H3VR2は史上最高のVRゲームか？Anton Handと読み解く体験設計

The Voices of VR Podcast. And I'm going to call it now, I'm going to say this is the best VR game that's ever been made. It certainly has the depth, complexity, and just the brilliant game design of mashing up the roguelite to kind of have this procedurally generated world that gives us an incredible amount of novelty. With this incredible military simulation of this armory that is able to then create a possibility space that essentially creates this boundless level of agency and activity and ways that you can kind of play the game in so many different ways that you want to. and so that basically can adapt. And so this is what Anson says is kind of a genre of immersive simulation.

And I feel like HGVR 2 is certainly leaning towards that, if not outright achieving it. And that'll be up to the community to decide. But I think it's like one of the most interesting and exciting games that have come out in years. So this is just the first chapter, and we don't really get into the nitty-gritty of the story. We'll get more of the story later. But in terms of just pure game design and interactivity and play and innovations in terms of how you can create sort of replication of reality in a way that is in this surreal hot dog universe of the sci-fi future. It's quite a mashup and just, like I said, one of the most fun games that I've played in VR ever. So I'm looking forward to breaking it all down with Anton Hand to hear a little bit more about his journey and his experiential design process for Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voice of the VR podcast. So this interview with Anton happened on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. I'm Anton Hand, CTO at Rust Limited and Game Director on Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades 2.

Awesome. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space. Sure. I mean, I've been doing VR for about as long as I think most people operating in the field have. I started in VR. It was either 2004 or 2005. My memory's poor on the exact date, but I got into VR when I was in undergrad at the University of Buffalo as their digital media studies program had a low-cost VR system geared towards artists, and it just bit me like nothing before or since ever has as someone coming from a 3D artist background, the promise of being able to make something and then just step into it and be into it. And so, yeah, and I've been on, you know, also in the, you know, in the past 20 years, like there's been periods where I was more in the VR space and more out of it. But the past 10 years or so working on H3 VR 1, it has been the central axis of my existence. Nice. Well, I'm really excited to dive in into H3 VR 2, which is an absolutely incredible game.

I can't wait to dig into all the nuances and details. But before we start to dive in, how would you describe what is H3 VR 2? So H3 VR 2 is an extraction roguelike VR game that takes place inside a science fiction, futuristic sort of megastructure that is inhabited by these absurd creatures, these six foot tall sentient hot dogs called Sosigs, of which you are one, albeit a special one, and that you are the only one with hands. and you sort of come into existence at the beginning of this game, unsure as to where you are and why you are, and delve into what is ultimately the first chapter of what is going to be a longer experience that we evolve over the coming year or two as you explore the facility. Nice. Well, this game completely incepted my brain, and I played it for like almost 24 hours straight. I just went hardcore into it. And, you know, with hot dogs, horseshoes, and hand grenades, one.

We talked last time on the 10-year anniversary how whenever you launch with something that sort of gets typecast as that, as a genre. And so in my mind and my whole experience was like this is a sandbox game. It's somewhat like of a very high learning curve. It was a little bit too hardcore for me. And there wasn't other things that were really pulling me into it. But I think that the way that you've created H3 VR 2 is that with this kind of extraction roguelike core of game mechanic, it's compelling enough for me to be more of a casual user, I'd say, not someone who's like hardcore, but someone who is able to enjoy the experience of what you've created, but also see that there's this huge skill gap between what I see as Beat Saber's easy mode to Expert Plus. There's a huge gap between what those two ranges can do in terms of gameplay, an inability. And I feel like this game kind of encompasses that same type of spectrum. And there's so much possibilities, so much things to explore that I spent probably 35 hours in the game so far over the last like four or five days. And I feel like I've scratched

the surface and it was only just kind of focusing mostly on the first level for 95% of the time. So there's plenty of just in that same, what you've created so far. And so as you started to think about how do you address this paradox which was there's a video that you had linked to which was somebody who was talking around the paradox of extraction shooters of how do you create something that's hardcore and realistic but at the same time makes it accessible for casual users and i feel like that you've been able to achieve that in this game wonderful so i'd love to hear a little bit more of your way that you conceive of what you wanted to do and what you set out to do and what you think you're able to achieve with this fusion of these different genres and be able to handle this kind of cursed design paradox? Well, I mean, so to start off with, I've been saying this to a number of folks recently that if I were to make an argument of what is the VR software catalog missing right now, it is difficult, deep games. Anyone who's been in the space knows that over the past year or two, the draw to the

general gaming populace of our medium has not been very significant. end. Like at the young end, certainly there's a lot of free to play games that are like wonderful toys and social spaces that draw in a lot of younger users. But you haven't seen as much until the sort of recent stuff involving like AI assisted VR mods. And I think one of the whole reasons why there's been a bunch of excitement on that sphere is like people being like, OK, cool, I can play in VR and play these complex, deep, difficult games. And if you pull up, say, you know, Steam charts or Steam DB and are like, what are the top 20 games that are being played on Steam at any given moment right now? And ask yourself as you go down that list one through 20, is this game difficult? Is this game complicated? The answer yes is true for most of that list of 20 things. But then if you ask yourself, like, let's pull up the VR game catalog and ask yourself how many of those top 20 games are difficult and complicated, the answer is very few of them.

And so I think for me that making this game and assembling this team to put this game together has been about trying to create a rewarding long form experience, a game that 100 hours in you are still getting better at it meaningfully. And it's one of the things that I think I love extraction shooters because of that incredibly long curve. Like I put, for example, Escape from Tarkov. I put hundreds of hours into Escape from Tarkov. I am still terrible at it. And I've said this to certain people, but like, what, you've only played like 300 hours of it. You're still like, you're still at the beginning of it. And I was like, excuse me. And they're like, oh, yeah, to be like excellent Escape from Tarkov. You're at thousands of hours of playtime, because especially in the case of multiplayer ones like that, it's about getting in the head of all the other people who play it. Probably, you know, you know, much akin to playing, you know, high end hold and poker probably takes absurd, takes hundreds to thousands of hours as well. But yeah, so it's, for me, it's, I love this genre.

And I also think that the other reason that we sort of went in this direction was, I think that what VR, in all the ways that an extraction shooter is super compelling, which is about very, very large equipment sets, making complex, fuzzy decisions between, in a large possibility space, all of the things that are rewarding to do in an extraction shooter, I feel like VR amplifies those things. And so, yeah, to me it felt like the natural direction to go in if we were doing a sequel and being like, everything's going to be more complicated, everything is going to be more nuanced, the number of items is going to go up, the amount of information you're going to need to know about those things. I didn't want, like, that extra information to be memorization for memorization's sake. I wanted to make sure it was in a context where that knowledge literally helps you survive. so yeah yeah no i feel like that i was able to reach that state of understanding the value of the different objects because a lot of this is around looting and gathering resources that can be

converted into one of three currencies which is meat mustard and metal and so i feel like as i went on and leveled up by the end of it i was able to understand what resources were available how to mine for specific types of these elements, but also kind of realize that, oh, there's an in-game currency that my labor that I exert by going to gather these resources can actually reward in different experiential rewards, but to then buy something in that session and then use it immediately. And I wouldn't have been able to do that in the first round. And so there's a little bit of just like understanding what these items are and what they're worth, but then how you can use them in different contexts. I've been gathering them in terms of translating them into resources, and I have not yet even explored the full potential of what you can do experientially in terms of all the different attachments and guns and everything. I feel like that's a whole other layer that's like I've only scratched the surface after playing for 35 hours. Like I said, I really didn't play much beyond the first level

because I kind of suck at addressing and facing these so-sigs that would just kill me, And then I needed to kind of level up in a way that made it easier for me to kind of increase my capacity, increase the recycle efficiency. So there's all these things that you had created this pathway for me to uplevel my character in a way that allowed me to, by the end of it, feel like, okay, that wasn't just for nothing, just to kind of grind for grind's sake. At the end of it, I actually understand so much more around how to deal with these enemies, how to escape them, how to operate around them, how to navigate these resources and manage those resources and to deal with the stake of if I die, I lose whatever I'm carrying. And so, yeah, I feel like that you, and when I went back and read a little bit of our first interview that we did back in 2018, you were talking about relational abstractions that you're making in terms of the depth at which that you're creating this kind of hyper real simulation of both the guns, the ammunition you need, as well as their characteristics. I feel like is like on a whole other layer that is also interesting to like explore in the sandbox mode.

But just curious to hear around this baseline of this root of the physical reality that then you're using to then create a game around it in terms of adding all these other abstractions and values and currency to be able to translate it into a fun game. Yeah, I mean, so like when you ask the question, like what, like why, like we've obviously gotten so in the weeds with the simulation of all of these guns. in the supporting objects, like why build that substrate layer beneath something that is then going to be even more complicated on the top? And so much of it, again, as I've talked about in the past, like the things that differentiate most real world guns is the ways in which they are terrible relative to each other or their idiosyncrasies of operation. And the gaining a physical practice with a large number of those items, the more that you can make them different from each other, the more rewarding collecting those physical literacies is capable of being, both in terms of just memorizing and remembering how to use them,

and just, again, like the way that you may come to love one specific arm gun because the reload motion just is pleasurable to engage in. They're all instruments, and you're engaging in a type of pantomime of operating their real-world ones. And so, yeah, I guess it's to say that, like, extraction shooters in a flat game context have a certain amount of their experience It's a very physical one where we are in round, we're playing. And then there's a very cerebral resource management. OK, like if you watch a Tarkov streamer, the percentage of time they're like assembling their rig and ready to go in and then dealing with it after the fact versus the percentage of the time they may spend in raid may, in fact, be highly weighted towards the like I'm just messing with all of my stuff. and I think the beauty of VR is that you get to like expand out the physical practice component of the genre because it's so much more about your moment to moment like I'm fumbling it oh did I not see my magazine and oh wait which where's the safety on this you know what I mean it's

productively fumble core um and I think yeah I think that's an axis of richness that helps make each one of those objects more unique and resident in your mind, which is something that, like, one of the big cognitive overhead challenges of an extraction game is, like, there's thousands of objects, and you have to memorize them. You have to remember the differentiation between them beyond just how they look. And by the more that you can make them physically nuanced, there's more there for your mind to have a hook and a latch into. Remember, like, oh, yeah, this one has the safety is only on the left side of the slide, So I can only toggle it when I hold it in my right hand. And I screw that up once, and then I remember that about the gun forever sort of thing. And so you assemble these memory heuristics that grow out of the hyper-specificity of the object. And it turns them into being something richer than something that's like, this one does 13 damage, and this one does 11 damage. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, and I started with, like, when I first got into the game,

You sent out a document giving some suggestions about how to have the best experience. And I kind of just explored around, and I kind of jumped into the experience, and I just died immediately. I couldn't even figure out how to fire the gun. And then I was like, okay, I should go back and read what Anton had said in his introduction letter. And you said you recommend going into the certification courses. And I did actually go to the certification courses, and that happened immensely because the first times that I played, like I said, I wasn't even able to even shoot anything because I couldn't figure out the sequence of events. So I thought the certification course was a great thing to get just up to speed for how to even operate these guns. And then what I noticed was that I started with the normal scavenger mode where you get like a handgun. But I noticed that the gun wasn't as powerful as the long rifles. And I kind of preferred the long rifles because it was a little bit more forgiving for me as a newbie. But also there's a little bit more stealth mode that I didn't read until after you'd said that the SOSIGs actually are kind of nonviolent in a way. that they don't actually go out and attack you, that you can kind of just like turn the whole game

into a little bit of a stealth mode game where you're just walking around as long as you don't point a gun at them or directly interfere with them, that they won't bother you. And so then I discovered that, oh, if you use melee weapons, then as the guards are coming after you, then the gunshot doesn't attract others. So you can kind of quietly do this whole stealth operation, which was like a whole other mini game that was within this possibility space you've created. And so I feel like there's like a literally an infinite number of ways that you can play this game. And I just found it so fascinating just to stick on that first level to see all these different modes. And what I realized was that it starts with what do I want? What do I need? I'm going to go into this run with an intention. I need this thing. I need to try to extract this material or I'm just going to like learn how to play and fight and battle these enemies. And I feel like going in with that intention, I found myself if I had a split intention, Like, oh, I'm mining, but now all of a sudden I want to have this gunfight. Now, oh, shoot, now I'm about to die. I need to, like, find some health because I'm going to, like, ruin the first priority of trying to extract these resources.

And so it gives you this opportunity to be intentional and then, like, play with the game, but also it's adaptable enough for you to play it in so many different ways given whatever you want to experience. And so you've created so many different modes to be able to do that. So as you think about this game, I'm curious how you think about those archetypes or those different types of ways that you want to give opportunities for people to play in many different ways. So it's funny because I have very intentionally not used a certain term in describing this game for the course of its development for like ever so slightly a superstitious reason, but mainly just because there's a term immersive sim, which is like Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock, etc. And if you ask, okay, what does immersive sim mean? You'll get different answers from pretty much everyone who's into the game, especially like what their archetypal favorite M-Sim is. But I think if I could describe it, it is specifically a game design pattern where you are attempting to create enough systems that sit atop each other in a shared space

that a player can improvisationally sort of assemble a hybrid on the fly of what is interesting to them, what makes sense from a resource wagering expenditure standpoint, and that you approach challenge as being a matrix of actions that is preferably, like when done well, designed to create amazing emergent moments where something unexpected happens to you and then you improvisationally respond and you find yourself in a place you didn't expect to be, and then you just discover an entire game system existed that you didn't even know, and then you just kind of go from there. While at the same time, each, and this is the thing that makes these games ludicrously expensive to make, typically, is that if you have a player who likes just doing one of those things over and over and over again, the entire game still has to be satisfying enough to do that from the beginning to the end. Like if you're playing Deus Ex Human Revolution and you're like, I want a suppressed handgun, and I want to shoot every single problem in the head with my suppressed handgun, sneaking around like I'm playing a Skyrim stealth archer from the beginning game to the end of the game.

It's got to be fun to play that way. And if I want to be the guy who just sneaks through vents and hacks things and turns turrets against people and has almost no direct gunfights, you've got to be able to play it. So to make an IMSIM is to make like six games that are overlaid in each other, sharing the same object space, the same levels, et cetera, which is why they almost, it's called the IMSIM curse, they almost universally bankrupt the company attempting to make them. And so I joke that I tricked my development team into making an IMSIM, and that basically I was like, we're just making a looter shooter roguelike extraction game, you know, guys. And then basically at the 85 to 90 percent mark, I felt like we suddenly crossed, I didn't know if we would actually cross the systemic complexity bar where I was like, oh, the je ne sais quoi of IMSIM is now present. And it's one of those weird things when designing one of those systems where it's like you suddenly realize you have stepped over the line, where there's enough lateral connections between not just systems, but your incentives as a player, where you're like, ooh, I have nothing but complicated decisions in front of me.

And there are, you know, as she said, like three or four different ways that I could choose to spend the next 20 minutes. Well, crap, which one am I going to do? That's that's when you know you're in M-SIM territory. And that's it's I'm so happy that we made it there. I wasn't sure that we were going to make it there. And if you tell M-SIM people that you're making an M-SIM and you don't live up to that bar, they're going to just be like, nope, 0451 code, you know, denied. so whereas but but yeah whereas i i feel like we it had been once we had gotten some of the security checkpoints together that we were like oh it's now officially guys there's so many moving parts and interrelationships now with just the situation that is this one room we have arrived yeah i playing 35 hours and mostly being on level one i feel like given that it's a roguelike which i think is probably worth discussing a little bit about what actually that means because you have this really fascinating, like, procedurally generation of these levels in a way that,

the way that I think about it is that there's a beginning, middle, and end. And so you can think about it, the first act, second act, third act. And so that there's a waypoint where you go to the first act to second act, which is a very specific room that once you identify that room, you know, okay, I'm on the right path. Once I go here, then I'm entering sort of the second act. And then you have another waypoint room that after you cross that, then you will eventually get to the end. And so it's almost like some of those waypoint rooms will change. But more or less, there will be one way point and a second way point. And then you'll know eventually by the time you get to the end, you've now entered the end game, which as I experienced it, I have this sense of time. We're like, OK, I have the beginning, middle and end. I have to manage my resources. I want to get to the end. I want to achieve these goals. Given where I'm at, where I know where I'm at in this kind of three act structure, then how do I get to the end and how do I play to achieve my goals? And so I was able to do that so many times. And by having the procedural generation of these levels, there was enough novelty and difference in ways that these combined and unique and different ways that it just felt unbounded in terms of all the different possibilities that could happen.

And I was, like I said, I was mostly extracting resources and learning how to interact with the guns and play and operate the different incentives and different things I was doing. But this kind of procedural generation of the roguelike, I'm just curious to hear a little bit around your inspirations for that. And then to actually be able to pull that off with the level of environmental design is pretty incredible. I mean, it is the fact that this works. I mean, the game has a number of technological marvels in it. But this is arguably my favorite because I'm an environment artist, first and foremost. And every time, everything I've worked on in the past, I essentially have had one of two options. Pretty lighting that is baked, you know, light-based lighting. or a generative layout where things can be in many different places. And the technology stack that we have here is a best of both worlds situation. You know, you played enough of, you know, the sort of generation structure of the level is rooms connected by hallways.

And the way that we make this whole system work is that the hallways are light baked in a way that makes all of the pieces visually connect to every other piece, which is itself an insane design constraint. You have to design the topology such that you don't have inconsistencies between or even near those join points so that the lighting looks continuous. And then we have the individual rooms that are baked and authored and sort of manually lovingly made The loot is generative inside them obviously And we then have a system that at runtime on the quest like light maps in just in two dimensions, the hallways, and then does this light transmittance between the hallways and the other rooms. And that's what allows it to look like it is one mostly contiguous light environment. And I have never had anything like that. That was the before we had even signed the contract for our funding for this. That was the first thing that Zach prototyped, actually, when we were like, can we actually because it was like we can either pull this off or the lighting of the game will look ugly sort of thing.

Like it was a question of like how not ugly can we make the lighting look because the lighting in every single generative layout like this sounds mean because there's some, you know, there's some procedural layout games on Quest. They look like the real-time lighting you are typically limited to when doing it, which to me is not super pretty. And so this is the rare case where I got to have my cake and eat it too sort of thing. And the entire, you know, sophisticated games architecture is built for being able to pull this off. It's still a marvel to me that it runs on the device doing this. And, yeah, and it's the beauty, like, H3VR1 has always been, like, our take-and-hold game mode is enjoyable. but it was fundamentally limited to the fact that it's just a fixed level layout. But you might play through it in certain random orders, and that was how the way a take and hold level was designed was to try to get as much random variation as I could possibly get out of one big fixed layout. And so in this case, having a system that just gives you

an inconceivable amount of variation, that is very easy for us to expand. Like we have some things coming in our week one update that is going to expand the permutation space further. Like, it was one of those things that I realized in testing. Like, folks like yourself are going to play level 1 a lot, especially if they haven't played H3VR 1 and they're still learning the fundamentals of shooting and playing the game mode. And so I was displeased at the amount of room variation that is in the first game. So, like, literally in between last week and today, like, I've already authored, like, a dozen more rooms for it just to, like, increase that. So by the time we do our week 1 update, Let's see, it's the third now on what will be the 19th. The individual room permutation space for that level will probably be like three times larger than it currently is. That's incredible. Yeah, even with the way it is now, it does have a coherence, which I haven't seen before. And it gives a sense of immersion that I think is a big part of what it's like to be in VR is this environmental design.

It reminded me of what it felt like to play Half-Life Alyx, which, of course, is very authored and not generative at all, but the level of exploration and immersion within that world. And also, I have to say that the sound design in both Half-Life Alyx and what you've done here is absolutely incredible. Just in terms of, like, just as an example, I mean, all the gun sounds and everything are incredible, but the one moment that sticks out is playing in stealth mode. sometimes I would like extract this little card from the window machine and then it would cause enemies to come but once the alarm goes off you have all these civilian hot dogs they're kind of like walking around but then they get panicked and they start running that running sound is the exact same of what it sounds like when a social security guard is running and so there's no way to differentiate the two running and so there's just like I'm waiting for the door to open is that it is that it and so you have this this sense of suspension but that was so much of the sound design that you're able to create these moments. And I think that it sort of speaks to the way that

you're giving indicators as to what's happening in the larger world in terms of, okay, there's a security now. Okay. Now that's stopped. And now that's over. Now you're safe from being attacked and ambushed and just all the guns and everything, all the other sounds and all the different sound effects is on a level that I think is when you do it right, it's invisible, but I just sort of really appreciate the depth that you're able to create with the sound design to be able to create that level of deep immersion. Yeah, I mean, all shout outs, all kudos goes to Joe Cataldo of Mad Wave Audio, who has been a longtime collaborator of mine at this point, thanks due to just a fluke meeting at GDC of like a decade ago, you know, and I've been working with him long enough that It's that there are creative partnerships that you can end up having with people where you can basically just like scribble the most generic thing on a napkin and hand it to them. And you just know they're going to make the thing that is in your head.

Like you just have that telepathic back and forth. Like, you know, even with the music for this, like Joe knows what I love, what I'm obsessed with, what I've wanted to make. I know the things that he's wanted. They're like, Anton, let's do X. And so I was able to give the loosest of constraints, and I just knew that he was going to bring in, you know, like even if it was something I had not imagined, he was going to bring in exactly the thing that was needed. And so it's an absolute delight. And although there's a lot of audio in this game that is essentially recycled or remixed from the first game and sort of migrated into our new system, so it's both new stuff for this game and just stuff that we have assembled over a very long time. And then obviously from the firearm standpoint, I do want to also want to bring out that like without sharing the secret sauce, we are doing some fundamentally different things with the way that we are recording all of these firearms. Like obviously there's a lot of reuse because we don't have access to all 50 of these guns in real life sort of thing.

but these are all recorded in a very special multi-microphone configuration that he is then mixing and working on. And so I think they're the most richly authentic set of firearm operation sounds that anyone has assembled for a game. And as someone who owns several of the firearms, they're recorded in it, you know, and has experienced some of the others. It's downright, it's like it provokes the hairs on the back of my neck. And they're like, yep, that's exactly what that sounds and feels like in my hands. And the differentiation between those two is a really tricky thing because a lot of people think like, oh, if you just get a neutral recording of something like a gun making a sound, like a clack or a click, it will cross that line of verisimilitude. And it doesn't at all because all firearms that you're holding and manipulating are vibrating through your hands, through your bone structure. So you are experiencing every gun sound of a gun that you're manipulating as haptically as you are through your ears.

And so if you just give someone a very neutral, uncolored recording of firearm audio in VR, it doesn't feel like the real thing. It has to be colored to match your complete sensory experience of it. And we have a process for that that I think is. yeah and because you have multiple microphones are you mixing it down like an ambisonic mix this isn't ambisonics we're using a spatializer plugin which helps tremendously because that placement of it in space is incredible i believe the plugin is called atmo key okay which we're using in addition to to f mod and it's amazing how much just that subtle positional sort of thing helps a little bit of reverb for wetness for it etc that prevents because otherwise again with those recording the actual samples if i played many of the actual samples unmixed you'd be like wow that's dry and shrill and that's because they were recorded correctly yeah and i'm curious to hear a bit more context for how you conceive of the rogue like or rogue light genre and how you're

kind of blending that with the extraction shooter and maybe some inspirations for other things that are kind of similar genre. Yeah, so, I mean, obviously this game is both an extraction game in sort of like core mechanics, but its progression is that much more of a roguelite. I'll use that term instead of roguelite because, you know, the people who wore on the meaning between those two terms are very, very passionate about it, and I don't want to make anyone feel like I'm dismissing them. So I'll just use roguelite. and one of my favorite games of all time is the binding of Isaac i think the binding of Isaac as much as people do recognize it as being you know sort of seminal i think it is under recognized as being the genesis point of the template of taking the pieces of a roguelike and pairing them with an arbitrary action game like everything is downstream of the binding of Isaac in a way that if you go and actually play it and like play a hundred hours of it.

It's like if you've never seen the movie Aliens and then you in 2026, you go watch Aliens and you're like, oh, wow, 15 years of video games. So just people who could not get over how this movie made them feel and thus encoded every single memetic element of this movie into their work. The Binding of Isaac, to my mind, is that like it's just everyone. If you're making a roguelite, you owe fealty to it directly or indirectly. And it has its relationship to that possibility space is, I think, I think a lot of in the name of accessibility or in the name of, you know, stickiness of the game. A lot of modern action roguelites are soft compared to The Binding of Isaac. The Binding of Isaac just drops you in. The controls are just drawn on the screen in that very first room. And it beats the crap out of you at the beginning. You've got like you can take like I think it's six hits with the basic character and you're just dead. It's a lot of the possibility space unlocks over time in it.

And it just expects you to jump. It expects you to just meet it where it is and adjust to failure and let the ways in which you fail inform. You know, it's the like you have to fall over to learn enough proprioception to walk. It's a similar sort of thing. It's something that I feel like we've lost a little bit in other parts of as games have become more about optimized, extractive, like finance tools over the past like 10 to 15 years. I feel like that design pattern, it has fled many genres, but it's a really central one to me. And difficulty is important because difficulty on certain axes forces a person to actually engage and pay attention. And by paying attention, they can actually build mastery. Like one of the worst things that can happen with a game design is to be in the like midpoint difficulty wise where a player can coast cognitively for the first third of the game, not actually learn its mechanics.

And then all of a sudden they hit a difficulty cliff that was expecting that they were actually learning all the things they were laddering into over the course of it. And they just weren't because they just found a way to path of least resistance their way into the game. And now they're boned because they're 15 hours into an experience and they have not they've made no real progress towards the thing they were supposed to be learning. And so I think if you're going to make a difficult game, you actually have to put a little bit of that right at the front to let people know what the handshake is, that this is an experience that requires whole cognitive engagement. This is not a second screen watching game. This is not a have a YouTube, you know, up while you're playing sort of game. And, you know, this is not a get ripped stonkingly high and then play game, except for, I guess, the exceptionally seasoned sort of thing. It's a bring your A game kind of game. Yeah, I feel like most of my end result of playing the game has been knowledge around this possibility space and also the resources.

And I think there's a whole other layer of my embodied interaction and gameplay that other people that play the same amount may be optimizing for that. And they would be way beyond where I'm at. because I feel like the daily game mode is like you have one run. The first time I did it, it was like easy SoSIGs. The second time I did it, it was like I had a bolt action rifle and all these super intense SoSIGs came in and just mauled me instantaneously. I was like, well, that I'm clearly, once I approach those big enemies, I just kind of extract it out without actually killing them properly. And so there's the whole other layer that I know I'm at a certain level, but I know I have to increase my abilities in order to actually face those enemies. So I feel like it's naturally kind of laid out in a way that there's lots of ways to play, even if you aren't able to, you know, like I said, you can play it like a stealth game if you wanted to. But one of the things that I did gather was the tradeoffs between the currency that you have in game, between the meat, the mustard, and the metal. And I wanted to ask you in terms of like, how do you philosophically think about what is the archetypal character of each of these three qualities and how do you take an object and start to break it down into that in a way that is kind of in this world that you're creating?

Yeah. So basically what science fictionally, what each of those things sort of represent in this sort of future world where something past 3D printed synthesis is becoming a more common technology is that I think of them as being sort of three-er materials. where meat is a bioplastic. And so anything that is polymer or polymer adjacent is going to have a dominantly larger amount of that. Metal is quite literally just metal. It's like an uber alloy of some kind that is used for everything. And then mustard sort of represents the sort of sentience of the Sosegs in that it's basically a suspension of nanomachines in this sort of like lubricant cooling goo. And so anything that has computerization to it in some way, Like, if you need mustard, try to find, like, go to offices and try to literally just find computers left over on desks and recycle those, as well as some of the more advanced attachments, because they'll have high amounts of mustard in them. So I wanted to create something that those archetypes were soft, but without even necessarily knowing the guiding logic behind it, you'd be able to just cluster.

Like, oh, I get a lot of metal out of guns. I get a lot of meat out of just these sort of, like, generic plastic-y things. And anything techy, I get a lot of mustard out of. Because that's an important thing. Like, you can have a huge possibility space of items as long as people can conceptually chunk those things down into heuristics, even if they're just, like, only softly understood. That keeps it manageable. Yeah, it was probably 25 to 30 hours in that I discovered the mustard boon of the computers. Then I, like, realized that I needed to gather those a lot more. But also, I spent a lot of my time increasing my capacity and up-leveling each of the capacity for each of those three er elements of the meat, mustard, and metal. Because then you become more efficient of being able to gather the loot and translate them into a currency that you could use either to up-level your character, but also to use within the context of that game. And then there's money, which I thought was interesting just because you can gather the money in coins, and I did that a lot. But as you up-level, you also get a lot of money. and then I ended up kind of scrounging money together

and all of a sudden as I was up leveling I was getting lots of money and I was like what do I do with this and then there's a store that you can start to buy it so I think of what you've created in some sense of like the matrix just to conceive of it because you are in the so-called physical reality you go in and then you jump into what is the facility which is sort of like a simulated reality that if anything you take into the simulation for all the resources you've gathered when you die then you lose it but then you come back out and then you're able to then also have whatever you're extracted, but also the money is there that you can kind of use the ATM to have progression. Even if you live or die, you could still aggregate money that is able to pop it out back into the physical reality of whatever the outside of the facility. I'm sure you don't make the metaphysical distinction because in this sci-fi world, there's a difference between death and regeneration and reincarnation in a way that is a little bit less like what we think of as the Matrix as you're in a video game. versus when you're in physical reality. But yeah, I'd love to hear how you think of the metaphor between what's it mean to be on the outside world

and what's it mean to actually go into facility and also this kind of resource within the context of having resources in both of those realms and also the money. You can't really do much with the money within the facility of the simulation, but when you're outside of it, there's other things you can up-level your character or start to buy other things that you can have gear to then take back into the facility. Well, first off, the reason that the money functions different than the other currencies. It's like one of the big stumbling blocks that can happen with extraction shooters that can be a blocker and can make people burn out of them is this like some of their systems are set up where like you're just not making any progress. Like I just went in for four runs and I got absolutely nothing out of that time. And so like between the core resources, the money and the leveling up, we wanted to make sure that even if someone is essentially face-breaking their way through the game, that they made substantive progress that still expanded the game's verb set and gave them more opportunities to excel. So by putting the ATMs everywhere and allowing you to just dump your coins out at any part,

it effectively allows you to part extract, you know, progressively extract through play. And then the leveling up process, the way that we unlock, like there's this mechanic, obviously, of stealing chip blueprints out of vendors, but that's very risky because then the security responds. And so we wanted, it was when I was designing what was called our base level unlock system. It was the blueprints that you unlock as you level up to be able to purchase in Vendo. I was actually inspired by like a Kotaku article that was about, it was like Marathon Dave or something like that. It was like this random guy, who knows if it's apocryphal, who had played like a hundred hours of marathon without realizing it was an extraction game or how an extraction game worked because he had just played Destiny. So every single run he had just jumped in, had just shot everything that moved until he died. He never extracted once. He didn't accrue. He thought the like weapons they're giving him were just like trophies or something like that. But it was having a great time. And I was I read that article and I was like, you know what?

I want to make sure that if someone just doesn't get it, they don't get the flow of it because they haven't been inculcated into the genre or they're just not good enough at it, that they have an enjoyable time that I continue to like if they level up their character. I just continue to give them a larger and larger set of guns that they can save up the resources for and still have an enjoyable time. And so that's why that system is present there. And that's why those three different ways of progressing have different rules and are out of phase with each other. So that they just, A, are going to create a more complex progression from player to player. that each person's way of stepping through that system is going to be much more distinct than games that simply have one road of progression, and that it ensures that people who are coming in at very different exposure and skill levels still feel upward progress, even if it is longer and more challenging. So I imagine you have a pretty epic spreadsheet that has a lot of numbers and detailing this progression.

How many different sheets are there? Are there three different sheets, or is it one giant spreadsheet with all these numbers? I mean, it's a bunch of different sheets handling different things. I do a lot. It's funny. I tend to design individual systems and their progressions in one sort of thing. But the way that they all interrelate is literally just like up here. I don't do – in general, when I do game system design, I don't really do any statistical analysis on them because I – how to put this? This may seem like an aside, but I think it's an important thing to understand about me. This is going to seem like a non sequitur a little bit. Like, I can't stand D&D 3 onward compared to what is before it, because I feel like from D&D 3 onward, every one of those tabletop systems, despite being an analog game, were infected with the logics of a digital system insofar as the standardization of the user story that you get in a digital game that has to be balanced, quote unquote,

in for like speaks louder in those systems than those systems are representing an idiosyncratic reality. You know what I mean? It's the like we need to make sure there's an acid spell at evenly spaced places in the progression sort of thing that ends up making the system not feel like a model of a world, but a model of a system. And so for me, I am very careful about the amount of over analysis that I do when making some of these systems, because I don't want to create something that is too homogenous and too predictable. Like the real life is real life is full of noise. You go into a gun store, let's say, and there's just a completely idiosyncratic number of products that even though there are market forces that are shaping all of them, there's a lot of spiky differences between things. And that texture is very important. And so while I did do a little bit of analysis to make sure that there weren't truly errant outliers in terms of like value per

inventory space, I think when I ended up doing that analysis, I changed like 13 items total. and half of those were like literally I had just goofed and input the incorrect value and everything else. I was like, oh, okay, oh, cool. I've just shaved off the things that would read as errors to a user, and then everything else was just left in the form that it was because, for me, it's a vibes-based thing. It's feel, and it's, for me, it's about creating this, like when I think about value costing all of these things, I want to find this interesting midpoint between what would this be priced in reality and what is its utility in, because you can't go all the way to verisimilitude because then it's just, there'll be sort of local maximas all over the place in your schema that, like, players will obviously pick that small number of things and not pick anything else. So you do still need to do a little bit of balancing. but yeah that's for me that's the central tension when doing system design with this sort of large

of a possibility space of items is that how do I find the right mixture of how of internal diegetic logic for the prices of all of these things in the way that the game space thinks about their value to a person who would be in that game world and still making it just enough for, you know, to be right for players. And it just so happens that because our game, all of our game's guns are based on just physical parameters, right? They're not like, no balancing pass for our guns was done in the like, well, this one really needs to do 13.5 damage because it's DPS, like no it like no this is how much damage an AS762 by 39 millimeter round does in jewels because it this mass going at this velocity and the rest of the game system is balanced around this is just a simulation of reality And so it's a very, very, very different way to balance guns in a game.

I don't know of any other major game that does that. yeah i jumped into the uh shooting range and there's a meat that is like a different depth of meat but you can shoot into the meat and it'll tell you how much jewels for each of the guns so you can start to then have a baseline in terms of like what is this gun what is this round and how what is the difference between them and i thought that was really uh nice to be able to again it's like the kind of the knowledge of what are the stats of this and what are the experience in that it i guess the question is how did you get upon those numbers? How do you research? Is it just a pure physics equation of the velocity and the mass, or is there other kind of empirical kind of data that folks out there have been collecting on this, you know, actual measured results, given all the friction and everything, all the other kind of variables? I mean, there's a lot of layers to this, and we definitely go much further into the weeds than is sensible. You know, the sort of baseline stuff, like if you just go buy a box of ammo, it's going to give you certain sorts of stuff,

And that's one set of, that's your baseline inputs. There's then, if you're doing drag simulation, like air drag and drag through surfaces, you can compute that drag literally like based upon the actual shape of the round. And so that's what we do. So successive impacts, blunt rounds, and it's like they're all different shapes. And that's sort of like represented as a series of constants. It's still a course abstraction, but it's still, you know, you get very, very different behavior from it. And then there's the one of the wild things is like we have a full pressure pressure curve simulation, which is actually pre computed. It is not efficient enough to compute that real time. That is actually like the volume of specific powders in the given round. So we're keeping track of the masses of all of those things, the mass of the casing, the mass mass of the round. And that's feeding directly into the mechanical simulation of the gun. So I don't know if this has happened to you, but there's a number of guns that are like that are semi-automatic that are like right on the edge of being able to cycle the cheap blue tip ammunition.

And so like the USA S12 shotgun, for example, if you feed blue tips into it, it's going to probably fail to extract once every four to five shots because built into the system is actually the fact that all ammo that you would buy is not 100 percent consistent in the amount of powder that is loaded in. And cheap ammo has more of a variance than expensive ammo. So the blue tip ammo is represented as being really, really cheap. And so there's enough of a powder difference that one given blue tip round may fully cycle a USAS. And one, it'll short stroke and it won't fully extract the round out of it. So you have to manually grab the handle and rack it again to fire it. And so, yeah, we went super, super deep in the weeds. And again, to create this, it's – and the beauty of that by going data-driven is that everything else built atop it is just flowing from – I don't have to idiosyncratically set all of these values to try to balance them to reality. It's just the output of the simulation model, and that feeds into damage.

That feeds into the recoil that you're experiencing with all the guns is coming direct, like feeding. That starts at the pressure curve simulation of the cartridge, goes through the bolt masses of the weapon, the center mass of the weapon, into your handling, and is then attenuated by how much stuff you're carrying. Right. Yeah, I did purchase that, is it A-U-S-U-S-12? USAS. USAS, yeah. The USAS-12, or is it 12? Yep. Okay, I did purchase the USAS-12, and I didn't, like, go into the facility with it yet, just because I feel like I would have to learn how to use it more. I did shoot it in the range. I was like, oh, let me go try to see it. I was like, oh, I don't know if I spawn in, if I'm going to actually have a clip, or if I'm going to have to like manually load these in somehow, and I couldn't figure out how to do that. So then I was like, well, if I load it in and I die, then I lost it. I can rebuy it now because I could like it's in the window where I could use the other resources of either metal and meat to kind of combine

to actually purchase it if I wanted to get it again. But I wanted to get it just to have it, but then also like I didn't know if – so there's different modes. there's the so i learned the hard way that if you if you go into the facility with equipment you may lose it because i had accidentally spawned the backpack that you're awarded in and i died and then it was gone i was like oh no i guess you can take items into these runs which was like a great realization to discover but i was also like oh crap i don't know if i'll ever get that backpack back again uh up until at some point maybe it's become available as a pretty rare item and when you have hundreds or dozens of different canisters that you have to take from one side of the room to the other, it's nice to have a backpack. Luckily, there was a backpack that I was able to get. Anyway, I digress. There's a whole different modes that you can go in and there's different conditions. And there's something about the extraction shooters and also roguelike where there's real stakes that you've spent labor and time and energy to gather resources and make purchases.

And then if you die, you may lose everything that you have kind of incepted into the facility with. And so it has a different stakes. And so I was like, I'm not ready to actually kind of be at that level of that gun because I'm still kind of exploring all the other guns. Maybe at some point where I feel like, okay, now I need to up-level my guns to be able to fight some of these enemies that I can't seem to kill with these other means. But there's different modes. Maybe just talk around there's the main gameplay mode, there's the kind of the daily mode, Then there's also the fun player, the free-to-play mode, and then there's also the sandbox mode. Maybe just kind of describe how you start to conceptualize how each of those modes are different and how there may be different logic. If you incept into those modes and you die, you may lose something. Yep. Before I do that, I do want to mention just riff off one thing that you said, that that experience of I've got this sick object or the sick gun that I found, I'm just going to leave it in my inventory sort of thing, is like such a core part of a good extraction shooter.

Not all of them give you that experience. Like there have been times when I was playing Tarkov a time, and I'm like, you manage to down a player who's way better than you, and you pick up this gun, you're like, oh my God, this is like the top end meta AR. Got to get to the extract, got to get to the extract. And then you bring it home and you put it in your inventory, and you're like, I'm never taking that in. Because I will definitely die if I take that. So that is going to just sit at the top of my inventory as a trophy until the next wipe. And that feeling is fantastic. So I'm glad you had something adjacent to that. Yeah. But yeah, so the different sort of pillars and modes within H3 is obviously there's the facility, which is the central campaign mode that you're playing. There is free play, which allows you to play any of the levels you have reached in playing the primary mode. And you can just play them with any number of settings in essentially in a non-equipment persistence way, meaning the stuff that you have isn't taken into the run and you don't actually get anything out of the run.

The whole purpose of the free play is just like, oh, you know what, I just want to do a run of level two with an AK-47 sort of thing. So you just go in, you can set it to just like have Vendo spawn at the beginning and have it function the same way it does in a sandbox. You can just pull whatever gear out you want. It's a great experimentation mode. If you're like, okay, what if I started this level with this piece of equipment here, is this actually beneficial, or would I want another thing? It allows you to try out a configuration. It is, in a sense, like, on one hand, it's for people who just want a more flippant, sort of like, ah, just run and gun experience, but if we think about all of the different components of H3, it's like, I'm giving you the tools to do the science necessary to get better at the next thing. The function of the free play mode is that, okay, I've gotten to level three. I now have level three unlocked in free play. I don't know how to play level three and I don't want to risk certain gear. I want to know what gear is worth taking in to solve the problems in level three. I can essentially experiment freely with that using Vendo to come up with a strategy.

And then once I have a strategy, I can take the full real run at it in a given run. If you just want to defray risk and learn in that particular sort of way. And then the daily run is the like, like the joy of a daily run precisely is you don't know what you're going to deal with. And it's like comparing you versus other people for just that improvisational, unique configuration of a problem space and just see who gets, see who does the best with the random thing that it ends up giving you. So it's an optimization puzzle, but it's an optimization puzzle you get exactly one chance at. so yeah i i felt like i i spent a lot of time in the the main mode because it was like well if i'm going to play i want to extract resources and i wanted to kind of level up my character and i think as i'm leveling up it made more sense for me to do that but now i'm to the point where i got to level two and three but i haven't i kind of stuck at them and i need to it's like i i got to the end of one of the levels and there's like this turret thing and i was like kept shooting i was like i have no idea how to kill this thing i kept shooting it with this rifle and maybe i'm

not hitting the right spot. I was like, I need more of an experimentation mode. I think going to the free-to-play would allow me to, like you said, there's the Vendo, which allows you, so basically in the sandbox, you get everything that's possible in the game. And in the Vendo mode, if I understand what you're saying correctly, is that you basically, as you level up, you get more options that you can start to play with. Also, you can start to steal the card out and extract the card and then when you put it back into your card you get new items um which i started to do but there's a bit of a weird cursed bug that happens where when you do that it currently uh doesn't extract any of my loot and so as i was getting both mustard and these other things there's there's still something to be figured out with this bug that it was sort of like i would have continued down that path and then once i got up to a level of kind of extracting a lot of the stuff, then I would have probably done the free play mode more. But I was sort of just kind of scavenging and gathering up resources. But it sounds like that with this window, you have the ability.

That's another kind of leveling up of sorts where you have the ability to basically, before you go in, spawn different objects. And I really appreciated having the map because on the second level, I would just get lost. Like the first level, I was good enough to be able to remember it. But the second level, I was like, I need this map, and I need to learn how to use this map, because I can't actually navigate this level without this map, because I'm just going in circles here. And then also taking in health bars whenever I'm spawning in to be able to also have, if I'm going to go do a long run, I want to be able to have health. So I've gathered the resources. I can kind of gear up. I can have a backpack. I can take in stuff. So as I go into these longer runs, I can strategize more. But now that I know what the free play is more, I can use that to kind of experiment to see what things would be useful on these modes. And how can I experiment with kind of addressing these enemies that feel pretty intractable just going into the normal mode? Absolutely. Yeah. And it's, it's, and again, it's like some people like, like, you know, Tarkov has a range, like, like, you know, Tarkov, I believe even has like a practice mode.

And like some people prefer to play that sort of way, but like like defray risk a little bit, learn their lessons in in a, you know, in a lower stakes environment. And some people have just no interest in that at all, that like that the central tension of, oh, my gosh, I'm going to lose things if I die here is is actually utterly essential to making you play the way that you're going to play. and you can't remove, if you remove that piece from it, something, you know, is lost. So in a big way, it's just about, like, providing sufficient options, especially because that's always been our vibe in general, is just making sure that folks have a wide possibility space for how they want to play. And I was really struck by there's actual piracy in this game where you're, like, taking out a card and then putting it into your own card and you're kind of stealing aspects. And, you know, obviously within the VR industry, there's also lots of discussion and I think lots of actions of games being pirated and also emulation.

And so just curious to hear some of your thoughts of what does it mean right now to be like a somewhat indie dev that has funding from meta, but also kind of entering the space where so much things are being pirated. I know in the past you have updated the H3 consistently in a way that would make it less valuable to pirate. But I'm just curious to hear some of your thoughts on the current ecosystem right now, because it seems like there's just a lot of pernicious piracy that's happening that is kind of eating away at the industry. yeah i mean at the end of the day i think um you know to to to to just sort of like sidestep or move past the the the most common topic space that's been talked to to death about that and try to just address i think the most contemporary tangible reality for an indie dev right now is that in a sense, I think of the moat that you have for yourself as being on several axes. There is the essential one at the end of the day, which is community, is that at the end

of the day, people follow people significantly more than they follow projects. It's not to say that that's the case for every game, but what we've done and what I've done in relationship to H3 has been to put forth the narrative experience of me working on this thing for that period of time. And, you know, and to, in a sense, establish that relationship to the customer of, of like trust and interest of the like, that like people, I would think some segment of people are showing up because of the vision sort of thing. And so that's, that's one axis. And I think the, I think at least for now, I mean, I, to make any prognostication about this segment of software about all of the like AI stuff right now is to just is to likely make yourself a fool because whatever happens in the next six months, it'll probably just not be the order of things that folks expected it to happen. But at least for now, I think at the end, I think that these systems are more interpolative than they are extrapolative. And so the at the end of

the day continuing to make something that is strange is probably a good, you know, is to a certain extent a good move. And I don't just necessarily mean that in terms of style and aesthetic, you know, but that's one end of it, but even sort of systemically and in sort of like combining very, very specific knowledge that is not necessarily represented deeply in the corpus of what has been, you know, encoded into all of these things with, you know, an atypical approach. Like, at the end of the day, like, you know, knock on wood. Like, on the axis of the VR catalog, if you were to sit down and be like, I'm going to copy that game with the AI sort of thing and create an axis of how hard that would be, be, you know, on one end, you would have like a lot of like, you know, rail shooters and, you know, certain types of like, you know, toy social games and almost on the entire

opposite end of the spectrum, you would have us for a whole bunch of reasons just related to technological constraints, specificity of knowledge, large amounts of the information that have gone into this game and informed the models were not acquired digitally. They were just on paper. And so, yeah, and come from understanding a physical practice, from like also shooting for over a decade and things like that. And it just so happens as well with relationship to firearms. The thing that I always joke about that is always funny is that for hilarious reasons, LLMs are pretty terrible at giving you a lot of very specific, accurate information to help you build information about gun-centric things that are realistic. because the information space is so poisoned by information about guns in video games, probably to a 200 to 1 ratio.

And then of the remaining information that's not about video games is just like boomers arguing with each other on forums for 20 years that was also slurped up, that is filled with wives' tales and superstitions and patently incorrect information. And so when you just soup that all up, the amount of stuff that comes out of any AI asking specific and idiosyncratic information about firearms is just fucking wrong. And it's a scream. And so I like to think of that as my third moat, is that it's a high noise to signal ratio space. But yeah, I mean, in regards more broadly to like outside of the AI stuff, just sort of like piracy in general, like I see so much of these things as just being fads to a certain degree. Like it's like, oh, this thing's possible and then it's cool and then it becomes normal and then it ceases to be cool. And, you know, there's a component of that action that is just like people don't have money.

And so the people like the economy is not great and it's not going to be great in the near future sort of thing. And so there's going to be a segment of people who just acquire their games that way because that's the only way they're ever going to play that sort of thing. And, yeah, I don't know. I try not to let most of it bother me and just kind of like, you know, let it be like just try to take a more utilitarian approach about it. And just that, like, my job ultimately is to let people know that, like, what we've made is worth it. And it will, because we're going to be updating it real frequently, the most convenient way for you to play our game long form is to just buy it and have the updates auto download onto your headset. And if you want more of our game, pay for it. If you don't want us to keep putting more things in the game, then don't pay for it because then we won't sell enough copies to keep putting stuff in it. But if enough people decide to, who knows? We might make this one last for 10 more years, assuming people are still playing video games instead of 10 years, instead of scavenging in the ruins of nuclear reactors with sticks and stones.

Exactly. Yeah. And in terms of the DLCs, I imagine that you just buy the game and that's it. Everything in the game without any sort of additional like spend this amount of money to get this amount of resources in game. Or is that something that you're considering? So we're going to, we have been very open about the fact that, like, we are probably going to do paid DLC in the future, but that that paid DLC is going to be essentially in two categories, one of which is where we substantively expand the scope of the game. So it's like all the guns, all of those sorts of things, everything that is essential in core to facility is going to be a free update to the game. If we make a whole extra game mode, that's probably going to sell as like a side DLC for a couple bucks. And if we do licensed collabs sort of thing, because like if you're just if you're using someone else's IP to do a cool collab, those are usually those are usually revenue split opportunities. opportunities. They let you bring in A and B and C from this cool movie or this cool game sort of

thing. And then you put essentially a product together and you sell that and you do a revenue split for it. So we definitely want to do some of those collabs. It is something that has become more common. I mean, I love Fortnite. Fortnite is the game that basically championed the like, let's pour all the IP into the giant IP soup and just stir it sort of thing. And I love my slop too sometimes. Well, I know that you've had a lot of people request for multiplayer, but I understand from what I've heard the last time we talked is that the technical requirements to be able to do the type of real-time simulation that you're doing would be compromised if you try to sort of do the dance to be able to make it as a shared social experience, but also there's different trade-offs between the visual aesthetics and other stuff that you can have a better first-person experience if it's a single player rather than a multiplayer. there's going to be things that are degraded that you think would compromise the integrity of the overall experience. And also, I mean, there's probably lots of other reasons, but there's some core technical ones that, my understanding at least is that there's technical reasons also for why you are not interested in doing that

because it's a different gameplay design. Yeah, so the first one is that there's like a cascading series of things that happens, which is that we're doing a lot of things with physics and a lot of things that rely on essentially frame perfect, synchronization of elements for things to function because they're a simulation, which means, which follows that basically there's one smart way to do that. One type of category of middleware, which is like paid middleware that is also paid hosting that also involves building the entire game in what's called ECS, Entity Component System. Significantly faster execution at the cost of working the entire time at a different structural distance abstraction wise for systems that you architect that in super compressed layman's terms would make all of the idiosyncratic things ways that we make every gun different much more expensive to execute and so it would be like applying a massive cost multiplier on top of a game like

ours that is already doing simulation stuff that is right at our level of capability of just like talent, time execution for money, etc. Like we're already doing something that is like level 10 hard and then to network that well would also be a level 10 hard thing. And so I flippantly said to people like, oh, what would it take for you to make a game like this? You know, multiplayer, I'd be like five to 10 times the budget and three times as much time. We would disappear and go do it for six years and then come back hopefully successfully. And the reality is in VR, that would just be such a roundly stupid way to spend your resources. Like it'd be one thing if we were talking about a game that could have a CCU of 50,000 people, then making that kind of investment to try to do that sort of thing to like take a run at like no there going to be as many people playing this as play arc raiders Then that would make sense to to take a swing at but for the ccu of a multiplayer vr game that like maybe hits a thousand people at its launch and update moments

but then otherwise settles into a trough of like several hundred sort of thing it doesn't it doesn't make sense i've always said like people who are demanding that i add multiplayer are just demanding that i go out of business and have a miserable time up until the point that i go out of business And so, and that's just on the sort of technical and financial end. From a design standpoint, to make a multiplayer game is to fundamentally make a different, like, play it like Elden Ring is different than six people in a party D&D. Like, you design, like, every combat encounter is fundamentally different. Your relationship to resources, to objects, and to the psychological experience of being alone. Like part of our entire, the gist of the things that I'm interested in making are this sort of like tension between coziness and alienation as this, these sort of like two sort of contrasting emotional elements where you're simultaneously in awe, but you're also like, I'm so alone in this space.

I'm grappling with this architecture, with this threat, et cetera. And it's just a fundamentally different emotional experience. It becomes, it's always going to become more goofball. It's always going to become more flippant, I think, with few exceptions, the moment that you add extra people onto that. And that isn't necessarily a universal, but I think it's the thing that people will expect to bring into that. And so it's just, that's not what I'm authoring, and I like playing those things, but that's not the thing that I'm looking to make, at least right now. Yeah, and after playing for over 30 hours, there's plenty of ways that you can enjoy this experience without having other people in there. Because I think the difficulty level of what you've already created is what I felt like, similar to when I was playing with Rec Room and he's kind of multiplayer, I would sort of get into similar modes where I would play a lot. But I feel like you've been able to generate the novelty in the world building of the space, but also there's a double kind of arc of building up your character,

but also a larger arc of a story that I've only, frankly, scratched the surface of. And just a quick logistical question. How many levels are there? Are there five levels, six levels? There are five. Five levels. Okay, so there's five levels. And you said that's a Chapter 1. How many chapters are there? Yeah, that's Biome 1, and we're just launching with Biome 1. Biome 2 will come sometime in the first half of next year. It'll be called Industrial. The first biome is Bunker. And in between those two, we plan to, which is also, this is also taken from the Binding of Isaac, our plan is to create a number of alt levels in the progression. So meaning that, like, when you're playing through from the beginning, you may get upper reach or you may get infected reach. And so there'll be a statistical chance that, like, a whole bunch of things will become slightly less deterministic, that you'll get a level of appropriate difficulty and theme for level two, level three, but there might be something altered about it. Different tile sets, different challenges, et cetera.

And so that's one of the things that will probably – I'm still working out exactly, like, what internal flag or moment gate triggers that, because you don't want to hit people with that out of the gate sort of thing. You want to let them sort of like get grounded. But yeah, so we'll be adding a bunch of width to the permutation space of Biome 1 in our regular updates, while also in parallel working on Biome 2 that will be a whole new set of five more levels with even more intense and interesting challenges, new sets of equipment, new game mechanics, etc. Wow. And those are both included in the purchase price then? Yep. Yeah, and our roadmap right now takes us through. Our goal is to ship two biomes next year, one in the first half of the year, one in the second half of the year. Wow. And there's also meatness that's coming up? What's that? Yeah, yeah. Probably small. Like, we're still figuring out, like, we're kind of burnt out from these two years. So the holiday thing this year is going to be cute and small sort of thing,

but loving, as is always the case. So I'm going to say we'll figure out we'll probably be the update that goes out either December 3rd or 6th. I'd have to look at like which day it fits on the calendar where a tree will go up in the hub and there'll be some festive holiday stuff added. Because I have to say that there's a lot of environmental storytelling that's very subtle. And I feel like it's, I think I'd have to like get through all the five levels, but also like there are moments where you have a for me as a character who's speaking to you and talking. But most of the other story is much like you immersed in this world and trying to figure out what's the context, what's happening. I noticed an interesting observation, which is as I was walking around, the Sosigs don't usually bother me if I just walk by them without pointing a gun at them or interact with them. But there's the, in the second level, there's like these kind of zombie-like characters that have these nanites or granites or something growing on them. And if I go into the room, they'll immediately attack me. And then they'll have the So-Sigs and they'll start fighting each other.

So it's like, okay, there's something going on here where there's these different factions and there's something different around these infections, these kind of zombie-like So-Sigs. So I'm sure that as you start to tell this environmental story between Biome 1 and Biome 2, do you expect to sort of have a full arc of the story between those two, of like kind of a beginning, middle, and end of what story you're telling amongst that entirety of those two worlds? Yeah, absolutely. That's the plan with this is that, you know, because this is one of those things that certain – this is part of the extraction shooter typically done in the multiplayer context. I'm trying to, like, tell an ongoing story and about having the sort of reach that the player can have expand over time. It's our way of structuring the thing that, like, in H3's ongoing content sure, and that was much more scattershot, and here's a bunch of different experiments. And this was the idea with this was to create a central axis that like as we want to expand into like we want to make like grenade launchers and rocket launchers and ordnance weapons.

where we're also going to build challenges that require those objects into the next biome so that as we create new equipment, new toys, and new things right at the central axis of the game in the primary mode, you're going to actually need to learn how to use those things and the possibility space of the way you can kit yourself and sort of deal with that challenge will grow, as will some of the spaces in size. so when biome 2 comes out will you have to start from biome 1 and play through all five of those levels in order to get to biome 2 or can you start straight into biome 2 so we are probably going to do something wherein you can either play on through it which you may have noticed at the end of the train stations there are warps that you can use a security card to use to jump certain levels we'll probably add another warp that takes you like say right from the train station in level three directly to the first level of a biome two, if you have the correct security card and we'll probably end up making sort of

like paid access to it. So like if you use one of the, one of the, it's a very important with currency systems in these sorts of games, because people will accrue endlessly certain amounts of them. You want what are called currency sinks. You want consumable ways to use those things. So there will probably be essentially a ticket that you can use to just start right at biome 2 via using some of your scoings. Okay, yeah, because I think I aggregated it to like 75,000 scoings and I wasn't really using them. And I was like, oh, yeah, I bought some guns. I did a bit of splurge, but I think I still have like 59,000 or so. There's a paid mode where you can go in and start to use like a loadout. And there's also a thing that's like under construction. I don't know if you have any sneak peek. Yeah, that's just saving space for the first game mode that we add on. Okay, gotcha. Well, I have to say this. I felt the same way after playing HCVR 2 as I did after I first bought Beat Saber at GDC in 2018.

I was like, wow, there's something really here that is super compelling. I couldn't wait to play it. And then less so around Half-Life OX because that just got released and I played it when it came out. But having a chance to see a game before it comes out, I have a sense that there's so much interesting things that you've been able to create here in terms of just the reflection of the reality and how that then maps up into a possibility space that then you can start to then explore that possibility space by expressing your agency in all sorts of different ways. but less than the sandbox mode but having a time-based mode to be able to go in and have more of a casual experience I feel like you can have many different ways that you are leveling up different aspects of whatever you want to level up and how you play it's going to change how you play and yeah there's so many different modes that you have here that just feels like I've just barely scratched the surface of it after playing it for more than a couple of dozen hours and so yeah I'm really excited

to continue to play it and to track it. And I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think is the ultimate potential of this type of medium and this type of immersive game. And dare I call it an immersive sim, which I do think that you've, based upon what you said, I think you've been able to create that on top of being a extraction roguelite type of game. But yeah, I'm curious to hear what you think is the kind of ultimate potential for this type of medium and what you think it might be able to enable. yeah i mean i mean in regards to the the sort of game specifically as i said the the the one thing that you know in many people's mind h3vr1 lacked was a sort of central pull sort of thing an adventure that was totalizing that was about the whole thing there's a lot of the short stories that exist within the game there there are full-fledged robust game modes um but they don't really speak to like the degree to which they speak to each other is is is very minor there's just a couple sort of like hidden things in there whereas yeah to to like like i love the idea of

making something that someone comes like puts down for a while and then they come back after a couple months and they're like they're they get an experience of it that's akin to like getting another book in a series they like that cause and like all right it's time to knock the rust off I haven't used a pump shotgun in a while. I'm going to do some challenges to, like, get limber again and then dive in, and they get to get another sort of another chapter that sort of expands and has you be like, wow, how large is this space? What else was going on in there? And getting sort of further clues as to, like, what exactly has caused it to become this sort of malformed configuration? And, you know, obviously, why do you exist? And so that's one that's a story that I I want to tease and tease and tease long form. It's I love Puzzle Box prestige TV. And so I love the idea of doing something very similar in in a game world over a period of hopefully that sells well enough years.

You know what I mean? And and yeah, I think that's for me. And it gets back to the thing, and I told you several interviews ago, that for the longest time, like, yes, I'm a game maker, but I consider myself a maker of VR. And the thing that I think differentiates at the end of the day my approach to VR and what I value philosophically is first make a place. The game can reside inside the place, but that's the ontological order. of it. It isn't a game that contains places. It's a place that contains games and contains objects and contains rules and contains things. So at the end of the day, I just want to make, you know, I want to lead this team to creating just a compelling place to be and then continue expanding the horizons of that place and the depth of the sort of, you know, adventure that

you can have within it. Yeah, as I think about from an experiential design perspective, what you're doing, you're creating the world, it's rooted in the world, it's rooted in the realism of these guns, the sort of earth element that's embodied in environmental presence. But then there's the probability space of what those represent, which creates a possibility space that then allows you to express your agency and play in so many different ways that is this sort of source of endless novelty. But then you also have this kind of time-based experience where you kind of have beginning, middle, and end as you go into these different sessions. But then you're also having larger arcs of other different cycles of other things that you're progressing yourself over time. And so it's really deep and rich. And I think one of the things that's unique about what you've done that I haven't seen anyone really do is the type of world building that you're doing is also like a collaborative alternative reality game that's done in collaboration with the community because you are listening to the community taking input and that there's a sort of a collaborative lore making that you've been able to do with h3vr of the last decade that i feel like

i can sense it and i'm able to get a taste of it and i i wish the you know that the wienerpedia right now is like very bare bones and i imagine that the maybe outside of the game might be way more involved in terms of like having all the statistics and everything like i would love to see Like, what's the value of this or that? Or, you know, as you scan things, you know, to have it as a potential resource to look at. And I'm sure that there will be people within the community to develop that. But just to go back to the point that you've been doing this in collaboration with the community for over a decade of this kind of collaborative lore building of this. And just curious to hear any thoughts and reflections on that and how you're able to kind of take that and then take it to the next level. Well, first off, you know, H3DR1 was a series of different short stories and sort of like narrative experiments that share a theme and share a sense of humor and a relationship to things but were not authored to cohere in sort of some specific way. A lot of them were like highly driven by like what mood was Anton in that year sort of thing.

whereas like hcvr2 is its own narrative continuity it is not trying to connect back into sequences of events and specific things that transpired in the first game and we have this is something that adam our uh our world builder and narrative uh lead has we have basically just had one continuous conversation for two years working on this and the i would say that the world is is very much an iceberg in that we have a lot of very specific explanations for tons of stuff that are in the game the the ideas on sort of like what was the sort of like alt history that led up to this situation whose fault all of this is what is going on and almost none of that is made explicit currently because we want it to be a the guiding logic behind things and to slowly progress you into that primarily through insinuation. And what we have at launch here is close to, like from a narrative standpoint,

is basically just a getting you into the setting sort of thing. Getting into the setting, provoking a bunch of questions, and then seeing what folks piece together and what sort of questions they ask. And then the second biome is going to start getting a little more explicit with what exactly is going on here. Um, but again, like still in a way that is designed, like how to put this, you've probably heard this term, um, uh, use, use, uh, I've seen some recent discussions about it, which is people consuming is like database consumption of fiction, which is that there, there's a growth, but because of the nature of fandoms, I would really call the nexus point of this in Western parlance, the star Wars fandom, like this is their fault, which is the, like the wikification of narrative and the way in which a story has been sort of like grabbed and decimated down and torn apart and sorted into lore as a set of things that have objectively

happened. And it's like if you take a David Lynch film and ask like, what's the lore of Twin Peaks? Like, I hope whoever asks that question gets punched sort of thing, because it couldn't be missing the point more. And I think within video games, and especially because things are tied to fandoms, there's this default position of communities who want to, like, database consume that sort of fiction of, like, instead of being a story or a set of themes or things we feel and question and don't necessarily agree on and receive different things, collapse that down into, here is a list of things that occurred and their dates and I've sorted them alphabetically. And so a bunch of the tension in terms of like how we will tell this ongoing story is to sort of fight against that impulse is that I think I think that there's an earlier era of games that were

allowed things to exist out in a negative space of the unknown and modern games are significantly more encircled so as to make them like consumable in an efficient way by by folks. And yeah, I know that's sort of like talking around a whole bunch of things. But that is that's that's my, you know, our authorial impulse is to is to be enigmatic, is to be absurd and to resist the notion that you are necessarily going to understand everything that is going on because that's an essential part of like the real reality that we attempt to mimic in VR is that like like the reason that video games are comforting like one of my assertions like the reason like a fantasy game especially is frequently um concerning is that it grossly simplifies the world and it's like oh yeah there are actually like eight gods one of them really likes war one of them likes eating one of them likes banging and if you do this set of things

You'll get into, you know, you know, Alt of Valhalla or whatever. And like the horizon of the world is narrow enough that you can actually understand, like, like box it in and consume the feeling of understanding all of it. Right. You know, the joy of a Fallout game is the like, I'll piece together every single thing that happened. And once I know what happened, I will have beaten their Fallout narratively. I will understand. And I will get back everything that was lost in that cataclysmic moment. And I can feel the satiation of knowing what the world was and why this has happened to the world. But, like, that doesn't happen in real life. Like, the world is a bunch of complex systems that, like, we fail to have accurate intuitions of. And we don't know why X and Y and Z happens. And we are surprised. And so, yeah, so for me, a significantly more interesting narrative position is one that like never fully resolves, you know, that is all that and that if people end up coming to very conflicting opinions on what is going on, that is significantly more interesting to me than five people who got together and are like, this is definitely the 17 things that's happened.

Let's sort them and put them in a wiki. Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because there's my sense was that there was a particularly obfuscated, like deep narrative that I could sense that there was there, but I haven't seen like how it starts to play out. So it's good to know that we're just kind of getting a little bit of a taster and context setting a little bit of prologue before we start to really dive into the deeper story. So awesome. Well, this is such a rich and incredible achievement that you have with H3 VR 2. And I'm so excited to get an early look and also have other people have a taste of it because it is this kind of interesting mix of hardcore stuff, but also like stuff that there is access points, many different access points to get in. And that's what I was missing maybe from when I first saw H3 VR 2 in 2018 and then, you know, wasn't able to really kind of commit to what I needed to do to learn it. And in this, I feel like there was enough of a kind of onboarding. And also the certification was such a great, like, okay, here's how I can actually, like, not be frustrated and not be able to shoot anything.

But to learn what I need to know to be able to go in and have these different experiences. And, yeah, it's just such a rich possibility space of creative expression and amazing world building. And so I'm sort of looking forward to see where you take it all in the future. And is there any other final thoughts, anything left inside that you'd like to share with the broader immersive community? Yeah, I mean, I would just, when it comes to playing our game, you know, I just ask people, like, it's going to be hard, as we've talked about, and that I just encourage folks to, like, take some time to meet the game where it is, do our certification material, and just, like, baby step your way in. You know, like, this is one of those games you should not feel bad if you play it on easy. Easy is closer to other games' notion of normal. and so yeah that this is not a game that is you will still be fumbling and finding your feet far enough into this game that you will have completed other games and so if i like don't feel bad if you find yourself in that position that is the game functioning as designed and we're just going to

be here adding more ridiculous things to it over time so awesome well anton it was such a pleasure to get a chance to to have an early look and have a chance to talk to you today and i'm so much Looking forward to this being out in the world and for more people to get a chance to play it. So thanks so much for joining me today to talk a lot more around your design process and, you know, just your thoughts and deeper reflections on where things are at and your design intentions for what you've created with H3 VR 2. So thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning I want to give away all this information for free, make it publicly accessible for not only you, but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. You know, I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1,000 true fans. And if I have just $5 a month from that 1,000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast,

then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.