Earlier this week, Bethesda Softworks gave fans two big virtual reality announcements: VR versions of beloved RPGs Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. You could argue that these kinds of big, open-world titles are the perfect application for VR — the medium needs games that can keep players entertained for more than a few hours, and people want to feel like they’re really living in their favorite world.
I think, however, that you’d be wrong. Because so far, the little I’ve seen of both titles suggests that most of the great parts of present-day open-world games don’t translate well into a headset, and that the perfect VR open world won’t look anything like what we’re used to.
Fallout 4 in VR has gotten a lot better since it appeared last year as a proof of concept. Bethesda has reworked the interface so it feels more intuitively three-dimensional — if you search a body, for example, the inventory box seems to pop over it. You can now move with the analog stick as well as teleportation, which means you can walk around without thinking quite so hard about where you want to go. And the quasi-turn-based V.A.T.S. option has been turned into something more like bullet time, where the world slows to a crawl and enemies’ body parts will light up when you point at them for better targeting.
‘Fallout 4’ is a lot better than last year, but it feels inherently awkward
Bethesda says the game was fully playable at E3, and I believe it, although I only had time to go through a couple of sorties with ghouls and raiders. But the game doesn’t feel finished. The most obvious problem is that Fallout 4’s dusty brown-and-green environments are difficult to parse on a grainy headset screen, making it tougher to spot enemies. My demo had minor frame rate issues, and the visuals had jagged edges similar to those of Resident Evil 7’s VR mode. Things like the frame rate could be fixed by the game’s launch later this year. But that won’t solve the bigger issue, which is that Fallout’s huge spaces aren’t as much fun to explore in VR.