Test: How Skyrim feels in VR

There's a lot going on in the land of Tamriel. Parallel to the release of a Nintendo Switch adaptation, a complete VR conversion of Bethesda's epic role-playing game will be released almost on time for the six-year anniversary of "The Elder Scrolls V" on 17.11.2017. The fact that the title is now being brought to the less powerful PSVR first probably has something to do with the range of the audience. For Bethesda, together with the VR developer team Escalation Studios by their own account The VR team made a huge effort to make hundreds of hours of play of the main campaign, including all side quests, enjoyable in the virtual first-person perspective. We already had the opportunity to test "Skyrim VR" extensively before the release. And the version for the console is not bad.

A game for those in need of catching up?

Back then, when "Skyrim V" came out for PC, I immediately grabbed the title. However, it was rather a feeling as if the Elder Scrolls epic should not be missing from any game collection, because all my colleagues were talking about it. But did I ever have the leisure to complete all possible quests during 300 hours? Although my jaw dropped a few times at all the beautiful Nordic forests and dimly lit caves, I simply lacked the seat leather in 2011. But the idea of experiencing all the dungeons and those fabulous landscapes in a complete 3D immersion warmed my gamer heart again a year ago. We already know from some VR experiments like "The Mage's Tale" or "Walth of The Wizard" how powerful it feels in VR to slip into the role of a mage and thunder spells from your hands. You are, after all, a "Dovahkiin" (Tamrielistic for "dragon's blood") with half the soul of a dragon and chosen by fate to save the whole of civilisation from Alduin, the World Eater, to save.

Numerous comfort options

When you put on the PSVR for the first time, you immediately realise how detailed the graphics were back then. Even the first scene is perfect as an atmospheric VR invitation. There is a civil war in the province of Himmelsrand and you are on your way to the execution. Until you can escape in the fortress of Helgen thanks to an unexpected encounter with the dragon Alduin. Already at the beginning of the week there was a Bethesda Twitch Conference to see that the developers have fortunately not only integrated classic teleportation, but also natural locomotion. And this works extremely well with both the PS Move control and the DualShock 4 controller - all things considered. If you prefer to curl up on the sofa, the game controls itself similarly to "Resident Evil 7" or "Robinson: The Journey" and you turn with the left analogue stick in pleasant quarter-circle sections.

Difficult Moves with PS Move

With the PlayStation Move hardware, getting used to it is a little difficult at first. In fact, after the first hour, I even had to put down my PSVR once and dig out the little manual on the game disc to understand the control assignments. Now I also finally know that holding down the two trigger buttons of the PS4 accessory is mostly used to navigate the menus, and due to the limitations of LED tracking, you "pull" the sticks in the desired direction when you move around in the options - it's also like that in the PS4 dashboard. Once you have internalised this and made use of the favourites menu for quick weapon assignment, the controls are more or less effortless.

Look where you are going

The 180-degree change of direction is well solved because the PS4 camera only captures the front area. Here, you move to the left and right in quarter circles with the two lower buttons of the right move bar. The developers have built in a little help against the well-known disorientation problem that can occur in heated battles: To avoid having to tape your feet to the parlour floor, simply keep looking at the transparent compass, which is only displayed when you are looking straight ahead.

If you use the Move controllers without teleportation, you move in the line of sight by holding down the left Move button. However, this has its pitfalls if you have to dodge enemies at the same time as aiming a weapon. On the easier difficulty levels this is just about okay. Aiming with the arrows is particularly unnatural and annoying. Killing enemies here really requires practice - or not at all. Despite dark surroundings and precise positioning within the PS4 camera's visual spectrum, my interest in archery here remains, at best, at my first taster day at the Berikon-Widen bow club. This is something that would definitely be more feasible with the precise laser tracking of the expensive HTC Vive.

Good: the control with the DualShock controller

By the way, not all players like me tolerate the natural movement instead of beaming around by aiming at the ground points so well. That's probably why they thought of "tunneling" the field of view (FOV) with a round shadow contour so that your gaze remains focused as you move forward, which can also be turned off or fine-tuned if desired. It all feels much more natural to me with the PS4 DualShock controller: I get through the equipment menus at lightning speed and in a targeted manner, can arm myself with shield and sword in no time at all and still dodge when I hop away from an enemy with the press of a button by simultaneously moving the left analogue stick into the escape zone.

Zoomable mission map

The fact that the developers have made an effort and not simply pasted the six-year-old game into VR is noticeable at the latest in the fine-tuning of the sub-options. Personally, I particularly like the new spherical map screen: instead of looking at a flat disc, you can now see the map in the best possible way. Google Earth VR style zoom into the locations from above, which brings a whole new dimension to the aging title. As we all know, the world of Skyrim has a lot of beautiful landscapes to offer, and the developers really want you to see all the effort.

Acceptable PSVR graphics

Keyword graphics: Skyrim already ran smoothly several years ago with better mid-range graphics cards from 300 francs upwards, even in 4K resolution. The first PSVR launch titles already left me in doubt as to whether this is now possible in VR without any blocky graphics for distant objects on console hardware. I played "Skyrim VR" on a PS4 Pro and can confirm that a slight edge flicker is not omnipresent even at close range, but it is sometimes noticeable in buildings and walls; however, I was never extremely bothered by it. On the other hand, Sony's RGB matrix displays are a not inconsiderable advantage for the huge RPG; although they switch a little slower than the PC competition, they make fonts much clearer to read from my point of view.

Déjà vu with old bugs?

I was more disturbed by minor graphic bugs, which at least I don't know from the Special Edition. Once you look at a companion by the river and his dog hovers above the figure, while houses in villages a little further away are suddenly built up in a jerky manner. Why they can't fix something like that after all these years remains a mystery to me. Fortunately, these bugs remain within limits. It is also possible that individual figures were removed from the open-world landscape so that a little more computing power remains, since some areas seem slightly more barren to me than in the original version. Grosso modo, the PSVR remake reminds me more of the PS3 or Xbox 360 version, but that's okay as long as we don't have so much pixel muesli from all directions. It was apparently a stated goal of the developers to keep the frame rate at 60 frames per second, and that's a good thing.

Nevertheless, there are sometimes minor problems in the VR view, for example when a character suddenly appears in the menu.

The 3D sound seems to work with my 450 franc iSINE in-ear earplugswhich I am currently testing, to reach my ears with spatial precision. I remember several bugs in the 5.1 version of the PC version. You would approach the people speaking and suddenly the voices were much too quiet. That was probably due to driver problems at the time. Fortunately, these interfering effects are no longer present in either German or English and the presettings did not require any fine-tuning. So of course one enjoys the elaborately censored soundscape of the whole game once again.

Skyrim received numerous awards in 2011 as one of the best role-playing games (MMO) of all time. You can expect - with all expansions - in principle over 300 hours of play or endless gameplay. The main quest is to find the cause of the dragon's awakening, but there are endless side quests, because Bethesda has built in a unique "Radial Quest" system that continuously generates new side stories. Especially cool: You always end up in places that you haven't discovered on the map yet.