The Cutting Room Floor

Image courtesy Chris Alderson, Polyarc

As with literally any game ever made, there’s things that just don’t make it into the finished product for one reason or another. Looking back on the game’s development, Stiksma says the team worked hard to make sure only the best content made it out the door, even if that meant cutting content that the team had spent considerable time on.

“As VR is still a new technology, we have a lot of experiments and ideas that don’t make it all the way. We had entire areas that we were really excited about, but we couldn’t make the scope work. We also had visions for a few more of the characters appearing in the game world rather than being only visible from the book. Being a small team, we couldn’t deliver on everything, so we had to choose where we spent our development time,” Stiksma explained.

As for some of the things that didn’t make it into Book II?

“We have some 3D models for characters who we couldn’t rig, some concepts for characters who have yet to exist, cosmetics for Quill, and prototypes for more weapons too. There was a mean prototype for Quill using a bow & arrow and she was kind of unstoppable. […] many puzzles don’t make it. We create many puzzle rooms to test out concepts and they often stay in our development folder, with only the best being moved into shipped dioramas.”

As ever, content that didn’t make it into a game often finds its way into a sequel…

Book III?

Image courtesy Polyarc

The end of Book II left us with something of an ‘Inception spinning top’ tease; I’m sure they knew the question was coming… will we see a Book III?

“We’re absolutely excited to continue telling more stories as long as our fans still want to explore our worlds,” Stiksma teased.

And when I asked if the studio planned to stick with the world of Moss or explore new IP in the future, he told me the studio has a few irons in the fire.

“Hah, it’s hard to predict—but we are exploring new projects with another already running right now and some ideas for others on the horizon.”

– – — – –

Moss: Book II launched on PSVR earlier this year and is heading to Quest 2 on July 21st. Read our full review here.

More from this series:

Stormland – Insomniac Games

Asgard’s Wrath – Sanzaru Games

Blood & Truth – Sony’s London Studio

ASTRO BOT –  Sony’s JAPAN Studio

Lone Echo – Ready At Dawn

ARKTIKA.1 – 4A Games

Robo Recall – Epic Games

Bonus Art

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

Image courtesy Polyarc
Image courtesy Mike Jensen, Polyarc
Image courtesy Tomas Gomez, Polyarc
Image courtesy Polyarc
Image courtesy Polyarc
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Ben Lang
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."
  • Mettanine

    Pretty disappointed that the topic of it ever coming to Steam wasn’t brought up (unless it was on page 2 which I skipped due to the spoiler warning).

  • Definitely hyped for this and will be giving it a wee purchase. Not sure yet whether I’ll get the PC VR or Quest 2 version though. The amount of love and attention to detail that’s been put into the game is very obvious. This is the kind of polish all VR games need. Great stuff.

  • Beautiful pictures!

  • Martijn Valk

    I loved the first part so this will be a definite buy ;)

  • ShadowkingMS

    I want more chapters because of this