Western players will instead get a Steam version Tokyo RPG Factory announced yesterday that its upcoming role-playing game, I Am Setsuna, would launch this summer on PlayStation 4 and PC via Steam. Notably absent was news of a Vita version, which accompanied the game’s launch on PS4 in Japan. According to director Atsushi Hashimoto, the team chose to instead focus on a gameplay experience built for a larger screen when bringing the game stateside.
“I think the focus was leaning more toward that sense of immersion, being able to jump into the world on a larger screen," Hashimoto told Polygon via translator. "That’s one of the bigger elements that sort of drove that decision for the no Vita plan.
"Of course, there is the technical market aspect as well. Unfortunately the Vita market isn’t as large as the console and the PC-based … that’s the sort of direction the team decided that they wanted to take for the U.S. release, was to rely on the players that are on the Steam platform as well."
When asked if the company still sees the Vita as a viable platform, Hashimoto laughed.
"We definitely see the Vita fans, and we acknowledge that there are very passionate fans out there, and we think it’s great," he said. "We do feel it’s a viable sort of platform. Of course, it’s just a matter of scale. We don’t mean to give you the impression that we feel that the Vita market is weak or anything; by no means do we want to make it seem like it’s any sort of inferior platform. It is a platform where there are very passionate fans that love the games that are on that platform."
He added that the console is perhaps more popular in Japan because of a large commuter culture.

I Am Setsuna, first announced as Project Setsuna, is heavily inspired by the "golden" era of RPGs, the ’90s. It pulls heavily from Chrono Trigger, which Hashimoto credits as an especially memorable game for Tokyo RPG Factory.
"That’s one of the major reasons why ," he said. "The second reason is you don’t see many RPGs out there in the market that are a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger, even within Square Enix. Of course it’s because it’s very rare to see something as memorable as Chrono Trigger. And then the third reason is that title is such a popular and beloved game all over the world."
But I Am Setsuna is not actually a spiritual successor, Hashimoto said. Instead, it’s an homage to the beloved RPG. It draws most heavily from Chrono Trigger in its battles, which are turn-based with an active time battle system, better known as ATB. The team also used names for items and spells found in franchises like Final Fantasy to make the game more accessible to those fans.
"Of course, the team could have come up with different, original names that are completely unique to just the realm of Setsuna, but so that the players can easily accept that sort of classic RPG and familiar elements," Hashimoto said.
Although the Western release won’t include any major changes, it’s possible it will get additional content.
" currently considering maybe doing some sort of additional weapon or item for the Western audience," Hashimoto said.

Still no hard sales numbers, though Tom Clancy’s The Division continued selling well after its impressive first 24 hours, breaking Destiny’s record for the highest sales of a new franchise — in dollars, not number of copies — during its first five days of release, publisher Ubisoft announced today.
Activision launched Destiny in September 2014, and reported sales of $325 million from the game’s first five days on the market. Ubisoft announced today that estimated worldwide revenue from The Division’s first five days of release exceeded $330 million. Destiny launched on PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, while The Division is available on PS4, Windows PC and Xbox One.

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“The Division taking the top spot in the industry for first week sales of a new franchise is a tremendous achievement," said Yves Guillemot, CEO and co-founder of Ubisoft, in a press release. "We are very proud of our teams, and humbled by and thankful for the millions of players who are giving us their feedback and support."
Last week, Ubisoft said that The Division set multiple internal Ubisoft records, including the one for number of copies sold on launch day. The publisher also said The Division came in as one of the top four launches of new brands in gaming history, with the other three being Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs and Activision’s Destiny.
Now The Division stands alone at the top of the opening-week sales chart. In addition, Ubisoft reported that The Division is now the publisher’s best-selling game of all time during its first week of release. The company has not announced specific figures for the number of copies sold.

Electronic Arts’ Star Wars-themed shooter Star Wars Battlefront is coming to PlayStation VR, Sony announced today.
“This will be a Star Wars Battlefront gaming experience like nothing else," said Andrew House, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, "where players can transport themselves to a galaxy far, far away."
Sony promised more details on Star Wars Battlefront for PlayStation VR in the coming months.
Developing…

Sony’s virtual reality headset for PlayStation 4 is coming later this year PlayStation VR, Sony’s virtual reality headset for the PlayStation 4, will launch worldwide this October for $399, the company announced at a special event at this week’s Game Developers Conference.
The platform formerly known as Project Morpheus will sell for less than some other VR headsets launching this year, namely the $599 Oculus Rift and the $799 HTC Vive.
In Europe and the U.K., PlayStation VR will cost €399/£349. In Japan, the PS4 headset will cost 44,980 yen.
Andrew House, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, showed the final retail version of the PlayStation VR headset, and confirmed the platform’s hardware specifications. PlayStation VR will ship with a 5.7 inch OLED display that supports refresh rates of 120 Hz and 90 Hz.
House said that more than 230 developers are currently making content for PlayStation VR. He expects 50 titles to be available for PlayStation VR between the platform’s launch in October and the end of 2016.
For more on PlayStation VR, read Polygon’s feature on the making of Sony’s venture in virtual reality for its current home console.
Developing…

Developer Cliff Harris adds significant features for new game Democracy 3 Africa sounds like an expansion, but it’s not. It’s a standalone game, albeit one that will work with the core game’s previously released expansions.
Speaking to Polygon at Game Developers Conference, developer Cliff Harris said that the new game is aimed at fans of his much-admired government simulation who are looking for a serious challenge. The point. he explained, is that while running a country in an established Western country is tough, it’s an entirely different matter to maintain stability in many rapidly changing African countries, which often face a different set of issues.
Democracy 3 puts players in charge of a country and asks them to make decisions on a raft of issues. So, players can cut taxes or ban guns or increase fines for violations of the law. Different segments of the populace react differently to these changes. Sometimes a player loses voter support and is kicked out of office. Other times, he or she is assassinated.
In Africa, there are additional challenges. Many of the ten countries featured in the game have a history of unstable governments, rights abuses, poverty, civil war, coups and epidemics. They are often in the midst of a transition between agrarian and industrial societies. Old certainties, such as religion, are threatened by new experiments, such as liberalism.
Democracy 3 Africa will be released for Windows PC in April priced at $14.99

Sony left a small detail out of the PlayStation VR announcement Sony announced the PlayStation VR virtual reality platform will launch for the PlayStation 4 this October for $399, but neglected to mention that the hardware requires the purchase of the $60 PlayStation 4 camera to function and provide positional tracking.
Sony has confirmed to Polygon that the camera is required for the virtual reality hardware to function, but was not included in the $399 package due to many customers already owning the accessory.

Sony left a small detail out of the PlayStation VR announcement Sony announced the PlayStation VR virtual reality platform will launch for the PlayStation 4 this October for $399, but neglected to mention that the hardware requires the purchase of the $60 PlayStation 4 camera to function.
Sony has confirmed to Polygon that the camera is required for the virtual reality headset to function, but said the camera is not included in the $399 package because many customers already own the accessory. The camera provides positional tracking for the headset.

Your movies and games, floating in a black void! The $399 PlayStation VR platform isn’t just for gaming content, Sony announced during its press conference for the virtual reality hardware. You’ll also be able to play games and watch movies that weren’t designed for virtual reality.
The system also has a cinematic mode, which “lets users enjoy a variety of content in a large virtual screen while wearing the headset," the press release stated. "Supported content for the Cinematic mode includes standard PS4 games and videos as well as variety of PS4 features including Share Play and Live from PlayStation. Users will also be able to enjoy 360 degrees photos and videos that are captured by devices such as omnidirectional cameras on PS VR via PS4 Media Player, which will let them feel as if they are physically inside the captured scene."
How big will the screen look? That’s up to you, but Sony gives some idea. "Users can enjoy content on a virtual screen up to 225 inches (5 meters in width) at a distance of 2.5 meters," the release explains. "The size of the screen will feel different depending on individual users."
The cinematic mode will allow you to play existing PS4 games and use video features, and the player will be able to select small, medium or large sizes for the virtual screen. We were able to try the feature during Sony’s event, and the software places the viewer in a black space watching a floating screen; there is no surrounding environment. Nearly all UI elements of the PlayStation 4 will function in this mode, although Sony didn’t detail which features wouldn’t be available.
PlayStation VR launches this October for $399, and requires an additional camera accessory to function.

The Holodeck is a long way off says former Pixar technical director Max Planck, 10-year veteran of Pixar and the technical founder of Oculus Story Studio, threw cold water on his audience at Game Developers Conference 2016 today. For half an hour he explored the many constraints working against creatives working in virtual reality, and argued for prioritizing shorter experiences ahead of longform work.
“We’re kind of at where film was back at the time of the nickelodeon," Planck said, "where people were willing to pay a nickel just to see something cool. And I think we should embrace that."
Planck cited the independent games scene as evidence that consumers are willing to spend less on smaller experiences, while admitting that VR doesn’t have a pricing model yet.
The nitty-gritty of his talk focused on the limitations for developers working in VR, and delved into both the practical and philosophical.

For instance, in his years working in computer-generated animation Planck explained how he’s gotten used to a certain kind of workflow. Multiple teams can work on multiple portions of a motion picture at the same time without much interference, and directors can monitor their work from over their shoulder, essentially. That’s not the case with VR, he said, showing a video of one member of his team wearing a VR headset, trying to explain herself while her staff of animators tried to follow along on a traditional flat screen behind her.
Simply sharing the same virtual space is a practical impossibility for the artists and engineers building today’s experiences, and that slows down production. But by working slowly and carefully, his team has been able to produce short experiences like Henry, pictured above, which is available for viewing now.
Most importantly, the kinds of tricks that directors have used for years — like cuts, pans, fades and simple scene transitions — simply don’t make sense to the every-day consumers of VR. When they applied them to Henry, he said, people hard a hard time determining if he was real or a ghost.
These skills may evolve in the future, as the audience becomes accustomed to the medium, but it’s also up to content creators to create a new visual vocabulary.
It’s also up to content creators to create a new visual vocabulary.
"If you showed a movie now to someone who was watching movies in the 1920s," Planck said, "it would look like art. They would say, ‘This is moving too fast. These are just abstract images being fed to my eyes.’ I think VR is going to go through that same arc."
Instead of longform, wide-open experiences with lots of interaction Planck stressed the need to take things one step at a time. By focusing on smaller, more deeply refined experiences, teams around the world can help move the medium forward.
"The Holodeck is a very long way away," Planck said, "and I think that everyone wants the Holodeck now. They see virtual reality and our imagination has been filled up with the idea that this is what we should be making, and I feel that people are making less-compelling experiences because they’re reaching too far."

Climb on the Bullet Train Despite its intensity and clever design, Epic Games’ first foray into an entirely original virtual reality game still has no promise of a street date.
After spending an hour explaining to an audience of developers and press how Epic tackled a number of key issues found in VR game development while creating Bullet Train, the project’s lead designer broke their hearts.
“You’re not going to see this in the foreseeable future," Nick Donaldson told one attendee, when asked about a release date.
It remains unclear why that is, but Nick Whiting, technical director for VR and AR at Epic Games, said that the playable level of the game — the only one that exists — could be made into a full game.
"The experience does scale," Whiting said. "This is only one level. If you layer on top of that game-isms like combos, scoring, different environments, you can scale it up.
"If you’ve played it a few times you start getting much more physical with it, and then hygiene and fatigue are limiting factors."
The game has already grown quite a bit since development started on what was to become Bullet Train. Whiting told the audience that the game was a direct byproduct of both what Epic had done in the past and where VR game development might head.
Epic’s first foray into VR was shown at E3 in 2013, a simple demo. Next, the company created a tabletop game demo. Then Epic created Couch Knights to play with the idea of multiple people using the same game space. In 2014 came a demo called Showdown, which was meant to show how cinematic a VR experience becomes when running at 90 frames per second.

Last year, the team worked with Weta Workshop to turn a moment in The Hobbit films into a purely visual VR experience.
"All of those things had something in common," Whiting said. "We adapted content we already made into VR."
For its next VR demo, Epic decided to build something from the ground up, a playable demo that uses the Oculus Rift’s touch controllers, leans on the learnings from previous demos, and pushes what the team knew forward.
The goal was to create a game built for a GTX 970 graphics card — a step down from the card needed to run Showdown — but to make it look better.
The developers also wanted to make motion controls to be a central part of the game.
And they only had six weeks to flesh out the idea.
Epic eventually showed off the Bullet Train demo during last fall’s Oculus Connect event. In the short demo, which we adored, players fight around a train station shortly after disembarking from a bullet train (get it?). The game uses Oculus Touch controllers to control its guns. Instead of reloading, players simply drop or throw away their guns and grab new ones. Players can also slow down time and pluck flying missiles out of the sky to redirect them at enemies.

But months before, the team’s first approach for the Bullet Train prototype was a shooter that played a bit like a virtual reality version of the light gun arcade classic Hogan’s Alley.
"It was a basic shooter gallery," Whiting said. "We had a table filled with weapons and bots would run at you. You could pick up the weapons and use them and blow the crap out of everyone."
Then the team thought of turning that concept into a co-op multiplayer game, with two players standing back to back, facing two alleys as they tried to take down waves of enemies.
But both approaches got boring quickly, he said.
So the developers went back and started looking at what makes shooting interesting in movies. They quickly realized that to make the game more fun, they were going to have to deal with the issue of movement in VR, a problem that’s hard to address without causing motion sickness or unease in some players.

They examined Asian action films like Oldboy and Hard Boiled, and liked the idea of doing a single camera shot. The idea was to follow alongside the player as he or she worked their way through a stream of enemies with a seemingly endless combination of gunfire and physical attacks.
"The one-shot solved the motion problem because the camera is moving through the action continuously," Whiting said. "We also control the path. So we can do things like change directions and have players go through those movements. And there would be a lot of chaining. As you go through the scene, you attack one guy, punch him, shoot that guy, take his nightstick and beat the next guy with it.
"It looks like you’re a badass and you feel like a badass."
The problem the team ran into was that players would start to turn and eventually obscure the tracking cameras, basically breaking the motion tracking.
Eventually, the team came up with the idea of minimizing movement by allowing players to teleport around a map. They could still move if they wanted to, but by combining the ability to teleport with some smart design decisions, the game was able to mostly keep players from walking around too much.
First, the game takes place in a train station. A train track running through the center of the game map is a natural, though subtle, reminder to players not to walk across the map, but rather to teleport.
The team also programmed enemy AI to move toward the center and make sure the boss of the level appears and stays in the middle of the map.

Once Epic layered in the ability to teleport to different sections on the maps to get weapons, take out enemies and move away from danger, players simply didn’t feel the need to manually move much.
To highlight the fun of chained attacks, the developers worked in a few other interesting tricks.
Bullet Train uses a stealth teleport to essentially always move you close enough to an enemy that you’re trying to punch, if they’re already pretty close to you.

Unbreakable

It turns out that playtesting an in-progress game for the Oculus Rift and its Oculus Touch controllers can sometimes result in frustrating moments. During their GDC talk, the Epic duo mentioned some of the incidents that the touch controllers survived.

Being thrown across the room.
Being thrown into a wall.
Being punched into a wall hard enough to remove some of the plaster.

"These controllers are indestructible," Donaldson said.

Epic also tweaked the way some of the harder weapons, like rockets and grenades, work. If you keep missing with your throws, the game starts to subtly, slowly auto-adjust the trajectory of your toss to make sure you hit what you’re aiming at. The assist on those throws went through a lot of iteration before Epic found the balance between helping a player to have fun, but not coddling them.
"It’s really hard to fail," Whiting said. "The longer you suck, the less you suck."
The developers also made it impossible to die in the game.
"We didn’t allow failure to be an option," he said. "There’s no death; you only become more badass."
The end result is a game that quickly makes you feel like you’re a badass, throwing weapons at enemies to stun them and then teleporting by their side to grab that same weapon as it falls and use it to kill them.
The team hammered on playtesting and continued to add new twists and ways to have fun. That included being able to juggle your weapons between two hands to quickly switch which hand is holding which gun; racking the shotgun as seen in Terminator 2; and being able to toss a grenade and then shoot it out of the air.
Bullet Train lead Donaldson said Epic even played around with the travel speed of bullets, just to make sure players caught a glimpse of them.
"Our solution was to slow the bullet down to a quarter of its original speed over one-tenth of a second and then to speed it up to 1.25 the original speed over time," he said. "The total time is about the same, but early on it’s slow so you can see it."
While Donaldson enthused about living through "oh shit" moments in Bullet Train, he also made sure to point out that VR gaming is still very much in its infancy.
"It’s like the early mobile game days," he said. "I think it’s the same with VR. You’re not going to get to play 120 hours of Skyrim on your couch.
"I think it is going to be a completely different sort of games that succeed."