Even after the belated release of The Last Guardian, Fumito Ueda remains an interesting figure in the Japanese gaming industry, and someone we’d love to see work in VR.
Ueda’s games have a distinct feeling to them. Their crumbling ruins and archaic worlds make them unlike anything else in the medium despite inspiring many other developers and being outright imitated by others. While his most recent project, the long-delayed The Last Guardian, would be interesting in VR — who doesn’t want to hug Trico? — it’s his 2005 masterpiece, Shadow of the Colossus, we’d most like to experience with a headset.
Shadow remains the best for Ueda’s trilogy of PlayStation games thanks to its brilliant concept and wonderful atmosphere. A game purely consisting of boss fights, you climb massive beasts and attempt to take them down. The scale of these monsters is something that would be brilliantly captured inside of a PS VR headset, and we’d love to experience the game’s sweeping landscapes inside a headset. It also sports one of the best game soundtracks of all-time.
Ueda himself seems to think that such an experience would be special, but VR has too many problems to make it a possibility right now. In a recent interview with Glixel, Ueda said that, if he were to make Shadow of the Colossus VR, he would have to “create something that goes beyond the expectations of the fan base.”
“It wouldn’t be enough to just make a game where you’re standing at the feet of a colossus,” Ueda continued. “My biggest concern for a Shadow VR game is that it would be a first-person perspective and the biggest problem with VR, I’ve heard, seems to be that the motion makes people feel sick. So I don’t know if it would really be a good match. I don’t have the confidence that we’d be able to overcome that problem. ”
Ueda also touched on the small install base for the VR market right now, and expressed doubts as to if a VR project would make “business sense”. All hope is not lost, though, as he did say he was “interested in creating something for VR”, but it would have to find the right balance financially.
Personally, we’d welcome an Ueda VR game with open arms. He’s worked closely with Sony before, though there were obviously issues getting The Last Guardian out the door. But perhaps the two could pair once more for a dream VR project.
