I made my way down to Los Angeles late last week to try out the VR games produced by ZeniMax subsidiary Bethesda and (in the case of Doom) id. Consistently, whenever we write about Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, or Doom VFR those stories are among our most well-read. In other words, of the games coming to VR these titles seem to be the most anticipated. These are three of Bethesda’s biggest and most beloved IPs and they’re all getting the VR treatment within the next few months. So we’ll jump at any chance to find out more about them.
This was my first time playing these VR ports. While I’ve barely touched Skyrim and Fallout 4 on traditional screens, I played through to the end the latest entry in the Doom franchise. So I was eager to compare it to the VR version, which features an original story.
The first thing I noticed in the HTC Vive version of the game is how different the scale of the world felt in VR. It just felt…right. Like Hell was a real place around me. More significantly, the pace of the gameplay felt totally different. The latest Doom, originally released in 2016, was praised for its fast-paced gameplay. In VR things felt much slower. I instinctively enhanced this effect because the world enters super-slow motion when the teleport button is pressed.
So, in the demo at least, I could take as much time as I wanted selecting where I was going to move next. I eventually realized there was no limit to how long I could keep the button pressed and the world moving in slow motion. As these giant hell-spawn would run up behind me and freak me out, I discovered that keeping them in slow-motion kept my anxiety lower and allowed me to dominate more fully. I could still fire in this mode. Traditionally games give you a difficulty selection screen at the beginning, but with Doom VFR it was as if I had an “easy” button at my fingertips at every moment. Given that I believed I was in Hell with all manner of monsters coming after me, my anxiety left me relying on this “easy” button far too much.
Over the course of my short demo I started becoming more comfortable with the other method of locomotion I tried — which moved me in short bursts in directions I swiped on the Vive controller’s touchpad. I’m generally susceptible to simulator sickness but experienced no discomfort in my time with Doom VFR.
Overall I enjoyed Doom VFR the most of the three Bethesda VR games, but I’m unsure if that’s because I’m familiar with the original or because the game it is based on is only a year and a half old — meaning its graphics and animations aren’t as dated as Skyrim and Fallout. I look forward to spending some significant time with the game when it is released Dec. 1 for Vive and PSVR. I’m very curious to see how the finished product balances out the adaption to VR, where things like slow-motion and physically aiming a gun at a monster’s most vulnerable parts can dramatically change its feel.
Let us know what you think of Doom VFR so far down in the comments below!
