Gravity Rush 2’s development has been pretty quiet until recently. Aside from the odd trailer, the biggest look the general public have gotten of the game came last week during an E3 stream from Sony.
Today on the PlayStation Blog, Creative Director Keiichiro Toyama talked with Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe’s Content Producer Cory Brotherson about Gravity Rush 2.
The game world will be much bigger says Toyama, with the game’s map being two-and-a-half to three times larger than the first game. Toyama’s team wanted to make the world feel alive and pushed the PS4 to its limits to do it.
Making the world seem extremely alive was hugely important for us, especially as the series was coming to PS4. We wanted dense cities and environments, with vibrancy about them.
To that end, the team put a ton of effort into the details to make the environment feel real. Even the little things. For example, the entire city is made up of a series of floating islands and Toyama made sure that the islands acted like it was realistically floating.
Every location you visit in the game is an independent floating island, so we wanted to make sure they were all floating correctly and moving independently — this was difficult but we were really focused on getting it right.
The story is another thing that has changed since the first game. In the original Gravity Rush, main character Kat was discovering who she was and why she has her powers. Now that the plot line has been resolved the story will see a lot more personal growth out of Kat.
Gravity Rush 2’s story will be a more mature one, but that doesn’t mean that the game won’t have its lighter moments.
Gravity Rush 2 is really about development and maturity –Kat is mischievous, but she’s also a great person and we wanted to go into that more and find out who she actually is.
A lot of the story’s humor comes from the smaller side stories in the game. The game will have over fifty side stories, Toyama says, each with their own comedic moments. He mentions one story in particular where Kat is up for a part in a movie and the entire movie is filmed in the game. “It’s all very light hearted, as you would expect.”
Gravity Rush 2 is a PS4 exclusive and is currently slated for release sometime this year. You can check out the E3 trailer below.