There is a lot of love in the community for the work that Astro Bot: Rescue Mission developer Team Asobi has done. From the explosion of success and acclaim they had with the aforementioned gem on the PlayStation VR, to their first work with The Playroom and The Playroom VR and most recently with the beloved PS5 launch title/demo, Astro’s Playroom, the team hasn’t swung and missed yet. Despite all of that, they’re already proudly proclaiming that their next game will be their “biggest to date.”
In a sweeping interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Team Asobi’s Studio Director, Nicholas Doucet discussed the game’s that they’ve made, the feelings they want to elicit, and even lightly touched on the nature of what is coming next.
While some were surprised by the success and quality of Astro’s Playroom at the PS5’s launch, the pedigree of their previous works should have been the perfect counter to that. Unfortunately, though, the team had been shoehorned by the masses as a team who could develop for VR, and so Doucet and the team were eager to prove them wrong. “Of course [Astro’s Playroom] was a showcase of the DualSense, and a love letter to PlayStation, but one of the goals was: can we live up to making a TV game? A classic non-VR game? And do character controls and all that? Are our skills sufficient?”
He continued, “Making a VR game for PS4 means doing PS3 quality levels in terms of assets because you’re on a tight [technical] budget. But when you jump to PS5… are we able to go to that level? So we got some confidence out of this. It’s very nice to know that whenever a PS5 is bought, Astro is going to get played. It was a big responsibility, because if you make something that’s a little bit without flavor, then you run the risk of making the console feel that way.”
With that confidence on the team’s side, they’re turning their eyes to what is next. The team once consisted of 35 people and has now expanded to over 60. Doucet expects the team to expand to 100 people. “We have a current production, and that’s going fine,” he says. “But we want to have another group for R&D, and we want enough in this group to explore as many areas that are interesting. And to potentially start other projects. But we’re not giving ourselves any limits. If good people want to join Team Asobi, then we will be willing to talk to them. There is always stuff to do. There is always new projects to begin. We are not limited by any money or time. If we could double the studio just like that, we would find work for everybody.”
That leads us to the new project. Doucet says that it will follow in the footsteps of the games it has done before, but will be a full-scale title “and our biggest to date,” and he considers the Dualsense to be a “special weapon” for the team that they’re eager to toy with and extract the best out of. “Any new technology, we like to take it for a spin,” Doucet noted.
What all of this means for the project itself is interesting. The scale is obviously larger, and the excitement around playing with the technology at their disposal is still abundantly clear, but the nature of the project still remains a mystery. Another 3D platformer? More Astro? Both seem likely, but when we learn for sure about what this title entails remains a mystery for now. Maybe the answers will become clearer when PS VR2 is fully unveiled.
