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Tech

'Fallout 4' in Virtual Reality Isn't As Fun As It Sounds

Shooting raiders is generally fun, but the technology suffers from poor movement and visuals.
Image: Bethesda

Over by the road, a pair of leather-clad raiders were trying to shiv my dog. I leveled my sawed-off shotgun at one of them and fired. He flew backward in the direction of the town of Concord. I switched my handgun and shot the other guy three times, and he crumpled on the dead grass.

"I did not ask for this!" I said under my breath.

Oh, but I had. Kind of. This was the post-apocalyptic roleplaying game Fallout 4 in virtual reality, and I was playing it through the HTC Vive headset at developer Bethesda's booth at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in L.A. last week. Bethesda's bestselling RPGs have always struck me as particularly well-suited to virtual reality, and for years I've wondered why the studio hasn't been riding shotgun on the VR bandwagon since the beginning. For years I've spoken and written about my desire to play Bethesda's 2011 fantasy RPG Skyrim with the tech, thus using actual movements of my arms and hands to cast spells and hack up dragons rather than subtle flicks of a gamepad joystick. And at last, here I was living out that dream, even if it was Skyrim's irradiated, futuristic cousin Fallout 4.

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Image: Bethesda/Wikia

I geeked out a bit, standing there in the glassed-off booth with the headset on. I won't deny it. But the experience unfortunately also highlighted just how far virtual reality has to go before it can deliver the memories contemporary blockbuster games give us, as disappointment followed every joy. During one peaceful moment, I'd marveled at the way I could pick up newspapers and plates off the counter and flip them over in my hands, or the way the series' signature Pip-Boy device floated a bit down from where I held the left-hand controller almost as if I really wore it on my wrist. The next, though, I'd be frowning at the way I could only teleport across the wastes of 23rd century Massachusetts, using the left-hand controller to point at a spot and zoom there rather than running or sneaking. At one point, I even found myself sitting in a broom closet by accident when I'd been running from bandits a split second before. Fallout 4 counts as sci-fi, but the tech of its world isn't quite at that point yet.

In fact, whenever the raiders showed up, I usually found myself struggling to figure out what was going on. Regardless of whether I'm on Google Cardboard or the HTC Vive, looking through a virtual reality device has always reminded me of peering through a screen door or a fencing mask. That proved a handicap here, where ruffians melted more easily into the tangled, earthy details of the scenery than they would have on a normal monitor. It didn't help that something seemed off with the stereo implementation, thus rendering it rough to determine where gunshots were coming from, or that I always had to check myself from tripping over the wire when I spun around to face foes behind me.

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Bethesda claimed at E3 that the entirety of Fallout 4 will eventually be playable this way. Allegedly much of it already was when I played the demo, although the voice of a PR person outside my headset would always shoo me back when I tried to make a beeline for Boston. Right now, though, the limitations above make the virtual reality version come off as the inferior incarnation in most respects, as it strips the series of the sense of moving through the world with the movements of a real person. Had it been playable with a virtual reality treadmill device like the Virtuix Omni, I suspect I would have gotten more out of it. But that's a lot of commitment.

Combat, though, is its saving grace. Never have I enjoyed Fallout 4 so much than when I was using the Vive's right-hand controller to flip through the various weapons and fire them. For some folks, I imagine this does much to make up for the complications of movement, as handling a weapon in VR Fallout 4 feels much like handling that weapon in real life.

I'd already had a taste of this with Bethesda's VR demo of Doom at its E3 press conference a couple of days prior, where I lobbed grenades with my left arm and pumped demons full of laser with gun in my right hand, spinning around in my anchored spot as they rushed me. It was glorious, even though the demo itself was apparently only made for the show, and it proved virtual reality shooters could be thrilling in the right hands.

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Image: Bethesda

In Fallout 4, Bethesda does its job a little too well. My session ended shortly after I inched toward a final raider gleefully harassing my German Shepherd. Whether because of the usual Bethesda bugs or because of his preoccupation with my dog, he didn't see me, even from a distance so short he could probably hear my footsteps. With my right arm, I raised my shotgun and aimed it inches from his head.

There's always a sense when you're playing with a controller or a mouse and keyboard that you're playing a game; that you're popping off pixels toward masses of other pixels. But taking the effort to raise my right hand and aim a weapon at the head of someone who doesn't even see me? That kind of deliberateness is something else entirely. It feels a little too real, and it made me feel dirty in light of last week's events.

I pulled the trigger anyway. Boom. Down he went, sprawled over the cracked cement. The dog looked up at me, panting. I shuddered as the demo went dark.

The guy was a vicious raider who was attacking my loyal dog in an irradiated wasteland. He arguably deserved it. But it's that image that sticks with me two days after walking out of Bethesda's booth, and it's that image that haunted me briefly last night in my sleep. I've killed hundreds or thousands of fake people in Fallout 4 since it went live last November and now it's this guy who'll remain stuck in my brain.

Is this the reality we're asking for?