How Insomniac is marrying VR and esports with The Unspoken

The main selling point for any game that aims to be successful in the growing and profitable esports scene is its competitive nature. Can people play this game, over and over, for hours, days, weeks, and months on end — at the exclusion of all other games — and continue to improve and discover new strategies and wrinkles throughout that time? Will people be able to actually improve their skill, as players, to differentiate their rank in the game, rather than just upgrading stats and unlocking new items?

Those are important questions to ask and, luckily, it seems like the Insomniac game studio has thought of answers for its upcoming Oculus Touch launch title, The Unspoken [Review: 9/10]. Not only will the game come with all Touch preorders, but it also includes enough depth and competitive flair to be well worth the time investment. It’s also the third VR title from the veteran studio, following Edge of Nowhere [Review: 9/10] and Feral Rites [Review: 5/10].

Finding a competitive balance

“For us, developing The Unspoken started with making a really good and fun competitive game,” said Chad Dezern, the creative director of The Unspoken at Insomniac, during a phone interview. “Once we started getting into competitive matches at the office and realized the game needed to be about magic duels with a solid beginning, middle, and end, it really helped us find the core of the experience.”

No matter who you are, you’ve likely fantasized or thought about throwing fireballs at some point in your life. When you put on a VR headset and transport yourself to fantastical worlds of fiction, there’s no more appropriate time to indulge in the fantasies that come from the technology. But beyond the content and setting, the real magic (pun intended) comes when you face off against someone else inside the immersive environment.

“It really started clicking for us when we were able to make a very naturally competitive game,” said Dezern. “And once the mechanics were established, we were starting to realize what the habits of really high level players were. We started there — with competition — because that is the core of it, but we did’t specifically set out to make an eSport game, it wasn’t a game design goal.”

Which is a huge point to pay attention to. Esports isn’t a genre of video games. Even if you try your hardest, you can’t force your game to be accepted and promoted in the esports community. But instead, the smarter idea is to craft an inherently fun, well-designed, and balanced game and encourage the community to support and build it up over time.

And that’s what Insomniac is doing.

“We want to focus on making the individual player experience fun, more so than creating a team game,” said Dezern. “We made it a duel because we wanted to really focus on those dynamics.”

In this way, it’s actually different than most popular competitive gaming experiences. MOBAs like League of Legends, Dota 2, Paragon, and Heroes of the Storm are all about team dynamics, Counter-Strike and Overwatch are team-based first-person shooters, and other than the fighting game community, most esports — and physical sports in general — are all team-based. The exception is Hearthstone, Blizzard’s card game that’s a 1-on-1 experience.

This presents an opportunity for a game like The Unspoken.

By focusing on individual players, the core skill-based gameplay is able to shine more clearly: master your class, memorize the spells, and create strategies for moving around the maps, baiting opponents to open them up to your more powerful abilities, and more. The Unspoken, and other VR titles, become just as much about your physical endurance and coordination as they are your knowledge and ability as a gamer. VR esports are getting closer to, well, actual sports.

We’re approaching Tron-like levels of immersion and competition.

Identity through magic

“We have matchmaking features, you can invite friends to matches, and ranked matches,” said Dezern. “For single-player content, you can go into a practice mode with all the classes and spells to get the hang of things, as well as battle a very challenging A.I. opponent. It’s great for learning how to play the game.”

There’s a story as well, but it’s just not the focus. “The narrative is there to setup the game, we want everyone to be intrigued, its just the tip of a very big narrative iceberg, said Dezern. “We didn’t go all in on everything because we wanted to do one thing very well instead of sprawling ourselves across several modes. For us, that one thing is competitive 1-vs.-1 multiplayer duels.”

Rather than a traditionally fantastical or mythical world of magical creatures and forbidden lore, like you might find in The Lord of the Rings, The Unspoken features a much more grounded “What if?” scenario. This isn’t about a fictional world of witches and wizards, but instead asks a very Harry Potter-esque question: What if the world of magic was hiding just beneath our noses?

“Think about that feeling you have when you’re in a new city and you don’t know what’s going on just around the corner,” said Dezern. “How do we work that notion into a spell? We don’t have many straight-up D&D spells, for example, except for maybe the Fireball, because — come on, it’s a fireball.”

Time will tell whether games like The Unspoken, or even RIGS, are able to find footing in the competitive gaming scene as VR titles. In the meantime, developers should take a note from Insomniac’s book and focus on creating well-designed, fun, and balanced games that can stand on their own.

If Insomniac does this, an esports scene will form organically.

This post first appeared on UploadVR.