// GAMESPOT — GAMING
High On Life Is Helping Make The Case For Bigger Games On Quest
High on Life has been a big hit since it first launched in 2022, thanks to its bizarre sense of humor, motor-mouthed guns, and polished gameplay. But can it succeed as a virtual reality port? That's the question Flat2VR is aiming to answer, as the team behind several VR games is now working with Squanch Games to bring High on Life to Meta Quest 3 and 3S headsets.
While it's still early days for the project, I took the time to chat to High on Life VR game director Emily O'Neal and Eric Masher, co-founder and chief operating officer for Impact Reality and Flat2VR Studios, about this project and the challenges involved in adapting it for a new platform.
And yes, Knifey did make his way into the conversation.
So why VR? High on Life has been available on PC and console for several years now, but it is considered a smaller, niche platform--or so you'd think, as Masher explained that the VR user base has grown considerably over the years. "VR is a smaller market; it doesn't mean that it's a small market," Masher said. "You know, we're looking at numbers now of Quest headsets being in the 30-million to 40-million range. Those are not numbers to take lightly. A game like Gorilla Tag--which is a free-to-play game--has done over $100 million in revenue. We do see that audience that has been playing Gorilla Tag starting to grow up. They started when they were younger kids, and now they're getting older and have disposable income. What are they going to want to play next?"
"We want to bring them those high-quality games like High on Life, that [have] more teeth, more depth, and more playability as an actual game. We're not here just for a short snapshot in time; we're here to help grow this industry to where it will be in three to five years from now. Our job and our mission at Flat2VR is to bring the immersive, amazing games that you love playing right now on your console and PC, but bring it to another platform that makes a whole bunch of sense and that feels completely different but still the same.”
Bringing High on Life to VR isn't an easy task either, as you can't just press a "Convert to VR" button for a project of this scale. As O'Neal explained, the original game is massive, and the team is looking to make it run as smoothly as possible on a VR headset.
"There are a ton of animations and wildly different worlds, so even getting that much data to fit on a standalone platform is a big challenge," O'Neal explained. "You have to load it all in a decent amount of time and run it in real time, ideally at 72 frames per second. All of that optimization represents a cluster of problems our tech-art teams are chipping away at from many angles. A huge part of our technical challenge has been upgrading the game to a more modern version of Unreal Engine. Modernizing our toolsets allows us to perform the optimizations needed to get these massive, gorgeous, colorful worlds running on Meta Quest. That covers the core issue: the sheer scale of the game and optimizing it to fit on the headset while maintaining frame rate."
O'Neal added that the team wants players to poke and prod the Gatlian firearms they collect in the game, and they represent an incredible design challenge thanks to their expressive facial details and complex skeletons used to make them emote. "The Gatlians are without a doubt my favorite part of the game. When defining the mission statement for the VR adaptation, they are 100% the centerpiece. The core question we continually return to with every feature is: Do you feel like you're holding a living creature in your hand, and when they speak to you, do you feel like you're truly interacting with them? Because the Gatlians are the main characters, they are our highest priority."
"A huge part of that focus goes into the gunplay since they serve as your weapons. With any VR first-person shooter, how you handle reloading is vital--whether that's a realistic manual reload, a simple button press, bringing the weapon to your hip