Skyrim: VR is out

Skyrim is out for PC, I've played it, and rather surprisingly, I'm only slightly nauseated! No, seriously, I made it past the intro, sold some stuff in the town, accompanied the lady from the tavern out of town, and then had to save and exit. Although teleporting around to move is less jarring than sliding around, apparently teleporting rapidly for an extended period of time was enough to do me in.

The tutorial

The game opens with control selection and a brief tutorial before you jump into the game. It rather clumsily introduces you to the controls, but doesn't let you experiment with them before presenting you with choices. Luckily, you can hit the menu button and modify the controls through the menu so you can try out the different options.

The controls

It is much easier to aim magic in the VR version than the regular PC version. You assign left and right trigger actions, for example, for spells, just like with the mouse in regular Skyrim, except it's much easier to carefully aim spells with your hands. Depending on what you selected as your dominant hand, your non-dominant hand is used to teleport via middle pressing the track pad and your dominant hand is used to quickly turn the camera (as opposed to turning your body, you can reorient this way). If you hold your hand over an item you can interact with it via middle clicking your dominant hand track pad. Beware when looting bodies, the trigger will immediately use/equip the item. I discovered this when trying to loot a stack of potions. I drank several of them before realizing my mistake. You dominant middle click the track pad to take an item. Squeeze the grip to exit a menu. Oh, and squeeze the non-dominant grip to sneak.

Also, along with the aiming being better for magic, I didn't accidentally steal crap from the shop and have to restart my game from the auto save!

The nausea

The game opens with the wagon ride into the fort. It's not terribly bad about inducing nausea, but it did make me a bit uncomfortable. I was never a fan of the opening sequence in the regular Skyrim, I always added mods to skip the wagon ride. In regular Skyrim it was because I was impatient. In Skryim VR it will be to avoid the discomfort.

I highly recommend not teleporting too rapidly across the world, and try to keep looking towards the direction you are teleporting when you hit the button. I think this is what was ultimately my downfall.

The character customization (and models)

Once you get to the part where they ask you your name and it kicks off the character customization you might notice that it has the typical odd graphics of regular Skyrim. My character's left eye had some clipping issues and it was a bit freakish looking. Also, the textures were a little difficult to differentiate. I tried to move closer to the slightly larger than life representation of the character in VR, but it was leaning awkwardly away from me and into the chaperone lines, so I couldn't get close enough to really get a good look. I assume there's some key or gesture to realign the character because it would have been nice to stand right next to the character and look into the eyes while I was playing with colors and settings. You do not see your body while playing, I'm not sure where you can ever see your character again once you've finished customizing and started playing.

The NPCs

They have the same flavor and what-not of regular Skyrim, of course, so be sure to put away your magic (put away the same way it's equipped) or granny in town will complain that you're going to start a fire... Occasionally the motion of the NPCs wont make sense, they'll slide or put their hands through stuff, but in typical VR fashion, you really feel like they're next to you and I find this occasionally unsettling, but always awesome.

The dragons look pretty cool. Of course, I've only seen one.

The mods

I haven't tried to add any yet, but I already anticipate going to find some to improve the skin textures and character models. There is an in-game menu for add-ons, but I haven't played with it. I'm a coward and I'm going to wait for other people to post detailed guides on it (as well as update the popular mods to work with it).

The end

It'll probably be a few days before I play any more, the nausea has a lasting effect on me sometimes. Plus, I don't have much time to play it. I'm hoping in a week or two I can block off some more time to go into the mountain and retrieve the claw, but I've lots of other (some even steem-related) stuff that I need to do before then.

So, anyone else playing it yet? You play with mods?