The hidden features that will keep you coming back to PlayStation VR Worlds

I’m Simon Hermitage and I’m the Lead Designer on PlayStation VR Worlds. It’s a product which has been born from us here at London Studio exploring what makes the best possible VR experience.

The result is five purpose-built, awesomely immersive VR experiences which will have you diving with a shark, playing futuristic sports, hurtling down a mountain road on a street luge, pulling off a diamond heist, and exploring space wreckage in a mechanical spider.

We know you will want to play it again and again, and show it off to your friends and family, so we added a load of features you might not yet be aware of to keep you coming back for more.

You have probably seen videos of people playing The London Heist: Move controller-wielding journalists reloading their virtual guns and firing at enemy bikers on London’s streets – it’s manic and action packed. But, we also added a mode for you to show to people who are less familiar with traditional gaming. It adds laser sights to the guns to help with aiming and reduces enemy damage. With this mode enabled, you can experience The London Heist as more of an interactive story and still get to the dramatic finale.

We had so much fun with the gunplay that we created four shooting ranges for you to take a little target practise before you play the story mode. Our favourite British thug Mickie will put you through your paces taking pot-shots at shop mannequins, rough-cut wooden shapes and bouncing car tyres. There are even a couple of Molotov cocktails thrown in for good measure and a little constructive criticism care of Mickie himself!

The shooting ranges have laser-sighted and unassisted versions, with leaderboards for each one. So you can compete with the whole PS VR community or invite your friends round, log in, and pass and play to see who is best (we’ll even track your scores on a friends-only leaderboard).

Dangerball and Luge also have leaderboards to bring out your competitive side. Dangerball’s ‘Score Attack’ is an endurance VR game where players must hit the highest scoring tiles and maintain combos to push for the high score. Here at the studio, the competition between QA and dev team scores has been fierce during development, so we can’t wait to see what gamers can do.

Dangerball also features ‘Tournament’ and ‘Quick Play’ modes where you can play against AI opponents with various special moves, such as power shots, swerve balls and ball splitting.

Test your nerve in a VR Luge time trials, again with online leaderboards for each course and you’ll be able to refine your own performance by comparing it with the ‘ghosts’ of other local players that appear on-track.

We also have a fiendishly difficult VR Luge ‘Tour’, where players must complete all four tracks consecutively within a difficult target time before they can post their time to the exclusive Champion’s leaderboard.

Ocean Descent is far from being a passive VR experience. There are three different versions of the dive, allowing for gentler experiences for VR newcomers and building up to the terrifying Shark Encounter for VR veterans. The ocean is filled with reactive wildlife for you to discover and the longest of the three dives has a mysterious story running through it.

Scavengers Odyssey is our epic space adventure where you become an alien whose quest is to find a mysterious artefact. The story sees you taking control of a spider-like craft which can walk on the walls and ceilings of giant derelict Space Hulks and jump huge distances through floating wreckage.

As the name suggests, Scavengers Odyssey has an intriguing backstory to discover as you quest through bug-infested wreckage. Your agile Spidercraft means you can explore and discover the scattered Blackbox recordings and unearth details of what happened to these giant space wrecks.

So that you get to fully experience PlayStation VR Worlds we have wrapped up the five experiences with a challenge and trophy system which will give you tricky gameplay targets to achieve, special actions to perform, and new places to visit. You’ll see everything we have to offer and platinum the game if you can complete them all.

We really hope you enjoy the PlayStation VR Worlds experience when it launches on 13th October, we have loved making it!