A new behind-the-scenes look at Skydance Interactive’s upcoming VR game shows a meticulously-crafted post-apocalypse New Orleans.
Arriving on headsets January 2020, Skydance Interactive’s The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is shaping up to be one of the biggest VR releases of next year, offering players a rich, complex RPG experience during which they’ll go head-to-head with not only walkers, but other humans as well. You can take on a variety of missions, team-up with — or takedown — warring factions, craft unique weapons and tools, and battle waves of flesh-hungry undead using a unique physics-based combat system.
Set across the flooded remains of New Orleans, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners promises to immerse users in a truly engrossing post-apocalyptic world, unlike anything you’ve seen on a VR headset. In a new behind-the-scenes video released by Skydance, the development team gives us an even closer look at these incredibly detailed environments.
Saints & Sinners is an open-world experience, meaning you’re able to move throughout the environment any way you’d like without restriction. In order to keep you properly engrossed at all times, Skydance’s level designers went to work on a meticulously-crafted playspace packed with incredibly minute details.
“One of the things that we encourage the environment artist to do was to really think about the space that they’re working in. And if it’s a room, tell the story of that room,” adds Art Director Jake Geiger. “You know, don’t just make it a room that’s got some trash around. Do a little bit of environmental storytelling to say, ‘Oh, this room was broken into once. It got looted. Somebody may have died in the corner here.’
“When you walk into a space like that and you can already put that together in your mind, suddenly the world becomes a lot bigger and feels a lot more real.”
When you need a quick breather from all the action, Skydance has included a “home base” where you can repair and upgrade equipment, plan out your next objectives, and check your progress. The team decided that a cemetery would serve as the most logical location within the confines of the story as it would be one of the few areas devoid of walkers; and since the cemetery is next to a church, what better shelter than a rundown church bus?
Much like the rest of the environments featured in Saints & Sinners, your home base is also packed with interesting details, thanks in large part to the buses previous resident.
As for why the team settled on New Orleans for the setting, they credit the city’s strong southern cultural heritage as well as its well-documented resistance to destruction.
“The resilience of that city, right? Like we all know it,” says Davidson Cole, Writer on Saints & Sinners. “I think that that’s something that we’re really trying to explore in terms of — again — the human side of things. The Walking Dead universe is all about resilience as it is, and then you magnify that with a city that has proven extremely resilient over the years.”
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners will be available January 23rd, 2020 on PC VR headsets via SteamVR and Oculus.
Feature Image Credit: Skydance Interactive
