#1321: Breaking Down the Epic Immersive Adventure of “Asgard’s Wrath 2” with an Oculus Studios Producer

Asgard's Wrath 2 is one of the most epic games I've had a chance to play, and I think it's fair to say that it's like Meta's Half-Life: Alyx in terms of a premium AAA game that could be a system seller for the Quest 3. I'm about 40 hours into the game, and I'm only on the 3rd of 7 total sagas. Meta reports that the main campaign is around 60 hours with 130 total hours if you try to achieve all of the side quests and other completionist tasks. Overall, there has been plenty of ways that I've found to play, and there is a really great balance between the different qualities of presence that leverages the many affordances of the virtual reality medium.

Asgard's Wrath 2 has an amazing amount of depth and evolution of gameplay, incredible worldbuilding, challenging puzzles, and a story with a mythological context to weave it all together. It's core center of gravity is active presence with the rich embodied melee gameplay along with a secondary focus on environmental presence with exquisite environmental design and vast architectural spaces, and the third quality of mental and social presence with the god-scale puzzle solving, RPG strategy, and lots of backstory of the lore that you can read, and pro-social relationships with your followers and fellow characters, and finally the emotional presence of overall narrative leaning heavily into Egyptian and Norse mythology to tie everything together. The story is the least strong element of the game as it is interesting enough for me to engage me, but the story often seems to mostly function to set a broader context for the next quest adventure rather than developing deep characters with meaningful interactions or story elements. The context of story definitely benefits from leaning into existing Egyptian and Norse mythology, which deepens the symbols and iconography used in the environmental design and create a more nuanced worldbuilding. But that all said, the feeling of open world adventure and player agency is really strong with gameplay that feels like it's evolving (even if it can get a bit repetitive at times), and the environmental design is absolutely incredible, and the puzzles are challenging enough to feel satisfying when completed, and the story bits function to tie everything together into a deeper purpose.

Overall, this is the most immersed I've been within a VR game in a long, long time, and there are enough aspects that can satisfy most of Bartle's taxonomy of player archetypes of the killer, achiever, explorer with the socializer being the least emphasized as it is a single-player game with some asynchronous social dimensions that can feel like digital graffiti and break the overall immersion. But overall, this is one of the most epic games I've had a chance to play in VR for a long time, and I was able to surrender to exploring the many different dimensions for how you can play through the main line and many of the different side quests that were available

I had a chance to speak with Oculus Studios producer Mari Kyle who provides a lot more context for some of the design intentions to make a complicated RPG easy for first-time users, and to not be too overly penalizing for dying. It's one of the deepest and most involved games that have been developed for VR so far, and worth tracking how it impacts Meta's overall strategy with VR and how to create compelling-enough content to sell more VR headsets and keep people coming back to play more.

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