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Shawn Kittelsen of Skydance Interactive knows there are a lot of tradeoffs between performance and graphics fidelity in making good virtual reality games. Last December, Skydance released its Behemoth game, where players immerse themselves in VR to battle gigantic beasts.
The game is now available on the PlayStation VR 2, PCVR and Meta Quest headsets, and it recently launched a new patch. I caught up with Kittelsen, creative director on Behemoth and senior vice president of creative at Skydance, at last week’s Dice Summit in Las Vegas. We talked about the challenges of making VR games work across a number of VR headsets with varying quality and performance.
I tried out the game last year and it makes good use of the sense of size that you can get in a VR game, with an enemy towering over you as if you were an ant. It was like playing Shadow of the Colossus where you had to dodge blows and use your wits to scale up giant monsters and defeat them. It makes you feel like you’re swinging heavy weapons with two hands or wielding big swords.
The $40 first-person action-adventure game was the first major VR game for Skydance since it tackled the award-winning The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners franchise. It combined brutal physics-based hand-to-hand combat with player traversal, environmental puzzle-solving, and larger-than-life boss battles. You also had to defeat faster human-sized enemies wielding swords — always in a visceral way.
Skydance Games brings its signature creative and technical approach, virtual physicality, to Behemoth. Realistic weight, physics, and interactions create a sense of immersion that feels both natural and heightened in all facets of the game: combat, traversal, puzzle-solving, and more. The tech had to be pushed to the limit, Kittelsen said.
Skydance, which is owned by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is also working on games led by Amy Hennig and Julian Beak (Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, untitled Star Wars Game)—as well as its games publishing, interactive licensing, and transmedia storytelling teams.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: How are things going?
Shawn Kittelsen: They’re going. We just launched our game in December. We had our second major patch…yesterday? DICE time has screwed me up. We’re in the midst of putting together a lot of quality of life updates and responding to the community. We have a few extra surprises in store for folks this year. We’ll keep supporting the game with those. We’re nominated here for VR game of the year and for technical achievement in the immersive category.
The technical achievement in the game is one thing I’m the most proud of. You don’t see a lot of games that run really well–we run native framerate. We don’t use reprojection or anything like that. We run on everything from the Quest 2 up to PSVR2 and high-end PCs. That was not an easy task, to keep the game performant and have every version of it looking pretty good. We had people at Meta telling us we had pushed the Quest 2 about as far as anyone possibly could.
GamesBeat: Were there particular scenes that pushed it the hardest?
Kittelsen: The game has dynamic physics objects throughout. There were two areas where it was really tough to get the performance. Any area where you had a full complement of five enemies to fight. The more enemies you had on screen, the more AI runs through cycles, and the number of physics objects being generated through combat–maybe that’s enemies dropping weapons, or you’re cutting them in half. And then the bosses. Every moment with the bosses, whether it was the giant behemoth boss fights or the cinematic moments where you encounter the behemoths.
Early on we were seeing our framerates grind to a halt. All kinds of other weird things would happen, too. Sound would drop out. Very strange memory leaks, stuff like that. That stuff was pretty much all fixed at launch. We had some bugs at launch, but overall the game was pretty stable in how it ran, particularly on the Quest and PlayStation 5.
GamesBeat: Was there a difference between being able to use the horsepower of the PlayStation versus a stand-alone? Is that a wide performance gap?
Kittelsen: Massive. It’s a massive performance gap. The game was built with a base layer that was built to run performant for the Quest, but then on the PS5, you have effects on top of effects in terms of graphics and sound and all that. You can bring such a higher fidelity to things. It’s not just turning up the render scale. It’s adding in different visual effects for each platform. If we had fire effects, we had to create fire twice. Once for mobile platforms and hardware, once for PlayStation and desktops. All those particle effects, shadows, all of that varied depending on which platform it’s on.
It’s the hardest development challenge I’ve ever seen, short of when I was working with NetherRealm on Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat XI, seeing them try to squeeze Mortal Kombat onto Switch. I would liken it to that, though. When you see things like Witcher 3 or DOOM running on Switch, it’s a miracle. There’s that wide of a gap. I would definitely encourage or advise other developers, especially teams smaller than ours that don’t have the resources we have, to focus on one or two platforms, because getting out on everything is a lot of work.
GamesBeat: I remember that for the Switch, the executives had to make these decisions. Do we want to make a game that runs on the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, and then create a separate team to make something run on the Switch? In some ways it was an advantage for Nintendo, but it was a big disadvantage for the third parties who had to say, “We’re only taking Call of Duty to those three platforms, not the Switch.”
Kittelsen: We had that earlier, 14 or 15 years ago, with the Wii. You’d have a completely different game for the Wii. This is going to sound like a real blast from the past, but the Green Lantern movie game, there were two different ones. One for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and then the version for the Nintendo Wii. It was a completely different game, of course, completely different graphics. Similar storylines, but you effectively had to do that.
Now there’s such a push from users. They want the same experience no matter which platform they’re playing on. That was important to us. There were compromises we could have made that would have made it easier to push graphical fidelity on the Quest. Using asynchronous spacewarp, which is their reprojection technology. But that would then compromise–it would create this delta on how the game felt in your hands depending on which platform you were on. There’s a magical feeling when a game runs in native framerates, especially a game like ours that relies so much on the physicality of it. That one-to-one connection between your hand and the controller.
GamesBeat: Did you wish for some alignment? When the Switch 2 comes it seems like Call of Duty will run on it. Would you like to see that for your platforms?
Kittelsen: There’s bound to be a point where everything converges. The leaps we’re seeing in mobile processors and hardware are on a very steep incline. The bandwidth you get out of GPUs in desktops and consoles, it’s not the same. The threshold is–they’re really eking out gains here and there. That’s where I feel like at some point, the steep incline of fast progress in mobile catches up to the standard hardware. It gets to a point where it’s negligible. I think in the next 15 years, without a doubt, we won’t be able to tell the difference.
GamesBeat: Do you feel like VR is still in a good state compared to other platforms? Some people are starting to wonder whether Mark Zuckerberg wants to put more money into AI now.
Kittelsen: VR is still nascent. I like to compare it to film development. We’re still in the silent era. We’re just getting into talkies, maybe. We haven’t broken into Technicolor. It’s so early. I don’t think it’s going away any time soon, for a couple of reasons.
One, it offers a different experience than you can get with traditional flat screens. Whether that’s a media consumption experience, where you feel like you’re playing something on an IMAX screen sitting in your living room, or it’s because you enjoy the physicality of a game like Behemoth, or a game like Beat Saber, or Batman: Arkham Shadow, where you really want to physically embody. You can’t do that outside of VR. There’s that unique offering. I think that’s durable long-term, especially as we see that the audience is changing, particularly on the Quest platforms. It’s a much younger, more emerging audience that’s driving a shift toward more casual and free-to-play titles on that platform. That audience is growing up native to VR. Their demand is going to increase over time.
The other reason, I think regardless of the current priorities on AI, wearables as a category are going to grow well beyond head-mounted displays. If anything, Meta has definitely demonstrated a commitment to glasses. They’ve already disclosed the Orion tech. All that’s running on Horizon OS. It’s built on the same foundation. What they’re doing now with the Quest is R&D for wearables. It’ll translate to better and better Quests, and eventually, like I said, this convergence moment.
What may end up being more of a passing trend, or not necessarily the mode–right now the default for a head-mounted display is you are closed off. You are shrouded from the world. I do think we end up in a different place where your glasses can go between mixed reality and a full immersive mode, but you’re never fully closed off. You always have your peripheral vision. That may be more favorable for a lot of people, because that’s one of the barriers we’ve seen. It’s an obstacle for someone to join VR because they’re worried about being closed off. They don’t want to be shrouded from the rest of the world around them.
GamesBeat: Have you tried to figure out game-related applications for that?
Kittelsen: Not yet. Our focus at Skydance Interactive and Skydance Games has been how far we can push the technology with head-mounted displays and touch controllers. We haven’t even really ventured into hand-tracking controls very much. Our games are very core. There’s a level of fidelity that our players expect that we can’t get from hand tracking yet. Once we start playing with hand tracking more, that’s when we’ll start looking more at mixed reality and other applications.
GamesBeat: I played with a demo from the hand exoskeleton guys. It’s almost a spider-like set of sensors on your hand. It has a ways to go before it works well.
Kittelsen: It gives you active resistance, right?
GamesBeat: Yeah, you could feel resistance from things you were grabbing. The hard thing is that VR is a platform that’s never done. You have to decide what features to support.
Kittelsen: One of the ways we’re responding to player feedback is by recognizing that there’s a vast spectrum of VR players now. When we released Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners five years ago, there was really one kind of VR player. The early adopter, hardcore, probably into PC VR. They wanted a lot of physicality. They wanted a high skill curve on the physicality. They were playing things like Lone Echo and Echo Arena and all that.
Now we’re seeing people who say, “I want to get into VR. I want to be immersed. But I don’t need to full-force throw my punches.” Maybe they have a physical condition that prevents them from doing that. Accessibility becomes a much bigger discussion. That leads to–as broad an audience as there is for VR, there becomes as broad a spectrum of content for the audience. That goes all the way from the more passive experiences to physical endurance and fitness training experiences.
GamesBeat: How much of that content variety do you intend to hit?
Kittelsen: In the long term, it’s anybody’s guess. In the near term, we’re focused on the core games that we do really well, but we’re trying to broaden the funnel for those core games to bring more access to more players. If you look at the spectrum of things, the intense physical combat in Behemoth is probably the peak of how physically intense an experience can get in VR. In the future we’ll probably try to have different modes for different players in our games.
We want to make immersive story-based experiences where you feel like the game reacts to you. You don’t just want to react to the game, but feel like it reacts to you. But how do we make that something that someone who might get winded, or who just might not be physically able to swing away for hours and hours in VR–how can we make them have the same epic experience without those demands? And meanwhile, for the players who really want to get physical, how do we give them the infinite challenge that they crave? They really want to feel like they’re in it. They want to be on the holodeck and feel like they’re really punching and swinging and living that life. Somewhere between a Disney dark ride and Westworld is where we want to architect our future.
GamesBeat: How many people are in the VR team right now?
Kittelsen: Just about 100 people. We’re a multi-project team. That’s a big part of it. Especially in a growing space like VR, you need a lot of people, internal or external. We certainly work with a lot of partners. It’s very important to not peg everyone on one title, but have a variety of work happening in the shop at various stages of development, so you don’t just walk off a cliff at the end of the game. You want to have meaningful work for your teams to do. That’s where plenty of studios have gotten themselves into trouble. It’s one reason why we’re not looking to grow too big too fast. Where we’re at already feels more than big enough for the near term. We’ll be hiring very slowly and strategically based on what we need for different projects.
GamesBeat: What do you have upcoming that you can talk about?
Kittelsen: Only more content for Behemoth. That’s all we can share for now. We have some cool projects that we’re working on, some fun tech that we’re exploring. Again, the Skydance Interactive team in particular, we’re committed to immersive games in every sense, and exploring what that means. We’ll have a much broader definition of that in the years to come.
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