High On Life Is Helping Make The Case For Bigger Games On Quest

“There are a ton of animations and wildly different worlds, so even getting that much data to fit on a standalone platform is a big challenge,” O’Neal explained. “You have to load it all in a decent amount of time and run it in real time, ideally at 72 frames per second. All of that optimization represents a cluster of problems our tech-art teams are chipping away at from many angles. A huge part of our technical challenge has been upgrading the game to a more modern version of Unreal Engine. Modernizing our toolsets allows us to perform the optimizations needed to get these massive, gorgeous, colorful worlds running on Meta Quest. That covers the core issue: the sheer scale of the game and optimizing it to fit on the headset while maintaining frame rate.”

O’Neal added that the team wants players to poke and prod the Gatlian firearms they collect in the game, and they represent an incredible design challenge thanks to their expressive facial details and complex skeletons used to make them emote. “The Gatlians are without a doubt my favorite part of the game. When defining the mission statement for the VR adaptation, they are 100% the centerpiece. The core question we continually return to with every feature is: Do you feel like you’re holding a living creature in your hand, and when they speak to you, do you feel like you’re truly interacting with them? Because the Gatlians are the main characters, they are our highest priority.”

“A huge part of that focus goes into the gunplay since they serve as your weapons. With any VR first-person shooter, how you handle reloading is vital–whether that’s a realistic manual reload, a simple button press, bringing the weapon to your hip, or providing options for all of the above. While our design team has built reload mechanics many times before, designing them for the Gatlians has been uniquely fun because of their distinct body shapes and personalities. We look at the unique physical traits of each alien, considering not just function, but how players can fidget and interact with them while listening to in-game dialogue. Ultimately, the Gatlians are the defining feature of the VR port because they are in your hands the entire time.”

Out of all the Gatlians, Knifey is arguably the breakout star of the High on Life arsenal. A sentient blade with an unmatched bloodthirst, O’Neal teased that the murder-happy melee tool is a big focus of the team. “Yes, Knifey is 100% getting the most treatment out of the whole cast,” O’Neal said. “There’s a huge gap between pressing a button to trigger a knife slash versus making that motion yourself, so some of the biggest new systems we’re building are specifically for Knifey.

“His whole personality revolves around pure bloodlust—he’s constantly begging you to use him and stab things—so we’re leaning hard into that. We’re building new VR-specific systems to capture that visceral feeling of stabbing Knifey into flesh. It’s not a gory game and won’t feel like one; we’re maintaining the same comedy and humor with all of Knifey’s interactions, but leaning into mechanics you can only achieve with a knife in VR. Most importantly, we want a Knifey-first strategy to be a genuinely viable way to play the entire game, so we’re spending a lot of time with him.”

One of the other challenges with virtual reality, especially games with a variety of fast-paced movement systems like High on Life, is the looming spectre of motion sickness. Some people don’t suffer from it; others are ready to hurl chunks after a few minutes of Pistol Whip. But as Masher explained, the High on Life VR team is going all out on providing options that help players fine-tune the game to their tastes.

“We take comfort super seriously. The real power fantasy lies in the traversal abilities you get with the bounty suit, so we don’t want to sacrifice or remove any of that from the game, but we do want it to be approachable to anyone who wants to play,” Masher explained. “The first piece of that is performance: It has to be stable, responsive, and hit its target frame rate. That’s the foundational element to ensure people don’t get motion sick. Beyond that, we’re going all out on options. As a team of people who love and play VR in our free time, we offer the full suite of accessibility settings you’d expect in a VR title–from snap turn and smooth turn to custom smooth turning speeds–so players can tune the experience to whatever feels comfortable for their body. The goal is to let players dial in their preferences to minimize the discomfort that can come from smooth movement and turning.”

Masher also added that motion sickness was something we could hear much less about in the future, as, thanks to a generation of young users growing up with VR headsets, the immersive nature of games on that hardware was something they’d become accustomed to. “What’s nice about motion sickness is that we’re starting to see it become less prominent, especially with younger players. Years ago, VR was a niche hobby where you were probably 20 or 30 years old before putting on your first headset. That’s no longer the case–kids are growing up in VR headsets now, with games like Gorilla Tag introducing kids as young as 10 or 11 to the platform.

“They know nothing but gaming inside a VR headset, so by the time they grow up, it’s completely normal for them. It’s almost like we’re breeding motion sickness out of the audience. You’re either susceptible or you’re not, but if VR is all you’ve ever known, motion sickness just isn’t an issue. So I’m hopeful it becomes a thing of the past. Plus, as Emily noted, hardware getting better and making higher frame rates easier to hit makes a massive difference.”

High on Life VR doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can preorder it now through the Meta Horizon Store.