Siege of Heaven, the wave-based tower defense game mode in VR roguelite In Death: Unchained, will be released as a separate standalone game for Quest.
Superbright CEO Wojtek Podgorski made the announcement via Discord, saying the decision stems from a lack of visibility for Unchained's more accessible gameplay mode, a new potential revenue source to fund further game development, and allowing for game upgrades deemed too risky for Unchained.
More Accessible Gameplay
As Podgorski puts it:
The problem is that outside of our community, almost nobody on Quest knows Siege of Heaven exists. Because the main mode of Unchained is our flagship experience, all of the store presence is focused on that and the dark, intense setting and demanding controls can be intimidating for more casual VR players who would actually love Siege. Giving Siege of Heaven its own spot on the store lets us finally put it in front of those players.
Per Superbright, Siege of Heaven is played by forty percent of Unchained's players who have shared stories of putting friends and family into that gameplay mode to allow them to enjoy In Death's signature archery combat without enemies in close proximity and having to learn the teleport navigation. Siege of Heaven has a skill-based scoring system and the standalone game will have its own separate leaderboards, allowing veteran players to start fresh from the first season.
Harry Baker
Alternative Revenue Source
By this point, we hopefully should not have to recount the numerous job layoffs and studio closures that have been happening in the VR ecosystem over the last few years. Multiple studios have been seeking alternative sources of income to supplement lower VR revenue and fund new projects.
In his post, Podgorski says the IDU community has been requesting Superbright to release paid DLC or other means to continue supporting the studio:
There's one more big reason we're doing this, and it goes back to the messages you've been sending us. So many of you have asked us to release a paid DLC or give you some way to buy the game again just to support us and keep development going. As a smaller team, building a whole new DLC from scratch right now is a huge undertaking and we just don't have the manpower to do it.
Releasing Siege of Heaven as a standalone title is a realistic way for us to reach new players and help fund our ongoing work - and if you're one of the people who asked for a way to support us directly, picking up the standalone version (or grabbing it for a friend or family member who found the main game too intense) helps us out massively. And of course, if you'd rather just keep playing Siege inside In Death: Unchained as you always have, you don't need to buy a thing.
This isn't the first example of VR developers spinning off sections of their games into separate applications. The immersive putting mode in GOLF+ will get its own application soon. Combat Waffle Studios released Ghosts of Tabor: Legacy, a time-locked 2024 version of the popular extraction shooter, earlier this year. Soul Assembly also spun off Home Invasion, the mixed reality mode for co-op zombie shooter Drop Dead: The Cabin.
Mitigating Risks In Upgrades
Superbright did update some of In Death: Unchained after the Quest 3 launched, but Podgorski said some of the upgrades the team wanted to do were too risky for the full game:
Building it as a standalone app also let us make some upgrades under the hood that would have been impossible (or way too risky) to do inside the massive main In Death: Unchained build - most notably a new rendering setup with Mobile HDR for richer lighting and glow, a redesigned lobby menu, and new gameplay music.
The post does not clarify when Siege of Heaven expects to launch and at the time of this article, it is not listed on the Meta Horizon Store. We will keep an eye out.
