‘DrakkenRidge’ Is an All-New Epic Fantasy Adventure Out Now for Meta Quest

Life as an adventurer in a land overrun by monsters may not sound particularly relaxing, but nothing quite matches the thrill of wielding magic and slaying dragons. If you’re interested in swapping the desk and 9-to-5 for a battle axe and fireballs, then the new single-player fantasy adventure RPG DrakkenRidge is just right for you.

You take on the role of a Hunter, a Novice of the Mage Order, tasked with policing the usage of magic across the land. It’s a time of peace, so you work as part of a private militia to help maintain law and order in the titular DrakkenRidge archipelago. There’s a sweeping main questline, tons of side quests, multiple islands to explore, and dozens of weapons and spells to use to your advantage.

We spoke with Artist and Designer Cyril Guichard, Programmer and Designer Simeon Acker, and SFX and Voice Supervisor Logan Zimmermann from developer Garage Collective (Shock Troops, Stones of Harlath) to learn more about DrakkenRidge and what makes this epic adventure one worth sinking your teeth and time into.

Cyril Guichard: Discussions around what would ultimately become DrakkenRidge started when we were exploring concepts for a Stones of Harlath (SoH) expansion. There was so much more we wanted to do, and we quickly realized that the systems in place in SoH couldn’t support that new gameplay: It would make more sense to start from scratch.

During that time, we were talking about a ‘Pirates’ expansion to SoH, so when we shifted to making a brand-new experience, I had already graphically explored what a light ‘pirate’ inspiration would mean in our low-poly + pixel art style. Skull Island was born!

Later on, we decided that we wanted to widen the game themes, so we started departing more and more from the visual codes of piratry and leaned more on classic fantasy themes and environments — although all our locations are coherent with one another (and share an ongoing storyline).

CG: Not as much of a “world,” but an experience. From the visual standpoint, I want our players to experience varied locales: I want them to feel like they’re on a grand, worlds-sweeping adventure. So all our biomes have very different vibes. We want players to explore — therefore we need to reward them for it. A lot of our mechanics support that philosophy.

Simeon Acker: Our world and our game mechanics are built to complement each other. To deliver the experience of grand adventure, we expanded the scope of our exterior spaces and biomes, building the large-scale environments that we have now in DrakkenRidge. This goal also necessitated fresh gameplay designs from the very beginning. For example, as the player journeys across Drakken Isle from the western harbor to the southern town of Greenhaven and then north to the fortified keep of Eaglemore, what adventures might they have, what characters might they encounter, and what dangers might they face? Questions like these, prompted by the scale of our environments, sparked some of our most exciting ideas, such as the rock-climbing mechanics, and stimulated more designs and opportunities for dangers and discoveries, risks and rewards.

CG: Scary as hell! Making a game that size was a lot of work for our small team: Now, we hope our game connects with players and provides that sense of “sweeping adventure” that was at the heart of our idea. We had immense fun creating this experience — now we wait to see if players share our passion for the world of DrakkenRidge.

Logan Zimmermann: It’s incredibly exciting. The idea of creating a world for others to experience is what got me interested in video game development in the first place. Getting to hear my work in the context of a vast, fantastic world cemented for me in that moment that I picked the right career. I can’t wait to hear what people think of our world, and I’m especially excited to share it with all the amazing voice actors who contributed to this project as they truly brought this game to life.

SA: Yes, crafting is a great way to stock up on essential items such as healing draughts, but it’s also necessary for rare items such as shield ward potions and blast grenades.

To find hidden treasures and crafting materials, players engage with our climbing and traversal systems, which will have them scaling cliffs hundreds of feet above the sea, ziplining across bottomless chasms, and riding minecarts down into the deepest abysses of the earth. And if players complete the “Birds of a Feather” side quest, they can get an eagle-eye view of an entire island, with those great majestic birds carrying them between landmarks.

Some quests require the completion of puzzles as well. For example, activating environmental mechanisms in the correct order will disable all traps in the area. And as players’ skills grow throughout the game, some previously closed areas will become available, once the players have learned the techniques needed to access them.

And we can’t forget the player’s magical grimoire. This enchanted book ties together many of the game’s systems, containing a live-updated minimap, quest and side quest objectives, and references for unlocked recipes and spells. Definitely the most valuable tool in the Hunter’s arsenal.

SA: As players advance through the story, they’ll encounter powerful creatures and characters, each seeking to use or corrupt one of the great Runes of Power. As each rune is recovered, the player will grow in power themselves — each rune unlocking a new class of spells on the spell tree.

Spell classes contain several spells, each tied to different actions on the Touch controller, so a player can have four spells equipped and ready at once. For example, you can freeze enemies and summon ice claws with your right hand while launching lightning and summoning a thunderstorm on the left. In combat, players reach out and physically draw runes in the air with their hands to equip their spells of choice.

SA: Defeating enemies is the surest way for the Hunter to earn Experience Points, and the more powerful the enemy, the greater the reward. Completing quests and searching for hidden treasures is also an important aspect of progression — in fact, some of the most powerful weapons and upgrades can be earned through the many side quests on each island.

As the player’s spell tree grows, so will their inventory of weapons, some of which are imbued with magical enchantments, bringing together the strength of the mage and the warrior.

CG: It came as a two-beat decision. First, since Theta Legion on Oculus Go (and Stones of Harlath as well as in Shock Troops), the Garage Collective style has been anchored in that retro pixel art feel. It’s a style I’m very familiar with. I made a whole bunch of 2D games back in the day, and I’m of the C64/Amstrad/Amiga generation. I just love that light level of abstraction that really allows me to focus on the art direction. I’m also pretty fast at creating pixel art, so it helped with the large scope of the game.

Second, for our other VR games, we had used billboarded (always facing the camera, a la Wolfenstein3D) sprites for our enemies. It worked great for shooters, or games where the enemies are far away. But this time, we wanted more realistic, physics-based combat. We needed our enemies to have arms and legs to attack, punch, and kick the player. So we went for the next closest thing: low-poly, which is also a style I’m quite comfortable with. This means that players can parry incoming attacks and target the shield of enemies or weak body parts. This wouldn’t have been possible with sprites.

CG: The sheer scope of content — many Islands mean many more dungeons, NPCs, quests and side-quests, various rewards, and enemies to fight, and all those need to be animated, sounded, etc. It required a lot more original content than any of my other games before, especially since we wanted to avoid repetitive content as much as possible.

For most of the development time, we were two people working on this, so you can imagine we were busy. Later on, Logan Zimmermann joined us as well as our long-time music collaborator, Retrovex. Finally, at the very end, thanks to Meta, we got a great QA partner, GlobalStep, that helped us polish the release candidate. So while it stretched us as a two-person team, we also got all the help we needed when we needed it.

LZ: The biggest challenge for me was casting, recording, and editing 56 characters with a total of a

180+ lines of dialogue, all in the span of a few months. Being so tight on time and resources meant we had to be very efficient with our actors. We ended up having some actors play multiple NPCs, for example.

Another challenge was getting the sound of the shoreline right. It took about seven tries because it needed to sound serene and stylized, but everything I had sounded too sloshy and turbulent. So to get what I needed, I ended up recording the gentle waves while visiting Puget Sound, and after cleaning out distant boat noise, I mixed in the sound of me gently pushing water across my shower basin. All of that created one of my favorite sounds in the game: the serene waves of DrakkenRidge.

CG: We have a total of five islands, nine dungeons (about two per island, except for the first one, Skull Island, that for all intents and purposes functions as a tutorial/onboarding system), plenty of weapons and spells, and as many enemies to decimate them with!

We hope there are multiple ways to enjoy the game: Some players will fast-track through the main quest, but others might enjoy soaking each world in, exploring it, and doing the side quests. Some players might spend a lot of time hunting down crafting materials to stock up on potions, grenades, and ammo — it’s a great way to tone down the difficulty of some fights.

The playtime for each of these player-types, thus, will be wildly different, but I’d say anything between six to 10 hours — and a lot more for completionists.

CG: Enjoy the world, take your time if that’s your thing, and just be aware that, in addition to the Eagles side quest mentioned by Simeon, there’s also a side quest that grants you a pet: a faithful dog named Pixie (after one of my dogs that passed away during development) that will follow you in your adventures. And when it comes to fetching that bone, she doesn’t play around!

DrakkenRidge is out now on the Meta Horizon Store for Quest.