Fallout 4 VR is here to give HTC Vive owners access to hundreds of hours of VR content. But can you play it on an Oculus Rift + Touch?
The good news is that, technically, Fallout 4 VR does indeed work on the Oculus Rift with the Touch controllers. Though the game only designed natively for the HTC Vive, appearing on SteamVR means that anyone with a Rift can jump inside the game too with their Touch controllers. The game isn’t optimized for Touch, though, which brings about some issues.
Firstly, upon booting up Fallout 4 VR you’ll notice that the menus are incredibly hard to navigate with Touch. The game still recognizes the controllers as Vive’s wands and so, when you push the analog sticks to navigate the menu, it reads this as you dragging your thumb along the Vive’s trackpad. This slides the selector along but, when your stick moves back to the center of your controller, the game again reads this as a drag of the thumb, thus moving the selector again, likely away from the option you want to select.
It’s incredibly frustrating to try and navigate the game’s UI with this flaw, and somewhat impossible to accurately apply your character’s stats at the start of the game. However, I found a somewhat inconvenient workaround by using a traditional gamepad to navigate the game’s menus. While it doesn’t look like gamepad support is included in the full game, it does at least register the flicks of the analog stick and the confirm button.
You may have also seen reports that the game comes to a halt on Rift when you have to enter your name and the SteamVR keyboard doesn’t communicate with the Touch controllers. We encountered this issue too, but only when we were running the beta version of SteamVR. Once we switched back to the stable build, the Touch controllers worked fine here.
But, even then, the controls aren’t perfect; it takes multiple clicks of the thumbstick to interact with objects, for example, and it seems impossible to effectively manipulate the in-game map.
Again, the game isn’t natively designed for the Oculus Rift, so we’re not surprised to encounter these issues and you can’t really fault Bethesda for not optimizing for a platform it’s not supporting, but we did want you to know this if you’re a Rift owner wondering if you can play Fallout 4 VR on your VR setup. Regular gameplay still works well; you can aim and fire weapons just fine, but these constant annoyances with the UI might mean some Rift owners will want to wait for a possible native version.
No doubt Rift-only households will be disappointed that Fallout 4 VR is so troubled on Rift as we’re just two weeks on from when the Bethesda-published Doom VFR also ran into support issues with Rift. There, Valve issued a SteamVR fix that allowed Rift owners access — and Bethesda apologized for the issue — but this is a different problem entirely, one that may not be solved without native Touch support.
