I Expect You To Die and Until You Fall developer Schell Games’ latest VR effort isn’t designed for a home-based standalone headset or room-scale technology, but instead to be played inside a car.
That’s right, a moving car. On the road and everything.
The game is called Cloudbreaker and it was revealed during a talk at the AWE event in Santa Clara this week. Cloudbreaker is being built for Holoride, a platform that tracks locational and navigational data from a vehicle and implements that into VR experiences. The idea is for a means of immersive in-car entertainment for passengers in vehicles that also doesn’t make you motion sick given your body will be feeling the natural motions of a car that are reflected in-game. Obviously it doesn’t work for the driver considering that’s about as dangerous a thing you could possibly do.
In Cloudbreaker, players are transported to the ruins of the Cloudscape and do battle with enemies known as the automata in third-person. You go on runs through the dungeon, daring yourself to stay longer as the difficulty increases. When you’re in-game, lines at the bottom of the screen represent driving along the road. The game is being built using Holoride’s own Elastic SDK. Some footage of the game was captured during the AWE presentation, which you can see below (thanks to eminus for capturing it).
I apologize for the blurry video but here’s a bit of demo footage of the game. pic.twitter.com/cG2cLQ8RbO
— e-🎥@AWE (@eminus) November 9, 2021
“Cloudbreaker is the first experience we’ve created using the Holoride Elastic SDK, and we are thrilled with it,” said Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games, said in a prepared statement. “In-car entertainment is going to be a key part of what is thrilling about the metaverse, and playing Cloudbreaker feels like a glimpse into the future.”
Cloudbreaker is set to release on the platform sometime in 2022. It’s certainly an intriguing concept though if the industry is still trying to get VR headsets into people’s homes, getting them into the backs of cars feels like it’s a fair bit further out. This isn’t the next big home release from Schell Games, then, though the studio did tease earlier this year that it’s working on a project that takes an interesting approach to physics in VR.
