How the Epic Scale of Skydance’s Behemoth Was Built on a Lapsed Love of Bouldering

Stood next to the lumpen foot of the Dreddstag – one of the titular giant bosses from Skydance’s Behemoth – my head reached, roughly, to the height of its toe. That’s how gargantuan the godlike enemies in this fantasy action-adventure VR game come. And yes, your job is to scale them. Those afraid of heights, try not to look down once you pass the kneecaps.

After attempting (and failing) to clamber up this particular antlered colossus at Gamescom 2024, we had the chance to speak with one of the leading minds behind its immense size. Game director Brian Murphy sat down with Restart to discuss the origins of Skydance’s Behemoth, how the team approached VR melee combat, and the creative expression of climbing.

Fittingly, Behemoth is a project of towering ambition for the team behind it. In the realm of VR, Skydance is best known for the intense and gruesomely intimate zombie slaying of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. But here, there’s no license to build from. Behemoth brings its own fantasy world, and a focus on a very different strength of virtual reality.

“Scale has always been something that’s really powerful in VR,” Murphy says. “So the idea started to float around of taking what’s great about Shadow of the Colossus and games like that where you’re fighting gigantic monsters. What would that feel like in VR? What would that spectacle be? And that really excited us.”

As influences go, Shadow of the Colossus is practically coded into Behemoth’s DNA. In the latter, you play the role of a warrior with deific poison in your blood. Flowing through your veins, it can grant bursts of inhuman strength or speed. Unfortunately, that comes with the cost of a steady decline to your mind and sanity. The only solution, it seems, is to traverse the Forsaken Lands, hunting these mighty creatures and claiming their powers as your own.

“We wanted to take the physicality and the visceral nature of our melee combat and pair it with a bigger spectacle and bigger set-piece narrative moments,” says Murphy. “Shadow of the Colossus was definitely a core reference point for us in terms of how we structure our boss fights and the sense of awe that you experience in that game. But we’re also looking to create a fuller world that is our own. So when you’re down in the snow and the mud of the Forsaken Lands, fighting with the marauders and the ferals, that kind of resonates more with The Walking Dead. That would be familiar for our original fans.”

Establishing a new world in VR is more challenging than you might imagine. While the medium is more immediately immersive, no one wants to be taken out of sword-clashing combat to have a 10-minute cutscene forced into their eyes. As a result, Skydance conceived some less conventional methods of conveying their narrative – both in-game and out. A standalone graphic novel sets the stage for the events of the game and its cast. And with the headset strapped on, players can take a more hands-on approach to history.

“Within the world we’ve created lore objects that are skulls,” explains Murphy. “It’s like Hamlet, except that you crush the skull – a great VR moment – and then the memories of the dead seep into your mind. This is really cool because it gives us an opportunity to flesh out everything. Suddenly that’s not just an old, dilapidated tower; there’s a story behind it. Not only do we want the combat to have weight. We want the world to have weight, too.”

When you’ve dedicated time to crafting a 1,000-year backstory, it may be tempting to ensure that players are forced to notice and engage with it. But to Murphy, letting go of that direct control is one of the most important lessons his team had to learn. Especially in VR, where hijacking a player’s viewpoint can prove particularly (sometimes nauseatingly) disruptive.

“The interesting challenge with VR – and this is true of a lot of a [first-person] videos games – is that we can’t guarantee you’re gonna be looking in the right direction when we do the awesome thing” Murphy says. “The challenge is not necessarily how we somehow force the player to see the cool thing. The challenge is an emotional one for us as creators where we say: ‘Let’s be comfortable with the player not looking in the right direction.’ Because when they see it, it will feel like it belongs to them.

“You can walk around and say: ‘Oh my god, the elk is right over the bend, and if I hadn’t looked right at that moment, I might have missed it!’ And it’s true, you might have missed it. But that’s how we make that elk, the whole scenario, feel real. If I had taken you out, set up a camera, and forced you to watch that really beautiful scene of an elk walking through the forest, that’s cool. But I think the promise of VR is that you’re there. You’re immersed. … They’ll see most of it, and the bits they miss? Hey, maybe that’s there for them next time.”

Thankfully, there’s little chance of missing Behemoth’s main baddies. Especially when, in the case of our dance with the Dreddstag, a significant amount of time was spent staring at thigh muscles while clinging on for dear (or perhaps deer) life. Climbing is every bit as integral to Skydance’s Behemoth as swinging an axe. But it’s also a system that brings its own challenges in virtual reality. In real life, climbing makes demands of your entire body, not just your arms. But Murphy believes that they’ve managed to bottle its essence by focusing on a different aspect: one he picked up through former days spent navigating bouldering walls.

“I always loved the fact that you can reinvent how a handhold works,” says Murphy. “How am I gonna do this? Can I hook my leg under here and then get over there? … That’s something that I definitely took from the bouldering gym: This notion that something as simple as a boulder can have multiple routes, and that it can be creative. That bouldering is a sport but it’s also a creative art – how am I going to use this combination of holds to get to wherever my destination is?”

That freedom of path-finding looks to extend to the game’s platforming and puzzle sections too. Our demo included a short opening sequence which utilized a grappling hook. We could make our way around a longer, safer path of platforms, or opt to swing precariously over an abyss, chaining together grappling points like an ax-wielding Spider-Man. We opted for the latter, managing it after two bungled attempts in what the team claimed was the fastest time they’d seen yet. (Praise we’re certain they offered to all players brave enough attempt the path.)

For all the mighty monsters Behemoth plans to send stomping our way, however, the smaller skirmishes matter just as much. Our play session featured a series of fights against more reasonably sized human foes. But combat with them was no less punishing than a fall off one of Behemoth’s mighty beasts. To excel, we had to match our pace to our character’s in-game equipment, blocking and swinging with careful timing to intercept or parry inbound strikes.

“Part of the secret sauce for us that makes us unique or stand out in the VR market is that we’re really interested in giving weight to our combat,” Murphy says. “In Saints & Sinners, one of my favorite moments from the series is actually one of the very earliest, where you take a screwdriver and drive it into the skull of a zombie. It gets stuck, and you’ve gotta yank it out. That physicality is interesting because it’s not completely one-to-one. Even if I can move my hand away, if the screwdriver is stuck in its skull, my [in-game] hand stays behind. In that way we allow the world to act upon the player’s hands and the player's moments, and that’s what gives it weight.

“When you hold the battleax [in Behemoth] with one hand, it’ll feel heavy and slow. And then you grip it with two hands and suddenly it begins to respond and feel like you can swing it. That’s kinda like how it would be in the real world. By putting limits on the player's actions and making the hand movement react to physics, we think that creates its own special sauce.”

Ferocious weapon waggling is not a path to success in Behemoth. At first, it felt jarring to find our real body out of step with our in-game actions. But as we slowed our pace and began to account for the heft of each weapon, we were rewarded with some seriously satisfying parries. Patience and precision were the keys to opening up windows for efficient and deadly counterattacks. And when all else failed, we could always activate that aforementioned super strength and punch our enemies’ heads clean from their shoulders.

For fans of VR gaming, Behemoth is an especially exciting prospect in a field that has been struggling for some time. With studio closures and Sony seemingly diverting minimal attention toward its PS VR2 headset, large-scale VR projects have become few and far between. Skydance’s Behemoth is one of a handful of major upcoming releases. But as a believer in the technology, Murphy isn’t concerned by the situation.

“As a creative person, I love working in VR because there’s still so much untapped opportunity in the medium,” says Murphy. “To be able to work at the scale that we’re working at on this project is a profound honor. I think it’s really exciting to be working on something big and ambitious in VR. And I do think there’s an audience out there that’s eager to enjoy it. It’s really cool that we were given the opportunity to build what is basically a pretty core gamer game and not shy away from that.

“We’ve had a lot of discussions regarding what is this experience going to be and how do we build the best version of it? We’ve been allowed to, every step of the way, build that version of the game. Rather than necessarily making things too easy or too hard in a way that may serve outside goals. I’m really excited about that, and I think there are a lot of VR players who are core gamers who are going to have an absolute blast with this game. I’m excited to see it in people’s hands."

Our thanks to Brian Murphy for taking the time to talk with us about his work on Skydance’s Behemoth.

Skydance's Behemoth

Release Date: December 5, 2024

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