We just announced ARK: Survival Evolved and Im here to tell you how excited we are about bringing this experience to PS4 and Project Morpheus. From the earliest stages of our development we knew we had an opportunity to create a game that pushes next-gen gameplay experiences in addition to providing awesome visuals. The result is that the world of ARK and its inhabitants feel like a real place that you can walk through, explore, and truly experience in your own way.
The PS4s powerful hardware has allowed us to bring a scale and scope to the game that wasnt previously possible in the console space. Were shooting for the moon with this one, a fully persistent game world, tens of thousands of AI entities, totally destructible foliage and environment, and multiplayer on a huge scale. And yeah, weve got dinosaurs. Dinosaurs that you can ride! At release, were shooting for about 60 distinct species, and we dont plan to just have them just wandering around as cannon fodder.
All creatures in ARK have their own living ecosystems, predator hierarchies, and an autonomy that exists outside of the players influences. Their interactions with each other intertwine with the way that players might use them, because almost every one of our creatures will be able to be tamed and used for peace or for war. The PS4 has the horsepower to pull this off, so were really excited to be finally bringing these kinds of next-generation gameplay experiences to consoles.
We didnt stop there, though, because whats better than experiencing all of this as if you were really there? After working for almost three years pioneering and creating high-end experiences for HMDs, I can tell you with good confidence that not much compares to soaring over the jungles and mountains of ARKs islands on the back of your very own pteranodon. The feeling of immersion the team has created in this beautiful world simply has to be experienced first-hand; it is profound and impactful, and even for me was a little bit surprising when I first tried ARK in VR.
When you design an experience like this, one of the most important things is to not fall into the trap of focusing on one platform and type of input while letting the chips fall where they may on the rest. Just like a mouse versus a gamepad, you have to design with VR in mind from the beginning. All of your testing, all of your gameplay elements, they need to tie into the experience of wearing a VR headset, the different FOV, the perception of motion and presence that exists between looking at a flat computer screen and virtually being there. In the end we dont just allow for VR, we recommend it and ARK will be a richer game because of it.
Still, for everyone that can play with VR, that should be good news.
