Crackdown, Realtime Worlds’ open-world gang take-down game for Xbox 360, was the biggest inspiration behind Gravity Rush, SCE Japan Studio’s upcoming original IP for PlayStation Vita.
“The game I was most influenced by was Crackdown,” said game director Keiichiro Toyama during an interview with the PlayStation Blog. “I really liked the aspect of unlocking skills and becoming more powerful, and achieving a higher level of freedom as you become more powerful. Plus the open-world setting. I enjoyed moving in that game.”
But the open-world setting wasn’t there from the beginning, he said.
“We took a lot of different approaches. I requested not just falling vertically, but also horizontally. And we thought that an open world works better with that. This world is based in gravity, so it matches that the level becomes big not just vertically, but horizontally as well, so you can fall and travel in any direction.”
Toyama also touched upon the switch from PlayStation 3 to Vita.
“Originally, we were making the game for PS3. We came across PS Vita along the way. We played around with it, and thought it was perfect for the game, and so we switched to PS Vita.”
Stay tuned. We’ll have our own Gravity Rush interview posted within the coming weeks.