In order to embark on its most ambitious project to date, an online combat game set in a contemporary fantasy version of the UK’s capital city, PlayStation London said it is quitting the virtual reality market. Stuart Whyte and Tara Saunders, co-studio heads, spoke about the project and its origins on the Sony Interactive Entertainment blog.
It’s a modern fantasy London, it’s cooperative action. And what we really love about this project is that it’s giving us an opportunity to showcase a lot of wonder and magic. It’s our home city, and the idea of bringing fantasy into a believable, modern London world fills us with a lot of excitement.
Whyte stated that Guerrilla’s Horizon Zero Dawn served as an inspiration for this new project’s ideation process. Before the selection process started with a series of surveys within PlayStation London, then within PlayStation Studios, and finally within a group of UK and US gamers through market research, the team was given a briefing document with high-level guidelines that allowed them to imagine about 60 variations.
According to Whyte, the engine for PlayStation London, which was specifically updated for the PlayStation 5, will be used to create the game.
We’ve got a super talented team working on our in-house engine, Soho. And the key thing is that it isn’t an engine that we modified to fit PlayStation 5: it’s an engine that we’ve rebuilt from the ground up for this generation of hardware and the needs of the game we’re creating.
It’s been designed to take full advantage of the PlayStation 5. I remember when we saw the early specs of PlayStation 5—things like ray tracing hardware, the super fast storage—and how that inspired us to set out and build an engine that could push the platform as much as possible.
That started when we got our first PlayStation 5 prototype dev kits, but in fairness, the actual tool set and some of the pipelines predate that, going back to the work we did on VR Worlds and Blood & Truth. Those games required super fast, highly efficient engines and at its heart Soho is still that, but very much tailored for the PlayStation 5.
Sony had previously made a suggestion that moving forward, live service games would be available on both PlayStation and PC. Therefore, it’s not out of the question to think that the PlayStation London game will also grace PC shores, perhaps even from the start.
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