Jaime Griesemer, one of the original designers of Microsoft's mega-hit Halo and a veteran of many other massive games, says he has one failing as a designer: He hates solving a problem the same way twice.
"It drives people nuts," he says. "We already have a solution that works, and I'm like, Yeah, but this one is new! So I'm at my best when I'm in an environment where there are all new problems."
That desire to tackle a different set of problems led Griesemer and his colleagues to virtual reality. During last week's PlayStation Experience in San Francisco, Sony unveiled a quick teaser for Golem, a first-person VR action game from Highwire Games, a tiny new studio created by Griesemer, the renowned Halo composer Marty O'Donnell, and a handful of veterans of triple-A games eager to escape the bloated teams that create most blockbusters.
"When I started on Halo, it was seven guys. When I stopped working on Halo, it was 350 guys," Griesemer says. "It's just not as much fun working on a giant team."
With the flexibility to create any game imaginable, Highwire came up with Golem, a game about making, then inhabiting the bodies of, automatons great and small. No one is saying much more than that. "There are golems, and there are people that can control them, and that's about all I can say." Griesemer says.
Griesemer, O'Donnell, and Highwire technical director Jared Noftle let me try it after PlayStation Experience, though. I donned a PlayStation VR headset, and someone handed me a one-handed PlayStation Move motion controller. Golem is a seated VR experience; you move your character around by gently leaning your torso forward and backward, left and right. "We're calling this the incline control scheme," says Griesemer. "We spent 6 months polishing it: How do you tell the difference between someone wanting to go backward, or just looking up?"
I eventually end up controlling a massive golem, but at first I'm put inside a tiny one that runs around on the protagonist's bedroom floor. The game's main character is bedridden and unable to walk, but can magically create and inhabit inanimate objects, and move about freely that way. The fictional process of making golems in the game, Grisemer says, is "very mechanical."
"The more hand-wavy or magical things are, the less they make themselves available to people," Griesemer says. "Yes, there is magic involved obviously, but you're not summoning them out of the ground. It's much more technical."
So now I'm micro-size on the floor. The room is a modest wooden dwelling, seemingly set out in the middle of nowhere, but full of belongings. Staring up at the low ceiling is like looking at the vaults of a cathedral. A dead beetle, taller than me, lies belly-up on the rough-hewn wooden floor. I can crawl under the blankets and find what's rolled under the bed.
It takes a while to get used to the control scheme—you only have to tip your body slightly forward to start advancing—but after a while it becomes, if not quite second-nature, at least something approaching it.
"People are pretty sensitive to undesired movement in VR," Griesemer says. "If they don't know what's happening, and they get into this state where they're turning around, and they start spinning, then they rip off the headset and they throw it out the window and they can't play for two days."
"We spent a lot of time getting the controls just right, because it's so important to be able to explore in VR," he says. "Exploring an interesting space is the basis of hours and hours of gameplay. And we didn't want you to do that with a controller, and we weren't satisfied with anything that was point to point, or on rails. No—we really just want you to be able to walk around an object, look at it from all sides, and feel like you're in a place."
There's no goal for this first bit; I can just explore the bedroom with a torch in my hand, controlled in real-time by the PlayStation Move. "We love the Move," Griesemer says. "It was a peripheral ahead of its time... great tech, but it felt like it was in search of a problem. It found the problem, which is VR input."
The Move is about to get a real workout, as I move into the second half of the gameplay demo—a fight with a giant golem with a big sword. Luckily, I too am a giant golem with a big sword.
"One out of every two Xboxes also sold a copy of Halo, in lockstep ... every single month," Griesemer says. "That's kind of where we want to be: the go-to game. 'Oh, you have a PlayStation VR? You've got to have Golem."
Highwire doesn't want to rush things, but neither does it want to miss the "launch window" of PlayStation VR next year: "It's gonna be a complete game, but you don't want to be late to the party." It's aware that Golem might end up being many players' first VR game, and so Highwire wants to take it easy on how long players spend inside the device.
To that end, Golem is a hybrid game: When you're inside the body of your human being character, making your golems out of clay or whatever, you'll be watching your television. Only when you decide to jump inside the bodies of your creations will you'll put on the VR headset—in effect, turning wearing the VR set into an extension of the game's fiction.
"Your access to golems at the beginning is going to be more limited, so you're going to spend less time controlling a golem, so you're going to spend less time in the helmet," says Griesemer. "You can acclimate over time."
With the light and breezy bedroom demo out of the way, I'm ready for a more intense experience. Stepping into the body of what you would more traditionally think of when you hear the word "golem," sort of a Marvel's Thing rock creature with a perma-scowl, I'm now holding a sword and standing inside an arena with another big rock monster. We're outside, in a rocky, Stonehenge-like arena, no one else around for miles.
Swinging my sword at my opponent randomly doesn't do much. But he's telegraphing three kinds of big sword swings, giving me enough time to block his combos by holding the Move in the right orientation, his sword clanging off of mine. If he raises his sword, I must hold mine horizontally to block the incoming slash; if he draws back to the left I must hold my sword vertically to block his sideswipe.
Of course, while all of this is going on, I'm moving around by inclining my body just so, although it doesn't seem necessary to defeat this guy. Once I've blocked three attacks in a row, weak points appear on his body, and I can precisely poke them with the Move. I do this three times, and the big guy goes down. It doesn't work quite as accurately as I'd like, at this early stage, but of course there's lots of tweaking to be done before Golem is finished.
"When our first swing at [the control scheme] didn't work, it wasn't, 'oh, this isn't going to work,' it's 'this is not tuned,'" says Griesemer. "You get a feel for the difference, when you've been doing this for as long as I have, for what has potential and what's a dead end. You can feel those coming pretty fast."
Highwire doesn't expect Golem sales to explode out of the gate, but sees VR as being more of a "slow burn." "It's not gonna sell like the next iPhone, day one, millions and millions," Griesemer says. "But as it grows, we're going to grow with it."
"Not necessarily in size," he adds.
