None of us have been an ape, so it's impossible to say "Well, that's not how that works...". Starting from there, climbing was a no-brainer, but getting the walking right was harder. It was about trying to give the player a gesture that would help them feel big and powerful. I can't tell you how many hours we spent really tweaking it and testing it until it felt just right. But it was all in service of getting you into the ape mindset.

Grabbing worked excellently in the game, be it with cover or climbing. Where did that idea come from?

In some ways it seems really obvious - grab cover and move yourself! But when we all first played the prototype it was like a revelation. It just made sense in a way that seemed so obvious afterwards. It really makes you feel like this agile, powerful creature who can look for and exploit advantages not available to full-sized humans.

It's also really intuitive. It's one of those great VR mechanics where you kind of already know what to do because this is how real life works. Point being: I'd love to say that we really struggled and worked on this feature, but it came together really quickly and actually didn't change much during development.

What did change was how we built the game around that feature. In early versions of the Warehouse level the layout was such that you could kind of shimmy along these pipes and such. But playtesters told us that what they really liked doing was that arm-over-arm, monkey-bar style of climbing, so we went back and redesigned a lot of the levels to create more dynamic arm movement that really explored the strengths of the grab system.

How do you minimise motion sickness? Did it have to do with peripheral vision?

We spent a lot of time tuning the game for comfort and it really came down to a few things. Having that black vignette come into your vision does in fact help quite a bit - I think Eagle's Flight pioneered that idea. Basically, if your brain doesn't perceive motion in your peripheral vision it won't think you're "moving" which helps quite a bit with comfort.

The other thing we did to help with comfort was to make sure that the amount you move your arm is really the amount you move in the game. It helps your brain to match the virtual action of the game to what it'd expect to see if it was real life. Trippy.

Crisis on the Planet of the ApesCrisis on the Planet of the Apes

What was your approach to weaponry. How much did you want in there from the start?

We knew that we didn't want to go overboard, but there was also a funny constraint here: those big ape hands look ridiculous holding smaller weapons like pistols or grenades. Once we got done having a laugh about that we really wanted to settle on two weapons that would feel tactically significant.

Was it always the goal to portray an ape's perspective, rather than a human one?

Completely. A really important question for us anytime we begin a project is: 'Why is this in VR?'. The chance to put players in the role of an ape was a really unique opportunity and one that really answered the "Why VR?" question. In the films we get to see the lives of these apes and their society and struggles, but only in VR could you really live it first hand.

That said, there could be a really interesting game in seeing how the humans are dealing with this world that's come apart underneath them. Some of that is explored in Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, the console/PC game, also by Imaginati. But it'd make an interesting VR game - looking out for Apes in the trees, trying to keep the peace. Maybe an idea for next time!

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Crisis on the Planet of the Apes is available for PlayStation VR as well as HTC Vive and Oculus Rift users, and for more gaming goodness in the franchise be sure to check out the aforementioned Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier on PC, PS4, and Xbox One, a review of which you can find right here.

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Crisis on the Planet of the ApesScore

Crisis on the Planet of the Apes

REVIEW. Written by Sam Bishop

"Considering how much we felt like we were immersed in the world, it was a real shame that from a mechanical perspective the game was rather frustrating."



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