A deep dive into Reach’s gameplay features, out on PS VR2 Oct 16

Hi everyone! I’m thrilled to reveal more details about our debut game, Reach, an immersive action-adventure built from the ground up for next-gen virtual reality.

Launching on PS VR2 next week, Reach puts you in the boots of a reluctant hero drawn deep into a world of collided realities. What starts as a search for an escape quickly becomes a high-stakes journey of survival, discovery and agency – where your movement, your decisions, and your tools directly affect your adventure through the game.

We set out to create a VR experience that offers the scale, depth, and spectacle of a blockbuster action game while staying true to what makes VR special: presence, freedom, and physicality. Here’s a deeper look at what makes the game tick, and the journey we took to get here and how we’re making use of the power of PS VR2 to make every moment feel more impactful.

Become an action hero

Embodiment is one of VR’s biggest strengths, allowing for unrivalled expressive roleplay as you step inside a virtual body and experience the world through it. One of our core goals with Reach was to push embodiment further than ever before through a responsive full-body avatar that gives you a true sense of presence in the world in a way that’s only possible in VR. Whether you’re reaching for a ledge, dangling above a perilous drop, or dodging an enemy attack, your actions feel natural and fully grounded in the world.

In Reach your physical actions really do directly impact the world around you. We want you to have the power to create epic moments and live through these thrilling action sequences, not just observe them. Key to this is how you traverse – or move – through the world.

Traversal in Reach is so much more than a way of getting from A to B. From death-defying leaps across chasms to scaling breathtaking and vast environments while performing acrobatic escapes from the imposing threats within, you’ll feel like a true badass. No rails, no teleporting, it’s just you, your instincts, and the environment.

We’re incredibly proud of this combination of physicality and responsiveness that makes every action – no matter how subtle – feel immersive and real.

Complete freedom of choice

One of our core aims, right from the start of the prototyping phase of Reach’s development, has been to put player agency right at the heart of the game. We want to give you the complete freedom of choice on how you approach every situation and to reward you for experimenting with different strategies.

We’ve leant into this with our tools and weapons. They’re multi-functional and designed to adapt to whatever situation you’re facing, from parkour to puzzle-solving. Mastering these tools make you feel like you’re wielding superhuman abilities as you make your way through the game’s unpredictable and varied world.

A perfect example is how you can transition from traversal to combat. You might start by using your grapple hook to swing from grapple point to grapple point, then fire arrows into a wall using your trusty bow, climb the arrows up to a vantage point, pull them out of the wall, and then fire them at an enemy from long range. That’s the kind of versatility and improvisation that we’re encouraging.

This philosophy also shaped how we built levels in the game. Areas can be scaled in various ways and approached in multiple directions with the game rewarding experimentation and exploration. We’ve found that people start off slow and steady but quickly become more daring and confident, making death-defying jumps to access hidden paths and vantage points.

Harnessing the power of PS VR2 

Our ethos as a team has always been to continue pushing VR forward through innovative gameplay and boundary-pushing technology. Every system, animation, and interaction is designed to drive immersion, presence, and roleplay, and we’ve sought to use every ounce of PS VR2’s power to make moment-to-moment gameplay feel as impactful as possible.

Using PS VR2’s Sense controllers, every interaction feels rich and tactile. Through haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, you’ll feel the weight and resistance of objects and surfaces as you interact with the world around you: doors push back as you slide them open, your hands adjust as they grip uneven surfaces, and your limbs react realistically when brushing against walls or crouching under obstacles. The tactility of that feedback as you land on a ledge, having desperately flung yourself across a cliff face, legs flailing beneath you, adds an extraordinary extra layer of depth to the feeling of embodying an action hero.

Visually, we’re also using PS VR2’s 4K capabilities to bring our intricate world to life in spectacular fashion. Higher-resolution textures help to tell the story of the vast scale and minute detail that fills every area of the game, from sprawling caverns to crumbling subterranean architecture.

That’s just a taste of what you can expect in Reach. If you like what you’ve read, then you can pre-order Reach on the PlayStation Store today ahead of its launch next week. We can’t wait for you to experience this exhilarating VR adventure for yourselves..