Author: Ian Hamilton / Source: VentureBeat
2018 is shaping up to be a big year for VR arcades and attractions, and a new player in the space is looking to find success with an approach that focuses on fun gameplay and multiplayer.
Cyprus-based Neurogaming is a joint endeavor made up of Wargaming — the publisher behind World of Tanks — and a venture funding group called VRTech.
They’ve got a development office in Moscow and two demo offices, the first in New York. Together, this group is developing a number of VR titles alongside cloud services and hardware packages designed so operators can easily set up and run their own VR arcades.Neurogaming invited me to the New York demo office among a small group of journalists to see what they’ve been working on ahead of a larger push at GDC next month. It is still early for the group, but they are focusing more heavily than other solutions I’ve seen on one critical aspect of an alluring VR attraction: hooking people to come back with a quality competitive gaming experience.
Here’s a look inside.
Fighting with Russians
I was navigating a tank over the bumpy terrain of a small village in the middle of a snowy winter when I first started noticing the Russian chatter. The three Neurogaming representatives playing with me were yelling to one another outside VR, and they were doing it in their native language. I suppose I’m revealing something of my prejudices here, but their chatter activated something in me. If you strip away all the VR tech, this simple human behavior had an incredible effect on my sense of immersion.
I was now driving that tank in the mindset of Rambo with some Russians to beat.Neurogaming said World of Tanks VR is built from the ground up for the medium, completely separate from the other versions of the game for mobile, console and PC. I believe it. I was a little lost at first but in a single play session of 10 minutes I got a good grasp on the controls and was playing much better by the end. The tanks are actually pretty nimble and as the match progressed it became clear how well they’ve balanced the size of the map against the number of players, the length of each round, and the challenge of both aiming and moving. After they are finished further balancing the game, Wargaming plans to release a version of it for home systems sometime early next year.
Simply put, when we finished the match I was disappointed it was over. I got to see my score at the end and while I wasn’t the worst…
The post Neurogaming’s World of Tanks VR attraction reminds us that arcades are social experiences appeared first on FeedBox.