Fus Ro D’OH!
While we all eagerly await what revolutionary games VR will bring us in the near future, it seems that the transition for current titles into virtual reality isn’t going as smoothly as we would hope. At least when it comes to Bethesda’s monumental RPG success story – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
According to IGN writer Alanah Pearce, who managed to get a taste of it via a demo at this year’s Gamescon, the experience wasn’t as mind blowing as expected.
On the technical side of things, she writes:
In order to walk around with Move controllers, you use left and right buttons to turn in jarring fractions, and another button to point and teleport. This isn’t something that’s easily picked up, and in a game with fast-moving enemies like rats, I spent a lot of time spinning in place, unable to move fast enough to see the enemies darting around me. Every time I turned to find them, they were already out of my view. I should note that the game is playable with a DualShock 4, but I didn’t have a chance to use that traditional control method.
Skyrim is also a game full of dungeons, a lot of which have narrow paths and sharp turns, which are annoying to navigate when you can’t smoothly teleport around a corner. You have to get to the end of a tunnel, stop, pivot, and teleport again. In essence, the system slows everything down, and Skyrim isn’t a game that’s designed to be played slowly. When you can’t even teleport all that far ahead, every familiar looking pathway feels a lot more tedious than it does in any other version of the game.
So if you are an easily triggered, impatient claustrophobic, then perhaps re-visiting Bleak Falls Barrow may not be in your best interest.
Still, do not lose heart fellow Dragonborn, as she goes on to say that thanks to the scale of the enemy NPCs, the VR edition is not without merit.
Seeing a dragon fly overhead actually scared me a little (and it never has while playing Skyrim any other way), just because it’s presence felt like an invasion of space. Dragons are enormous, and picturing one standing in front of ‘virtual me’ made me incredibly nervous, adding a tense threat that doesn’t exist otherwise. Having to fight a giant spider in VR is absolutely chilling, too, because you don’t have the comfort of your living room separating you from it. Where you’re in a more open space fixated on something in front of you, it adds an intense, worthwhile atmosphere.
Guess there’s still hope for us to live out those fantasies of slaying giant spiders!
Check out the video below if you want a teaser as to what Skyrim will hopefully look like in VR!