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Charles Martinet’s 6 most iconic video game performances
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Skyrim celebrates its 10th anniversary with yet another re-release
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How To Play Skyrim VR On Oculus Quest – What You Need And The Best Options
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is still one of the largest, most immersive, and greatest VR games out there. It may not have been designed with VR in mind when it originally released back in 2011, but this VR adaptation does a serviceable job of shoving Tamriel’s northernmost region into VR headsets.
Now Skyrim VR of course released first on PSVR, but then later came to PC VR headsets — including mods. As a result, it’s still one of the most exciting games to play because the active modding community continues to deliver amazing updates. Here’s how to install mods if you’re curious.
Last year we covered an early (and outdated) method of streaming PC VR content to Oculus Quest using RiftCat and VRidge, but it’s far from the ideal method these days. So the rest of this article will cover how to play Skyrim VR on Oculus Quest, the best options out there, and what you need to make it happen.
What You Need To Play Skyrim VR On Oculus Quest
For the most part, in order to play Skyrim VR on Oculus Quest you just need good internet and a VR-ready PC, in addition to your Quest headset. But let’s get into the specifics of what the “recommended” specs look like in order to run Skyrim VR comfortably:
- Processor: Intel Core i7-4790 or AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB / AMD RX Vega 56 8GB
Going above and beyond these settings is of course encouraged so that you can take full advantage of the Skyrim VR modding community and try to negate any performance concerns.
You can grab Skyrim VR on Steam at its regular price of $59.99 or wait on a sale.
Skyrim VR On Quest: Wired vs. Wireless
There are two fundamentally different ways to play a PC VR game on an Oculus Quest headset. You can plug it into your PC directly using a USB-C cable via the Oculus Link feature, which tells your computer to treat the Quest like a Rift S essentially, or you can stream PC VR content to your Quest wirelessly. Interacting with VR content in this way requires a very strong 5Ghz WiFi connection to avoid latency issues.
Naturally, there are pros and cons to both approaches. The major benefit of playing PC VR games on Quest with a wire is a dedicated connection that ensures higher graphical fidelity and avoids added latency. The quality of the streamed solution is extremely dependent on the quality of your WiFi router and the strength of your connection. But then in the case of the wireless streaming method, it’s difficult to articulate just how amazing the added value of wireless roomscale movement is. It’s truly a game changer.
To see comparisons wit ha single game focused on Link vs. PC VR content streaming on Quest, check out this breakdown of Half-Life: Alyx.
Oculus Link Cable Recommendations
If you have a VR-ready PC that also meets the minimum requirements for Skyrim VR and want to go the direct cable route, make sure that the PC also meets all compatibility requirements for Oculus Link. Then, the only other physical equipment you’ll need is a USB-C cord that is compatible with Oculus Link.
The easiest option to adopt with the least hassle is the official Oculus Link Cable, available to purchase from Facebook. It is a 5m, fibre optic cable that is relatively thin and provides good flexibility, with USB-C connectors on both ends.
The official cable is pretty much guaranteed to work, provided you have a USB-C port on your computer that is the USB 3.1 Gen 2 standard. If you only have USB-A ports, you’ll need to buy a USB A to C adapter to use the official cord. Make sure that both the adaptor and the USB-A port on your computer are USB 3.1 Gen 2.
Recently, Facebook also upgraded the Oculus Link platform so that USB 2.0 cables will work as well and as a result, all USB 3.0 cables have even higher fidelity than before.
For options other than the official Oculus Link Cable, check out our article on building a USB cable solution that works with Oculus Link. And for instructions on how to use Oculus Link with your Quest to access PC VR content, check out this Link-dedicated guide.
Virtual Desktop Wireless PC VR Streaming For Quest
First and foremost, you will need to purchase and download Virtual Desktop from the Oculus Store for Quest.
However, the default store version of Virtual Desktop does not allow you to stream games to the headset wirelessly. To do that, you’ll need to sideload a patched version of the app using SideQuest, which enables the functionality, after you’ve already bought and installed the official version.
If you don’t know how to sideload or use SideQuest, you can check out our guide on the matter here. You can find and install the alternate Virtual Desktop app by searching for it in the ‘Games and Apps’ section of SideQuest. The sideloaded version of Virtual Desktop still checks for a valid app licence, which is why you’ll need to buy the Oculus Store version first. This patch was released by the actual creator of Virtual Desktop, so it’s a legit download.
Once you have the sideloaded version of Virtual Desktop installed, you will also need to install the streamer app on the same PC from which you want to stream Skyrim VR. This is available on the Virtual Desktop website.
With the streaming app installed and opened, enter your Oculus username into the Streamer app’s menu on your PC.
Then, launch Virtual Desktop on your Oculus Quest and enter SteamVR to play Skyrim VR or any other PC VR game wirelessly from your Quest.
However, there are some important caveats: Virtual Desktop is not as much of a ‘works-out-of-the-box’ solution as Oculus Link. You’ll likely need to do some tweaking to adjust the performance, visuals, and latency depending on your personal internet quality and router configuration.
Some users get great visual fidelity with very low latency through Virtual Desktop, while others struggle to get consistent performance. It will all depend on the quality of you internal connection between your router, PC and Oculus Quest.
Here are some things to check to ensure optimal performance:
- Make sure that your Quest is connected to a 5Ghz network.
- Make sure that your PC is connected to your router via ethernet and not Wi-Fi.
- Try to play as close to your router as possible, with minimal physical interference from walls, furniture and the like.
In our experience, we’ve found your mileage with Virtual Desktop can vary greatly depending on your equipment and setup. There may also be additional steps which we’ve seen recommended by others – such as changing security settings on your router – that may improve you performance even more. You’ll just have to see what’s required for your situation and setup.
That should cover the basics of how to play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR on the Oculus Quest using Oculus Link or Virtual Desktop. Any questions? Put them down in the comments and we’ll see if we can help out.
The post How To Play Skyrim VR On Oculus Quest – What You Need And The Best Options appeared first on UploadVR.
Steam Awards 2018 Finds Its VR Game Of The Year
After months of user-voting, Valve finally announced its Steam Awards 2018 winners this month. It was Bethesda’s Skyrim VR that took home the award for VR Game of the Year.
Skyrim VR fought off some stiff competition in this year’s category although, sadly, most other entries were from other years. VR Chat, Superhot VR and Bethesda’s own Fallout 4 VR all made their debuts before 2018. Skyrim VR and Beat Saber were the only two truly ‘new’ games on the list. Even then, Skyrim’s launch on PC last April came off of the back of the PSVR version from late 2017. Beat Saber, meanwhile, is yet to leave Early Access on PC.
It’s a deserving win all the same. Skyrim VR packs in all of Bethesda’s beloved open-world RPG will full support for hand controllers. It’s undoubtedly one of VR’s meatiest and deepest games with hundreds of hours worth of content. The PC VR version also goes above and beyond with mod support that turns the game into an unending ocean of VR content. Indeed, the game scored in the top three of our best games lists for both Vive and Rift last year.
Steam’s awards were entirely user-voted so there’s not much disputing the win. Still, we’d have liked to have seen a few more of 2018’s best VR games on the list including the stunning port of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Transpose and The Exorcist: Legion VR. Hopefully there will be enough big new VR games releasing in the next 11 months to topple some of these mainstays by next year.
Tagged with: Bethesda, Skyrim VR, steam, Steam Awards, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, valve
The post Steam Awards 2018 Finds Its VR Game Of The Year appeared first on UploadVR.
‘The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’ review
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’ review
‘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.
Hands-On: Skyrim VR Without Teleportation Is Much More Immersive
The first time I tried The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR at E3 2017 earlier this year I was optimistic. For me, it was enough just to visit the world of Tamriel from inside the immersive confines of a VR headset. However, it had some major flaws. Until now the only demo we’d seen required you to teleport around the game world using PlayStation’s Move Controllers. Needless to say it was a lackluster implementation and when compared to Fallout 4 VR, the issues were even more prominent.
Thankfully yesterday at a private PlayStation press event in San Francisco, CA I got the chance to try a vastly updated build of Skyrim VR. This latest demo was essentially the entire game, not just a pre-scripted section, and featured both PS Move and Dualshock 4 controller support. Finally, this was the VR edition of Skyrim I’d imagined.
The demo loaded up with a basic, well-rounded level 10 character standing out in the wilderness. I tried playing with the PS Move controllers first since that’s the most unique and VR-ified version of the game. In the options menu I could toggle between smooth movement or teleportation, so I made sure to enable the smooth movement option, and rotation turns could be toggled to snap or smooth as well. To use smooth movement with the Move controllers all you do is point your left Move controller in the direction you want to go and hold down the Move button on the front of the controller. That’s it. From here your character will slide in whichever direction you’re pointing that hand so you can strafe, go forwards, back-peddle, and everything else quite easily. Rotation is done with the face buttons on the right Move controller.
Controlling my character this way sort of felt like I was wearing rollerskates at first, or driving a vehicle, but it eventually felt pretty natural after a short while. The biggest issue with this control method is that it essentially means you can’t easily move and use your left hand in combat. While aiming the bow, for example, I’d stretch my left hand out to aim at an enemy and instinctively wanted to strafe or move a bit while aiming, but wasn’t able to since the controller was being used elsewhere at the moment and wasn’t pointed correctly.
Naturally if you opt to use the Dualshock 4 control scheme then it’s a lot like you’re playing Skyrim outside of VR, but with the added benefit of head tracking. Everything worked smoothly in this setup and the controls were familiar with a more intuitive analog stick movement system. That being said, the added layer of immersion the PS Move controllers afford was lost in the process.
Swinging my arm to swing a sword, pulling back the arrow on my bow, and raising my shield to block attacks all felt great and those sorts of interactions are lost when using standard Dualshock 4 controls. To switch movement systems you have to back out to the main menu and reload your save with the appropriate options selected.
When we spoke to Bethesda’s VP of Marketing and PR, Pete Hines, at QuakeCon earlier this year, he talked about how some parts of transitioning Skyrim to VR interfaces were made easier by the mere fact that it’s a six year old game full of content that’s still relevant, polished, and ripe to this day. They didn’t have to design a game from the ground up, but instead, just figure out how to fit an existing (albeit enormous) adventure onto Sony’s PSVR headset.
The fact that I was actually playing Skyrim and not just a watered down iteration sunk in when I opened up the map screen during my latest demo. Rather than just panning across a flat map like you do in the base game, in Skyrim VR you actually get to fly across the world, Google Earth VR style, and choose your destination that way. Zooming over to the tip of the Throat of the World or any of the other amazing locations with an eagle eye view, only to then fast travel down to them was exhilarating. It’s a whole new way of seeing the land of Skyrim through the lenses of a VR headset.
So far the biggest hurdle for a game like Skyrim VR is still the menu navigation. In any modern, large-scale RPG you’re going to spend a lot of time sorting your inventory, leveling up skills, talking to NPCs, looting objects, and perusing other various menus and submenus. Unfortunately doing all that in VR (especially with the Move controllers) is far from ideal. Using the motion controllers you have to flick your wrist from side-to-side or up and down to navigate menus due to the lack of a directional input and even using the Dualshock 4 it feels a bit jarring to have floating black boxes in the game world with you.
Visually the game as a whole can’t hold a candle to the latest “Special Edition” version of the game that released on PC and PS4/Xbox One. When a non-VR game makes the transition to VR a lot of visual fidelity is lost in the process and that’s definitely true here. There is a vague, although noticeable, downgrade across the board, but honestly the environment designs are so beautiful still and the world is so vast, that it’s a reasonable tradeoff to get a game of this magnitude running on PSVR hardware.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is set to release on November 17, 2017 for PSVR and is expected to come to PC VR headsets sometime afterwards. Let us know what you think of the game so far down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Bethesda, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
VR vs. By Design
One of the columns I’ve been either meaning to or trying to write for some time has been one that takes on the topic of videogames franchises within virtual reality (VR) and this is probably as close as I’m going to get to doing so. We’ve been told, for what feels like forever at this point, that VR for videogames won’t truly be meaningful unless the big name players and big franchises get involved.
To be honest this idea has always been something of a nonsense. It works if it works. After all, perhaps the best-known VR title is Job Simulator and that’s got nothing to do with big franchises or non-VR.
In a lot of cases developers will not be able to twist the concept into something that works in VR. Even then there is the little matter of design. Much as the concept of a videogame can only be twisted so far before it breaks, the same is true of the design of existing games. The best VR experiences are always going to be ones designed from the bottom up for VR. A game not originally designed in this way can only be bent so far in its adaption. Again, it might well work – but it may not work. At least in the way the audience expects, if not outright demands.
Speaking of big names and original design let’s contrast two videogames: both using vastly popular brands that are being brought to the world of immersive technologies. The first is Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Here we have one of the most successful and popular action role-playing games in the history of the videogame industry. It is being brought to VR. Then we have Star Wars, one of the biggest and most profitable film and mixed media franchises in history. This is being brought to augmented reality (AR) thanks to the Lenovo Mirage AR head mounted display (HMD) and the experience Star Wars: Jedi Challenges.
For Star Wars you have a familiar concept that sparks the imagination – that of lightsabre duels – that has been adapted to AR from the bottom up creating in Star Wars: Jedi Challenges. Something that not only got people very excited in AR, but from the reports of those who have tried it delivers on its promises.
Contrast that with Skyrim. An existing product that has already been repackaged and repackaged and repackaged at this point. People have also been very excited for it. It is however a conversion and the design has been twisted to fit VR – it has not been designed for it. The result is that Skyrim VR succeeds in the part that is ‘Skyrim’ but feels a bit disappointing in the actual ‘VR’ part. At least that’s how VRFocus has found it to be. Others were less generous, a headline from Kotaku being perhaps the most shared and discussed opinion – although said opinion was actually that of YouTube channel Super Bunnyhop via Twitter – that the project was a “complete dumpster fire”.
Ouch.
But oddly, in part of the Twitter thread not quoted in the article, summarise what I’ve previously said: “It’s a shallow complaint, but Skyrim‘s strengths are in immersion and environmental design. Their VR port job worsens both.”
If you’re twisting existing immersion to VR or AR, you cannot expect it to be superior to that which is VR or AR by design. It’s not a coincidence that the Bethesda VR product that VRFocus’ writers have been the most positive about in their previews from E3 and Gamescom has been DOOM VFR – a game which I silent curse because I keep writing it as DOOM VRF for some reason. (I blame two and a half years of conditioning that R follows V in all things.) There we have the concept of an existing videogame and the design of an existing videogame but here both have been refashioned into something new and specifically for the platform.
It is designed as a VR game.
It plays like a VR game.
It succeeds as a VR game.
Now I’m not saying that success in VR is guaranteed by designing for VR, that’s not how it works. I am saying though that if you have an existing creative design it’ll only twist so far. VR and AR don’t need more square pegs in round holes. What it needs is designers to realise what shape their peg is in the first place.