Category: fallout 4

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‘Skyrim VR’ vs. ‘Fallout 4 VR’ – The Best Bethesda RPG in VR

Bethesda’s recent flatscreen-to-VR ports, Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR, face a few common challenges in terms of immersion. Neither are perfect, but at this point in time, both games represent something VR users haven’t had yet: vast and rich open-world adventures that offer a high degree of customization and replayability—so called real AAA VR games. Here I’m going to attempt to break down Bethesda’s flagship VR games into some more identifiable parts so we can see who comes out on top: food for thought for the PC VR gamer who is on the fence between the pair.

Also See Our Reviews

Fallout 4 VR Review – Released December 11, 2017

Skyrim VR for PC Review – Released April 2, 2018

VR Support

Winner: Skyrim VR

Photo by Road to VR

At the launch of Fallout 4 VR—for whatever reason—Bethesda didn’t support Oculus Rift natively, something that was remedied on launch of Skyrim VR. Even up until today though, the company hasn’t added the Oculus Rift badge to its list of supported platforms on Fallout 4 VR, leaving it in a grey area. Yes, it technically works thanks to OpenVR, but you’ll actually have to map the Touch buttons yourself by going into a beta branch of SteamVR and opting into the “openvr-inputemulator-temporary – Temporary branch”. So out-of-the-box VR support for all SteamVR-compatible headsets isn’t perfect on Fallout 4 VR.

VR Optimization & Mods

Winner: Skyrim VR

Fallout 4 VR has undergone two major patches since release, and while it’s gotten much better in terms of VR optimization since launch, it still has its limitations. Let’s face it, it’s a modern game built on an engine that was shoehorned into VR and not built from the ground up with VR support in mind. The short of it: you’ll probably have to futz with settings and .ini files to get it exactly right on your system. An NVIDIA GTX 1070, which is widely accepted as the median ‘VR Ready’ GPU, is the bare minimum you should have when playing Fallout 4 VR, making it not only less accessible, but less stable as a VR game in general.

As an older title that was first brought to the lower-spec PSVR headset, Skyrim VR works phenomenally well on lower-end VR Ready GPUs, and rarely causes those immersion-breaking moments of popping textures, blurriness, and short render distances that you still see in Fallout 4 VR to date.

Not to mention Skyrim’s many texture and weather mods that can give the aging title a serious facelift. With Skyrim VR being so computationally cheap when compared to Fallout 4 VR, you can afford to toss on pretty much as many non-UI changing mods as you damn well please (this guy threw on 285). The winner here is clear.

Role-playing Experience

Winner: Skyrim VR

Being able to choose how the story unfolds is a large part of what makes modern RPGs great. Having the ability to select your path can make the difference between being swept up in a story, and being swept along in the story, and in that respect not all RPGs are created equal.

I’m at first tempted to say Fallout 4 VR outdoes Skyrim VR in pure choice thanks to its multiple endings, which provides a slightly different terminus to the adventure. But that doesn’t mean Fallout 4 VR offers a better role-playing experience in VR just because you can get to the end in a few different ways.

image courtesy Fallout 4 Wiki

As a voiced protagonist in Fallout 4, you’re not given the freedom to define your own role and build upon the character’s lore. Instead of having the ability to choose which response is right for you word-for-word, like in Skyrim and older games in the Fallout franchise, in Fallout 4 your responses are bland, and voiced by someone else. This essentially tasks you with piloting another, fully fleshed-out person instead of filling in the gaps yourself, which is weird in VR when the voice coming out of your head is someone else’s.

In Skyrim, the world’s lore is rich enough to provide you with all the information you need to construct your own personality, be it a Nord stealth archer abandoned at birth and forced into imperial service in Cyrodiil before landing on the scene as a deserter, or the daughter of a mage family that was blackballed from every major magic college in Tamriel except Winterhold in Skyrim. You have that freedom; it’s not just a male/female selection screen with a few avatar sliders that defines you.

While Skyrim’s end goal is more simplistic than Fallout 4’s for sure, I found it left an appropriate ‘RPG gap’ for me to fill in myself. As a developer, you can choose to close those gaps for a variety of reasons and still have a great game, but just not as great of a role-playing experience.

Leveling Up

Winner: Skyrim VR

Gaining new abilities and growing stronger is a core element of what makes Bethesda’s RPGs fun. What should be a gradual increase in natural skill acquisition ultimately becomes an exponential increase in your ability to do interesting stuff. In both games, you’re rewarded with points you can spend on special abilities, and although a few years older, I found Skyrim’s perk/skill acquisition system much more natural: you simply have to engage in your chosen activity to get ‘better’ at it.

Perk Chart from ‘Fallout 4’

In Fallout 4, you’re given a simplified Perk chart featuring selections in Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. You can basically choose whichever skill you want provided you’ve put the points into your ability first and have the required level. This, essentially, means you can upgrade a skill you’ve never used.

image courtesy Nexus Mods

In Skyrim, the time doing something you actually like doing directly translates into better skills in that area, and because it’s a ‘perk tree’, choosing correctly is salient to forming a unique character with unique abilities (unless you go hog-wild and spend an ungodly amount of time maxing everything). Main criticisms of this system are that it’s not flexible enough and you have to spend too much time grinding for secondary skills like blacksmithing or enchanting, taking away from the more primary abilities like Destruction, Armor or Lock Picking. Both systems appeal to different playing styles, but Skyrim’s way of letting you progress in levels is decidedly more conducive to natural gameplay in VR.

User Interface

Winner: Fallout 4 VR

Both games are menu-heavy experiences, a design trope that unfortunately feels like an unnatural relic in VR. But Fallout 4 really has something going for it that Skyrim VR just doesn’t: the Pipboy.

Pipboy in VR | Photo courtesy Bethesda

It, as far as user interfaces go, is a golden gift to the VR version of Fallout 4. You can lift up your arm and fiddle through settings just like you’d expect to if you were magically thrown into the Wasteland. Skyrim VR is virtually unchanged from the flatscreen version UI-wise, making it second place by a long shot, given the way that the same old menus from the flat version just pop up and float in front of you.

Combat

Winner: Fallout 4 VR

Neither combat systems are perfect; you can’t naturally sheath/holster or draw a weapon, and there’s zero hand presence to speak of. That said, Fallout 4 VR has a distinct advantage over Skyrim VR thanks to its gun-heavy combat system.

When appropriately outfitted with glow-sights and scopes (which now work, although at launch they didn’t), you can play the game basically as it was intended. VATS, the slow-mo targeting mechanic, is also something that works really excruciatingly well in VR. Giving you time to line up shots and feeling the thrill of accurately dispatching several enemies in one go is really satisfying.

image courtesy Fallout Wikia 

Skyrim VR on the other hand offers some fun in the magic and bow-shooting department, but falls flat on its face when it comes to melee combat. No matter how hard you try, it’s nearly impossible to shake the omnipresent feeling that the 20 pound broadsword you’re carrying is really just a balloon animal that you can waggle back and forth to magically do damage to enemies.

‘Wow’ Effect

Winner: Skyrim VR

I’ll fully admit this this a matter of taste, and not based on anything objective in the slightest (we’re all different, right?), but this bears mentioning. Trekking over a mountain pass to solo-fight your first dragon is without a doubt one of the most exhilarating (and terrifying) moments I’ve had in VR gaming to date. There’s a lot of variety in the world of Tamriel, and as a result Skyrim VR is packed with those sorts of moments when you look around to say “wow, that’s pretty,” or “wow, that’s terrifying,” or “wow, that’s scary.” Skyrim VR is full of “wow.”

Image courtesy Bethesda

Fallout 4 VR is mostly a grey, drab and dirty world, and that aesthetic personally doesn’t lend itself to those breathtaking moments of pure awe. There are of course moments when you drop in on a Mutant running with those terrifying nuclear suicide bombs, or look out over the Wasteland from a Brotherhood of Steel airship, but I felt like those were too few and far between.

– – — – –

The Verdict

If you’ve been keeping count, then you’ve seen that Skyrim VR has taken a majority of the categories, so by now my personal verdict is probably obvious. Here’s a quick recap of the talking points:

Skyrim VR leaves more of a ‘gap’ for pure RPG’ers thanks to an immersive lore, is better optimized for lower-end systems, has a better overhead for all sorts of mods, a more natural skill leveling system, and a clear ‘wow’ effect (at least for me). Despite offering magic and bow-shooting, combat takes a hit by being largely melee-based, and UI is a straight port from the flatscreen version making a menu-heavy system worse.

Fallout 4 VR offers a rich and vast world that sacrifices pure role-playing immersion for a definitive story, has a less natural (but more flexible) leveling system, good combat thanks to guns and VATS, and a more natural UI thanks to the Pipboy. Shaky VR optimization keeps it out of the hands of some VR players though, leaving less graphical overhead for the more fun additive mods.

The post ‘Skyrim VR’ vs. ‘Fallout 4 VR’ – The Best Bethesda RPG in VR appeared first on Road to VR.

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VR Sale mit Spitzentiteln und satten Rabatten bei Humble Bundle

Im Humble Store gibt es derzeit einige Schnäppchen für Virtual Reality Nerds zu ergattern. Aktuell winken Rabatte mit bis zu 60% auf echte VR Highlights wie beispielsweise Fallout 4 VR, Raw Data, Gorn und Doom VFR.

VR Sale mit satten Rabatten

Der aktuelle Sale im Humble Store bietet so viele hochkarätige Titel, dass es uns schwer fällt, eine Vorauswahl für euch zu treffen. Dennoch haben wir die Titel markiert, die wir uns an eurer Stelle definitiv genauer anschauen würden:

Wenn ihr also nach einer guten Gelegenheit gesucht habt, um euren Pile of Shame aufzuwerten, dann ist jetzt ein guter Zeitpunkt dafür. Einige Spiele im Sale setzen jedoch auf Multiplayer-Battle und dementsprechend solltet ihr vorher checken, ob das Spiel eine gesunde Community besitzt. Hierzu könnt ihr die Steam Charts zurate ziehen, welche euch beispielsweise zeigen, dass Skyfront nur von wenigen Menschen online gespielt wird und man sich deshalb den Kauf überlegen sollte, auch wenn das Konzept überzeugt.

Der Beitrag VR Sale mit Spitzentiteln und satten Rabatten bei Humble Bundle zuerst gesehen auf VR∙Nerds. VR·Nerds am Werk!

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‘Fallout 4 VR’ Review – A Radioactive Open World Mutated for VR

Fallout 4 (2015), Bethesda’s beloved post-apocalyptic open world RPG, is now in VR, letting you stalk the Wasteland as the sole survivor of Vault 111 from the immersive point of view of the HTC Vive headset. This comes with most of the important trimmings and trappings of the original; a seemingly endless number of interesting and varied quests, multiple causes to join, base building, and plenty of guns and armor to scrounge. Fallout 4 VR successfully provides all these things along with the promise of holding a gun in your own hand, but fractures somewhat as it mutates from its native 16:9 aspect ratio to the new land of VR.

Fallout 4 VR Details:

Official Site

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher:  Bethesda Softworks
Available On: HTC Vive (Steam)
Reviewed On: HTC Vive, Tested on Rift (see note below)
Release Date: December 11th, 2017

Note: I have over 70 hours logged in the PC version of ‘Fallout 4’, but I’m attempting to set aside my personal affection for the non-VR version to put ‘Fallout 4 VR’ on the same plane as any other modern made-for-VR game.

Gameplay

If you’ve already played the PC or console version of the game, you’re probably looking forward to experiencing the world you know so well in the most immersive format available. If you haven’t, then your impression of the game will be entirely based on this version. It won’t be a ‘VR port’ to you, but rather a native VR game judged on its own merits.

As an action RPG, you’ll have to fill out your stats first to push you in the desired direction you want to pursue: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. You can grow these areas using the associated abilities and by spending XP to make them even stronger, which in turn gets you ‘Perks’ that can unlock abilities like master-level gunsmithing, better accuracy when shooting, master lockpicking, etc. It’s really a fun system that lets you play the game you want to just by being that person and by pursuing the sort of gameplay and abilities that you want to specialize in.

‘Fallout 4’ Perk Chart

Like Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR underperforms in a few areas specific to the VR medium while at the same time drastically outperforming many of its VR contemporaries thanks to the game’s overwhelming size, variability of quests, numerous AI, and gameplay length. Now for something you haven’t heard a zillion times before: the nuts and bolts of VR gameplay.

Fallout 4 VR’s default teleporting locomotion scheme can be pretty tedious when moving around the Wasteland overworld. Although I found its precision much more useful when moving around a building’s interior during dungeon clearing, I still opted for the free locomotion option in the end. If you stick with the default teleport scheme, you’ll quickly find out that long teleports will drain your action points (AP) which are useful to have when you engage V.A.T.S., the game’s bullet-time mode. The AP drain is true for running at top speed in free locomotion mode too, so both locomotion styles end up offering an AP cost for faster movement. You can technically do as many ‘close’ teleports as you want, as there’s no cool down period because of the lack of AP cost, making teleportation the fastest way to travel across the Commonwealth (besides actual fast travel, that is). That’s a lot of trigger presses though.

Head Controller-relative free locomotion is the only other option. Snap-turning is an available option, but most Vive-owners are probably capable of hosting a full 360 setup (unlike stock Rift-players), so while it’s a welcome addition, some users simply won’t want or need snap-turning. I’ll speak more about locomotion in the ‘Comfort’ section below.

SEE ALSO
'Skyrim VR' Review – The Other Side of the Immersion Equation

If you haven’t heard yet, Fallout 4 is mostly about wielding guns, although there are some melee weapons like machetes, baseball bats, bayonets, and (my favorite) Grognak’s axe. It’s safe to say then, if Fallout 4 VR can’t nail the shooting aspect, it’s failed in a pretty big department. Shooting is mostly a positive experience, although there are some hitches.

On my way through the world, my first gun was a 10mm pistol. Upon picking it up, I was happy to see the developers didn’t paste in an omnipresent laser pointer aimer, which always cheapens the shooting experience for me. That’s a big plus. While at close range, using a gun’s iron sights isn’t really an issue either, but the game’s occasional drabness demands at very least a glowing site so you can get a good sight picture in low light conditions. Thankfully, the base game is the gold standard of gun modding, letting you alter every gun you come across to make it stronger, take larger magazines, change sights etc. The VR version is slightly less effective in this regard though for one reason currently.

While a glowing iron sight made the shooting experience much easier, to my ultimate dismay I found that optical scopes simply don’t work. You can construct them, attach them, collect them, find guns sporting them, but when you try to use a gun outfitted with a scope, you’ll be presented with a dead, matte surface where you should be seeing a zoomed-in view of the world.

Reaching out to Bethesda, I was told usable scopes would come in a later update, but wouldn’t be available at launch. Reflex sights, the type of device that gives you a floating cross-hairs, work just fine though (hmph).

Otherwise, I’d say the game’s shooting experience is hampered by the lack of two-handed weapons, the lack of intuitive holstering mechanic, and a few comically-scaled guns. On the flip side, despite knowing two-handed weapons will never quite feel real with a dual-controller setup (not Fallout 4 VR‘s fault), the effect of shooting two of the game’s justifiably large weapons—the Fat Man tactical nuke launcher and the 5mm Minigun—was exactly as I predicted: pretty fucking awesome. Those certainly don’t make up for one of the most important gun mods being broken at launch, but you certainly can’t argue with being able to pistol-whip enemies in the face when they get too close.

V.A.T.S in VR | Photo courtesy Bethesda

My most favorite moments in Fallout 4 VR is battling two of the world’s medium-to-large menaces; nuclear football-wielding Mutants, and Deathclaws, the scaly behemoths that pop out of the ground to cause havoc. These hulking tank-beasts will make you practically drop your controller in fright as you try to run away, engage V.A.T.S., and cycle through your Pip-Boy hoping to find your highest-powered weapon that you forgot to favorite on your quick inventory list. There are larger baddies to battle, but those are usually boss-level fights that only happen every so often.

I don’t do companions besides Dogmeat, my mostly non-judgmental doggy pal. There are a number of companions available to befriend (and use as pack mules) though, but I find they get in the way more than anything. You can go it alone, or with any number of Wastelanders to make attacks a little less lonesome. Seeing these companions in real life was a bit jarring at first; from the whole new POV of a VR headset, the artificiality of the game’s NPCs comes to light—but I talk about this more in the ‘Immersion’ section below.

In any case, difficulty levels are variable, and can be changed on the fly during gameplay, making it as easy or as hard as you like at a moment’s notice.

It’s hard to beat getting a chance to walk around the more densely-packed areas like Diamond City either, which feel appropriately sized and filled with enough quests to satisfy several hours of losing yourself to the game. Yes. Side quests are abundant, but even the primary quest line will require tens of hours to complete—a main attraction to the game for sure. If you can overlook some of the less immersive bits (detailed below) you’ll find Fallout 4 VR mostly delivers on its job of plugging you into the Commonwealth.

A note about Rift support in Fallout 4 VR: As it is now, you can technically play the game on Rift (thanks to its inherent compatibility with SteamVR), but buttons aren’t appropriately mapped to make browsing in-game menus easy, or to make locomotion simple. Most interactions are based on touchpad swipes, which translate poorly to Rift’s thumbsticks. The game can be run on the Rift, but Bethesda doesn’t officially recommend it at this time.

Immersion

Even though you’re carrying a trusty map, genuinely massive games have a way of letting you figuratively lose yourself in the fabric of the story as its elements are strewn across an open world. Making your way into new territory for the first time can be a harrowing event, fraught with Ghouls, Mutants, and Raiders looking for blood. While the acute anxiety fades as you obtain higher levels, having a place as richly detailed as the Wasteland in VR is a major boon to immersion (despite the few ways it’s stretched to fit VR), if only for the fact that there’s always a challenge ahead, or a mystery around the corner to uncover.

While the game is both interesting and massive, I wouldn’t call any of the actual interactions within the world particularity immersive. That may be a harsh assessment, but as a two-year old game originally targeting flat screens, it feels too simplistic in some areas that a made-for-VR title would either do better, or avoid altogether.

Since you don’t have actual hands, which are replaced with floating controllers, hand presence is effectively null. This isn’t really a terrible thing, but the lack of meaningful object interaction in a world full of lootable buildings is. You won’t get a chance to do some of the things common to native VR games like manually inject a stimpack, physically reload a gun, or even pet a certain German Shepard (and tell him he’s a GOODBOYE). There simply isn’t any real object interaction to be had, as talking, eating, looting, and commanding your companion to do an action is all done through a single emotionless button press, often from a 2D menu. This may be convenient, but it isn’t really immersive.

Creating an inventory system for VR isn’t an easy thing either—nor is adapting one from an inherently menu-based game. Because a physical backpack full of 300 items wouldn’t exactly be practical, Fallout 4 VR definitely gets a break when it borrows a majority of its UI from the flatscreen version for its more utilitarian purposes. It does make a few VR-specific overtures when it can so as not to be entirely choked with floating 2D windows, but you’ll find those are pretty few in number.

Floating status bars aren’t really the most elegant of solutions for VR. There, I said it. Usually a developer would tailor the guns to give you some sort of indication that bullets were running out, or attach the counter directly to the gun so it doesn’t limit the field of view any more than it has to, but the blaring HP/AP bar and the ammo counter combined with the barrage of on-screen commands (looting, talking to NPCs, etc,) take away from the experience by being front and center most of the time. While navigation is neatly tucked away below your line-of-sight, everything else demands your immediate attention. It seems like a cheap fix to what rightly should have been overhauled entirely for VR.

The Pip-Boy arm computer tries to make up for all this PC-to-VR port-ness by being right there on your wrist, ready to flip through in a moment’s notice, enlarging somewhat as you bring it up to view. I liked using the Pip-Boy because it’s really the only place a 2D UI element makes sense. If you get tired of raising your wrist, you can make it function as a regular menu, although you’d be missing out.

Pipboy in VR | Photo courtesy Bethesda

Another big factor in immersion is the game’s NPCs and how you interact with them. NPCs move their heads and eyes to follow you as you move about the room during dialogue, but you won’t see anything like subtle reactions of getting too close, or any variable dialogue outside the game’s strict dialogue tree. Because VR is more immersive than traditional monitors, these things stick out more.

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I know we don’t live in a time where perfectly realistic NPC characters are actually possible—but if the NPC interactions we see in Lone Echo (2017) are the best we can manage right now, Fallout 4 VR is showing its age.

On the more positive side of things, base building really helps the game feel more like ‘home’, and works really well in VR. Perusing a carousel of 3D objects on your left controller and placing them in the world just feels right. Once I was sufficiently impressed with my base, I set up a chair on the top of the Red Rocket station, turned on the radio and kicked back to watch the sun go down. It’s honestly what VR is all about.

Like its non-VR forbearer, there aren’t many display options to turn up the visual quality of the game. Bethesda’s minimum requirements says you should be running at very least an Intel Core i5-4590 or AMD FX 8350, 8GB RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 / AMD RX Vega 56 GPU. The recommended spec specifies an Intel Core i7-6700K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 / AMD RX Vega 64 GPU.

My Exemplar 2 system meets those recommended specs, so while your mileage may vary, I found the game’s visual detail to be pretty incredible considering it’s supposed to run at or above 90 fps. NPCs don’t appear significantly worse than the flatscreen version, textures seem high enough quality, and draw distance seemed to be impressively far. The odd radioactive storm and night/day cycles really tie it all together nicely.

Comfort

As always, teleporation is one of the most comfortable locomotion options outside of natural room-scale walking. Even the controller-relative forward motion is good enough to be called comfortable though, thanks to an adjustable ‘comfort vignette’ that reduces your FOV while moving to keep you comfortable. You can of course turn this off to get the full FOV while moving.

Snap-turning is also adjustable, allowing you to pick the angle and type of transition; instant or ‘smooth’, the latter of which tosses in a few frames to better blend the normally jarring snapping transition. There is no smooth-turning to speak of though.

There’s no seated option in the game, which is a shame. When I play longer games, I tend to stand up for the first hour or so, but then naturally sit down to give my feeble, lazy legs a rest. If you are physically seated, you’ll be continuously ‘crouching’ in the world with no practical fix.

Update 5:00 PM ET: It appears I mistook the controller-relative free locomotion for head-relative, which would explain some of the strangeness I initially perceived.

We partnered with AVA Direct to create the Exemplar 2 Ultimate, our high-end VR hardware reference point against which we perform our tests and reviews. Exemplar 2 is designed to push virtual reality experiences above and beyond what’s possible with systems built to lesser recommended VR specifications.

The post ‘Fallout 4 VR’ Review – A Radioactive Open World Mutated for VR appeared first on Road to VR.

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Why I’m So Excited For Fallout 4 VR’s Settlement Building

Why I’m So Excited For Fallout 4 VR’s Settlement Building

Everyone seems to love Fallout for different reasons. The old-school gamers love the first two games for their excellent top-down tactical combat and intense sense of brutality in the world, while modern fans drool over the vast apocalyptic landscapes and tense firefights of the most recent releases. For me, I always enjoy the little things that helped make me feel like a part of the world. And in Fallout 4 (and soon Fallout 4 VR), the best example of that intention was the Settlement Building system.

Games like Skyrim VR let you buy houses or even build houses by purchasing pre-made pieces, kind of like following the instructions on a Lego set, but in Fallout 4 VR you can break everything down to its core pieces and create things from scratch. And we can’t wait to do it all over again in VR.

Sense of Ownership

When you’re standing in a new VR experience the first thing most people do is turn their head from side-to-side and look around. It’s almost like a test to make sure that everything is rendered correctly and the tracking works. Then after a quick glance around, we look down at our hands.

Since you can’t really pinch yourself in VR to make sure you’re not dreaming, or spin a top a la Inception, you can at least verify that you have control over your hands and body movement. That’s usually enough to sell the experience, but Fallout 4 VR has the potential to go a few steps further.

The problem with digital virtual worlds like Fallout 4 VR, Skyrim VR, or even the hyper-interactive Job Simulator, is that you are always going to feel like you’re just visiting a place. You didn’t build the house or decide to put the toaster on that counter, so every interaction you have feels like it was planned by someone else. But in the case of Fallout 4 VR and its dense Settlement Building system, now I’m in control of things.

I can tear down my house if I don’t like it and rebuilt it from scratch. I can turn on or off the lights and rearrange my furniture however I please. Nothing is nailed down (well okay maybe a few things are) in the world of Fallout 4 VR and having that sense of true ownership and agency is going to be incredibly powerful.

Intricate Interactions

The best parts of any VR experience are the moments of subtle, sometimes intricate, interaction. Picking up a cup of coffee and pouring it down your throat in Job Simulator, reloading a gun by ejecting the magazine in Onward, or blocking an arrow and shield bashing an enemy in Skyrim VR.

Moments like that where you don’t need to think so much about which button to press or how to hold the controller and instead you forget the controller is even there and simply do what you’d do in real life and the expected result happens in the VR world around you. It’s a great feeling and it’s precisely why settlement building in Fallout 4 VR is going to be so amazing.

Granted, we haven’t actually tried the settlement building features in any of our VR demos yet, but we can make some assumptions based on video footage we’ve seen. Things like picking up items in the world and freely moving them around definitely appear to be working and that alone will make the world feel all the more alive.

Establishing Presence

And all of that adds up to the ultimate goal of any VR app: establishing a sense of presence. VR developers want players to forget that they’re wearing HMDs on their face and holding hunks of plastic in their hands. They want us to feel truly immersed in the digital space around us — and there are plenty of amazing spaces to visit.

Bethesda’s games have always evoked a strong sense of cohesion and immersion even outside of VR, so it follows that they’d only be even more immersive once inside of a VR headset. So if Bethesda can do everything it needs to in order to make Fallout 4 VR as great as it an be and polish out all of the rough edges, this could be the system-seller the HTC Vive (and VR in general) has been waiting for.

Learning from the runaway success of Skyrim VR on PSVR isn’t hurting either.

Fallout 4 VR releases for the HTC Vive next week on December 12th, 2017. You can pre-order it right now on Steam for $59.99. And don’t forget to read our in-depth interview with Pete Hines about Bethesda’s approach to VR this year. Let us know what you think of the potential of settlement building in Fallout 4 VR down in the comments below!

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Bethesda Gives a Peek into ‘Fallout 4 VR’ in Crash Course Intro to Game Mechanics

In preparation for Fallout 4 VR’s upcoming December 12th launch on HTC Vive, Bethesda takes us through our paces with an intro to the game’s control scheme, base building mechanic, and V.A.T.S. focused combat, giving us a quick preview of what to expect next week.

Presented by Bethesda Community Manager Jessica Finster and Fallout 4 VR Lead Producer Andrew Scharf, the video shows the two main locomotion options: teleportation (which uses action points), and what Bethesda calls ‘direct movement’, otherwise known as smooth locomotion. ‘Direct movement’ mode allows both walking and sprinting in any direction simply by pressing down on the left controller’s touchpad in the desired direction.

When using the snap-turn function, which is ideal for front-facing setups, Finster commented “it seems like there’s movement for everyone,” likely alluding to the Rift’s standard tracking configuration.

Fallout 4 VR makes heavy use of the original’s 2D UI menu system

While Scharf didn’t mention any other comfort modes outside of teleportation and snap-turning, a ‘comfort vignette’ mode can be seen while Finster browses the game’s 2D menus, which could provide a sort of HUD to help keep players feeling more grounded, like you might feel in a cockpit.

Arguably one of the most natural fits for the PC-to-VR port is the game’s Pip-Boy wrist-mounted computer, which lets you flip through its various menus on the fly just like you would if you were really in the Wasteland. Finster admits using it might get tiring though, which prompts Scharf to explain that the Pip-Boy menu can be locked to the user’s point of view so you don’t have to raise your wrist to traverse the games settings. The selection in the menu can also be seen in the image above.

Pip-Boy in VR | Photo courtesy Bethesda

Workshop mode, which lets you build out your base, is shown in the video to be slightly more ‘VR-native’ as well. Presented with a carousel of items to choose from featuring 3D representations of the object, it looks like a nice break from the game’s flatter 2D UI.

image courtesy Bethesda

One thing we haven’t seen until now is the ability to pistol whip baddies if they get too close. Not being able to affect bad guys when they’re too close is definitely an immersion-breaker, so it’s great to see the game will allow you to flail wildly when you’re out of bullets and AP and still fend off the Feral Ghouls.

Lastly, the video shows a little of what Power Armor is like, where Scharf explains that stepping into the armor “scales you up” so you actually feel larger in the world.

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'Fallout 4 VR' Now Comes Free With Purchase of HTC Vive

It’s still uncertain how Bethesda is going to handle Rift support, if the recent release of the company’s latest title Doom VFR tells us anything, Rift support will likely be available despite no mention by the company—something you can chalk up to bad blood over the $4 billion intellectual property dispute involving Bethesda’s parent company ZeniMax and Oculus’ parent company Facebook.

Despite there being no Rift support at the launch of Doom VFR, the game was patched by Valve within hours of release, leading many to eschew the opinion that Bethesda specifically excluded Rift support for its game. It’s still uncertain if it was intentional or not, but we’ll be keeping our eyes on the Fallout 4 VR as it releases next Tuesday to report what unfolds.

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‘Fallout 4 VR’ Now Comes Free With Purchase of HTC Vive

HTC today announced a new Vive hardware bundle featuring a free copy of Bethesda’s upcoming Fallout 4 VR, a VR port of the entire game that lets you haunt the Wasteland like never before.

Customers who purchase an HTC Vive starting today will now receive a free redemption code well ahead of Fallout 4 VR’s December 12th launch. Currently available for pre-order through Steam, the new Vive bundle represents a $60 savings.

The company currently offers a $600 bundle which includes the Vive headset, two wireless controllers, two base stations, link box, earbuds, and Vive accessories.

HTC says existing Vive customers who purchase Fallout 4 VR will also get a bit of a consolation prize with a free 3-month Viveport subscription, available prior to the game’s launch. Much like premium video services like Netflix, the subscription service lets you play any number of Viveport’s 250 games and experiences.

According to a Steam survey, HTC Vive still holds a majority marketshare of the VR headsets in operation on Steam platform, although Oculus’ Summer of Rift Sale, which saw the Rift + Touch bundle slashed to just $400, has put a significant dent in the company’s overall marketplace supremacy. A bundle featuring one of a most-anticipated VR games in recent history could be instrumental in attracting new customers.

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Fallout 4 VR Needs A Lot Of Polish To Really Succeed

Hands-On: Fallout 4 VR Needs A Lot Of Polish To Succeed

Fallout 4 VR’s release date (December 12th on HTC Vive) is fast approaching. We first got our hands-on the game all the way back at E3 2016 when it was first announced, played it again at E3 2017, then again at QuakeCon, and in September we tried it once more at the Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC). The downside is that all of these sessions (except the now-ancient 2016 demo) have all been with the same dated build. The version I played most recently is the same one that was on display three months ago, so the game that actually releases this month should be a good deal more polished than what we’ve seen thus far. So let me restate that: I’ve been told the build I played is very dated and the final game will be a lot more polished. That is, it really needs to be more polished if it wants any chance of success.

People that play Bethesda games are used to bugs. It’s a long-running joke that their games are so large, so ambitious, and so detailed that it’s impossible for them to weed out every bug in the development process. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Fallout 4 are all prime examples. As a result, ideally, the team has done a lot of work to make sure the port of Fallout 4 to VR runs well and is as bug-free as possible.

From what I’ve seen it’s totally possible and fans of detailed, massive, immersive RPGs should absolutely still be excited.

In my demo everything started out at the iconic Red Rocket station between Sanctuary and Concord. After a minute of me getting my bearings, figuring out the controls again, and getting acquainted with the world, that’s when combat started. Feral ghouls and a traveling band of mercenaries made their way over the hill and descended upon me. Using the right trackpad I could bring up a weapon wheel to switch weapons, or look down at my left wrist to search through my Pip Boy-powered inventory in real-time.

When you play the non-VR version of the game bringing up the Pip Boy interface freezes the game and sucks up your entire screen space, but in VR it feels like just another part of the world and the rest of the game keeps moving around you. I’d love to see players actually fashion their Vive controllers into wearable Pip Boys in the image of the wondrous Collector’s Edition that released back for the game’s launch.

After I looked at my left wrist I could explore the entire interface of the Pip Boy using the left trackpad. It felt a bit awkward at first because I wasn’t used to that in a Fallout game, but quickly it started to make sense. The biggest barrier to mass adoption of a game like this is really going to be the controls.

Looting corpses is done by looking and pointing with the right controller and then navigating a floating menu with the trackpad. If you move away then the loot menu disappears. The same goes for the Pip Boy: look away or move your arm away, then you’re no longer using the Pip Boy. Everything is contextual, but even the act of switching weapons with the trackpad felt a bit stiff at first.

Notably, combat felt a lot more intense in VR than it does when playing the non-VR version. Generally speaking everything is more visceral from the confines of a VR headset, but now being able to do a side-by-side comparison of the same game really makes that more clear. Although, interestingly, despite the increased intensity I also felt more powerful. Bethesda seemed to have ramped up the number of enemies I faced at any given time and made it so I couldn’t die and provided me with oodles of ammunition, so I was a walking death machine.

Pressing the top button above the right trackpad turned on V.A.T.S. which works entirely differently in VR. In the base game time would slow down and you selected body parts to target with various percentage chances and critical probabilities. In VR you activate it to dramatically slow down time again, but now you have to manually target your gun and hope your aim is true. The result feels less like you’re Robocop and more like you’re in The Matrix.

Going back to the point about polish though, that’s my main concern. They added left trackpad locomotion so you can freely move around the environment, but anyone that’s ever used a Vive can testify to the fact that using the trackpads for movement is wonky at best.

At the top of my list of glaring issues I hope to see corrected before launch though is a pervasive sense of blurriness. Everywhere I looked there seemed to be a grainy layer of blurriness that prevented the game from looking as sharply as it should have, especially in comparison to the non-VR title.

Obviously some visual cutbacks have to be made to get it running at a high framerate on VR devices, but it was jarring as I made my way from Red Rocket to Concord. Although I will say that I, and another editor at UploadVR, both noticed that when you focused your sight on something it cleared up and looked less blurry. This could be a rendering technique to help the game run smoothly, but hopefully it’s less pronounced in the final release.

My demo concluded as I stormed the Minute Men base in Concord, wiping out bandits, and eventually talking with Preston Garvey. He’s a lot taller than I am, which is something I’d never think about in the non-VR version. Looking face-to-face with an NPC as they talked to me was pretty wild, but then having the player character’s voice (which sounds nothing like me) emanate from my face after I selected dialog options with trackpad clicks did feel a bit strange. Clearly this isn’t the end-all-be-all of NPC interaction in VR and future titles will have better solutions (like voice recognition maybe??) but it gets the job done for now.

Ultimately Fallout 4 VR is probably not going to be the killer app that turns VR headsets from expensive desk trophies to ubiquitous pieces of technology that everyone needs to have. It’s a very involved, hardcore, massive, and time-sucking game that won’t appeal to everyone. If you’ve played Fallout 4 already then exploring the Boston Wasteland again will be a crazy fun delight and newcomers have a lot to discover along the way.

But in order for Fallout 4 VR to be as good as it can be I really hope Bethesda has been able to slather on a heavy coat of polish before launch on December 12th. The game is being marketed as an HTC Vive title, but Bethesda has also claimed a desire to bring the game to “as many platforms as we can” and HTC has even had to backtrack its previous “exclusive” language on the game.

If they can add that layer of polish and learn some lessons from Skyrim VR and DOOM VFR this could easily be one of VR’s very best games. Let us know what you think of Fallout 4 VR so far down in the comments below!

Editor’s Note: This article originally published on September 22, 2017. We’re re-promoting it today in preparation for Fallout 4 VR’s release next week.

Correction: This article accidentally stated the release date as October 12th, when in reality it’s releasing December 12th.

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Bethesda Talks ‘Fallout 4 VR’, New Gameplay Footage Revealed

The Fallout 4 VR hype machine is slowly ramping up to full speed, as the company today released a talk with the game’s Lead Producer Andrew Scharf about some of the finer points of retrofitting the entire game for VR headsets.

“Feeling like you’re physically in the world of Fallout 4 by playing in VR is an amazing experience,” says Scharf. “All the way up to the sad moment when you remove the headset and realize there is no V.A.T.S. in real life.”

One of the biggest changes is how the game addresses V.A.T.S., the game’s aiming system. In VR, it’s a bit different, as instead of entering a selection screen to determine your shot, you activate a sort of slow-motion mode that you can even move around in. “I keep saying, it’s like you’re Quicksilver from X-MEN,” Scharf said, explaining what it feels like to use V.A.T.S.

Bethesda says in a blog post that Fallout 4 VR is to include all content from the base game “including hundreds of locations, characters and quests.”

The game, which is already available on Steam for pre-order for $60, is set to launch on the HTC Vive on December 12, 2017.

Make sure to check out our hands-on at E3 this year where we take a quick look at everything from inventory management to interacting with companions.

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