Step Into Adventure Like Never Before With Mixed Reality RPG ‘Mythic Realms,’ Out Now on Meta Quest
What if you could bring a magical fantasy world of adventure into your own home, instead of needing to transport yourself elsewhere? That’s exactly the premise behind Mythic Realms, an all-new roguelite action-RPG from developer Petricore, just released today for the Meta Quest platform.
To learn more about what’s in store for players, we took some time to chat with Lead Designer Oliver Awat and the game’s Art Director and Project Manager, Christina Andriano.
Oliver Awat: At Petricore we had quite a bit of experience in mobile AR. Based on the success of games like Pokemon Go in that space, we had originally imagined this game as a spanning RPG in a similar vein. That was left in ideation for quite a bit, but when Meta opened up their toolset to allow developers access to the room, the RPG we imagined felt like a natural fit in the space. As soon as we got to talking about having a dragon fly in from above and land for you to actually fight, it unlocked a sort of childhood imagination, and it felt like a game that just had to be made.
The working title early on was “Project MRRPG” which we loved shortening to Mr. RPG. Since it was about going back and forth between the real world and a virtual one, we drew pretty heavy inspiration from isekai anime (heroes going into another world). When it came time to replace the name, I was a big fan of making it an obnoxiously long isekai title like “My Room Turned into a Kingdom from Another World”. In the end, though, we went with a more straightforward title that kept the “MR” initials.
OA: Mythic Realms is a hybrid Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality experience. Players go on adventures that transform their room (the real world) into fantastical expeditions. Here they fight monsters and gather resources (fishing, woodcutting, mining) to bring back to the virtual town. In this village, players help to create buildings which let them craft/smith weapons and effectively cultivate a growing population of people. As the town grows, more characters come into play which gives players quests that reward the player with a bigger arsenal of weapons for their expeditions. Both sides really help to feed each other.
Adventuring isn’t without risks, though. Whatever you take with you is at risk of being lost upon death, so it’s a balance of managing when a run is meant more for exploration/discovery, or to take your best gear in order to be able to properly beat an expedition. At the end of a biome, the player places the ultimate challenge of facing a boss designed to take advantage of the full room’s scale.
It’s always fun to see how new players approach the game. There’s a sort of discovery that comes with playing something in your room where what once was a bed that you had to avoid hitting/walking into, becomes an extra footing that you can stand on to give yourself the higher ground.
OA: The biggest challenge was definitely having to account for a multitude of rooms and designing fights that made sense in a variety of setups. It’s honestly an aspect that we’re gonna have to keep improving over time as well. Utilizing your room actively as part of creating the space in which you play is still very much in its infancy, and there are just a lot less games that we’re able to reference when trying to make something like Mythic Realms. I still miss the early days when we put a lot more objects into your immediate space. We had to limit where we placed objects to room corners and walls since too often it would lead to blocking your vision of your floor, and then having you bumping into a couch/table because of it.
It was also a push and pull with how much movement we ask for players while playing the game. That was a big reason why we had the more stationary VR portion (as a way to take breaks for the heavy bits of action that you do in MR). Combat I would say was the second biggest challenge needing to be refined throughout all of development. It was originally turn-based, but we swapped to more action-based early on. From there, it was a back-and-forth with how much we dissuade spam and making the block/crit system accordingly. The final piece of the puzzle that brought everything together were the attack lines which gave players direction warning and a clear direction for how to dodge enemy attacks.
Christina Andriano: Continuing the point of how we used to have more objects in the immediate space during early development, that concern wasn’t only limited to the environmental decoration we added to walls and floors, but to the enemies and intractable components as well.
Early MR titles have enemies live in an expanded VR diorama “world” in the walls of the players room before one at a time entering your immediate space to fight you. Mythic Realms has all the action occur directly in your room, we don’t include a VR “wall world” at all. Because of that over the course of development, we had to shrink the size of or limit the number of enemies that appeared at one time because they physically took up too much space.
We talked a lot about the gameplay side of things so far, but I also want to add that simply the time management of development is something easy to overlook. It’s easy to fall back on prior knowledge when scoping a project, it’s something I think everyone does. With tackling something as new and unpredictable as mixed reality we found that things often took longer than we expected, even with all our prior knowledge from more traditional game platforms. Even something as easy as having the player press a button or showing player health had hidden complexity that should be planned for to need to be iterated on.
OA: I think permanence was the key ingredient for us to make Mythic Realms stand out. When the actions you take and the experiences you have in the game develop further as you progress, it helps to make everything feel like a cohesive experience. Having a town to go back to that continually improves and the ability to level up skills to get that much deeper into your next run, it all comes together to provide that one of a kind experience.
Our starting point for every enemy always involved asking “Okay, what would it be like to put this directly into your room”. We naturally had to scale certain things down (I think the final boss originally was 7’7”), but keeping the spirit of having a skeleton that climbs over a coffee table to chase you makes for a pretty compelling encounter.
CA: A core concept of Mythic Realms is the converging of digital and real worlds. To visually achieve that, we wanted to treat room decoration more as embellishments creeping in on top of the real world versus full room replacements. It's YOUR room that’s slowly transforming into a dungeon after all. From a forest environment with an exposed ceiling, revealing a massive dragon fight overhead, to spelunking where your ceiling is covered in stalactites and your walls with rocks and glowing mushrooms; each expedition incorporates your room differently and adds a different flair.
OA: Mythic Realms is designed in a way that’s fully expandable. We have a roadmap planned for the rest of 2025 including content like potions, farming, and a new biome to explore. However we’re keeping flexible after our launch, and plan for our first few updates to be focused around player feedback and suggestions. A lot of testing we did with players during development and before launch significantly influenced the direction of Mythic Realms. So we highly encourage players to join our discord and they can communicate directly with us about what they’d like to see in future releases.
OA: More space is genuinely better, but we recommend around 10m² set aside to be able to play nicely. Luckily, since all of the action takes place in passthrough, it’s perfectly fine if that space has furniture within it. Keeping things free of clutter will also make the experience better since dodging an arrow is one thing, but avoiding stepping on a rogue lego piece was unfortunately not something we were able to design around. Also, I think this is just a general VR warning, if you have a cat/dog, they sometimes will think you’re playing with them and they will join the action at the worst possible time.
CA: We’ve got a Linktree which includes all the social media platforms we’ll post about Mythic Realms on, and players can also join our discord to chat directly with us and get sneak peaks at future content. We’ll also continue to add posts to our store page outlining content updates and patches as we add them.
Now that we’re fully in the age of immersive mixed reality adventure games like Mythic Realms, it’s never been a more exciting time to get into the Meta Quest ecosystem. You can head over to the Meta Horizon store and grab a copy of the game for yourself starting today!
