PlayStation’s London Studio ventures off from their typical projects to something more fantastical. The gaming studio announced earlier today in an interview that its newest untitled IP would be fantasy online co-op combat game set in London. It’s a huge shift from what they usually produce, considering that they mainly experimented with VR and other PlayStation technology. Currently, there is little information on the game’s plot, but what is known is that it will be a PlayStation 5 exclusive and their most ambitious project yet.
“…With this project, we really wanted to explore some new avenues and set ourselves some new challenges,” said co-studio head Stuart Whyte. “We definitely wanted to try something a little bit different, and I think this new project really channels our ‘brave’ value and allows us to push ourselves on the ‘curious’ front, too. It’s an exciting future, it really is. Innovation is always going to be at the heart of what we do. If you look at our heritage and the titles we’ve done, there are a lot of firsts in there. And that will continue.”
“What’s great about that heritage is the problem-solving aspect,” said co-studio head Tara Saunders. “We have taken different technologies and looked at how we shift the games industry and come up with concepts that haven’t been done before. That heritage means the team is comfortable throwing themselves outside of their comfort zone. Even though we’re not working on something that uses all different bits of peripherals, it is still about taking that DNA of innovation and putting it into any game concept.”
Whyte went into detail on how the idea for the game came to be, from brainstorming amongst their team, talking to PlayStation leadership, to polling “hundreds of gamers in the UK and US through anonymous polls.” The untitled fantasy game will be built using London Studio’s in-house engine, the Soho Engine. According to Whyte, it was built for current-generation hardware, with some of its toolset dating back to the VR Worlds and Blood & Truth tech on the PlayStation 4. Whyte noted that the tech was ideal due to the VR game needing to have “…super-efficient pipelines and engines.”