Ready At Dawn Art Director talks studio history and VR esports
Ready at Dawn Art Director walks through past studio releases and touches on Lone Echo's eventual push into VR-based esports.
Though the crew at Ready at Dawn Studios have a remarkable history in video games development, the studio is perhaps most known for their recent efforts toward virtual reality experiences. Shacknews recently had the chance to sit down with Nathan Phail'liff, art director for Ready at Dawn Studios, to learn more about the studio's rise to fame and how they've embraced VR technology, including notions of creating one of the industry's hottest VR esports titles.
Some of the earliest Ready at Dawn releases that gamers might remember include God of War: Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta, released way back on the PlayStation Portable. Phail'liff notes that the team's first original IP was The Order: 1886 for the PlayStation 4. Since then, one of their most interesting projects is Echo Arena, the multiplayer component of 2017 Oculus VR release Lone Echo.
"Halfway through [Lone Echo development] we had a game jam week," Phail'liff said, "and two of the gameplay leads [...] just whipped up this competitive multiplayer game. [We] played it and it was like lightning in a bottle; it was almost greenlit overnight by Oculus. So the single-player game suddenly spawned this left-field multiplayer title."
Phail'liff goes on to discuss how Echo Arena was eventually adopted by the esports community, expressing awe at players' remarkable "merger of physicality and athleticism" in virtual arenas.
Lone Echo is available for purchase for the Oculus Rift through the Oculus Store. For more inside interviews and commentary from games industry talents, be sure to follow both Shacknews and GamerHub.tv over on YouTube.
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