Everything announced at Xbox Games Showcase Extended
This is what we learned about Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda's upcoming PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S titles during Xbox Games Showcase Extended.
Bethesda Plans To ‘Continue To Support’ VR In The Future On A ‘Case-By-Case’ Basis
For the past year or so, Bethesda has been at the forefront of the VR gaming scene. Last year they released Fallout 4 VR, Skyrim VR, and DOOM VFR — all of which sold “really well” — and now they’re developing two more VR games focused on the Wolfenstein and Prey franchises, as well as a VR port of The Elder Scrolls: Blades, an upcoming mobile game.
That’s a lot of VR from just one company. Ubisoft, Sony, and Oculus are perhaps the only other major publishers/developers that are as actively involved in VR development and you’d be hard-pressed to find any company in the entire game industry with a better overall track record than Bethesda.
Naturally, this makes me curious about just how heavily involved in the VR ecosystem they intend to be. There aren’t that many headsets out there, at least not compared to the millions of PS4 systems, PCs, mobile devices, Xbox Ones, Nintendo Switch consoles, and more. Until VR reaches that critical mass point we’ll likely have to settle for ports and tiny spin-off projects. But if most of them are as good as Skyrim VR, I’m not gonna complain.
At E3 2018 we got the chance to speak with Bethesda’s Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications about their plans for the future of VR, as well as Fallout 4 VR on PSVR and Fallout 76’s absence of VR support.
“Every studio that we have is thinking about the kinds of things they can deliver on different platforms, but it’s always going to be a case of deciding if it’s a good fit for timing and the experience,” said Hines. “Any of those guys have carte blanche to come up with anything, but it really resides at that level as opposed to me going to Harvey Smith [Arkane Studios Director) and saying, ‘Harvey, I want Dishonored in VR.’ It needs to come from Harvey coming to us. They have to be the ones to come up with it and say how they’re going to do it. It has to come from the programmers and artists to say this is what we could do and this is how it would work with this experience.”
Having played plenty of VR games that either don’t feel like they were adapted to VR well or should have never been in VR to begin with, this is great to hear. Developing games for VR is just as much about delivering something that feels right as it is delivering something fun and good.
“That doesn’t mean we don’t talk about it of course, like if they’re considering VR, but it’s more like that context of what are you thinking and not demanding a game and platform from our developers,” said Hines. “VR is still on our radar and it’s something we want to continue to support, but it’s got to be case-by-case, where does it make sense, and where is it a good fit. When we talk to devs we just want to make sure that they are considering and talking about all things.”
When it comes to VR development, not many studios can really say that they have a firm grasp of what it takes to deliver a high-quality VR experience. Some indie companies have perfected a very specific thing, but it’s been hard to craft massive VR worlds at large scales for the most part. Which is why having a company like Bethesda involved is so important.
“We now know what it takes to ship something in VR,” said Hines. “The Escalation Studios guys did a ton of work on both of those VR games [Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR] and they will tell you pretty quickly about what does and doesn’t work and how to do things correctly.”
As a fan of the industry and someone that covers games and VR professionally, it’s great to see a large company like Bethesda committed. Their press conference featured three VR announcements, while Sony — the manufacturer of the highest-selling non-mobile VR headset in the world — only showed a single game during their presentation, which isn’t even exclusive to the VR platform. E3 overall was a disappointment for VR gamers, but Bethesda is doing a great job of keeping that carrot dangling in the distance.
“We push the boundaries more than anybody else when trying to create a sense of immersion, particularly with respect to interactivity,” explained Hines. “There are lots of games that do lots of big worlds, but what those folks do with objects, for example, you can go into a room and see a dish or a phone on a table, but nothing you do can change that or pick anything up. But you often can and do in BGS games. A weapon shop isn’t just textures on a wall, but you can go grab it and try to run away. That sense of place and interactivity really does take those games to a different level in terms of what they offer.”
Hopefully we will see many more Bethesda games in VR over the next few years, especially once standalones become more prevalent. What are some of the Bethesda franchises you’d like to see in VR? Let us know down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Bethesda, e3, Pete Hines
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Bethesda: Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, And DOOM VFR Have All Sold ‘Really Well’
Editor’s Note: This interview was originally published on June 18th, 2018 and is being republished on August 10th to coincide with Bethesda’s annual QuakeCon event.
Original: Bethesda is one of the biggest game publishers that’s actively supporting the VR industry. Between Bethesda, Ubisoft, and Sony, you probably have well over the majority of the VR market in terms of revenue and awareness.
Last year, Bethesda launched Skyrim VR on PSVR, DOOM VFR on PSVR and PC, and Fallout 4 VR on PC all within just a few weeks of each other. Earlier this year Skyrim VR made the transition over to PC as well. That’s a lot of VR games in a short period of time.
“We were really pleased with how the three of those turned out on their various platforms,” said Hines. “We’re aware of all the, ‘Well, what else is Skyrim coming out on?’ jokes, but that version [VR] was a really good version of that game. DOOM VFR, Fallout 4 VR, we’re just really pleased with how all of those performed and were received. We’re going to continue to look at VR like we do at all platforms in terms of what’s a good fit for that platform and seeing what we’ve got and can it work.”
A big narrative in the VR market right now is that there just aren’t enough headsets to sustain development costs for bigger games. In other words, even if a game is great and every single person with a VR headset buys a copy, it’s still hard for developers and publishers to recoup costs of development. That’s why ports of already massive games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 make sense.
The question though is: Do people actually buy these massive, hundred hour long games in VR?
“They’ve done really well,” Hines said. “Skyrim rocketed right to the top on PSVR and stayed there, when we released Fallout 4 VR on Steam it shot to the top and stayed there. When we released Skyrim VR on PC it did too, DOOM VFR has done really well. When it comes to any install base more is always better, but yeah, they did well.”
It’s not a numerical value in terms of sales, but it at least tells us that Bethesda is pleased with performance nad intends to continue investing in VR. Hopefully Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot shapes up over time though, as we were not impressed with that E3 demo, while Prey’s VR support won our favorite Vive experience at E3.
Let us know what you think of all this down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Bethesda, doom, e3, E3 2018, fallout, Pete Hines, Skyrim
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E3 2018 Bethesda: Fallout 4 VR May Never Come To PSVR At All
Fallout 4 VR is one of the largest and most ambitious VR games to date. It features a massive open world, hundreds of characters to meet and talk to, and some of the most intricate worlds to explore. As one of the first people to emerge from a vault after a nuclear fallout, you explore the wasteland and collect gear to build up bases and survive against the enemies and bandits of a harsh new world.
It’s set in Boston, or what remains of it, and has gone on to be one of the best-selling VR games to date. Fallout 76, Bethesda’s next entry in the long-running series, is due out later this year and the company isn’t currently planning any VR support for that title.
Ever since Fallout 4 VR first released on PC VR, fans of the game on PS4 have been asking about a PSVR release. Skyrim VR first released on Sony’s headset, after all. In the past Bethesda has always given blanket statements about wanting to bring all their games to as many platforms as possible, but at E3 2018 this week we got a more specific answer out of their Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications, Pete Hines.
So, will Fallout 4 VR ever come to PSVR?
“I don’t know whether or not that will ever happen, like what the technical implications are,” explained Hines. “Fidelity-wise I don’t know if it would hold up and I’m not aware of where it is or if it’s even in the cards for later down the road. We’ll see.”
If I were a gambling man, I’d say no. Maybe for PS5 or PSVR 2? Maybe we’ll get Fallout 5 on PSVR 2 instead? It’s hard to say. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Bethesda, e3, E3 2018, Fallout 4 VR, Pete Hines
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Bethesda Says There’s No Talk Of VR For Fallout 76
Update: Official hands-on impressions are hitting the internet today on October 8th, 2018, so we’ve republished the below article featuring an excerpt from an interview with Pete Hines from E3 about the game’s lack of VR support that originally ran on June 14th, 2018.
Original: Today at E3 2018 I got the chance to sit down for a private interview with Bethesda’s Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications, Pete Hines. Most would agree that, out of all of the major press conferences at the start of the week, Bethesda’s was the best. It featured expansions on existing games, brand new game announcements, and extended looks at previously announced games. Everything looked great and Todd Howard lit the internet on fire with his charismatic delivery.
Undoubtedly one of the biggest games at E3 this year was the main feature of their conference: Fallout 76. While it isn’t playable at the show, it will have an open beta soon for testing, as it’s the first game developed by Bethesda Game Studios to include online features (The Elder Scrolls Online is developed by ZeniMax Online Studios) and the first multiplayer game in the Fallout franchise.
Given Bethesda’s recent history with VR in Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, DOOM VFR, and now Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot and The Elder Scrolls: Blades on the horizon, I had to ask:
Will Fallout 76 have VR support?
“I’m not sure how that would work,” Hines replied. “I’ve never heard that [VR] once mentioned in relation to Fallout 76. That doesn’t mean that it’s not going to happen, though.”
Hines explained that Bethesda, as a publisher, doesn’t try and push VR on development teams at all. If it’s something a studio or team wants to do and thinks would be a good fit, then great, but they don’t want to force VR if it isn’t appropriate or compatible.
Fingers crossed that Fallout 76 eventually gets VR support, but at this point I’m not so sure that’s gonna happen — at least not anytime soon.
What do you think of this news? Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Bethesda, e3, E3 2018, fallout, Fallout 76, Pete Hines
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Bethesda’s Pete Hines On Going Big In VR With Fallout 4, Skyrim, and DOOM VFR All This Year
Bethesda Softworks makes some of the most elaborate and expansive games in the world—and now they’re making them in VR. Last week, the publisher confirmed that Fallout 4 VR, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, and Doom VFR will all release before year’s end on various platforms.
It was no big shock that they were coming; after all, we went hands-on with all three back at E3. Still, it’s surprising to see that all three are debuting around the same time, marking a huge push from Bethesda to assert itself in the still young consumer VR space this holiday season. And Fallout 4 VR and Skyrim VR are absolutely massive games, vastly larger than the average VR experience, because they’re the very same epic role-playing adventures already out for PC and consoles.
Why serve up these enormous games in VR? I asked Pete Hines, the publisher’s vice president of marketing and PR, at this past weekend’s QuakeCon expo outside Dallas, TX.
Open-World VR
“Honestly, a lot of it is down to how those games are built—they’re not level-based, they’re not carvable. You can’t really say, ‘Here, let’s take this chunk and make it a two, or three, or five-hour experience.’ They’re all one thing,” Hines explains. “So in looking at VR, the studio is like, ‘Well, that’s how we built it. Let’s see if it works as all one thing on VR platforms.’ And it turns out that it did. Obviously, we had to put a lot of work into UI, UX, and performance. You need people to understand how to interact with the game, and then performance-wise, make sure they’re not throwing up because you’re dropping frames. But we didn’t have to solve any of the, ‘Well, what are our quests, or the story, or characters, or stuff to do?’ Because all of that stuff was already done.”
Both games were already deeply immersive experiences on TVs and monitors, which is part of why they can potentially work so well in VR: they’re vast, incredibly detailed, and just a joy to explore. In fact, we’ve already picked out 11 places we can’t wait to explore in VR in both Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR, and that’s really just scratching the surface. Hines says that “live another life in another world” has been Bethesda Game Studios’ mantra from the start, and that virtual reality just elevates it dramatically for these open-environment games.
“VR takes that to another level, where you just have a much greater sense of place within this world. You’re up standing on a mountain and the snow is blowing. You just feel that on another level that you don’t get playing anything off of a monitor,” Hines says. “Somebody was asking, ‘For you, what really brings home those experiences?’ And honestly, it’s like when something huge is in front of you and you look at the top of it like this,” he adds, looking up to the ceiling.
“You’re not moving your mouse to do that, or a thumbstick. There’s just something about craning your neck up to look at the top of it that is just so much more of an ‘Oh shit’ moment than anything that you’ve had before,” Hines affirms. “Or playing Fallout and dropping your head to look at Dogmeat. It just makes him feel so much more like your dog, and so I think it’s just little stuff like that. Until you play it or experience it in VR, you don’t really have the same kind of appreciation for that sense of place in games like these.”
That said, one of the reasons that many from-scratch VR experiences are short is because it better fits the consumption habits of VR players. Fallout 4 and Skyrim can each be played for 100 hours apiece or more, which can be a lot easier to tolerate in long stretches on a screen rather than within a headset. Hines says “it’s possible” that people will play those games in VR for such spans, but he suspects it’ll be gradually over time instead of in marathon sessions.
“I think it’s going to be the kind of experience that folks are going to graze at,” Hines suggests. “I don’t see people binge-playing eight, 10, 12 hours for multiple days in a row like they did when those games first came out.”
Doom and Beyond
By contrast, Doom VFR is a bit closer to what we’ve seen in the VR space: it’s a more compact experience that’s been altered to better fit the VR play design. Developer id Software started with the heart of last year’s excellent Doom reboot, but that game was far too frantic and insanely paced to work in virtual reality. Well, at least without rampant motion sickness.
“[Fallout and Skyrim] from a pacing standpoint work just fine as a VR thing—there’s some stuff you need to do with how you move, and obviously the UI and UX,” Hines explains. “We didn’t have the problem of like, ‘Well, you’re moving too fast.’ [But] in Doom, you’re moving too fast. You simply can’t take a game where you’re that fast and aggressive, and mantling and jumping and double-jumping, and have anybody survive that for more than 35 seconds. Rather than making a 35-second game, they had to look at it like, ‘Well, how do we take that and translate it into VR?'”
Instead of constant movement and those wild, up-close-and-personal kill moves against demons, now you’ll teleport around (or nudge forward with a tap) and can execute “telefrag” maneuvers that let you teleport into a foe to finish it off. It “still makes you feel fast and aggressive,” Hines claims, but it shouldn’t make players feel queasy in the process. Additionally, some of Doom’s environments were reworked to better suit the VR experience.
“They were designed for somebody moving fast and mantling and jumping, which you’re not doing any of,” Hines explains. “We needed stuff that’s more purposeful for how you’re moving and working through Doom VFR.”
All three of Bethesda’s big VR games will ship within a one-month span, although they’re not all getting multiplatform launches from the start. Skyrim VR debuts first on PlayStation VR only, on November 17, with Doom VFR following on December 1 for both PlayStation VR and HTC Vive. Meanwhile, Fallout 4 VR will only hit HTC Vive first on its release date of December 12.
Why no Fallout 4 VR for PlayStation VR? Likewise, where is Skyrim VR for Vive? Hines couldn’t offer a definitive answer.
“I don’t know. We want to put it out on as many platforms as possible,” he said about Fallout 4 for PSVR, and suggested the same kind of scenario for Skyrim on Vive. “Whatever will work and be viable, we’re up for. This one is gonna be the first, and we’ll see what happens after that.”
Similarly, he wasn’t sure if any of the games would be compatible with the Oculus Rift via SteamVR at launch, but said he could check and get back to us. I’ve inquired about it since the interview with Bethesda PR and will update if we get a response.
I also asked why Skyrim VR is launching with all of the downloadable add-on content already bundled in, while Fallout 4 VR is not, and Hines says it’s all about the code they started with. “We had done some work already with Skyrim and the Game of the Year [Edition] that already had all of that stuff,” he explained. “It was more that that was the code base and starting point for doing the VR version, and that simply didn’t exist for Fallout. What we started with was just base game [for Fallout 4] and game of the year with all the DLC [for Skyrim], so that’s why those versions look like those versions.”
Will Fallout 4 VR eventually get that DLC as post-release content? “I don’t know,” says Hines.
Making an Impact
Ultimately, releasing all three of these large and visible VR experiences a couple weeks apart wasn’t some master plan from the start—that’s just how they all came together, claims Hines.
“It’s just how they lined up. We didn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s launch three games next year.’ What we do and take on comes out of what the studios are interested in, and they know better than anybody,” he says. “They know their tech, they know their platforms—so it was really a question of how long they were going to take, and how long they needed.”
And in the case of Bethesda Game Studios and the VR versions of both Skyrim and Fallout 4, we can probably thank Dallas’ own Escalation Studios. Bethesda acquired them earlier this year, and Hines says their work has been invaluable in getting those two games ready for release. “Without their help, I’m not sure if they’d make it out this year,” he affirms.
Debuting three large VR titles at the same time might seem like a risk for Bethesda, but Hines says their performance won’t necessarily dictate the company’s future in the space. “All of our studios are actively looking at and talking about what they want to do. Our focus right now is on these three, given that they’re all coming out this year,” he says. “But it’s something we’re actively involved in and working with. We just haven’t talked about any of our other going-forward plans yet.”
Disclosure: Bethesda provided flights and accommodations to the author to attend QuakeCon.
Tagged with: Bethesda, Doom VFR, Fallout 4 VR, Pete Hines, Skyrim VR
Bethesda Will Demo Fallout 4 VR at E3
Bethesda’s Vice President of PR, Pete Hines has announced that the virtual reality (VR) version of the post-apocalyptic RPG series, Fallout 4 VR, will make an appearance at the company’s E3 Press Conference.
Fallout 4 VR did get a demo at E3 2016, which VRFocus managed to get hold of for a preview. There a 5-minute demo of some gameplay from early in the story was available. Since Fallout 4 VR is due to launch at some point in 2017, it seems likely that the version that will be available at E3 2017 will be a fuller version that will show more of the game experience.
Bethesda have previously confirmed that teleportation-style movement will be used to reduce motion sickness symptoms. The developer has also claimed that the entirely of the original Fallout 4 game will be available within Fallout 4 VR, which adds up to a vast amount of content and many hours of gameplay.
Hines, in an interview recorded by Hip Hop Gamer at PAX East 2017 (and subsequently reported by GameRant) claimed he had been told by the lead designer that “Fallout 4 VR is the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen in your life. You can’t even imagine what it’s like playing in VR and how realistic it looks with everywhere you turn your head.”
It’s not yet clear what else will be shown at E3 by Bethesda, but most analysts are expecting a new Wolfenstein game, and the announcement of The Evil Within 2. It’s not known of the developer will announce any new VR projects.
A release date has not yet been confirmed, but Bethesda say that Fallout 4 VR will be available sometime in 2017, exclusive to the HTC Vive.
VRFocus will keep brining you the latest news on E3 and Fallout 4 VR