“If they weren’t members of the Mongrels MC I don’t know if that would work,” he says.Īnd it’s that moment, St.
It’s the sort of character who would choose to stay with his biker friend in the midst of an outbreak rather than board a helicopter for a trip to an encampment with his wife.
“More important than that is the sense of brotherhood bikers have.” “All of these highways are choked, on top of that, he’s really good with a baseball bat, his ability to fight and use a gun and use a boot knife are all important,” Garvin says. John (voiced by Sam Witwer), a member of outlaw motorcycle club The Mongrels who refuses to go to the refugee camps when the outbreak sweeps across the globe. “They don’t explore the law and order nature of the sheriff, they explore what he brings to the post-apocalyptic setting, his willingness to break the law.” “It’s like the protagonist of ‘The Walking Dead,’” Garvin says. That didn’t mean he wanted to create a game about what it was like to be an outlaw biker, but rather have an outlaw biker thrust into this situation and then show how he survives. “We wanted to break the roads and force the players to sometimes go off-road.”įinally, Garvin says, he wanted the game to feature a protagonist that video games haven’t seen much of before: outlaw bikers. “We wanted to build it around the motorcycle,” he says. The team also wanted to create a game built around a singular form of transportation. “It’s just such a brutal exercise in eating and getting by day to day,” he said.
He also points to books “The Passage,” and “I Am Legend.” “The Road,” Garvin says, is a good example of that. “The kinds of things I’m personally drawn to are stories of survival that have more to them then just surviving.” Once you want to move south in the game, though, you have to push on those story missions.Ī Man, a Motorcycle, an Outlaw Brotherhood While players will eventually have to unlock a set of story beats to unlock larger areas to explore, Garvin estimates that someone could put 20 hours into the game without touching any story. There’s the main story, but also side stories about the protagonists past, some of his friends, and his wife. “We have always more than one core story going at a time,” he says. So whether a player is ambushing enemy camps, searching for items to help survive, exploring the world or trying to track down NERO - the game’s equivalent of a FEMA/NSA hybrid - it all directly ties back to earning trust at the friendly encampments spread around the world, which is tied to the story. “We do have hunting in the game because dangerous animals are constantly a threat and hunting helps build on that sense of a constant threat in the world. “We don’t have a fishing mini-game where you can go explore all of the lakes and ponds in the game, for instance,” Garvin says. Plus, golf franchise “Everybody’s Golf” will make its PS VR debut in Spring 2019.That means while you can spend hours in the game not interacting with its story, everything you do still pull you toward that larger narrative. More details on that will come in the weeks and months ahead. Pixelopus’ “Concrete Genie” is targeting an early 2019 release. From Software’s first VR title, “Déraciné,” is still targeting a Nov. Sony gave quick updates on a few other exclusives on Friday. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to have ‘Red Dead’ on a motorcycle and Freakers?” he said. Rockstar Games’ “Red Dead Redemption,” which has a sequel coming out next week, was also a big influence, Garvin said. There is way more run-and-gun gameplay and we are more action-oriented.” But if you play the game you will see how different they feel. ‘The Last of Us’ is beautifully written and a compelling experience and I can see why players notice a lot of similarities. “I don’t mind that, it’s good company to be in.
“We’ve been compared a lot to ‘The Last of Us,’” he said. The game draws some obvious comparisons to another Sony zombie thriller, “The Last of Us.” And that’s OK, co-director and writer John Garvin told Variety back in May.