Banners & Bastions Elevates Strategy To Three Dimensions

Banners & Bastions is certified Good VR.

Spatial constraints used by Banners & Bastions elevate strategy with VR.

Developers studied Bad North and Thronefall as well as the dome used in Airspace Defender and then made an experience that respects players in ways few games do in VR headsets.

“We had this idea of building this prototype and worked on it for three months and it turned out to be a lot of fun,” Sahand Malaei said on the Good VR podcast. “It was an experience that worked best in XR as opposed to its flat screen inspiration.”

Banners raise high above the battlefield so grabbing one to reposition troops still gives line of sight to the action below. As the battle progresses, with forces invading from different directions, getting a better angle on the action is a light gesture from the sides of the volume to rotate the board or simply lean in to see if the archers raising their bows to the sky have enough clearance to hit their targets reliably.

Banners & Bastions can and should share space with your physical reality as well as other minimalist works of mixed reality, like Thomas Van Bouwel’s Cubism, and the brilliance of its design challenges hardware manufacturers and operating system designers to rise to the occasion and make space for work like this to flourish as it should.