Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 developer Rockstar Games isn’t yet finished with VR, according to HTC.
Speaking with UploadVR, Joel Breton, GM of Vive Studios, talked about how early work from developers like Bethesda, Ubisoft and Rockstar had paved the way to bring more companies into the VR ecosystem. “So now everybody is out there building VR, unfortunately, it’s just not public yet,” he said. “So all of the third parties are working on VR now.”
Turning his attention to Rockstar specifically, Breton praised the work the company did on last year’s L.A. Noire: The VR Case Files. “That one, that was lovingly handcrafted,” he said. “They went through everything, every art asset, every animation. Any part of the game that didn’t work, they cut from the VR experience so things that ended up in those seven cases that are in the VR version, those were very very selectively chosen. They figured that would work.”
HTC worked with Rockstar to launch L.A. Noire first on HTC Vive before it came to Oculus Rift last year. Indeed, we were big fans of the experience and how it tailored many of its mechanics to fit headsets.
“So, you know, they’re not done either,” Breton said of Rockstar’s work in VR. “So we’re very very supportive of these studios both on the hardware side and the software side and the optimization side.”
This week is obviously a big one for Rockstar with the long-anticipated launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 (which, we might speculatively add, features a first-person view mode), but we’re obviously excited by the idea of another of the developer’s games being ported to headsets, if not something entirely new. Could the studio possibly be working on VR adaptations of either Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead that cherry-pick the best content as with L.A. Noire? Or is that still too much to hope for?
