The Master Controller: The Elder Scrolls V: Skryim VR

By ARIA DIMEZZO
TESV: Skyrim has been praised as immersive and ground-breaking, and nearly every gamer has played it this many years after its initial release, and Bethesda has now released Skyrim on PlayStation VR, a move nearly as likely to cause vertigo as the game itself. Everything that could be said about Skyrim is already known to players with even a passing interest in the game, leaving the only questions related to the VR implementation; Skyrim is still Skyrim, after all.

It’s easy to remember one’s first experience with Skyrim VR, and words like “remarkable” and “incredible” quickly come to mind, as the player finds themselves standing in Tamriel and casually glancing around, no longer simply looking through a character’s eyes but suddenly seeing through a character’s eyes. Scrutinizing players will immediately notice considerable blurriness and low resolution textures, a lack of Anti-Aliasing, and other graphical deficits, though these are immediately washed away by the novelty of the experience.

Although being led to the executioner’s block to have one’s head removed is perhaps something we did not need to experience in virtual reality, a short romp through a town is followed by a quick tutorial dungeon, after which the player has finally stepped out into Tamriel, free of the bindings imposed by the Empire. By coincidence, it is around this time that vertigo sets in and reveals itself to be among the worst examples thereof. There is no pleasurable way to play Skyrim VR for more than twenty minutes at a time, and players who believe themselves to “have the stomach for it” will quickly find that, in fact, they do not.

Players of First-Person Shooters who transition from console to PC are advised to increment their Field of View settings from console-standard to PC-standard, because PC players ordinarily are much closer to the screen, which is conducive to a wider field of view. This is something to which players can adjust, however, without causing copious amounts of motion sickness and painful headaches. There is no similar way to adjust to Skyrim VR. It is Motion Sickness: The Game.

Finishing even the main quest while skipping every side quest is beyond my imagination with this version of Skyrim, and it’s difficult to consider that anyone might achieve this voluntarily. Players who want the “full VR experience” can play Skyrim VR with two PlayStation Move controllers, and thereby can add the joy of headaches and vertigo to the pleasure of unresponsive controls, which continually give the impression they’re not entirely confident of what the player is trying to do. Like the Move itself, Skyrim VR is best characterized as a novelty produced for technology that isn’t quite ready for mass adoption. It’s silly to think video games would be the multi-billion dollar industry they are today if imprecise motion controls, headaches, and intense motion sickness had always been parts of the experience, so why do we tolerate them today?

In a word: novelty.

Using motion-based controllers to nock an arrow before pulling back and releasing, and experiencing all of this as a player standing inside the video game world, is something of which we have always dreamed. Gamers crave the “Holodeck experience” (or, at least, gaming companies tell us that we do), and desire to step into a room that springs to life around us, where the player is the avatar, and where all sorts of wondrous and magical things happen. Things like VR and motion controls allow us to feel like we may yet enjoy this in our lifetimes.

Drawbacks of this technology are rarely explored, though, and it typically entails major and unavoidable consequences. It would be too easy to forget which world was real, and the disorientation factor of stepping from one reality into another, while one’s brain disputes the sensory input as being impossible, are not to be underestimated. Although the weak graphical capabilities of modern VR prohibit the former, this also serves to exacerbate the latter.

TESV: Skyrim is certainly worth playing for anyone who has not yet done so, but not in this form. The game is solid, but the technology is not, and the result of filtering the game through that technology is unpleasant. Bethesda deserves credit for delivering a full game to a platform sorely in need of things beyond glorified tech demos, but the tech itself isn’t quite ready to be demonstrated.