Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation
What Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality developers are talking about
Sometimes, you just want to break a game and laugh instead of playing it seriously. Mods help you do that. Here are our favorite funny mods for games like Skyrim and Dragon Ball FighterZ.
The post Play while laughing with 8 of our favorite funny video game mods appeared first on Digital Trends.
Skyrim VR on PC Details:
Developer: Bethesda
Available On: Oculus RIft, HTC Vive, Windows VR, PSVR
Reviewed On: Oculus RIft, HTC Vive
Release Date: April 2nd, 2018[See our Skyrim VR on PSVR review here]
Note: It’s been a while since I played the original Skyrim, but I’ve had the opportunity to put in nearly 100 hours of questing across the flatscreen game’s vast terrain over the years. Time limitations only allowed me a fraction of that in the VR version, so for the purposes of this review, I’ll be focusing on the mechanics specific to the PC VR release, and try my best to balance my appraisal of the game for both new and returning players. I’ve also never had the chance to play Skyrim VR on PSVR (our review here), so this is an entirely new review specific to the PC VR platform.
An open world rife with possibilities; the chance to step into the boots of the Dragonborn, a foretold hero who appears once in a millennium who can speak the language of the dragons, a magical species woven into the world’s mythos. Thought long-dead, the winged overlords of the world of Tamriel appear just as you enter the scene as a prisoner on the chopping block. I won’t spoil it any further in case you’re new to the game.
Offered the choice of a variety of races, each with their own proclivities to magic, strength, enchantment, etc, you set out into the world’s sword and sorcery narrative. The entire avatar creator is here from the original Skyrim, replete with nose, eye, head, hair, complexion, and scar modifiers—something I don’t waste my time on since you never see yourself again anyway. Unlike the original, there is no third-person view, because, after all, this is a first-person VR game.
This is where you’re given the first of your moral choices, the ones that help shape your expectations of the world, and the world’s expectations of you. Do you start the game as a shiftless thief, sneaking into homes and taking everything that isn’t bolted down? Or are you a reserved, honorable warrior who doesn’t boast pridefully of your accomplishments, never taking anything that isn’t owed to you? Many of these moral choices are decided through the game’s text-based dialogue system, which admittedly isn’t ideal in VR, but it’s really the only way of inserting your opinion into the game’s narrative.
Skyrim VR plays very well on PC, and it’s really no wonder why. As a seven year-old game that first found life in VR on PSVR, I got it to run on max settings, supersampled via SteamVR’s automatic tuner at 176% with only minor hiccups on our test rig, the Exemplar 2, which is admittedly a step above the game’s recommended spec of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB and Intel Core i7-4790. Thanks to a bevy of options, lesser VR-ready systems should be able to chew through Skyrim VR on lower settings.
Perfectly rendering everything as far as the eye can see is an impossible task though; the max render distance is great, although rendering finer geometry is pretty noticeable in larger areas as you see grass and plants spring up in front of you to fill out the ground’s basic textures. There are plenty of options including various render toggles, but the only choice for anti-aliasing is predictably temporal anti aliasing (TAA) which isn’t exactly ideal. I didn’t find any issue though visually, as there’s not much TASS-related blurriness to speak of. Some textures can ‘pop’ and glare at certain angles, but this is only a seldom occurrence. Generally speaking, Skyrim VR for PC is the Skyrim VR you were promised, and can bet all of these things can be finagled into working more smoothly with a little elbow grease thanks to the knowledge base of the game’s robust modding community (see note on modding at article’s end).
There are only two fundamental locomotion options: teleport and hand-relative direct movement. Neither are incredible in my opinion, but are still serviceable. Teleporting across the region of Skyrim is laborious and it feels a little too cheaty for my tastes, so I immediately opted for direct movement (also called ‘free locomotion’). I personally am not a fan of hand-relative free locomotion, and would much rather have head-relative movement, which better helps me make natural micro-adjustments along my forward path. You can choose between snap turning with a variable degree, or smooth turning with variable rotation speed.
I found all control schemes, including scrolling through the game’s vast amount of menus, to be much more simple on Oculus Touch than with HTC Vive motion controllers. When played on Vive, the game makes extensive use of the Vive controller’s touchpad, so selection is mapped to thumb swipes and not verifiable clicks of the touchpad itself. I never really got the hang of it to be honest, and found myself much more readily playing with Touch simply because of the ease of navigating the game’s menus with the thumbstick over the touchpad. It’s also a bit awkward to use the Vive’s left grip button to jump while resting your thumb on the touchpad to move forward. Many times I found myself confusing controls and accidentally crouching when I wanted to jump, or ‘Fus-Roh-Dah’-ing the townsfolk and guards because I depressed the right grip button instead of the left to sheath my sword. Oh, you can also play on gamepad, but where’s the fun in that?
An adjustable height slider is available in the settings so you can appear taller in-game, something I turned to the max so I could sit down and still be at a reasonable height while running through the world and talking to the world’s six foot-tall NPCs. A physical ‘sneak’ is available, i.e. letting you physically bend down to ‘sneak’, although if you’re already seated, you’ll always be in sneak mode, so I tended to stick to the toggle sneak option which activates with the push of a button. One issue with that it sneak mode makes you physically shorter in-game, making your seated lower point of view even lower. To remedy this, I would physically stand in dungeons and activate physical sneak, so I could be the correct height and forgo the automatic height readjustment of the sneak mode toggle altogether.
Combat, while somewhat of a mixed bag, is serviceable. Melee combat isn’t great simply because your weapons, which are stuck to your hands, don’t really telegraph any in-game weight, so you can waggle what appears to be a 20 pound battle-axe as if it weighed nothing. Blocking with a shield isn’t really that great either, as it seemed to work only a fraction of the time I used it, making it basically a non-starter from the get-go. Archery and magic casting are really where Skyrim VR shines though, which should be good news for stealth archers and mages alike.
Bad news first: one of the worst parts of Skyrim VR is the predictable (and entirely necessary) continuation of the base game’s menu system. On a standard monitor, these make absolute sense, but in VR you’re faced with a floating window where all of your things are displayed in text form, which takes away from the majesty of the world and replaces it with an ancillary task that just doesn’t fit in the rustic world of Tamriel. Even though I understand the confines of the game don’t allow it, ideally all items would be represented physically so you could holster them appropriately, and so you would ideally have the option of keeping a sword on your hip, a bow and quiver on your back, and a satchel of food and medicine by your side. Instead, you just go through a menu and equip or consume whatever you need at that moment, and in a paused state so you can scroll freely without fear or being attacked.
If the menu is any indication of how things are, then its obvious that object interaction just isn’t going to be a natural experience in Skyrim VR, as you’ll see a potion on a shelf and spirit it away with a single button press into your inventory where it will go never to be seen again. Hand presence is also null, as the models of your high tech VR controllers are rendered when you haven’t actively equipped something, which is totally out-of-place in the context of the world.
Despite these misgivings, I can’t underline enough just how awesome it is to look over a mountain vista and see the vast, explorable world ahead of me. And while graphics are clearly showing their age, it’s all rich enough to make it a cohesive and frankly still breathtaking experience for anyone starting for the first time, or returning to a lovingly remembered place like a well decorated house Breezehome, or the dank sewers of Riften.
Besides that, you can cook, blacksmith, enchant items, collect tons of readable books, hunt, ransack houses, and help every bratty child in the game without even so much as an afterthought for the main questline. And if you do, you’ll have a seemingly endless amount of time to digest the game’s world-building elements, be it side missions to uncover revelations of the past, or through the hundreds of books scattered throughout the game that detail Skyrim’s well-crafted history. The game is undoubtedly vast and rich—something which is precious and few in VR at the moment. Not only that, Skyrim VR includes a number of official add-ons including Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn, adding more questlines and flavor to the world.
Both locomotion styles, teleportation and direct movement, are exceedingly comfortable ways of moving around. While you can run, turn and jump in-game, an adjustable FOV filter helps keep things feeling comfortable. You can turn this off for maximum FOV, although I found it both useful and non-intrusive at its default setting.
Because the game was designed first for flatscreens, the game’s architecture is littered with stairs, something that if not created with care, can possibly lead to nausea. Stairs are seemingly randomly designed to either let you glide smoothly upwards (good), or make your POV feel every bump on the way up (bad), which isn’t very comfortable in the short-term. Despite this, I still found Skyrim VR to be a mostly comfortable experience which didn’t hit any of those simulation sickness buttons in my brain I recognize all too well.
Modding: Mods should hypothetically work, although I wasn’t personally successful in getting any, either manually or through a few of the handy modding tools including LOOT, Mod Manager 2, or Nexus Mod Manager. None of these are tuned to recognize Skyrim VR currently, so easy mod installation isn’t likely until those services are expanded to include the VR version too, or cleverly tricked into working and correctly assigning boot load. Considering users cracked into Fallout 4 VR on launch day, I suspect similar results from other more familiar with manual mod installation even though I had no personal success. I’ll update this when more information is available.
The post ‘Skyrim VR’ for PC Review – a Dragon-sized Feast for the Eyes appeared first on Road to VR.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR will be making its way to the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive this April through SteamVR. The virtual reality version of the game was previously only available on PlayStation VR
The post Start your 57th character when ‘Skyrim VR’ hits Rift and Vive this April appeared first on Digital Trends.
The Nintendo Switch has a remarkable quality — Switch players seem shockingly interested in buying their favorite games a second time.
The post Playing games on the Nintendo Switch is so nice, you’ll buy your games twice appeared first on Digital Trends.
Six years ago Bethesda Softworks unleashed The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim onto the world. Is this modern classic still worth your time on new platforms, like the Nintendo Switch?
The post ‘The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’ review appeared first on Digital Trends.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR released less than a week ago and it’s taken the VR world by storm. With huge sales already spurring increased PSVR adoption, we’re in the middle of a big holiday-season swing for the VR market. Even though Skyrim VR is just an adapted version of a six-year-old game, it holds up surprisingly well. There’s no doubt that Bethesda has delivered what can only be described as VR’s most elaborate, detailed, and ambitious VR title to date.
Whether you’re new to Skyrim or you’ve completed the journey of the Dragonborn several times, we’ve got a whole host of tips that are sure to aid you on your travels. Playing Skyrim VR can be tricky with a big learning curve, so we’ll try to address as many details as possible.
Skyrim VR is a dense, massive, and highly interactive game. No two playthroughs will be the same and everyone experiences the world of Tamriel differently. Regardless of if this is your first time playing Skyrim, period, or you’re a veteran of the non-VR version, we want to start off this guide with some very high-level tips that could make a difference.
First and foremost, understand that Skyrim VR is a game that’s focused on letting you do whatever you want. Did your follower piss you off one too many times? Kill them. That shop keeper has a really nice dagger on their waist that you can’t afford? Pickpocket them and steal it. Want to become a badass battle mage that uses swords and fireballs? Then use swords and fireballs to get better at using swords and fireballs. And there is no wrong way to play Skyrim. All playstyles are viable and fun.
If there is anything that Skyrim doesn’t let you do, though, it’s run out of things to do. Within an hour or two of playing the game your quest journal will be overflowing with errands and adventures. All you have to do is talk to people. Shopkeepers might need help getting supplies, Jarls of kingdoms may need you to eradicate their bandit problem, or you could even be tasked with slaying a massive dragon. Sometimes you’ll even stumble upon quests just by walking around the wilderness or listening to tavern conversations.
Ultimately Skyrim is a game about empowerment and possibility. It doesn’t hold your hand or tell you how to do a lot of things, but simply allows you to do them. During our livestream yesterday in which I started building my house near Falkreath, a large number of viewers had no idea you could even build a house, although the DLC with that feature released over four years ago. Did you know you can get married, too? And have kids? Or that you can ride dragons in the Dragonborn expansion? You can even become a werewolf and a vampire. There is so much to do in this game it’s a bit overwhelming at times.
There are three main ways to play Skyrim VR. You can see Bethesda explaining them all in the video near the top of this article, but we’ll break them down here as well. The first and most obvious method is by using a traditional PS4 DualShock 4 gamepad. You play just like you would outside of VR except your head can move around freely in the game world. You can customize how much of the screen dims when moving or turning (as well as turn it off all together) and choose between snap turning or gradual, smooth turning.
The other two options rely on the PlayStation Move controllers: teleportation or gradual, smooth movement. For teleporting you point with the left Move controller and click the Move button to teleport. In the case of smooth movement you point again, but now when you press the Move button your character moves smoothly through the game world as if you were using a control stick. It’s not the most intuitive or elegant solution to movement, but it gets the job done.
Personally, even though the controllers lack a d-pad or analog sticks and aren’t the greatest, I prefer the PS Move controllers because it feels much more immersive. However, if it’s late and I don’t feel like moving around, I’ll use the DualShock every now and then.
When I play Skyrim I almost always play a sword and shield warrior. It’s my go-to in most any fantasy game, to be honest. However, Skyrim VR has tempted me another way. The bow and arrow mechanics in this game feel incredibly good and it’s so satisfying when you hit an enemy from long distance. Unlike in the non-VR game, where you literally just point and pull the controller’s trigger to shoot an arrow, Skyrim VR has you physically pull back and loose the arrow using your actual hand movements. Whether or not you hit something has less to do with your ability to nudge an on-screen dot and more to do with your ability to actually aim.
It can be tricky though because of the PSVR’s hit-or-miss tracking system. The best advice I can give you is that you should 1) put your PS Camera above head height and point it downwards towards your neck/chest and 2) turn slightly to the side when shooting the bow so that the camera can see both hands at all times. If you face the camera straight forward then your arrow hand could get lost behind the bow hand and occlude tracking.
And don’t forget you can punch with the bow to stagger enemies!
The bread and butter of Skyrim VR combat is surely good ol’ melee. Pick up any weapon from a sword to a mace to a hammer and you can start bashing in the heads of your foes. There’s nothing fancy to it, just start swinging with the PS Move controllers and you’re good to go. You can dual wield if you want, or use a two-handed weapon (which deactivates your left hand) or even equip a shield in your off-hand as well.
Now the trick to melee combat is that you want to maximize your playstyle’s strengths. That means if you’re dual-wielding you want to be aggressive and always be attacking. Your ability to block is diminished, which makes you more vulnerable, so attacking frequently is a better strategy. If you have a shield though (recommended in VR) then you have more options. Not only can you hold it up to blocks strikes, arrows, and elemental damage, but once you get close you can bash your enemies too by hitting them with the shield, which staggers them and creates an opening.
One thing to keep in mind here though is that if you block a heavy attack or take a big hit, you could get staggered yourself. In Skyrim VR this is represented by the game removing your weapons and displaying the Move controllers in place of your hands to signify you’re staggered for the moment.
If you can back your enemy into a corner and bash/strike repeatedly, then that is a great strategy, but it’s not always possible. A great trick is to point the left Move controller over your should behind you to backpedal out of the way of an attack, then dash forward for a shield bash and a few quick strikes.
Using magic in Skyrim VR really feels powerful. Unlike in the base game, you get a great sense that energy is erupting from your palms. When you cast spells like Healing the aura surrounds you from all sides, encapsulating you in a ring of healing magic, for example.
Being able to move each hand independently makes a huge difference for spell casters. Now you can do things like shooting Flames at two different enemies, or even to your side. You could block arrows with a Ward on your left and throw a fireball at an enemy on your right. It’s just a bit tough to get the hang of aiming spells.
The trick is to think of your PS Move controller as a wand. Point the tip of the controller in the direction you want to cast your spell and that’s where it should go. Don’t think about how your hands are situated as much. Hopefully though Bethesda will add a targeting icon of some kind.
The biggest advantage afforded by VR is just the simple fact that you get to really feel like you’re in Skyrim. Things like watching fish hopping through the water, butterflies landing on flowers, and the sun setting off in the distance are experiences now rather than just background noise and details. Walking through the forest, closing my eyes, and listening to the trickle of a stream is absolutely unreal.
Magic combat is much better this time around too, if a bit clunky at first. But the ability to shoot each hand independently in whatever direction you want is a literal game changer. And with melee combat it’s much easier to be hyper-aggressive and do repeated attacks and shield bashes unlike you could in the non-VR version.
But above all else it really does just go back to that sense of presence that Skyrim VR is oozing with while wearing a PSVR.
Just because Skyrim is in VR now doesn’t mean the entire game is made better as a result. Unfortunately, anytime you port a non-VR game (let alone a six year-old game) to VR there are going to be some areas of the experience that suffer. In the case of Skyrim VR that is undoubtedly menu navigation. Using the Move controllers feels awkward with constant wrist flicking and even with a DualShock 4 craning your neck around to read test on a floating flat box is far from immersive. A more elegant interface or in-game representations (like a backpack instead of an inventory screen) would have been great.
Also, some other parts of the game just didn’t come across very well in general. The graphics took a significant hit in comparison to the non-VR versions of the game and many of the bugs are far more bothersome when it feels like you’re actually in the game world. And as of the time of this writing there isn’t even a way to look at your character again after the creation menu, which is a huge bummer. There are so many awesome sets of armor that you never get the chance to see yourself wearing.
And that just about does it. Everyone plays Skyrim differently so there are surely plenty of things that we’ve missed here so feel free to drop your own suggestions and tips down into the comments below. And if you really want to get serious, consider busting out your treadmill.
Fore more on Skyrim VR, make sure to read our full review and check out our livestreams on YouTube. Our most recent edition saw us building a house near Falkreath.
Tagged with: Bethesda, Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls
‘Skyrim’ has endured as a modern classic, remade for every new platform since its 2011 release. Will the jump to VR make the game feel fresh, or simply reveal what it’s like to relive old games in a headset?
The post ‘The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR’ review appeared first on Digital Trends.
Skyrim VR is the first to launch in a series of VR titles from legendary game-maker Bethesda (with Doom VR and Fallout 4 VR soon to follow). The title is effectively a port of the now six year-old open-world RPG Skyrim. The usual wisdom is that VR is so new and so different that it can’t be shoehorned into traditional titles. And while not without its flaws, Skyrim VR challenges that wisdom by bringing a heaping helping of a different sort of immersion.
Skyrim VR Details:
Official Site
PlayStation Store [Digital]
Amazon [Physical]Developer: Bethesda
Available On: PlayStation VR (PS4 Pro)
Release Date: November 17th, 2017
Note: Prior to this review, I’d only played the original version Skyrim for a few hours around the time of its 2011 launch. For all intents and purposes my review of the game comes with the perspective of a brand new player, not a preexisting fan of the game or franchise. I haven’t yet completed the game’s purported 100+ hours of content, as the time since release hasn’t made that possible; this review focuses primarily on the underlying mechanics of the VR implementation upon which the meat of the game relies.
Skyrim VR takes place in a fictional province of the same name, encompassing a classic fantasy ‘medieval + magic’ setting for this monstrous open-world RPG. At the start of the game, you find yourself being transported by carriage as a prisoner alongside some other supposed scoundrels. With your head on the block ready for summary execution, you’re spared an untimely end thanks to a dragon which comes to harass the town. You escape in the chaos, and come to learn that dragons were thought to have vanished, and that their return has something to do with you and your “Dragonborn” bloodline.
At the start of the game you get to pick your race, gender, and customize a wide range of psychical features. The dated character models are rather ugly no matter what you pick, but avatar customization is a well-liked feature in the VR space, so this is a natural fit for Skyrim VR.
We spend a lot of time talking in detail about the intersection of game design and immersion when it comes to VR, one aspect of which is agency: your ability as a player to have choice and impact in the world. There’s different types of agency, and while Skyrim VR lacks in many, it positively excels in ‘choice’.
There are many different ways you can play the game: when it comes to combat, you can specialize in melee, ranged, magic, stealth, etc. On top of that, there are extracurriculars you can partake in, like hunting, cooking, smithing, and enchanting, all of which can compliment and define your character choices. You also get to pick what kind of person you want to be in the world—the smooth talking hero who does every good deed; the evil doer whose only goal is acquiring power and wealth; or something in between? It’s really up to you, and you choice is largely cemented simply by doing, meaning that your proficiency in the weapons and abilities that you use most will be the ones that level up. It’s clear that you could replay the game with a vastly different approach and have a different experience. This level of depth is not seen anywhere else in VR gaming to date.
Bethesda has retooled the game’s combat controls to work with the PS Move motion controllers. In the game the controllers represent your hands—you’ll wield one and two-handed melee weapons like swords, axes, and maces, as well as bows, and magic. For melee, you actually swing the weapons to make contact and damage enemies. A shield in one hand and a sword in the other is a classic combo, and feels good to actually hold your shield up to block attacks and bash enemies. As for magic, you equip a spell in each hand—like fire or electricity—and hold up your hands at enemies to aim.
Skyrim VR combat in not particularly visceral—hitting enemies with melee weapons largely feels like a hit-check rather than a blade slicing into flesh, while casting offensive magic feels like a point-and-hold affair. Skyrim VR’s bows, on the other hand, feel solid as far as immersion goes; using both controllers, you have to knock your arrow, pull it back, and actually aim it (accounting for drop and lead) to land shots. Your aim is really only done with your bow hand, which feels less intuitive and natural than many of the bow implementations we’ve seen in made-for-VR titles, but, functionally, it works pretty well.
It doesn’t come without its kinks however. Enemies usually come straight at you, but without the ability to properly move while drawing your bow, and no way for a quick 180 degree turn, you’ll find a fair bit of awkward shooting, spamming the turn button, running, then spamming the turn button again to face the target and fire more arrows. The same goes for shield wielding—since the free locomotion is relative to your left controller, if you’re holding a shield in your left hand you have to hold it up sideways, so when you try to move you’ll move sideways instead of forward. There’s an option to disable ‘realistic shield grip’ which can help—or you could try switching your shield to the other hand—but it’s a shame to have to compromise your play due to a game’s controls.
There’s a few things you’ll come across that work better or worse than expected. For example, you might think that shooting your bow from horseback would be natural and super cool. Unfortunately the same issue with the shield applies—you’ll get steered off to the side if you try to aim while your horse is moving. You basically have to come to a stop before shooting your arrow. However, it turns out that melee attacks from horseback are really fun. Two-handed weapons will give you the reach you need to catch up to a fleeing bad guy and strike them down with a war hammer to the back of the head. Unfortunately, if it takes more than one swing, you’ll have to cut a sharp turn on your horse to come back around at your foe—a task which feels incredibly awkward with snap-turning.
Which brings me to the game’s locomotion system, offering both teleporting and free locomotion (controller relative), along with snap-turning and a fair set of options to adjust things as needed. I started off with teleportation but eventually found the game more engaging, and thankfully tolerable, with free locomotion (more about this in the Comfort section of this review).
Though Bethesda has done a decent (or at least as good as could be expected) job at porting combat and object interaction for VR, it seems that eliminating the game’s menu-driven gameplay in favor of something more suitable for VR was simply too large a task. You will regularly find yourself digging through menus to access items, weapons, spells, quests, and plenty more, even in the midst of combat. Since the PS Move controllers lack a joystick or D-pad, this is all made more tedious by the need to use the finicky trigger-and-tilt method of simulating directional inputs with the Move controllers. I found the controls unintuitive in many of the menus, forcing me to constantly reference the mappings (which were generally shown somewhere on screen when needed). It took me hours of play time before I started to feel comfortable with what buttons did what. Even then, I still regularly press the wrong buttons and have to look at the mappings.
Menus interactions are the antithesis of VR. Having been exposed to so many VR games at this point, it feels like many steps backwards that I have to dig into a menu to ‘unequip’ a sword from my left hand and then ‘equip’ it to my right hand—rather than simply handing the sword from my left hand to my right hand. And instead of being able to holster my favorite weapons, I have to pull them out with a special favorites menu (which requires me digging into another menu to favorite and unfavorite items).
While Skyrim VR’s non-VR roots lead to sometimes glaring reductions in immersion, there’s another part of the immersion equation which the game does like no other to date: the depth of the world. We usually talk about immersion with regards to a feeling of physically ‘being there’, with sights and sounds being the key to convincing you. It’s one thing, however, for a virtual character to appear like it’s psychically ‘really there’ in front of you, but it’s another thing entirely to feel like that character exists in a broader universe that you’re standing in.
The game world feels truly massive compared to anything else available in VR right now, both in physical scale and depth of content. Being able to walk into any random house or tavern and see them populated with people—all with fully voiced lines—solidifies the world immensely. It was fascinating to simply walk into a town and watch as a character operated a saw mill. Just one detail among many littered throughout the game.
This depth drastically lowered my pace through the game; I’m not a huge RPG player, but feeling like I was standing in the massive world of Skyrim made me more interested in engaging characters in optional conversations to learn more about what’s going on in this reality. It also impacted how I felt about what I was doing in the game—since I felt more connected to the world than through a flat screen, I didn’t feel the urge to try randomly killing villagers or to steal their stuff just for the hell of it—I felt encouraged to hold up my part in the role-playing.
This extends to items and objects too. Although object interactions are hardly more than point and click, the fact that the world feels so full of ‘real’, often useful stuff makes it feel surprisingly solid. For instance, I was on my way from one town to another when I stumbled upon a random shack in the woods. Hopping off my horse to investigate, I found that no one was home. Even so, inside the shack were shelves full of objects that I could use or steal, a fully readable journal laying next to a bed that I could choose to sleep in, and a small garden out back with plants that I could harvest for later use. Both the fact that the items existed there, and the fact that I could make use of them elsewhere in the world, made even this random shack feel a lot more real than if it had just been an empty building.
Visually the game feels quite dated—to be expected from a 2011 title that wasn’t the top of its class even at the time. Even playing on PS4 Pro, which Bethesda says uses some supersampling compared to the PS4 version, it feels like details just 15 feet fall off drastically in quality, turning into an aliased mess. Large distant terrain often fares better than regions of high spatial detail (like nearby bushes and trees). There are occasional moments of beauty in Skyrim VR, especially from the gorgeous skybox and vistas that make you realize how damn big the world is that you’re standing in; but for every moment of beauty there’s also one of pretty glaring crap graphics, with somewhat distant towns devolving into completely unrendered fields and clearly repeating textures. Smaller spaces like building interiors and dungeons fare better, and effects like dust, burning candles, falling debris, and flowing water add visual interest. Thankfully Bethesda was able to fix a weird ‘squished depth’ issue that I had seen in pre-release hands-ons with the game.
Frequent loading screens between doors to most houses, towns, and dungeons was an unfortunate immersion breaker, even though they were pretty quick in most cases. I would have preferred to simply be frozen in place, at least able to still look around and hear the world, until the next space loaded, rather than fading to a black screen for several seconds.
The game’s generally ugly character models have serviceable animations, but janky transitions often ruin your suspension of disbelief, especially that of the would-be menacing dragons. One redeeming quality is that characters will maintain eye-contact for the most part, no matter where you move your head. Another is that characters subtly comment on you as the player—referring to you by gender and race, and sometimes by your actions. I was playing as a female Wood Elf, and occasionally characters would greet me as “Sister,” or say that they were glad to see another one of their own race (referring to me). Hearing people talk about your character (which you got to design) communicates how they perceive you, and in turn reinforces your presence in the world in a really cool way—one that I hadn’t quite appreciated until playing Skyrim VR.
There’s a number of unfortunate and seemingly obvious immersion missteps in the game. For one, when your weapons are sheathed, you literally see 3D models of the PS Move controllers in place of your hands. This feels totally out of place in the game’s fantasy setting. At the absolute minimum they could have textured the controllers to look like wood rather than plastic. Better yet, they should have swapped the models out with something that was more fitting, maybe like a wand, on even just hands. The only conceivable reason to show the models as they did was so the player could see the buttons on the controllers to assist with all the button-based menus, but there’s a million ways they could have achieved that objective while making the controllers feel like less of an utter anachronism. And even so, the buttons as rendered on the controller models are so small and dark that I often strained to see them. They absolutely should have been made larger and brighter for easy reference. Furthermore, when the game’s hand-models do appear, they are often poorly aligned to your actual hand position, making them not feel much like your own hands.
Since I’m usually sensitive to free locomotion, I initially opted for teleportation. This worked well enough but felt a little slow and not particularly immersive. So I gave the free locomotion a shot and found that the reduced FOV during movement was astoundingly effective at keeping me comfortable, even during situations that should by all accounts make me nauseous. For instance, running up a flight of stairs causing my character to rapidly bump up and down, jumping, and even riding horseback as the movement of the horse moved my head up and down. I didn’t have any moments during the game where I felt nausea (except briefly in the ‘god-view’ map) though as ever your mileage may vary. There’s an option to turn up the FOV reduction while moving, so if you’re having trouble feeling comfortable in Skyrim VR definitely give that a shot.
I opted to play the game standing for the most part, which worked fine, and I was also able to play seated when I needed a break—the game automatically calibrates to a standing height, even while you’re seated.
Much of the game’s persistent UI elements have been stripped out, though the Compass bar remains (look down about 45 degrees to see it). This is actually great because it acts to mark your real-world forward direction which helps you maintain the optimal position facing the PS Camera. Health, Mana, and Stamina bars appear above the compass as needed during combat, but they can be a real pain to see in the heat of battle. I often found myself straining to find my health bar while running away from an enemy to see how much damage I’d taken.
The post ‘Skyrim VR’ Review – The Other Side of the Immersion Equation appeared first on Road to VR.
Bethesda’s VR version of Skyrim (2011) is nearly here, launching on PSVR Friday this week. If you’re itching to see more gameplay before pulling the trigger on the full-priced game, Bethesda is running a live stream starting Monday, November 13th at 12:30pm ET (your time here) so you can get another peek at what’s poised to be an instant fan favorite.
You’ve probably played the traditional console/PC version of Skyrim, seen gameplay videos, or at least swam through an Internet’s-worth of memes before getting here, so you basically know what you’re getting with Skyrim VR: a giant open world that offers an impressive number of missions. As with all things, the devil is invariably in the details though, and porting a game to VR and making it work isn’t as simple as supporting a VR headset and calling it a job well done. The user interface usually has to be reworked, object interaction needs to be natural, scaling needs to be appropriate to the size of your character (you notice it more in VR than on a monitor). All of those things and much more have to work flawlessly for a PC-to-VR port like Skyrim VR to be a success.
If you won’t be able to see the livestream, there are a few recent previews from GameSpot, IGN, and Polygon worth watching to get a feel for what’s been changed to make the game more VR-native.
We’ll of course be bringing you our review too, so check back soon.
The post Tune in Monday for ‘Skyrim VR’ Gameplay Stream from Bethesda @12:30 PM ET appeared first on Road to VR.
Sony is quietly releasing the new hardware refresh of PlayStation VR they announced last month in a newly revealed Skyrim VR bundle which delivers everything you need to jump into Tamriel with sword and fire spell in hand (except the PS4 and TV, that is).
For $450, the bundle includes the PSVR headset (CUH-ZVR2), PlayStation Camera, two PlayStation Move controllers, and Skyrim VR with Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn DLC. An updated demo disc also comes in the package, providing 13 game demos. Pre-orders are available in the US at Amazon with delivery slated for Skyrim VR’s November 17th launch.
First seen on PSVR’s US site nonchalantly mentioned in the FAQ, Sony is bringing a minor hardware refresh to PSVR that promises to erase a few pain points. The updated headset features integrated audio, a slimmer connection cable, native support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) pass-through via its new Processor Unit—all while being 10g lighter. The current PSVR model (CUH-ZVR1) technically supports HDR pass-through, but you have to fiddle with HDMI cables every time you want to enable it, or buy an external switchbox if you wanted the clarity and maximum color reproduction the PS4 can provide.
You’ll be able to tell which unit a bundle carries by looking at the box, although admittedly that is easier said than done when looking at online listings, as it seems Sony is trying their best to not make a fuss out of the hardware refresh.
In fact, it was first thought the PSVR + Gran Turismo Sport bundle, which launches November 10th, would also contain the new updated PSVR, but a hard-to-read image confirms that the previous version (CUH-ZVR1) will be in the box.
Besides the fact Skyrim VR is poised to be an instant fan favorite, the fact that new VR users get the very best bundle currently on offer, which includes the full-length game basically for free when you consider the current price of a the ‘all-in’ launch bundle is exactly $450—well, you can guess what’s going to be under a few trees this Christmas. That calculates out at $60 savings; the price when you buy Skyrim VR alone.
To tide yourselves over, check out the new TV spot for Skyrim VR that does its best to communicate just how immersive VR should feel.
The post New PSVR Bundle with ‘Skyrim VR’ Will Include Updated Headset for $450 appeared first on Road to VR.