What Ubisoft learned from its first virtual reality games

GB: Now that you have all this learning, what comes next? Is there a second wave of games on the way?

Votypka: Right now we’re trying to get Bridge Crew out the door. We haven’t announced anything coming after that yet, but we’re continuing to look at VR, for sure.

GB: How long has Bridge Crew taken you guys?

Votypka: I don’t think we’re saying, exactly. It’s hard to put a number on it, because we’ve gone back and forth splitting the team between Werewolves and Bridge Crew.

Early: We’ve had VR experiments going on for at least two or three years at different studios. We’ve talked publicly about 10 or more studios that have tried things and done experiments. Some have worked out and become games. Some are still in the trial stage. Maybe we’ve found a good thing that works, but it’s not a full game yet.

GB: How do you look at the rest of the industry and how it may advance? The Capcom thing was pretty interesting, where a tenth of the players are playing Resident Evil in full VR.

Early: That’s back to what we were talking about around session length. Players want longer sessions. The biggest thing standing in the way today is when we cause some form of disengagement. Whether that’s from nausea, or physical discomfort because you have this three-pound thing on your head, or you trip over a cord, or the headset starts to fog up—if you remove all the non-game-related issues, session times for us get longer. People seem to want that.

There’s data from a Google survey showing that 50 to 60 percent of PS4 players wanted the same type of experience they had on a console, but in fully immersive VR. Maybe only 10 percent of players today can tolerate the weight and so forth, even though the PlayStation headset is the lightest of the bunch, but people could probably play full games as long as we solve those problems. As it gets better and better, I think we’ll get there.

GB: Did you pay much attention to all the talk about the “trough of despair,” whether there’s a cycle here you have to be aware of?

Early: From our standpoint, whatever you want to call it—what I’m most afraid of is people trying VR and having a bad first experience. Then they’ll be in the camp of, “Well, I tried that, and it doesn’t work.” It’s dismissive of the whole mix. I’m worried that there are thousands of VR experiences out there now and most of them are not curated. I’d say half of them probably produce negative results in the people who try them – not necessarily making them sick, but not getting them interested in the platform and continuing on.

Votypka: It ties to their desire for bigger games and longer experiences in VR. In the early days you’d get a lot of short, small experiences. We’re trying to do our part to add larger games to the mix. As better, bigger, longer games come along, that’ll help drive user desire to purchase the equipment.

Early: You can see it in the top earning charts. All the top earners are longer experiences, games where people spend $20 or $40 or $60, where there’s more of a game there.

GB: What about VR arcades? Do you think that will help?

Early: I think it’ll be an awesome discovery mechanism. The ability to come in and experiment—from my standpoint that’s awesome because it’s a curated mix of content. They’re not going to have a bunch of crappy content there, because otherwise they don’t make money.

Votypka: I actually feel really optimistic about VR arcades, for a couple of reasons. One, the hardware they can have in there can give you an experience you can’t have at home. Unlike the coin-ops of the ‘80s, where they replicated that on the Nintendo and other consoles, when you’re adding custom hardware and the ability to touch the environment, that’s an experience you’ll never have at home. There’s a very long life cycle coming for VR arcades, I think.

GB: We see a lot of filmmaker interest in VR, a lot of Hollywood interest. They’re doing some pretty cool stuff. They’re not exactly games, but it conveys what the show is like. I see better experiences coming from that direction as well.

Early: There’s so much we don’t know yet. I think about movies, about cinematics in VR, and I remember not looking at the right spot at the right time. It was as if the movie went on without me. Or I didn’t hear what someone said. That’s not commercial at all. And that’s just thinking about movies, how we keep people’s attention in the right place.

It’s the same in gaming. We have it easier in gaming, actually, because you can tell where someone is looking and know whether you should move the plot along or not.

Votypka: Movies are going to have to adapt some gaming technology and design there.

Early: Right. You think about that already in game design. You don’t think about it necessarily when you’re making a movie. You assume people watch what you’re doing because it’s on the screen. Oops, it was on the screen over there. Squirrel! [laughter]

Votypka: Film directors are used to having the viewer’s absolute attention. Not having that in an interactive experience is a new paradigm for film.

GB: How many intermediate steps do you see on the way to the holodeck?

Votypka: [laughs] A lot. The problem with the holodeck, if I recall correctly, is that you could actually touch things and feel the haptics and all that. That’s the hardest part of it all. But if we remove that from consideration, the rest of it will come pretty quickly.

There’s tactile feedback, touching something, or squeezing it. But then you have a situation like, I have a sword and you have a sword and we swing them at each other. If our swords go through each other, that’s not cool. How can they clash? That’s the really tricky part. I don’t know if anybody has a solution for that yet.

Early: You’ll just have to create a new form of combat that doesn’t involve physical items stopping each other.

Votypka: Spells! But even that, say I shoot a fireball at you. Are we wearing bodysuits? Are people willing to wear that?

Early: If we’re talking about investing in a holodeck, we’ll probably have air guns, sound wave machines—

Votypka: The holodeck, or something like that, will come first in theme parks. You can put all kinds of hardware in there.

Disclosure: Casual Connect paid my way to Berlin. Our coverage remains objective.