Student for Life

If there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear about the production of Arkham Shadow, it’s that Camouflaj as a studio was diligent about studying the Arkham games to make sure what it was building looked, sounded, and felt right. But the studio also spent time researching existing VR titles to borrow great ideas and learn hard-won lessons about what didn’t work in titles that came before.

When it comes to Payton’s advice for other teams building VR games—both large and small—he says everyone can benefit from that approach.

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“I think the secret to success in creating a great VR or MR game is diligently studying other titles. The rulebook for creating a great flatscreen game is many stories tall given the fifty-year history of the flat screen gaming medium. The time developers have spent developing immersive games (especially MR and now AR) is a tiny fraction of the time developers have spent on flat screen games, which makes our game development rulebook only a few inches tall, if that,” Payton says.

“We owe it to ourselves—and our players—to learn from the successes and failures of other VR and MR games, to learn, and to build off those learnings. That’s why I feel a sense of gratitude and indebtedness to all the developers behind the VR games we played while developing Arkham Shadow. We learned so much from games such as Assassin’s Creed: Nexus, Armature’s Resident Evil 4, Superhot VR, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, The Song in the Smoke and Asgard’s Wrath II, just to name a few.”

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Bonus Art

A few more pieces worth seeing that we didn’t have room for:

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Yeshaya

    Great interview and write-up, thank you! I have a pipe dream that they'll develop a sequel that would be ready as a Quest 4 launch title, and the processing boost would be enough to let that game be open world, a VR version of Arkham City, as Shadow was a VR version of Asylum. Would be awesome to see the remote batarang and TYGER robot dogs, esp since I though the stealth sections were a bit weaker and repetitive than combat, so more challenge and variation there would be excellent.
    Did you talk at all about post-release content? Would really love NG+, replayability of the BG-section story, and more challenge maps

    • MeowMix

      Camouflaj did a Q/A video a few days ago and said the Quest3 has the power to do an open world Batman game on the scale of Arkham City (of course the graphics wouldn't be as good). So they can already be done now, hopefully the next game is a fleshed out Batman Arkham VR sequel with an expanded game world.

  • XRC

    Very interesting interview. Keep em coming!