#skyrim vr

[chloe-of-astora]

Istg Skyrim VR is so dangerous, I now want to grab people irl by their heads and shake them around and I can not be doing that

[rowansinjune]

I've been playing heavily modded skyrim vr since I recently got a new rig and I just had the wildest experience in it

I'm playing a 7'2 brickwall of an Argonian named Smells-like-toad who is a skooma addict who awoke in a long abandoned prison and escaped. He wears no clothing except an amulet of Mara and a loincloth, one-hands massive polearms like they're twigs, and consumes exclusively raw meat and alcohol

Now, his first order of business upon escaping prison is to get some skooma, so he begins running down to Riften, but at somepoint takes a wrong turn in the dark (and nights are DARK without a torch) and happens across a Khajit in the night. Said Khajit just so happens to sell skooma. Mission achieved by accident

Now, Smells-like-toad realizes quickly that he doesn't have enough buy the skooma, but this is hardly an issue after he beheads the Khajit and rifles the skooma and moonsugar from his pockets. This is when the problems start

In VR, the button for pocketing items is much less ergonomically present than the button for consuming them, so by my mistake, a ravenous Smells-like-toad inhales 3 bottles of skooma and 5 rations of moonsugar

The modpack I'm using is so large I don't know half of the stuff in it, let alone the changes made to taking skooma. So next thing I know the world is spinning, warping between a rainbow of colors, some psychedelic rock plays distorted in the background, and all sorts of hallucinations begin immediately

For what I estimate to have been an in game 2 weeks, as the mods cause the day night cycle to run super quickly, Smells-like-toad was on a full skooma bender in the Skyrim wilds, heckling traveller's for more, lying catatonic for days on end, and getting even more lost

I'm not sure if it broke or not, but after the obvious effects wore off, the sky was still spinning. So I tried to sleep, unwittingly activating the thirst + hunger system mod. When slept didnt fix the sky I tried again and promptly died of dehydration

So, Smells-like-toad, an argonian beefcake, inhaled enough Skooma and raw moonsugar to send him on a two week bender that felt like 15 minutes to him, before he promptly dropped dead because he forget to eat or drink. What a legend

[andmaybegayer]

Skyrim VR is interesting because it's like the polar opposite of Half Life: Alyx. Skyrim VR is extremely bad stock, because they did the bare minimum required to make it work and threw it out the door, as a joke. Alyx is incredibly well designed to work well in VR, the levels are all perfectly designed around it, the interface is smooth and fluid and constrained specifically for this. Skyrim is a game where you spend 50% of your time in menus.

As a result, mods have sprung up to fix Skyrim VR but they can't do it by streamlining Skyrim because the fun of Skyrim is being able to do all that shit, so instead it's about trying to make interacting with menus turbo-efficient. Well it's also about correctly handling inverse kinematics and having weapons that deal damage proportional to speed and also the usual texture and bug fixes. But a lot of it is menus! How can you cram as many UI elements into things that you can do with your body.

Press these buttons and summon a huge floating menu of items in front of you. You can stash weapons on your back, on your hips, on your forearms, wherever. There's a few mods that run voice recognition on your mic which allows you to do everything from talking to NPC's to voice-selecting equipment to actually doing the dragon shouts in real life and having them register.

It's incredibly clunky but the tradeoff is that Skyrim was already made 15 years ago so unlike other VR games they don't have to make a profit on this one, they already have a game world the size of Manhattan that you can walk around in, and it feels like it! It's fucking huge! Solitude is like. A small city in the game, right, it's a comically small city, but when you actually have to stand in there and feel the stone walls tower over you and walk through the arches and step inside the buildings it feels enormous.

I think my wireless VR thing is giving me some bad rendering artifacts but it might just be LOD? Not sure. It looks really good in some places are really dated in others, even with mods. Might need to figure that out. I wasn't getting headache but this would probably be rough on other people, although I did turn off all the anti-motion-sickness vignettes. Anti motion sickness design is interesting because it makes a lot of sense but really constrains designers a lot, and I think that a lot of heavy VR users either have or gain a knack for just handling horribly mixed motion input. I never really suffered from motion sickness other than in one poorly programmed game (Fantastic Contraption) and you can just throw me around.

(This has, hmm, interesting interactions with VR pornography, which even more so than other VR video formats targets the lowest common denominator, it really limits the art form when your camera position has to sit in a fixed position and angle. You could do some very interesting things if you didn't have to worry about making half your audience throw up.)

Anyway I spent a couple hours in here with an alternate start just tooling around Solitude doing low level bounties.

Combat is so finicky if you don't have a ton of room, which I don't. You have to suppress your instinct to just jump aside, I whacked some chairs swinging my sword about. Aiming bows is very hard but that might just be practice, these mods make it so that it's more bow-like but it might be worth having a reticle. Magic is obviously the thing to do in VR, stand back and blast enemies with fire and ice, and it has aiming reticles. The mods here adjust the angle so that it comes out of your fingertips instead of your palm so that aiming is more natural. I mention all the tweaks to show just how much this has to be beaten into shape.

Skyrim's slow and unidirectional equipment progression works to your favour here. You simply aren't changing gear that often, so it doesn't matter that menus are kind of clunky. I have a few quick settings to handle basic gear and then weapon wheels on a key combo and that so far has handled it. Being a mage probably involves some horrible weapon wheels but they do theoretically support like 36 items per wheel.

The IK mods allow you to grab NPC's which is funny, not really viable unless you're in 1:1 but you can just pick a guy up and hit him. Comical. A lot of player retune melee combat way way down and I can see why, with a sword you can just wail on someone as fast as you can flick your wrist, it's so easy to score half a dozen hits on something as it runs past you. It would be interesting to make it so you have to swing at the right speed with haptic feedback or something for different weapons, it buzzes you if you're going at the right speed to land an attack.

Skyrim lacks a lot of the intentional sense of space that VR games use, but it trades off on just, scale and stuff. There are a lot of interactable items in any Skyrim location, tables of vegetables, shelves of armour, piles of books, even though they're not made for VR. With the addition of the very popular dimmer lighting mods, caves feel positively abyssal, I was going so slowly through those things.

I could see someone playing this from start to finish like this if they were really committed, with all the tweaks it is a pretty playable game, but it would be a hell of a commitment. I can see why you'd want to have a "sit down and play" mode.

[mr-nutt]

The real reason Skyrim VR exists

[elderscrollsconfessions]

Confession: My first time playing Skyrim was in VR (incredible experience, would recommend) but besides helgen, and a handful of quests, I knew nothing. I was clearing out a bandit camp when I came across “the Beacon” I had no idea what it was, so I picked it up. And literally tripped over myself when Meridias whole speech started. I have never been more scared in my entire life

[skyrim-forever]

Skyrim VR playthrough but it's just me slapping Ondolemar's bald ass head

[shanehollandyke]

obsessed with this channel

[cocho388]

Too Many

Alternatively - Where the HELL did January Go?!