Fallout 4 VR - Great game with Technical Issues

Hello fellow VR fans,

If you follow VR at all, then unless you've been under a rock this past week, you'll know that Fallout 4 VR was finally released this week.

As someone who has finished the "pancake" version of Fallout 4 twice, I pre-ordered the VR version the instant it was announced by Bethesda and came up on Steam. I am a massive Fallout fan and was completely overjoyed to learn that it was being re-released for Steam. Even the £40 ($60) price tag didn't put me off in the slightest.

However, I knew there was a risk about how good a port this would turn out to be, but I decided to just go with it.

This blog post is about my first 3 days playing Fallout 4 VR.

Performance

Perhaps the biggest question coming from people that don't currently own the game is "How well will it run on my system?"

If you read the likes of the Steam discussion forums and Reddit r/vive, there are many many complaints of people with high-end systems say they have performance issues. Comments like "I have a 1080ti and <decent processor> and I am only getting 45 fps/massive reprojection/etc" are rife.

And I do find it a bit strange, because I have exactly the spec for general entry-level VR, an Intel i5-4590 and Geforce GTX 970, and I find the game to be totally playable with no supersampling (Wikipedia) and TAA (Wikipedia) off (more about that later). Of course, I am getting reprojection (Wikipedia), a lot of it, and with the graphics running at native Vive resolution and no anti-aliasing (Wikipedia), it is quite pixelated (Wikipedia), but it is still definitely good enough for me to forget all that after 5 minutes and just get lost in the game.

So, without intending to unduly trivialise the experiences other people are having, I can't help but feel a lot of peoples' experiences fall into one of three scenarios:

• People with high-end specs are used to getting zero reprojection in normal made-for-VR games and are just focusing on the data rather than just feeling how the experience is. There is a suggestion that perhaps people on low-end specs, like me, have less expectations and therefore less likely to be disappointed.
• People have ganked their configs with dodgy tweaks killing their performance, and then complain it is the game's fault.
• People just liking to complain that, at the end of the day, this is a port of an already known-to-be flawed/old gaming engine. It was never going to be awesome work of art in VR because it was never awesome on the flat screen.

I repeat, I have an i5-4590 and GTX 970 and I'm loving playing Fallout 4 VR. I do not deny, however, that this game is challenging to deal with from a performance perspective, I'm not say people with high-end rigs aren't right to expect better.

Technical Issues

The second biggest thing (a close second) are the technical issues.

It has to be said that Fallout 4 VR has released with some head-scratching bugs. Head-scratching because they don't seem to be particularly fundamental issues, and one is really left wondering how such issues could have been missed.

Case 1: On release, the rendering resolution in the game was locked to what your current desktop resolution was. It was a really crazy problem that was causing a wide range of issues. For me, my desktop runs at 1080p, so the result for me was really crappy looking graphics but reasonable performance. Other folks with 4K displays were finding they had great looking graphics but really crappy performance, because the 4K desktop resolution was effectively supersampling the crap out of the graphics.

It's such a crazy bug, why on Earth the desktop resolution should have anything at all to do with the rendering on the VR headset is just totally bizarre, as is how such as bug could be missed before release.

The plus side on this is that this issue proved Bethesda was completely poised to resolve early issues, and they released a Beta patch for this problem within 14 hours of game release. They have continued to release 2 further issue-resolving patches up to now as well.

Case 2: TAA is really a problem. TAA is the default anti-aliasing algorithm Fallout 4 VR uses to smooth the graphics, and it looks blurry as hell. It seems to me that TAA is something that works perfectly well on the flat screen, but no-one in Bethesda did too much research into how well it looks on displays 1 inch from your eyeballs.

TAA on - Everyting is severely blurred.

The Reddit/Steam communities saved the day with that one, with a simple console command to turn off TAA and either just leave all AA off (like I currently do) or use a different better anti-aliasing method like SMAA.

TAA off - Sharp but severe pixelation

Bethesda seem to be focusing on resolving supersampling issues as a way to resolve graphics problems than messing about with anti-aliasing, which is fine. I'm on a low-end system anyway so I chose to just leave TAA off for best performance and deal with the pixelation.

Case 3: The most annoying bug for me, the tendency for the game to crash when performing certain container inventory actions. I have been getting crashes to desktop when trying to retrieve an item from a crafted container in my home hub of Sanctuary, plus now also getting crashes when just opening a random container out in some location in the Commonwealth. Bethesda released another Beta patch late last night that I haven't had chance to test yet, but it purports to resolve inventory crashing problems so I am hopeful this problem is also fixed.

So, this whole saga seems like we are on the bleeding edge, and you might call it bleeding edge if Bethesda was the first company to port a pancake game to VR, but Croteam showed how it is done with their Talos Principle VR port, so one wonders a little about Bethesda's approach to all this.

Bottom line is, if you feel like you can wait a little while before buying Fallout 4 VR, or want the price to drop, then you can probably avoid all this community enthusiasm for solving these technical issues.

I stress again, however, I am still loving Fallout 4 VR despite all this, I am a technical person so I can deal with these issues, and whatever their faults, Bethesda are watching community comments like a hawk and resolving issues fast, so they at least deserve credit for that.

Case 4: Scopes do not work, period. The scope lens renders opaque, so you can't look through them. Bethesda says they are going to fix that in an update, but we don't know when. So you are limited to iron sights like the glow sights or reflex sights for now.

The Gameplay Itself

I'm not going to go into what Fallout 4 is like in general, you can read any number of reviews for the original game for that, but rather the VR-conversion specifics.

It's a bit of a mish-mash really. The hand controllers are fully integrated, which is a massive plus, but, well, it would be dumb if they weren't, so you are fully capable of doing everything you need to in the game fairly intuitively. I do struggle a little with the over-sensitivity of the Vive touchpads, but it's a minor inconvenience.

Combat in particular is fun. You can smack things with melee weapons or even pistol-whip baddies by just waving your weapon around with the controller. Guns seem to handle well, despite even the huge ones being one-handed. Aiming is a bit odd, in general there seems to be an "RPG effect" where you can get your aim spot on, but there is still some "chance to hit" applied which may or may not cause your bullet to shoot at a slight angle to where you are aiming. You can look down the iron sights and fire a gun and see the bullet go off to one-side. It seems to be the same mechanic as when playing the "pancake" version, where you can see bullets spray around your target reticle. It doesn't work so well in VR though, but it's not such a big issue, especially when you are also using VATS to fight.

The biggest missed opportunity, I won't say disappointment, is the vast majority of interactivity with the game world is still via menus, albeit floating menus. Get stuff in and out of a container? Floating menu. Interact with an NPC? Floating menu. Remove a power core from a generator? Floating menu. Pick up an item in the game world? Point at it and click "pick up." There is only basic tactile interactivity with the world, even picking up objects to move them around is odd at the moment (likely to be fixed later I should think). I guess, with such a huge game to deal with, Bethesda felt this was the best approach, but it is the biggest missed opportunity to me. It's not something I find myself focusing on when playing so it doesn't get in the way, but still, I hope there are mods developed that bring some of these factors into the game.

Floating displays are core to gameplay - functional but not immersive.

Conclusion

I think choosing to buy Fallout 4 VR right now really depends on the type of person you are.

If you are like me, which means you *love* the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series, you are a VR nut, you have technical ability (and perhaps by that I mean real IT experience and/or know-how as opposed to being just some Joe who is as likely to break something by tinkering than improve it), then Fallout 4 VR is totally worth it. Despite the issues, I have no regrets about paying £40 for it and getting stuck right in.

If, however:

• You expect a game to just work when you buy it, which is quite reasonable and, ironically, the basis I have previously reviewed a lot of Indie games.
• Don't agree with paying top-dollar for what could be argued is still a work in progress (again, reasonable).
• Are expecting Fallout 4 VR to be some pinnacle of technical achievement. I'm not really sure why this should be the case but a lot of folks on the forums seem to be acting this way.
• Just can be arsed with all the bugs(back to being reasonable again).

Then waiting for a while before you buy is probably wise. I'm not sure if Fallout 4 VR will go into a sale price over the Steam Winter sale but it might be worth just to wait a couple of weeks and see.

I, however, am not disappointed!