Build and Defend Your Realm From Attackers in ‘Barbaria’ for Meta Quest 2

Not many games give you the option of playing as both a warrior and a powerful deity that can smite their foes from above. But that’s one of the perks of being a semigod in Barbaria: You can get your hands dirty and fight on the ground, or transform back to your immortal form to unleash devastating attacks on your enemies. And you’ll have to master this clever mix of first-person combat with god-like powers—along with strategic base-building—if you want to be the best semigod in the world.

Barbaria is now available on Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro for $19.99 USD.

When you first enter the realms of Barbaria, you’ll be tasked with assembling your own fortress using terrain Fragments, snapping them together as if they’re puzzle pieces. Then using toy-like figurines, you’ll place one of your Champions (the character you’ll play as on the battlefield), an army of minions (AI allies that fight by your side), and special structures that’ll help defend your base from other players. Of course, this also means you can attack other player-made realms online to earn rewards that’ll help you upgrade your items and characters.

You can get a sense of how combat and base building works in the hilarious launch trailer. We sat down with Stalwart Games President Andrew Jepsen and Technical Artist/Animator David Logan to talk about Barbaria’s unique blend of game genres and how best to defend yourself from your rival deities.

Andrew Jepsen: That actually goes back kind of a long way. I got the chance to build a Gladiator Duel game as a part of the Sports Champions launch title for the PlayStation Move starting way back in 2007. We built a few Move games at that studio and I absolutely loved the immersiveness of six-degrees-of-freedom motion controls (meaning the controller gives you both position and orientation). So when the Rift DK1 came about I was thrilled because it was clear 6DOF motion controls would be the natural way to interact with it and that the immersion would just be incredible. We built a demo VR fighting experience and landed a contract doing some VR work and we were off.

AJ: There are a few inspirations that came together to form the core of Barbaria. Tonally, we wanted to make players feel really cool and powerful when playing but never take things too seriously. We love movies like Thor: Ragnarok that really nail this blend. I have a deep and abiding love of melee combat and God of War has been quite influential in how we think about it. Visually, we kind of ran with a fantasy Mad Max vibe that fit the not-too-serious tone well. Tying that all together is the miniatures which is really about satisfying my inner child that loved model trains and wanted my action figures to come to life.

David Logan: We actually got to experiment with a lot of interesting game loops while we were doing VR R&D work, even a small open world concept. A lot of the groundwork for what is now Barbaria was laid during that time. One big zag was when we finally, after much discussion, tried the “action figures come alive” idea. It was so cool in VR that we had to run with it. The biggest change was after our R&D contract was done and we decided to move forward with the asynchronous multiplayer game loop that is the core of the game today.

AJ: Hopefully very seamlessly! At a high level, it was important to us that players have a lot of cool combat options available and that they’re making interesting decisions about what fun thing they want to do rather than being bogged down in the difficulty of executing it. In Barbaria you’re a powerful warrior and you should feel like it.

At a nuts-and-bolts level, it’s motion-controlled combat: You can fight with your fists and with a variety of weapons that you pre-equip or scavenge from the battlefield. Players can fight from range with a bow-and-arrow, or by throwing their melee weapons, bombs, or anything else they can get their hands on.

Each Champion the player unlocks also has a unique power they can activate to give them a boost. For example, the first Champion has Meathook which, when activated, can punch through blocks and really sends enemies for a ride.

Players can also bring ally minions with them into battle. Allies help take some of the heat off the player, but there’s another pretty cool feature with them that flies a bit under the radar. If the player throws or hits an enemy to their ally they can execute a teamwork attack that does big damage.

AJ: Whenever the player wants! You unlock your first semigod ability, Ancient Power, pretty early in the game. These are powerful spells that players cast from their semigod-form while towering above the battlefield. You can hop out of the first-person combat at any time to do this, but the use of Ancient Power is on a cooldown and a player setting up their defenses can always throw a proverbial wrench in the works with a Deity Disruptor structure.

DL: For launch, we’ll have three different unlockable Champions (Barbarian, Gladiatrix, and a goblin named Krank), and five different types of minions (Imp, Bones, Zealot, Shaman, and Cyclotaur). You can only have one of each type of Champion, but you can collect multiple minions of the same type to bring with you on raids or to defend your base. Imps, Bones, and Zealots are available to drop right away, and the Shaman and Cyclotaur unlock once a player has upgraded their realm to level three.

AJ: When you launch the game, you’ll start out in your immortal form in your Stronghold. The Stronghold is the central hub where you can pick what you want to do. In addition to building your defenses or attacking others, your Stronghold has a variety of areas that’ll unlock over the course of the game giving you extra things to do. “On the Level” is a shop where you can take items to improve them, and “Doug’s Discount Deity” is a merchant where players can buy new items with the in-game currency they earn on raids or for successful defenses.

“Rise-N-Grind” gives you a set of daily challenges to complete for currency and items. Challenges range from custom levels to play for the day, killing a specific type of enemy minion, or conquering a certain number of enemy realms. There’s a replay station where you can see your conquest history and watch previous battles, a color station to customize your banner and minion's colors, and then some places just for fun like the gym.

DL: And don’t miss the “Carnival” area! You can build a playground realm there separate from your main realm so you can experiment with different structures or layouts in a non-ranked way. There’s also a search box to find other players by name and attack their realms or playgrounds in unranked mode to see what other folks are creating in Barbaria.

AJ: Early Access players were incredibly helpful in finding balance issues and suggesting directions for new content. It became pretty apparent from the high-level early access players that our time limits were very frequently a limiting factor on high-level realms in a way that could be frustrating. So we added a piece of equipment called The Harvester to let attackers’ allied minions help clear terrain Fragments a little faster in addition to meaningfully increasing the time limits on higher level realms.

DL: Hah, yeah probably the most amusing thing while playing was watching the players’ skill at the game just absolutely sail past ours. We’re ostensibly pretty good by now—we’ve been playing every day for years. So it was a little mind-blowing how quickly we were seeing players defeating realms that are beyond us skill-wise.

DL:Barbaria is designed to be a living game, and we intend to continue regular content updates and balance fixes moving forward. New structures, weapons, minions, and Fragments to add new challenges when attacking realms are all on the list. We’re also planning to add more social features, expand the friendly attack modes that exist currently, and add Pantheons (team/clan groups) to create new ways to interact with other players in Barbaria.

DL: Don’t forget to upgrade your items! Most unlockable items can be upgraded at the Upgrade station. Minions and Champions will get extra health, weapons get extra damage and durability, and structures get an appropriate upgrade depending on what they are (cannons shoot faster, spawners spawn more enemies more quickly, etc.). You can even upgrade the Fragments themselves to increase their placement capacity so you can put more minions and structures down on them.

AJ: We’d like to give a huge thank you to the Stalwart Alumni team who helped to build the prototypes and create the characters that eventually made it into Barbaria: Edmund Park, Robert Berger, Cameron Davis, Jeremy Tabor, Rich Deione, and Bradley Pujala.

Thanks to the Meta team for helping to steer us through the Quest 2 release process. Also a huge thank you to all of our Early Access supporters who gave us such valuable feedback and playtesting to help bring the game to where it is today.

DL: Yes, we love getting player feedback! Please drop by our Discord and let us know what you think. As we continue to build and develop Barbaria, getting that player input will be super valuable and we can't wait to see what new ideas come in from Quest 2 players after we launch!

Build and fight against other semigods in the brutal world of Barbaria, out now on Quest 2 + Pro!