Formerly a PSVR exclusive, Skyrim VR is coming to PC via SteamVR, with officially listed support for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows VR headsets.
When it launched back in November on PSVR, Bethesda’s Skyrim VR was one the first major AAA games to get ported to a VR headset, far outclassing pretty much any made-for-VR game to date in terms of amount and depth of content. And while PC VR players got a similar treat in the form of Bethesda’s Fallout 4 VR in December, plenty of PC VR users have been itching to jump into the fantasy world of Skyrim.
Their shouts have been heard: Bethesda announced today that Skyrim VR will launch on SteamVR on April 3rd, just three weeks from today. Priced at $60 (including all of the game’s DLC), the game’s Steam page officially lists support for the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows VR headsets. And yes, you need to buy the VR version of the game separately, even if you own another version of Skyrim.
In our review of Skyrim VR on PSVR, we praised the game’s depth of content, which brought a different sort of immersion to the VR experience. Unfortunately the game felt a lot like a port (to be expected) rather than a properly made-for-VR game. Rough visuals didn’t help, and the game’s heavy reliance on menus designed for controllers with a D-pad made things tedious considering the Move controllers lack a D-pad entirely and instead relied on a finicky motion-based scrolling method.
With Skyrim VR now coming to PC VR headsets, there’s a chance that a number of our critiques of the game on PSVR could be quite improved. For one, there’s hope that the game will simply look and feel better on more powerful PC hardware, potentially offering higher resolution rendering, better aliasing, longer draw distance, and improved textures, not to mention native 90Hz rendering compared to 60Hz (reprojected to 120Hz) on PSVR. With more flexible trackpads on the Vive controllers, joysticks on the Touch controllers, and both trackpad and joysticks on the Windows VR controllers, we’re hoping the game’s frequent menus will less bothersome to navigate in the PC version.
And then of course there’s the generally improved tracking performance and larger tracking volumes afforded by PC VR hardware, which could help with your aim when drawing the bow, make hand-to-hand combat more interesting by giving you more room for dodging and striking, and make indoor environments like shops and taverns more compelling by allowing the player to physically move around inside them. We’ll see how things stack up when the game launches on April 3rd.
