VRodeo: 12: Skyrim VR, Beat Saber, and Starbear: Taxi

@rdfed: Audioshield (from the makers of Audiosurf) is a really great 'play the music' VR game.

I'm glad Jeff still wears that shirt. I almost forgot they made the perfect pokemon recently.

SkyrimVR is pretty impressive once you spend a half hour installing all the mods you want. Also I found that the Oculus Touch controller layout was a lot easier to pick up and understand compared to the Vive wands.

not since that one game room video have we been treated to a silent intro bumper

Wouldn't the voice shout mod just be the kinect feature?

Man skyrim VR is what I wanted fallout 4 vr to be. Installing all the fancy graphics mods and tweaking the AA brought me to the first realized vr world full of shit to do.

Bows are awesome and dual wielding lightning spells while role playing the emperor from Star Wars is the bees knees. (Do not judge me for installing CBBE).

I was actually shocked by how much I enjoyed Skyrim VR on PSVR. I ended up using the Dual Shock 4, and I think that was a good move. Not enough other games on PSVR that I want to play to justify a purchase yet, but definitely enjoyable for me at least.

I'd say the biggest surprise for me was that I did not feel sick at all and was able to play Skyrim VR for hours on end. I guess that comfort mode thing helped me a lot.

How is the movement? it looks nauseating with the teleport turned off. I thought games couldn't do full motion without making people sick.

Also, you can totally throw stuff around in the original game, You MUST be able to in VR but maybe there's a weird button for it. It was like alt or something on PC.

Hey Taxi!!

Can someone explain this?

In regular ass Skyrim, you can freely pick up almost any object and move it around and stuff. Is that seriously not possible in VR, the place where it SHOULD be among the first priorities, or did Jeff not find the button or whatever that enabled this?

Edit: Oh, what @casonsaid totally answered my question. Cool, thanks.

It's weird seeing vanilla skyrim. My mods folder is like 200 gigs and it's mostly graphical improvements. Bethesda can only make a good base game but it requires the damn community to make it playable.

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yo, skyrimvr is pretty gnarly with mods, lots, and lots of mods. One of maybe four games I'd say fill in the spaces left by expensive arcade shovelware. They should really check out Payday 2 VR, to Ben's point about 'this game showcases VR well', as I think as far as arcade shooters with a calatogue of 'stuff' to do, especially in a multiplayer setting with desktop players, that delivers really well. Hope to see them check that out in the future VRodeos

I haven't played it yet, but... did you notice the "tunnel vision" effect that appeared when Jeff moved around? That helps a LOT with preventing nausea. The first game I saw it used was Eagle Flight where you're flying all around a ruined Paris and it worked well there.

A lot of content lately going up with out the HD download link. Weird.

Yeah but if you don't espresso society thinks you aren't making an effort. Everyone espressos these days. You need to espresso to get anywhere in the world! If you don't espresso someone will compare you to the glossy espresso people on the Internet and in magazines and think, 'wow gross, he doesn't espresso,' and then you'll fall asleep on the job. Like Ben.

Beat Saber FunFact: Those circle blocks aren't stabs. They're omnidirectional.

Apparently people don't like playing the tutorial, as I've heard several other people also wrongly think they're stabs.

@jume1989 said:

Manspaning? Is that a new buzzfeed term for when a man uses a spanner inappropriately?

But seriously, it's a sad world we live in when telling someone to get more sleep or at least drink a coffee before appearing on camera is considered offensive, instead of practical criticism.

Ah, classic Giant Bomb content, meaning "do not check about something in advance, give it a half-assed attempt and proceed to complain about not finding an option that totally exists for the rest of the video".

It's less that I'm complaining about it myself (at this point it's part of the charm, I guess?), but I feel bad for the people that worked hard to put things in the game for *precisely* the kind of logic the guys are using to give them crap for not doing it. It's not fair to the game, and it actively pushes people away from it for no reason. I find it a bit irresponsible for people with such a big following, to be honest.

In this case it's even weirder because totally can do that with the old controller-based version of the game as well. The Internet is full of videos of people putting buckets on top of people's heads. These guys have talked about it before, even.

I think there might be more to Ben's sleepy state than "down an espresso" which is why I'm reluctant to make quips about it. Maybe he's just tired, maybe there are medical reasons who knows. In any case it doesn't bother me, and he's still on point and funny.

Beat Saber looks super-duper fun. If it had more songs i would think of getting a VR rig.

I think I may go my entire life without playing Skyrim. It's a game I can respect from a distance.

I think the VRodeo format needs a shakeup. Not learning anything about the games beforehand and having two ambivalent people sitting on the couch (Ben literally falling asleep in this case and every episode either starting or ending with '...VR is... still here...') is not entertaining viewing and also does VR a big disservice.

IMO Jeff needs to decide whether the VRodeo is EITHER for goofing around in VR games for entertaining video content, or actually spending time covering VR content. At the moment, it isn't really either.

@jume1989: Hmm he does.. people pay money to watch GB content. Brad and Jeff were great as always. Ben may need more sleep, he may need a better diet or it may be medical but it's up to Ben to make sure he's fit to do his job. If it continues you'd expect Jeff to speak with him and see how they can help by either changing stream times or not have Ben in front of camera for extended periods of time...

@mikemcn: The movement is great, as long as you can maintain the proper framerate. Sometimes it feels like I am moving doom speed because the default walk is super fast, but you need it to not feel sluggish. I installed too many graphics mods and it was doing about 70-80% re-projection. This was the only time any VR game has made me sick enough to take off the visor and feel weird for about an hour. With a more powerful computer (I just have a 970) I am confident that I will be fine.

You can totally pickup shit in the world by holding the touch pad on the vive. There does seem to be a cheese wheel shortage in the world, and a general lack of an abundance of objects to throw at people, but they are there to throw.

Overall this is one of the best games for me so far, but it's still me standing in place for extended periods of time and it gets old after an hour continuously. But man is that hour fucking amazing. This sounds stupid but one of my highlights is being inside some of these buildings and looking up at the rafters and general architecture.

Objects absolutely can be picked up, thrown, etc.

See my reply to @jume1989. It wasn't a serious retort by him/her. The comment parodied cultural obsession with physical appearance in a mock protest against nonexistent 'espresso culture', so I doubled down on it.

Next Ben's Lens should be 30 minutes of Ben taking a nap. I think he needs it.

Damn, Jeff is pretty fucking good at beat saber

It bummed me out that they didn't figure out their error during their time with the game on video. Honestly, I wish they'd focus less on critiquing games at this point, its not what I enjoy about their content. The Beat Saber stuff was great to see and I'm definitely interested to check it out on my rift.

@newfangled: Yeah, I know your reply was facetious, but I don't think theirs was. I think they genuinely believe your response was akin to 'mansplaining'. If they were joking, thank goodness, but knowing some of the people in this community, I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't.

RIGS was great.

Skyrim PC VR version is better from what I can tell and have experienced

Does anyone else get motion sickness watching VRodeo content? I have a feeling I wouldn't be a good candidate for a VR headset.

Sleepy Ben, best Ben.

@cason: Such has been the case in countless videos over the years lol. Sometimes it makes me laugh, sometimes it makes me mad but hey, thats giant bomb lol

Good goddamn catch there! I remember that back when it came out the "which side did you choose" polls were pretty split down the middle(something I never understood given how shitty and xenophobic the Stormcloaks are in game); I wonder if they would've been different now that the world has gotten another look at how ugly nationalist populism/demagoguery can be. Probably not...

Who would've thought Bethesda's piss-poor writers could accidentally stumble into making a poignant allegory.

Or at least it could have been if they weren't too chicken shit to take a stance on the conflict instead of arbitrarily going all "both sides."

Congrats on making me think this much about a game I don't particularly care about :P

Fuck yeah it was!

Are we ever going to see a VRodeo with Wipeout? Seems like the GB crew might have just not known about the release, which is too bad because it's some gut-churning fun times.

Completely agree.

I only have a psvr so I really hope Beat Saber gets the editor there. So far I can't find anything about that version aside from the fact that it's in development.

Since it didn't get showed off for some reason, the magic feels real good in Skyrim VR. Sparks especially... the spell they got.

Also mods work, for the most part, any mod that skyrim special edition uses skyrim vr will take, meaning you can make it a really pretty looking game.

I was also pretty confused when Jeff said he didn't know how to shoot a bow, since as far as I can tell, there is an unskippable 2 minute tutorial that forces you to do things like shoot a bow before you ever load the game proper. I assumed Jeff would have had to have done it before he launched the game today, maybe he forgot.

All of that said, it's a game not built for VR, and the amount of mods you need to install to make it great / look good is a bummer. No amount of mods make the melee anything other than passable, the best way to kill stuff is just sorta flailing your wrist around, regardless of the weapon.

Honestly if you can't find a movement setting in Skyrim VR that works for you and doesn't make you sick, VR isn't for you. It supports every method of movement. Theres even natural locomotion tools people have built that work where you move your arms to simulate jogging that I've read people are into. You can pick up / throw stuff, Jeff just didn't know how.

This has turned into a weird feature! Hard to tell what they're going for anymore, doing little research and dunking on legit good games I guess is cool now.

When we're talking about how you can pick up items in this, do we talk about the 'item hovers in the sky' pick up of the other skyrim versions or actually being able to pick things up by reaching at them with your hand?

spoiler!!!

@steveurkel: I gotta be honest with you. I got PSVR back in February and the thrill lasted about a month. I had fun, but nothing stuck with me really, very temporary experiences. I passed on Skyrim VR, because honestly I didn’t like Skyrim. The game just didn’t have the depth I loved about Morrowind and to a lesser extent Oblivion. I did however pick it up on sale last week after curiousity finally got the best of me.

Surprisingly, I’m addicted. Don’t get me wrong the game still feels like your visiting a guided theme park as opposed to a massive open world. The scale in VR is as impressive as seeing the Matterhorn at Disneyland as opposed to the real thing for instance. That’s all part of its charm to me though. It’s funny because some of the same things I resented about the original game are enjoyable in VR.

Using the move controllers takes an awful long time to get used to. Having two controllers with identical buttons and commands that require the same buttons used in individual hands is very confusing, at first. When I first set up to play more like a traditional game with smooth camera movement and got rid teleportarion. I found that movement in the world was great and intuitive, then I had to fight..... That took the longest to overcome, because playing while seated you instinctively want to do things your body physically can’t and I had to change my approach to combat. The bow is also a bit of a pain at first. Since you can’t aim down sights without setting the bow to go into a frenzy and break your digital arm in 6 polygons. You have to practice constantly to judge an aim just offset.

I’m playing a thief character and I think this is where this game mostly shines. Sneaking around and physically checking around corners, backstabbing, picking locks and stealing. Its really too bad Looking Glass Studios is no more, I can only imagine what they could do with a Thief VR.

All in all I’m incredibly impressed with the effort, low res textures and all. What I would love to see is someone develop an open world game more on par with Morrowind/Daggerfall. An RPG that takes away the simple guiding mechanics littered throughout Skyrim and gives you a hands free adventure. Maybe some day, maybe not.