The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners Is Next-Level VR
Screen Rant went hands on with The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, which aims to be the next generation of immersive virtual reality gaming.
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The next generation of VR begins with The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, a full-scale action adventure survival horror game based on the legendary license. Virtual reality gaming has blown away audiences with deep immersion and a level of interactivity regular gaming simply cannot provide. However, many VR games fall short of the standard of gameplay depth provided by non-VR games. As a result, many of the best VR titles are described as either “arcade-like” or “immersive experiences,” rather than fully-featured adventures on their own.
There have been, of course, exceptions to this rule, perhaps most notably in the form of the critically acclaimed Resident Evil 7. The first-person survival horror adventure can be played entirely in VR, as long as one has the stomach for it. Now, a new survival horror shooter looks to be the definitive VR adventure for a new generation.
The Walking Dead has always used the zombie apocalypse as a backdrop for human stories of hope and despair, and that formula is being applied to a new VR video game, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, from Skydance Interactive, in partnership with Skybound Entertainment. At an event in New York City, we got to spend nearly an hour strapped into a VR headset to try out the new game, guided along by Creative Director Adam Grantham and VP of Global Interactive Marketing, Guy Constantini. Saints & Sinners surprised us with its incredible depth and exploration, and truly shows off the power of Virtual Reality to enhance traditional gaming experiences.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners takes place in New Orleans, Louisiana, three years after the start of the zombie outbreak. The city looks like the bombed out ruins of a once-great civilization. The ruling faction in the city reside in The Tower, a well-defended skyscraper. However, with supplies running low, the beginnings of a new power vacuum are starting to form. On top of this, rumors of a hidden bomb shelter stocked with years worth of supplies spread feelings of desperation and anxiety over the city. All told, New Orleans is a powder keg ready to explode, and that’s where the player comes in.
Scavenging for supplies, breaking down items into their base materials, crafting weapons, and gearing up for missions is pretty typical for the open world survival genre, to the point where performing these tasks becomes menial and tedious. In VR, however, there’s a true sense of agency. From their home base (a rusted-out school bus parked on the outskirts of town), players can prepare for the coming mission in all of the aforementioned ways, but the level of immersion offered by VR in these situations cannot be overstated. At the onset of the Virtual Reality revolution, it was a joy just to play round with physics objects in games like Job Simulator, but with The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, we’re entering a whole new era of VR: items are more tangible than ever before, from the in-game notebook to weapons which can be equipped on different parts of your body. It’s hard to express just how cool it feels to equip and holster weapons, to say nothing of actually drawing and shooting guns or stabbing errant walkers.
VR games like Superhot VR have taught players to use quick, subtle motions to take down enemies. In that game, enemies break apart after taking just a single light hit from any weapon. In The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, combat is a whole other beast. Light taps with a knife won’t do anything but irritate a zombie. In order to score a kill, you have to truly drive the knife into their skull with a forceful thrust. We were instructed to perform the go-to technique, of holding the zombie’s head with one hand while stabbing them with the other. Other VR games have had similar interactions, but none feel so tangible as The Walking Dead. Similarly, guns feel almost uncomfortably real, and lining up headshots using the iron sights felt natural and intuitive, despite this writer’s complete lack of experience with guns in the real world. We had a bit of trouble using two-handed melee weapons like an axe, but the two-handed rifles and the bow-and-arrow worked just fine, so it was almost certainly just our own skill curve holding us back, in that particular case.
If they wanted, the team at Skydance Interactive could have crafted these combat systems and deep interactivity, put the player in a map with a bunch of monsters, and called it a day. But they clearly went the extra mile in terms of storytelling, which has always been what distinguishes The Walking Dead from other forms of zombie fiction. Saints & Sinners’ version of New Orleans is populated with NPC of various gangs and factions, all of whom can be interacted with in a variety of ways over the course of what they promise to be a 15 hour story. Factions can be turned into allies, or the player can literally kill every single person they meet and loot their bodies for ammo and supplies. There’s no wrong way to play, and the story will change depending on the player’s decisions.
In our demo, we came across a group of NPCs who gave us a quest, to save a young man who had been captured by a group of bandits. From there, the options were many: we could try to talk to the hostage-takers, fight them in a battle to rescue the hostage, or join them and execute the hostage. We could even kill the questgiver and move on, and the game doesn’t induce a fail state for any of these outcomes. At its core, this is still The Walking Dead, so whatever happens, that’s how it goes.
Our approach was well-intended, but doomed to failure. The hostage-takers were hiding in the second floor of a bombed-out house, so we climbed the drain pipe to stealthily reach the second floor. The climbing felt intuitive and realistic, but those with weak stomachs might find this mechanic a bit more challenging than basic movement, which presented no problem to our personal constitution. Upon reaching the second floor, we launched a sneak attack on the bandits, which ended with the hostage being killed in the crossfire, courtesy of an admittedly skillful headshot from our six-shooter revolver. Hey, in the chaos of battle, it’s hard to tell who’s an ally and who’s an enemy.
The Walking Dead’s art style is clearly reminiscent of the classic Telltale Games adventure series, and based on what we saw from the game, Skydance has earned the right to invoke that storied take on the franchise. The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners is positioned to be a true game-changer for VR. With a bit of luck, it might just be the title that ushers in the next generation of Virtual Reality gaming.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/walking-dead-saints-sinners-vr-preview-hands-on/