OtherSide Entertainment is best known for its upcoming surprise sequel, System Shock 3. Though undoubtedly a massive project, that’s not all the studio is working on.
This week the Concord, Massachusetts based developer has revealed a VR spin-off to its Kickstarted dungeon crawler, Underworld Ascendant. Named Underworld Overlord, this is a mobile-based blend of the tower defense and god game genres. In a twist on the usual genre conventions, here players will command the bad guys, so to speak. Set in a dungeon, you’ll lead hordes of monsters and set traps to take down adventurers that have stepped into your domain. You can expect to see characters and creatures from Ascendant popping up, though it’s still a standalone game.
The new experience is designed exclusively for the Google Daydream platform that the company announced at its I/O developer conference yesterday. Creative Director Paul Neurath noted that the game was “specifically tailored” to the ecosystem’s capabilities. That means you can expect it to appear on Daydream Ready smartphones and utilise the motion controller that Google itself has built for the platform. Both of those are launching this fall (maybe November), but it’s not confirmed if Underworld Overlord will too.
This might not be all that OtherSide Entertainment is working on in VR. During the Kickstarter campaign for Underworld Ascendant the company teased that its project, which is intended to be a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld games, could also integrate the tech. The developer noted that it would be a “natural fit” for its game, though also acknowledged it would take a lot of work to implement. Since then the team hasn’t confirmed any official VR support for the PC title, but we’ve still got our fingers crossed that it will happen eventually for Rift and Vive.
As for Daydream itself, plenty of other projects have been confirmed for the new platform, including a sequel to Gunjack and the next title from Resolution Games. There are also content partnerships in place with EA and Ubisoft. It’s early days for this new initiative, but it’s already building out a strong software portfolio.
