Imagine this game in VR... (irreverant, fanciful thinking follows)

You stand in the middle of a group of soldiers. A Budget Cuts-style teleport system allows you to move around the map, or teleport over to the Heavy who just jetpacked over to the top of a nearby building. You open a little portal to the heavy, and stick your head through. Through the Heavy’s eyes, it looks like some crabmen up ahead of the main squad, so you deactivate the portal, click/tap the Assault guy next to you, and point him to cover up ahead. He reaches cover, then alerts with “Enemy Spotted”, so you pull out the portal, and switch to him.

First-person now, you can see two crabmen. You open your inventory by tapping on your (now Assault class armor’d) wrist, and pull out a grenade. A translucent Heads-up display in the soldier’s helmet shows you where the grenade will land, from a bird’s eye view, centered on the blast. You move your arm around, trying to find the perfect trajectory, but you can’t hit both, so you switch to Assault rifle. Pulling the rifle to your eye, you see a zoomed-in view of the crab men, electronics bleep and whirr as the sights give you information on the bodypart you are aiming at.

The target is behind indirect cover, so you lower the weapon, waiting for their idle animation to be a bit more favorable. At the right moment, you snap it back up, take aim, and fire. You drop one, and by luck do decent damage to the other. You don’t feel the need to be as precise for the next shot, but you’re out of AP, so you open your inventory, go to the Squad tab, select Heavy, Fire Weapon, and finally, point out the crab you need shot. From where you’re stood, a hail of fire from overhead finishes the second Pandoran.

I mean - it’s literally a thought I had, that I wanted to share, and would be a way, way down the line idea, but how cool would that be? Once things are settled, maybe as a single-map concept DLC, that people can toy around with, and feed back on, if they happen to have a Vive?

Even if it doesn’t happen, fun to think about!

Notes I thought while writing this:

  • When your soldier uses a jetpack, a blast helmet with a generous viewing port should enclose over the player, if in first-person. This will help prevent instant, torrential vomiting.
  • When moving around as commander, you can order soldiers around by pointing and yelling.
  • To issue move commands, you must come out of first-person. Because - the vomit.
  • Your portal should allow you to portal to soldiers under your command, and enemies that your soldiers can see. This will help players use and predict indirect cover more easily.
  • On the enemy turn, attacks against soldiers should show in a heads-up display, unless the player left themselves in first-person control of the soldier being attacked. In which case…
  • Getting mindfragged in first person should be so horrific you never accidentally leave yourself in first-person control at the end of your turn ever again.
  • When a soldier you’re in first-person control of dies, they should just ragdoll off you and leave you stood there, like their soul fell out.
  • The Geoscape could be a big, physical model, with tactical data being projected on to it, initially in a “fixer-upper” command room, that changes over time, due to story events.
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(I recognise this would require developing a robust speech-recognition engine that can identify all the callsigns from the game, and would therefore be mad to even attempt. But going “God DAMN it, Psylocke!” and having that callsign go “Sorry, sir.” would instantly make me like them more, and cause me to spend twenty minutes of every mission yelling at people.)

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