Long Time No See - Skyrim VR

Hello my avid reader(s),

It has been a long time since my last post. This is not because my intentions to blog are dead. Since my last post two things have happened. One, I have expanded my family and that has meant about 6-9 months of not really having any chance to play VR. I'm glad to say that now things are settled down, that I'm getting chance to go back to my Vive headset again.

The second thing that happened is that I started playing a tremendously long game in VR that, for various reasons, I wanted to complete before writing this blog post. A daft idea in retrospect because it has taken me so long to get here, but what is done is done.

That game is Skyrim VR and it is what this blog post is about.

First I need to give you some context on my relationship with Skyrim VR. The word "relationship" in reference to a game may seem daft initially. In this case, it is because I have played and attained all achievements on Skyrim on PS3, PS4 and Steam as well as played it twice again on PC with significant mods installed. So I have probably quite literally spent over 1000 hours of my life on Skyrim in one form or another. And now I have played it all over again (and attained all achievements) in VR.

So what is it like?

The first thing that strikes you about Skyrim in VR is the massive sense of scale, much more so then playing it on the flatscreen. Suddenly the first dragon in Helgen seems huge, the mountain ranges flanking your path epic, and the first time you go into Dragonsreach you will think to yourself that you had no idea the ceilings were so high.

Dragons feels much larger and more menacing in VR

VR adds a new feeling of wonder to Skyrim like it never did for Fallout 4, and it really does bring new beauty to the game, even with the stock unmodded graphics.

In terms of the player controls, it is a bit of a mixed bag of nuts.

With archery, the bow and arrow mechanism is what you want it to be, with the player having to manually notch the arrow and aim. Sadly, aiming doesn't feel quite as natural as in the Longbow game in Valve's "The Lab," so manual aiming is some work, but the Eagle Eye perk allows you to paint the target with a crosshair which makes things a lot easier. Unfortunately, due to some of the trade-offs of porting this flatscreen game to VR, the way archery has been adapted for VR does leave it a little over powered. In the vanilla game you had to wait for your player to draw back the arrow to get full power, which means you can only fire arrows at a limited rate. In VR, because you can draw back your arrow in an instant, it effectively lets you rapid fire your enemy. It won't let you take on Draugr Deathlords when you are level 5, but once you have levelled up a bit you could probably just stock up on arrows and forget any other forms of combat if you were so inclined.

Archery feels mostly natural, but you'll still need the Eagle Eye perk to help with aiming.

The other big improvement controls-wise is with magic. Shooting flames out of your hands never felt more natural as it does in Skyrim VR, and being able to aim two jets of flame to two different opponents is fantastic.

Sneaking generally works well, but I do have a gripe with it. You can set a "natural sneak", which means if you physically crouch down you will automatically go into sneak mode, but I challenge many gamers to be able to put 200+ hours playing a game like this, especially if stealth is your main play style as it is with me. Alternatively, you can set sneak to a key press as with the vanilla game. The downside of this is that your character in the game crouches, but you are still physically standing up, so the feeling for me is that now I am suddenly a midget in the game.

My first manual tweak, causing me to dive into the game's INI files, was to set the sneak height the same as normal height, so now when I sneak I am effectively just walking around more slowly to avoid detection. This feels good to me and I'd recommend it to other players as well.

Lastly in terms of controls, what seems a standard pitfall for converting flatscreen games into VR is porting so many controls into the limited set of buttons you get on VR controls. In Skyrim VR this is achieved by context mapping some buttons. If you click the right trackpad on an object you open it or pick it up. If you click the right trackpad with no object then you enter the favourites menu. This means when picking up small, "hard to point to" items lying around like gold coins and gems, or picking glowing mushrooms off cave walls, half the time you'll pick the item up and the other half you'll open the favourites menu by mistake. It's a frustration that luckily you can get used to, because you'll be doing it a lot.

The first time you set foot in Dragonsreach, you'll stop to look up at those high ceilings.

After ploughing your first 100 hours into the game, the sense of wonder may go away but the joy of playing the game and really being there in Skyrim persists. It's amazing how many more things you find in dungeons that you missed playing on flatscreen. It's now much easier to really look closely at all those desks and surfaces that might have a small ring or gem on it. It's also much quicker and easier to scour dungeon rooms for those urns placed on top of shelves, that you might miss on the flat screen generally looking down most of the time.

It was truly a joy to play Skyrim all the way through again in VR. On this play through I achieved the highest character level I ever have (level 123), attained more than a million gold for the first time (previous record was around 700,000) and put more hours in a play through (a total of 232 hours).

Although it may "only" be a VR port, I highly recommend anyone who is a VR enthusiast to buy Skyrim and play it through. True, as a VR port, there is not a lot of manual mechanics in the game after the archery. You still interact with pretty much anything via menus and buttons presses and so if you are a VR purist you will lament missing being able to manually pulling levers and winches, pulling items out of your backpack and so forth. However, I think if you get hung up on that you are potentially missing out on one of the most epic and in-depth game experiences available to VR players today.

If you somehow haven't played Skyrim before but you love the fantasy setting, and you have a VR headset, all I can ask is "What the hell are you waiting for? You are in for a treat!"