Sparc is making its way to PSVR tomorrow, and developer CCP wants to share more about the history of the VR sports game via the PlayStation.Blog. Sparc originally begun as a VR project called Project Arena, and CCP was so surprised at the player reception of the 1v1 title that they decided to make it into a full blown game. A little over a year later, Sparc is now completed and heading to gamers worldwide.
Here’s more information from CCP about Project Arena:
Every Spring, CCP holds Fanfest, an event in Reykjavik, Iceland, where EVE Online players meet for several days of panels, parties, pub crawls and more. As part of that event, CCP likes to show off a bit of what the rest of the company is up to, so we were asked to bring several of our VR prototypes to EVE Fanfest 2016.
One of those early VR prototypes was an experience that we called “Project Arena”, and it wound up really grabbing people’s attention at Fanfest. We had many people queue up multiple times to play over and over and we saw some great matches play out between the competitors. Even in that early incarnation, players were having a lot of fun, and we could see the potential for something special and exciting. That excitement, coupled with an overwhelming response to our early “mixed reality” test video , led us to the decision to make Project Arena into a real product.
And more about how Project Arena turned into Sparc:
We liked the social dynamics of a 1v1 sport, but instead of translating a real-world sport into a VR version, we decided to try to make a sport for VR, a virtual sport, one only possible in a virtual world.
We’ve been calling it a “vSport”, and we approach our design decisions from the perspective of designing an actual sport. While we’ve tried to have some fun and funky character customization options, your avatar in the game is meant to be a representation of you, not some fictional character. We think of your VR gear as your sports equipment, just like you’d need a tennis racquet or a baseball glove. If you get tired from playing a particularly intense game, we haveCourtside, where you can take a step back and just watch others play for a bit while you recharge.
Sparc will release tomorrow, August 29, on the PlayStation VR.
[Source: PlayStation.Blog]
