as the augmented reality title The Playroom (as well as Playroom VR), and free to play Vita and mobile title, Run Sackboy Run! Still, it was a move that fitted with the philosophy the studio had taken towards these projects. “We’ve done a lot of what I call ‘strategic projects’ where we partner up with big platform holders,” says Graeme Ankers, managing director of Firesprite, “and it’s generally about looking at new technology or things that are coming in the future. That’s a lot of what we do as a studio.” With this in mind, Firesprite’s latest announcement seems to be a bit of a surprise. The Persistence will be coming in non-VR form to PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch this summer – with existing owners of the PSVR version receiving it for free as an update. It’s an unexpected move from a studio known for experimenting with new technologies, but one that Ankers argues stays true to the studio’s core philosophies: “The key drive for Firesprite is to really push and deliver something special, and do something slightly different. Even in going from VR to non-VR for Persistence, we still feel that we’re experimenting in bringing innovation and something new to the genre.”
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n a market filled with shorter, more casual experiences, The Persistence was something of a success story for the PSVR. Releasing in 2018, the survival horror VR title was one of the few to offer a hardcore, eight-to-ten hour experience exclusively for Sony’s headset. It was a success for developer Firesprite too. The Persistence was the Liverpool-based studio’s first IP, entirely self-published by the studio, and was warmly received by the press – clocking in at 78 on Metacritic, with critics regarding it as one of the best VR experiences available at the time. It’s a strong first showing for a studio that had previously worked on other studios’ properties, such
Above: Graeme Ankers of Firesprite
PANCAKE MODE It’s certainly new to see a VR game being adapted for a non-VR platform. If anything, we’re more used to seeing movement in the opposite direction – such as with Skyrim and No Man’s Sky moving to VR, for instance. Adapting The Persistence for flatscreen platforms (or “pancake mode,” as Firesprite calls it) brought a host of problems to development, both expected and unexpected – leading to a much more difficult process than had been initially anticipated. “We were doing a lot of testing side by side,” notes Ankers, “even when we were developing the game for PlayStation VR. And it just seemed to really work, in every component of the game. Once we’d delivered the PlayStation VR experience, and we got some really lovely critical and commercial success from that, we then thought ‘well, why don’t we explore this on different platforms?’ And as optimistic developers, as we always are, we thought this would be really easy. “Going from VR to non-VR, the whole design language of the game is very different. Even how you treat a user interface, or taking account for where the player is sat in the experience is very different. VR controls are very attached to look at systems that are played based on head tracking. So on PSVR we had something that was quite subtle, but we had a cursor that wrapped around the objects that you were looking at. So we’re changing that language completely moving to a flat
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