Lucky’s Tale Windows, VR game

Lucky's Tale, the third-person platformer that will be bundled with the Oculus Rift headset as a launch title, should be about 3 hours long. According to Playful CEO Paul Bettner in an interview with Gizmag, the game's length is "...kind of in the Portal 1 realm," though additional gameplay modes that encourage players to revisit levels could extend this length further.

Bettner likens this to revisiting levels in Super Mario Galaxy, or Super Mario 64, to find hidden collectibles: "And actually, that sounds gimmicky, but in a game like Mario 64 it worked really well. And I think Lucky's Tale is like that too, because the levels are so rich that you do really want to keep going back into them and find the secrets ... and just playing through it linearly once doesn't feel like enough. 'I want to go back in there, that was a beautiful world.' So I think we can do more of that, but we're working on it now."

Lucky's Tale was born from one of 40 prototypes that Playful created when it first started experimenting with developing for the Rift. Bettner recounts how the team were surprised that first-person experiences which they expected to work well - such as flying on the back of a dragon - did not, in fact, feel good. "But we were willing to let go of those expectations because we just felt, especially when we started working on it: this is such a new platform; what worked on games we've been making for 20-30 years on TVs and computer monitors and even mobile, has no bearing necessarily on what's going to be great in VR," Bettner continues. "And even our own thoughts about what we think is gonna be awesome in VR, really doesn't have any bearing on it."

A third-person game such as Lucky's Tale became an unexpected focus, but Bettner describes how focusing on a moving character in an environment does not produce the same kind of motion sickness that moving through such an environment in first-person VR often can. Check out the rest of the interview for more, and we'll have our own impressions of Lucky's Tale once the Rift launches in April.