Skyrim VR... Introduction

During the great lockdown shenanigans of recent years, I panic-bought an Oculus Quest 2.

Err sorry, a Meta Quest 2.

Whatever. Mine has an O on it.

Anyway, I was like, /shrug, everything has been cancelled, PAX has been cancelled, my tickets have been refunded, all that money I would have wasted on merch could be used to buy a shiny new toy that I would have played with at PAX, but I can do it from the comfort of my own home... retail therapy justified.

Turns out it was a fantastic purchase, after spending many many hours exercising in Beat Saber, I started to wonder what other experiences there were.

I played quite a few... Highly recommend The Last Clockwinder. Somewhat enjoyed In Death: Unchained. The Vader chronicles were okay.

But then I discovered Virtual Desktop could link my Quest to my PC over WiFi and my world changed.

I was completely blown away by Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice VR Edition, especially when you toggled to the experimental 'tabletop' mode. It was next level cool stuff.

I pottered around in a few car racing games that had VR compatibility (along with my steering wheel), Elite Dangerous (with my HOTAS), Electronauts, Overload, even Stunt Kite Masters VR.

And then Skyrim VR went on sale.

Now, full disclaimer, I did a lot of reading on Reddit first so I knew what I was getting myself into... basically the consensus seemed to say that Skyrim VR was not worth playing out of the box, but if you are willing to mod the heck out of it, you will have fun.

Being somewhat tech-savvy, I wasn't afraid of a little modding, but it still took about 20 hours of tweaking before I was happy with the experience.

Luckily, the community has developed this thing called Wabbajack, which helps you download and install a bunch of the mods. I started out playing with UVRE, however it was quite choppy and unstable on my computer (RTX3070/i7-10700/32gb). My mate tried FUS, and said it was rock solid (GTX1080/i5-6500k/16gb).

The trouble was I already had a taste for what 'ultimate' could be, and going back to vanilla-plus-plus seemed a bit of a step backwards... so I did a bunch of chopping and changing and ended up with a modlist somewhere between FUS and UVRE.

If you want to play for yourself, I 100% recommend FUS as a great starting point (you can tweak the mods if you like after you have gotten it working). Do note that you will need your VR legs (eg don't get motion sickness when moving in VR), and some patience for bugginess and tweaking.

My journal starts out a bit rocky, especially the opening few days, but once I got out into the main world it was an utterly amazing experience.

Oh and yea, I've never played Skyrim before (so don't spoiler me, even though I will totally spoiler you).