On Sunday during its press conference at E3, video game publisher Bethesda announced that its sales breaking Fallout 4 game will be heading to the HTC Vive headset in 2017. While an updated version of the game will be ready next year, Bethesda also says that Doom will be coming to VR as well but has not given it a release date.
Bethesda revealed that bringing Fallout 4 to a virtual reality platform is no easy task and it will take an ambitious effort to bring such an expansive title to an emerging platform and breathing new life into it at the same time.
These will not be will simple port-overs. While some have noticed that Fallout 4 is already playable on the Oculus Rift, but Bethesda’s approach will take some adaptation. The game’s transparent green dialog interfaces will be updated, along with some tweaks to prevent motion sickness which can result from traveling long distances in VR environment
HTC’s Vive virtual reality platform went on sale April 5, 2016 and offers gamers 2160x1200p resolution (1080x1200p per eye) at a 90Hz refresh rate across dual OLED displays. It has currently received over 22 product awards, including the Best of CES 2016.
“The promise of VR will take our worlds to amazing new places,” said Bethesda in a recent Twitter post. “We can’t wait to share it with you.”
“Let’s not make a short version of Fallout 4–the promise is the whole game,” game director Todd Howard said.
Fallout 4 sold 1.2 million copies on Steam in its first 24 hours of release, and earlier this month the company claimed that mods on Xbox One have generated 50 times the traffic of official mods supported at launch on the PC. Mods for the PC version were officially supported in version 1.5 which released in April, including a Fallout 4 Creation Kit for PC users.
Meanwhile, Doom (2016) launched earlier last month for PS4, Xbox One and PC and is the first major installment in the series since Doom 3 in 2004. It was the second highest selling retail video game in the US in May 2016, reaching over 500,000 copies in a little over two weeks.
