TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: VR

  • I’m playing Skyrim again, and it is because of Skyrim VR

    After not playing Skyrim for years, I’m back at it and having a great time, and it is all because of Skyrim VR. I bought Skyrim VR for my PSVR and think it is great fun (see previous comments about it)! After playing a good few hours of it, I realized that Skyrim VR is absolutely the best way to experience Skyrim, but it isn’t the best way to actually play Skyrim.

    What the heck do I mean by that kind of crazy statement? Well, in Skyrim VR, the experience is top notch. Aiming and looking are perfect, and the visceral feeling of being there is completely engrossing. But, you’re playing with a scuba mask on your face, which gets uncomfortable after hours and hours. The scuba mask, err… VR headset, also interferes with some important things while playing Skyrim: you can’t see the wiki or game guide to help with the puzzles or some of the less-clear quests and choices. Having to remove the VR headset to check the wiki on an iPad is annoying (this could be solved by adding a context-sensitive lookup/hint capability in-game – and I know I can open a browser within the VR environment, but that’s unwieldy). The other thing the VR headset eliminates is snacking and drinking, which may be good for us slightly overweight gamers, but is annoying nonetheless.

    So my thorough enjoyment of the first few hours of Skyrim VR prompted me to get Skyrim Special Edition working on my PC. I had bought all the DLCs for the original Skyrim, but stopped playing before they came out (I finished the main campaign, though). Then, because I bought it on Steam, I got Skyrim SE for free (which is still one of the coolest moves in the game industry, so thanks Bethesda and Valve). Now I’ve got my character storming through the Dawnguard quest line after finishing the Dragonborn DLC and having a great time. Since I’m on the PC, I’m using a few mods to: (1) keep my follower alive – I’m sick of having to reload after my follower gets killed, and (2) let me carry more weight, since I’m a loot-hound and want pick up anything worthwhile and sell it. Skyrim VR rekindled my love for Skyrim!

    If you have a VR headset, I strongly recommend Skyrim VR – it is amazing. And Skyrim in general is such a lot of fun, so I’m glad I came back to it.

  • Skyrim VR is better than it looks!

    Well, there’s a backhanded compliment if I’ve ever written one. The implication is that Skyrim VR doesn’t look good, but as a game, it is better than it looks. Yep, that’s exactly right. It looks surprisingly bad on my PS4 Pro and PSVR system. Like 640×480 bad. Well, maybe 1024×768 bad. Everything is jaggy, seemingly with low polygon count and low-res textures. The lighting is pretty bad too, with horrible shadows obscuring faces, for example. It’s also really cool and I highly recommend it.

    I played (and loved) Skyrim on PC with a few mods to make it look even better, but even vanilla Skyrim from ages ago when it was released looks better than Skyrim VR. It looks like they must have needed to dumb down the graphics so it would work on the original PS4. It really does look like it is running on a low-spec machine at 1024×768 resolution. That is, until you realize that the world revolves around you smoothly as you move your head.

    As a VR gameplay experience, Skyrim VR is excellent. The VR headset tracking is perfect, and the control scheme I’m using (using the Dualshock 4 rather than dual Move controllers) is intuitive and outstanding. I haven’t played too far, but because of the VR view, I felt much more connected to the gameplay than playing normal Skyrim. I’m using the Dualshock 4 controller scheme because it makes movement simple and doesn’t require lots of flailing around in my limited space to swing weapons. I will try the Move controller mode sometime so I can figure out which I prefer. The right stick on the Dualshock controller is normally the camera control, but you’d think that would work poorly with headset tracking and induce nausea. It is still camera control, but it does a quick rotation of maybe 45 degrees, so all finer look/aim is done with the headset tracking. This makes gameplay easy, because turning around just requires a few taps on the right stick rather than turning my body and head around or however else it could be done. I applaud the control scheme that I’ve used so far.

    The game is just like I remember it, but aiming is precise and looking around is very immersive. If you have a PSVR and any fond memories of Skyrim, get Skyrim VR – so far, it is very cool!

    My only concern is that I will really miss the mod that prevents my follower from being permanently killed. Since they’re so stupid and just run into battle without any thought to their own welfare, things could get ugly.

  • My gaming news, including Skyrim SE, LOTRO, VR, The Division, & more

    Since my hiatus from Destiny has allowed me to play other games, I’ve played lots of them. Since I’ve had all these (mostly) good experiences, I thought I should write it down.

    I’ve spent most of my play time in LOTRO, which I mostly stopped playing when Destiny came out two years ago. I still logged in occasionally to pay my housing upkeep, but I let my VIP payments lapse (in terms of total dollars “invested,” LOTRO is by far my most expensive game, with maybe 5 years of VIP payments, plus buying all the DLCs – they’re good at extracting money from me). I made it to Gondor and did most of the Dol Amroth quests with my level 100 Lore Master, but then stopped. Now that they have tons of new content, I wanted to experience it, since I love the lore and the Tolkien universe.

    First, being in Middle Earth without being VIP is very constraining. Most of the quests are locked off, travel is expensive, and many perks are disabled. So within minutes of restarting, I was paying up for a few months of VIP. At that point, the quests unlocked so I could deal with the baddies in Perlargir and all around central Gondor. Hopefully soon I will hear over to Minas Tirith and experience more of the story.

    The game play came back very quickly, though I’m not as adept a Lore Master as I was, since I’ve forgotten what about half the skills do. The combat is quite boring, compared to Destiny and The Division or even Elder Scrolls Online, but it is a bit more strategic as I can’t just power through mobs, but have to worry about crowd control, debuffs, buffs, etc. And when I try to power through, I aggro a bunch of enemies that run over and kill my poor, squishy LM.

    One of my favorite parts about the Rohan expansion to LOTRO was the war steed combat. I loved that and ended up being pretty good at it. But in Gondor, the enemy density is high and the terrain isn’t well suited to it. However, I still use the war steed, because it is fast and I can mount in combat. Unfortunately, even a light war steed turns like an aircraft carrier in confined spaces, so I’ve died several times trying to maneuver through a narrow passage to escape a bunch of enemies only to become stuck, dismounted, and killed. Also, the rubber-banding effect where the game lets you progress past an obstacle you hit on your war steed only to pull you back a few seconds later is still present. In fact, I had one instance yesterday where I was maybe 5 seconds and hundreds of feet past the obstacle when it yanked me back. It isn’t a game killer, but it is an immersion killer and quite annoying.

    I also played with some VR games (well, really VR tech demos) on my new Playstation VR. It is a very comfortable unit and works quite well. The resolution isn’t great, but you quickly forget about it. I really enjoyed the shark encounter scenario in the VR Worlds Ocean Descent “game.” Even though I knew I was sitting in my chair at home, I was very concerned about that shark prowling around my cage, and when it attacked, I cringed in chair. Very well done!

    I played a little of, and then deleted, Transformers Devastation and Lords of the Fallen. Transformers was a pretty OK action game with some RPG elements. It had a cartoony look that fit the theme, but as I was never a Transformers fan, it didn’t grab me for too long. Lords of the Fallen is an excellent Dark Souls clone that was difficult and very tense. Unfortunately, I have Dark Souls and never finished it, so I’m sure not going to finish this one.

    So in my quest for action games, I went back to The Division. After this latest patch, it is quite fun. They’re trying to out-Destiny Destiny with all the loot that drops. I kill random baddies on the street and they drop top-of-the-line gear (though none better than what I had, so far). Some of the missions and encounters are still too hard to solo, at least for me, but it is a much improved game.

    Finally, I tried Skyrim SE. Since I already had Skyrim and all the DLC on Steam, I got SE for free, which is damn nice of Valve and Bethesda. Unfortunately, Skyrim SE doesn’t support my 3440×1440 monitor. Sure, I could and did edit the .ini file and make it draw at that resolution, but the UI is cut off at top and bottom in that case. (To be fair, the original Skyrim is the same.) It is sad that a new release is so limited in what it can support. Even LOTRO, STO, and Fallout 4 support my monitor with only a little stretching sometimes. In any case, I never played the Skyrim DLCs, so I had thought maybe I’d give it a shot in SE, but since I used mods in Skyrim that don’t work in SE, I don’t want to mess with trying to load the saves, and I sure don’t want to play the whole thing again! So perhaps I will go back to Skyrim some day…