Asgard's Wrath 2's "Godscale mode" is about perspective, not power

gamedeveloper.com:

Sanzaru Games' Meta Quest game Asgard's Wrath stood out in a sea of first-person virtual reality combat games by mixing first-person hack & slash action with a host of powers inspired by Norse mythology. For Asgard's Wrath 2, the Meta-owned game studio sent its Norse heroes south, and set out to experiment with new mechanics that sell the power of godhood.

One such mechanic is a new feature called "Godscale perspective." It's a toggle where players switch from the first-person perspective of a warrior on the battlefield to the top-down perspective of a god hovering over the landscape. Objects become relatively smaller in this mode, meaning that a wall that blocked your progress is now a piece of wood you can pick up and move around. It brings the spirit of old "god games" like Black & White to the VR era.

Senior game producer Mari Kyle of Oculus Studios (Sanzaru Games' parent company) told Game Developer that developing Godscale was an ambitious goal from a technical and design perspective—even though giving players the point-of-view of a god feels great, the free agency they have to move around the space means that there's no room for error on a game running on the Meta Quest's hardware.

Here are some interesting lessons from making the perspective shift work in VR.

Given that Asgard's Wrath 2 is set in a massive open-world inspired by ancient Egypt (itself an impressive technical achievement given how early days it still is for VR), letting players ascend to Godscale perspective anywhere could take the fun out of the game. If you can escape from any problem by just floating up to the sky and dropping rocks on enemies, the game might feel mythological, but it would put a damper on the first-person combat.

That's why Kyle