Brian Fargo on Exploring VR with The Mage’s Tale

Brian Fargo has had a chat with USgamer’s Kat Bailey on why exactly InXile is pursuing the VR avenue with their newly-announced The Mage’s Tale. Without further ado, here’s an excerpt with some relevant information:

Fargo is the latest developer to be seduced by the siren song of VR, which is getting its hooks deeper and deeper into the medium. Once I was extricated from the Oculus headset (no easy process), he shared why he had decided to embrace the nascent technology. “Oculus used to be in Irvine. I went over to their office, got a bunch of demos, saw the dinosaur coming down the hallway, and I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do a dungeon crawl.’ The ecosystem isn’t really big enough to support this, but thankfully Oculus was greatly supportive and they liked what we were proposing and here we are.”

The game he and his team have come up with is a first-person dungeon crawler in the classic sense. You are a spellcaster exploring dank ruins crawling with monsters—an old concept with a new VR spin. You use a spell shield to block projectiles with one hand, and you toss spells with the other (an admittedly cumbersome process that can result in a lot of off-target fireballs). Fargo likens it to his own formative experiences as a gamer, “I like to talk about how I was a kid with the graph paper before Bard’s Tale, and now here I am in the dungeon. It’s the ultimate leap from where I’ve always wanted to be.”

Your guide on your adventure is a snarky little creature named Crux—a floating goblin who spends most of his time chastising you for your meager abilities. I tried to throw a fireball at him, but it sadly went right through him. Fargo laughed when I told him about my impulse, “We might have to let people throw a fireball at him. That’s one thing a lot of people want to do.”

That’s one little way in which VR comes into play, but what’s really interesting about Mage’s Tale is the way it visualizes the usual mechanics associated with the roleplaying genre. When you level up, for instance, you raise your hands to teleport back to your cauldron, where you’re given a choice between a handful of vials. You throw one of the vials into a cauldron and poof, you have a brand new spell at your disposal. In effect, you’ve just navigated a skill tree without even knowing it.

Other aspects of Mage’s Tales are more mechanical, of course. Enemies still take a fixed amount of damage, for instance, which is visualized by a certain number. Specific feedback is important in RPGs, Fargo says, and that is reflected in Mage’s Tale even if it’s not entirely natural.

The end result is yet another interesting little experiment in VR gameplay—a game that reflects the development community’s growing understanding of how to engage with the new medium. As an indie developer, Fargo acknowledges that it’s still extremely early days for the medium. “I know it will be many years before it will be self-sustaining in terms of major efforts, so it’s no surprise to me where it’s at now,” he says.