The popular Bandai anime is now a competitive multiplayer VR arcade game.
Japanese VR arcade, VR Zone Shinjuku, is only getting cooler. The immersive playground made headlines earlier this year with the release of Mario Kart GP VR, a custom Mario Kart VR experience that utilizes a driving rig with steering wheel and hand trackers, allowing you to physically throw items at friends. Combine that with the other 14 immersive experiences found within the 40,000 square foot facility and you have one impressive operation. But it seems they were only just getting started.
Bandai Namco has officially announced a brand new multiplayer VR experience tied to the Ghost In The Shell animated series set to release exclusively at the megacenter. Played within a designated 20m x 12m flat arena, Ghost in the Shell: Arise Stealth Hounds (damn that’s an awesome title!) pits two teams of four against one another in a futuristic firefight set within the turbulent Ghost In The Shell universe.
You’ll join bad-ass super soldier Motoko Kusanagi’s team, taking down your real-life buddies (or enemies) using massive firepower and an array of special abilities from optic camouflage, cyberbrain, prosthetic body and more.
You will strap on a custom-looking headset and what appears to be an MSI PC backpack. There are also several unique VR markers on the wrists, ankles, and hip to track your full-body motion that translates real-time capture data. Advanced room-scale tracking gives you complete control of your actions within the dedicated VR action and is capable of tracking even more complex movements such as ducking, jumping and running. Which is good, seeing as you’ll be doing a whole bunch of it.
Although real world players will be physically navigating an empty play space, in VR they’ll be shoulder-to-shoulder inside complex futuristic infrastructures. It’s there that they’ll need to lean, crouch and hide behind various digital obstacles in order to survive incoming fire and complete the objective. That’s what makes this particular VR PvP experience so unique. We’ve seen other services such as The Void provide similar services in terms of free-roaming multiplayer VR, but whereas many of these experiences are cooperative or single-player, Ghost in the Shell: Arise Stealth Hounds pits real players against one another.
It’s this type of gameplay that could open up a whole new chapter in competitive multiplayer shooters. The physicality and sensation of actually crawling underneath incoming fire or tapping your allies shoulder as you move to new cover in a VR experience is something many of us dreamed up as kids, and still do today. Even though this new Ghost In The Shell experience could very well just be a stepping stone in that direction, it’s an exciting one at that.
Ghost in the Shell: Arise Stealth Hounds will be available exclusively at VR Zone Shinjuku December 9th. You can head to their official site to register for tickets today.