A letter to the Community: 4A and VR
Greetings to all our fans,
Last week we revealed the first of two major projects in development at 4A Games – ARKTIKA.1 is a AAA Virtual Reality shooter for Oculus Touch set in a new post-apocalyptic world. It’s a great project for the studio, as VR is a good match for our overall goal of making IMMERSIVE games!
It’s clear that some of you really like the look of ARKTIKA.1, and we’ll talk about that a bit more below – but we also see some of you were… maybe a bit disappointed. Perhaps you prefer traditional PC / console games, and maybe you were hoping we’d announce… something else!
So let me say again – ARKTIKA.1 is one of TWO projects in development right now. It’s not holding the other project up – with our new Malta studio we are a much bigger team, and it is better for us to have multiple projects, for our own independence and creativity. We’re not ready to talk about the other project just yet, but we think you’ll like it. So please be patient!
Back to ARKTIKA.1 – in short, we’re really happy about it; we love being a part of the first wave of large VR projects. This happiness might have deep roots within the experience of our team (the core of which is comprised of people from Ukraine) – we were rather late to enter the games industry and were always chasing after the leaders of that pack.
Now the others will have to chase us.
Why VR?
VR is very immersive. We pride ourselves on our ability to make immersive experiences so it makes sense.
We’ve always been creating immersive games, and I think we can be rightfully proud of our success in this pursuit. Oculus has allowed us to take the immersion to a whole new level, and it would have been a shame to miss such an opportunity.
VR will be the king in immersion until they figure out way to send information right into the brain via WiFi, and with every passing year VR will continue building that momentum.
The decision to start a VR project came rather spontaneously – we just tried it out, and that was it, the decision was made! We’re not much different in that regard from most of the people trying VR for the first time. The experience is, without doubt, eye-opening and we see the potential.
ARKTIKA.1 is a full-blown ААА title, and we are fully employing all of our accumulated experience to take advantage of all the new opportunities provided only by VR. ARKTIKA is not a port, the project was built for VR and the Touch platform from the ground up.
ARKTIKA.1 mixes the post-apocalyptic setting traditional for our team, with Sci-Fi, which is something new for us, and we hope that you like it. We ourselves like the way it’s coming out a lot.
Thank you for your support!
Andriy “Prof” Prokhorov
Creative Director, 4A Games