Feral Rites
Insomniac sets out to rite some wrongs
Insomniac Games, a studio best known for creating Playstation hits such as the Ratchet & Clank franchise and the Resistance series of shooters has jumped into the VR pool with both feet, developing a slew of new games due out for the Oculus Rift in 2016. In addition to Edge of Nowhere, a fascinating, and somewhat nerve-wracking looking Arctic survival game and the crazy looking first person, gesture based magic duelling game The Unspoken comes Feral Rites, a colourful third person action brawler that sounds part Altered Beast, part Zeno Clash.
Players take the role of the scion of a noble tribe, whose father, the Chief has been killed. Rescued from a similar fate, the child was raised in a faraway land, the now adult survivor travels back to the island of their birth, a deadly place fraught with danger and teeming with savage beasts to punch a trail of vengeance through all those that stand in the way of revenge. That revenge comes in the form of combo based brawling and the ability to transform into a number of savage beasts to better slaughter enemies.
Both the nature of the action and exploration aspects of Feral Rites have apparently raised a number of hurdles for Insomniac Games. By opting for a third person camera, Insomniac have leapt some of those hurdles by giving players a sense of scale and range in the brawling combat, but a fixed third person camera proved to be unworkable as it didn’t give the player enough spatial sense to fight large groups of enemies. The final game will have a dynamic camera that will change view distance depending on the situation, pulling further away when the player needs greater spatial awareness, such as when fighting enemies from all sides or exploring the lush jungles of the island, and closing in when a closer POV is necessary. The third person camera should also do away with much of the discomfort that could come from a fast paced action game in VR jerking the player’s vision around erratically and violently.
Though renowned for their excellent weapon design in previous franchises, Insomniac Games is taking a very different approach with Feral Rites. Aside from the ability to transform into animal forms there are no weapons in the game. Instead, players will be able to upgrade their armour as well as develop their character in as yet unspecified ways. At the time of character creation, players will be able to choose the sex of their character, and, rather interestingly (or worryingly) each sex has different powers and abilities. We’re a little worries that this might mean that female characters will be the little, fast and stealthy fighters and male characters may be the brawny tanky type, essentially fixing the genders into stereotypes, but we’ll leave our final opinion until the game comes out. We’re also curious to see how control works as well, whether the game will be gamepad based with the player’s head controlling the camera, or whether some form of gesture/motion control will be used. At any rate, we’re definitely excited to see what Insomniac Games has in store for us when Feral Rites is released sometime around Christmas.