What Impact do VR Controllers Have on the Traditional Strategy Game Genre

With Virtual Reality (VR) technology becoming more accessible and popular, video games have been taking advantage of its uses. Racing games such as ‘Driveclub VR’, allows the player to have a higher level of interactivity than compared to their regular screen counterparts. This paper will investigate the impact VR technology can have on the Real Time Strategy (RTS) game genre.

This paper will give game developers who wish to develop a strategy game for VR, a list of recommendations that can help guide and influence their design process. The use of these recommendations will give the developer a template on how to create their VR strategy game, that has been guided by focus groups and research and will improve the quality of their control schemes and input mechanisms.

The project found that VR controllers can have an impact on the strategy game genre, but further development of the recommendations would be needed to see if they can be used in a fully developed game. Taking influence from various sources such as non-VR video games, VR Games/ Applications and tabletop games, a control scheme for VR games was created and made into a list of recommendations. The research into this found that participants design decisions were heavily influenced by Google Products such as Google Earth VR and Google Tilt Brush, this can be seen in the recommendations, especially when examining the recommendations for the UI. Other influence can be seen such as traditional strategy game style 3D spaces.