The Magic of VR: Insomniac and inXile in Conversation

It’s been a week since inXile Entertainment launched The Mage’s Tale, bringing 10+ hours of dungeon-crawling adventure to Rift. Since then, players have logged nearly 6,500 hours crafting potions and casting spells, which got us thinking: What is it about magic in VR that makes it so, well, magical?

To answer that question, we sat down with inXile Lead Designer David Rogers and Insomniac Games Creative Director Chad Dezern for a deep dive into the magical worlds of The Mage’s Tale and up-and-coming esports favorite The Unspoken.

David Rogers: The amount of control you have over your spells is higher than we could achieve on a PC game. I’ll use triple shot bouncing fireballs as an example. You can craft your fireball to bounce, which causes it to gain bonus damage on each bounce. You can also craft your spell to triple shot in a wide spread. If you throw it like a baseball, it’s just chaos. Two of your three shots go awry, bounce everywhere, and don’t add a ton of value. However, if you skip the fireball like a stone across a lake, turning your hand sideways, suddenly the horizontal spread turns into a vertical spread, and all three shots tend to bounce off the ground and nail their target dead on, resulting in massive damage. Exactly how you hold, rotate, and aim the controller; position your body; and move in room-scale, all have major combat implications. You simply couldn’t ask a player outside of VR to manage that many controls at once, but when your whole body is the controller, it's easy.

Chad Dezern: With a traditional controller, there’s a layer of abstraction—the buttons you’re pressing influence what’s happening onscreen, but you need to learn the button mappings to be fluent. With VR and Touch controls, we can map real player actions to the spell with a relationship that’s 1:1 and intuitive. The motion you make when you’re pretending to charge up a giant fiery skull or a protective telekinetic bubble—and I know that we all do this—is the exact thing that you do in-game. It’s the realization of all of your wizard dreams!

DR: And let’s not ignore how the environment comes into play. The ability to take cover behind objects, lean around corners, and have spells source from your hands means you can form whole new combat strategies. Watching my wife play, she took an effective, if less-than-brave, approach to combat that worked. She’d hide behind cover and just stick her hand out and blindly cast auto-seeking spells, letting the magic do the work for her. It was a clever, sneaky way to approach the problem, so long as the enemy didn’t flank her position.

CD: We’ve also discovered spells that track all around the arena, move slowly toward you, or just flat-out surround you are very fun to defend against in VR. That was a surprise to us, since slow-moving projectiles tend to feel passive in console games. But the spatial awareness and anticipation in VR make these fun—you have to actively move your gaze around to track the object.

Concept art from The Unspoken.

CD: We focused on augmenting players’ natural motions, so when you throw a fireball in-game, you can hit your target with precision—we factor in the direction of your gaze to help determine what you’re targeting. We also use visuals, audio, and haptics extensively to sell the experience. When you’re charging up your Spectral Knives, you see, hear, and feel each knife forming in your hand. And when a knife connects with the target, you get a satisfying impact effect and sound. You feel like you’re causing things to happen through your movements—and through force of will. You feel ultra-competent and powerful, just like an archmage!

DR: We started by looking back on when we were kids playing in the backyard, pretending to be a wizard or superhero. What kind of poses do you strike when you’re electrocuting someone? Well, you’d probably hold your hand out like Emperor Palpatine or Iron Man. If you want to force push someone like a Jedi, you’d probably thrust your palm forward to give it that extra oomph. Those spells feel natural because they’re designed to match what you’ve already imagined.

We looked at power poses, popularized by Jane McGonigal, to make you feel powerful during combat. We designed combat to encourage you to open up, extend your arms, and take open postures as you block attacks and cast spells. When you want to teleport into the lab, you lift one hand above your head like you’re Superman about to take flight—you feel powerful in that moment, the hero of the story.

Strike a power pose while battling the undead in The Mage’s Tale.

CD: In a way, yes. Mechanically, there’s now an expectation for player inputs that capture the feel of using magic. It’s hard to go back to a more disconnected model when you’ve had the experience of lifting cars in the air by raising up your hands.

DR: I feel like, as kids, we had a really good idea of what being a wizard was supposed to be like, and we moved away from that idea as we got older when it came to representing magic in non-VR games. But VR lets us tap into our youth, getting us closer to what being a wizard is supposed to feel like. With VR and Touch, we can use gestural commands to summon up spells and manipulate magic with our hands—it just feels right. The only thing that could help us bridge the gap even more would be some kind of mind-reading tech. If you know someone working on that, please put them in touch with us.

CD: Another thing—over time, players have become a lot more accustomed to moving the camera around in console games. In our earliest free-roaming 3D games, we tried to build worlds that didn’t require any camera movement at all. But now players expect to move the right stick, so we think about the full space a lot more. It’s easy to imagine VR pushing that convention even farther.

Promotional art for The Unspoken’s Anarchist class.

DR: Our biggest claim to fame right now are our crowdfunded games, bringing old-school RPGs to audiences that want them. The success of VR gaming is like the success of those crowdfunded titles—anything that creates wider, diverse audiences for different gaming experiences pushes the entire video game medium forward. We’ve gone from mapping computer dungeons on graph paper to actually walking through them in VR. With VR, you aren’t clicking on images of spells or crafting ingredients—you’re actually flinging fireballs and brewing magic. That’s a powerful storytelling tool.

CD: VR opened up so many possibilities for competitive play—more than we ever imagined. Advanced players use feints in the game—they pretend to cast a spell to trick their opponent into teleporting, then really cast the spell after their opponent commits to moving. Players also save up spells and cast multiple slow-moving projectiles at one time to overwhelm their opponent’s perception. You can feel the momentum shift when this happens.

It’s about focus, being in the moment. You can make a comeback if you really lock into the battle and focus on defense. Add that to the social component of seeing your opponent’s tracked head and hands, the physical component of graceful movement, and the strategic component of choosing your Artifact loadout before each match, and you end up with a very layered and watchable competitive game. You can watch the real human and understand what’s happening in the match. That seems like a big leap forward for spectating.

One of the many crypts, sewers, and dungeons to explore in The Mage’s Tale.

DR: You can’t get away with low-detail scene props anymore. The player is totally in control of their own ride. They can go up to and interact with anything and look at it as closely as they please. We very quickly came to the realization that everything had to behave as you assumed it would, or the illusion would be broken. If you picked up a bottle and threw it, and it didn’t break, your immersion was lost. This made us carefully choose what would go into our world and ensure all those things could be grabbed and manipulated so they fulfilled expectations.

CD: It took some time for us to get the buttons right. Given our console game heritage, we overdid it with the face buttons at first. We had a breakthrough when we realized that we shouldn’t even try to train buttons; rather, we should let players do what they do naturally with their hands and build around that. For example, we don’t say, “Use the X button to teleport.” We say, “Point to teleport.” That’s a lot easier to remember—and a lot closer to what a real spellcaster would do!

Similarly, we resisted the temptation to use the analog sticks. We’re happy they exist, but for The Unspoken, we think fewer buttons is better. We get a lot of mileage out of the grips and positional tracking, so skillful play is about graceful casting instead of button inputs.

The Unspoken features a number of artifacts to conjure, from Cthulhu’s Grasp and the Dark Forge to the Clockwork Imp and more.

DR: We got a ton of good advice from people who were blazing trails ahead of us. We took advice on how exactly the trajectory should be calculated for throwing, how many milliseconds a movement warp could be before you started feeling uncomfortable, and how selecting objects with long-distance telekinesis should feel. The VR dev community is very willing to share their hard-learned lessons because we all know that everyone benefits from more rad games coming to VR.

CD: The VR community is very collaborative in that regard—it feels like we’re all building a new language together. When we were developing our throw model, at first we used a physically accurate throw—like what you’d get with a real-world baseball. That turned out to be frustrating, since most of us (um, especially here in the world of game development) aren’t the most coordinated people. Sometimes we think we can hit a distant target in the real world, but we really can’t. Plus, right now you can’t simulate the illusion of weight to give players a sense of how much force to put behind the throw.

But Sanzaru—bless them—pointed us toward their “eureka!” moment from VR Sports Challenge. If you factor in the player’s gaze, you can get a skillful throw that makes you feel like you can hit a very small distant target. We adopted their model, tweaked it a bit, and ended up with a fireball that you can throw like a baseball or a dart, over- or underhand. Our current throw works with the player’s natural inclinations.

DR: We also found that people think they’re much better at throwing stuff than they really are, at least in VR. At first, we’d calculate your hand's velocity and just let the spell fly. Of course, you’d feel like you were right on target, even though you probably weren’t, based on the direction your hand was moving. But you’re a wizard, and your spells should bend to your will more rather than simply obey the laws of physics.

Now, we look at the enemies in the room and where they’re positioned, what you’re looking at, and what type of spell you’re throwing and use all that data to help us determine where you intended your shot to land. Of course, how you move your arm matters, but your wizardly intention is considered as well.

Craft potions in The Mage’s Tale as your snarky goblin companion looks on.

DR: From a moment-to-moment gameplay perspective, VR and PC follow a very different set of rules. Much of what you’re designing for are fun ways to move your body, which isn’t something we consider very much in traditional PC development. Thankfully, things like a compelling collectible system or what goes into a head-scratching puzzle seem universal. A lot of the RPG high concepts hold true, but the moment the player has to interact with the world or make any kind of selection, we should throw out the rulebook and think of how it would work in VR.

CD: And we’ve learned a lot over the years about making mechanics feel responsive. We think a lot about the right visual, sound, and animation frame to get the best feel for any effect. What makes the most impact? What do we want the player to focus on at each moment? We have a lot of experience with projectiles, explosions, mines, homing missiles, beam weapons—you name it! When you boil it down, making a great spell is a lot like making a fun Ratchet & Clank weapon.

DR: One of the most exciting parts of the development process was opening our new studio in New Orleans to support The Mage’s Tale development. We’ve quickly become a part of the growing game development community there, and the talent we’ve brought on-board have made us a better company overall. It’s been a great partnership with the City of New Orleans and a great partnership with Oculus and the team at Facebook.

CD: I’d also like to add that now’s a great time to play a competitive match in The Unspoken! Our new Spar Mode is a good way to learn the game without all the pressure of the ranked game, and the community is very welcoming—often, experienced players help show new players the ropes of competitive spellcasting. We’re updating The Unspoken throughout 2017, with new modes, classes, arenas, and artifacts. It’s grown tremendously since launch.

On top of that, the VR Challenger League is starting up on July 12 with online tournaments and a $200K prize pool, so we’ll see you on the Astral Plane!

Thanks to both Insomniac and inXile for taking the time to talk spellcasting and VR with us. From the crypts of Skara Brae to Chicago’s urban enclaves, there’s never been a more magical way to game.

Check out The Mage’s Tale on the Oculus Store, or score The Unspoken at a discount today—and stay tuned for more Summer of Rift action later this week!

— The Oculus Team