The only thing redeemable about this port to VR is the fact that mods can be installed. I used the VR essentials pack created by GingasVR and it changed the experience 180° from a bland demo with floating controllers to a fully immersive experience fallout4 experience that felt almost like it was made for VR.

So, you’ve decided to buy Fallout 4 VR! Well, hold on there, sport! There’s a few things you should know about this game before sauntering off into the Commonwealth. These are important characteristics that will influence your overall experience with the game. Here are the defining attributes that make this game S.P.E.C.I.A.L.!


(S)ystem requirements:

My PC runs Skyrim VR perfectly on high settings but refuses to run this in (what I consider) an acceptable state despite exceeding the minimum system requirements. Much of the time I've logged has been tweaking settings, modding, and testing it in an attempt to get it to run in a tolerable state, and nothing has really worked. Eventually I gave up and just decided to tolerate it, but the experience was so underwhelming that I couldn't stick with it for more than a few hours. It's technically "playable," but visual hiccups and bugginess aside, it's still not good.

*The game runs natively on Oculus Rift and required no mods to support Touch controllers. Steam apparently doesn't want you to know this, but it does.

(P)erformance:

Smooth turning created no issues for me, but snap turning created reprojection frames that I could not seem to get rid of no matter what I did. Turning all settings down to “potato” didn't seem to solve this, and even after extensive performance mods the game would struggle to run at a stable 40fps. My standards for a VR game are higher than this, but yours may vary.


(E)ntrepreneurship

One of the things that makes Fallout 4 VR so incredibly S.P.E.C.I.A.L. is its price point. At a whopping $60, you know you’ll be getting a fully realized VR experience. But be careful, because this game has had almost nothing done to it to improve or optimize the game for VR! Those pesky folks at Bethesda are surely taking you and your hard-earned caps for a ride. It wasn’t long before I found myself asking “why did they bother porting this to VR at all if they did nothing to actually enhance the experience?" The answer is simple: this was a cash-in.

(C)ombat

The good news for Fallout 4 fans is that this is still Fallout 4, for better or worse. F4VR is as straightforward a port as you can possibly get to VR, but in this case, that's a bad thing. So little has actually been changed that the only few distinguishable differences are the less-than bare minimum changes made to accommodate a VR platform. Throwable weapons were mostly satisfying in my time with the game and shooting was occasionally fun, but neither were any more engaging than in the vanilla version of the game. Guns are all one-handed and feel like toys, which makes the game feel like a cheap light gun shooter you'd find in an arcade.

(I)mmersion

The Pip Boy feels clunky no matter what you do with it, and you don't have virtual hands for some reason. Without the cinematic flare, V.A.T.S. feels somewhat unsatisfying to use. These design choices strip you of any possible sense of immersion and effectively render the game a cheap novelty more than an immersive VR experience. There is no seated mode and the game does not adapt to your height, so you have 3 options to play this game. You can 1) always stand when you play it; 2) sit and talk to people's crotches; 3) sit, set your height a lot shorter, and interact with a tiny world that's not to scale.


(A)wkward for lefties

The bad news for lefties is that the left-handed shooting mode is no more customizable than that found in most other VR games. Switching to lefty mode will designate movement to the right stick. Anyone who has been playing video games with an analog stick for most of their life will likely have trouble adapting to this and it can't be remapped, so left-handed players will have to decide between "steering" or shooting with the wrong hand. I ended up playing in right-handed mode and shooting at a disadvantage.


(L)azy

This entire project is just a lazily ported cash grab from Bethesda and it really shows. It's clear that not much care or time was put into it. I want to love this so badly because I love Fallout and I love VR, but this game is sadly just not what it could or should be. If you're looking for an immersive VR RPG, look elsewhere.

Conclusion:

Fallout 4 VR is an underwhelming experience at its best, and a mess at its worst. It was never meant to be a VR game, but the right changes could have made it feel like one. I do not believe enough changes have been made, and some of them weren’t even the right ones. If you're still not sure about this game, have a look at NexusMods and see what it will take for you to get the experience you want out of it, then decide for yourself if you're willing to put in the work. Even after mods, the game was still a subjective mess for me, so your purchase could still be a gamble.

Pros:
- Runs on Oculus Rift
- It's still Fallout 4 (to a fault)
- The music is still good
- Grenades are satisfying to throw

Cons:
- Way too expensive
- Poorly Optimized
- Ugly and buggy
- Doesn't feel like a VR game
- Not immersive
- Guns are one-handed
- No virtual hands
- No seated mode
- Lefty support is typically restrictive


[TLDR:]

4/10
Save yourself the headache and just get Skyrim VR.

If your going to purchase this game, do it while it's on sale. This is ridiculous that this game with no DLC, (That's right) is 59.99. And even more a slap in the face that they stated they wont add the DLC. Well Gents and Gals, time to DIY this trash fire they gave us. If you have the patience to read all of what's spewing out my mouth and onto this keyboard I'm hammering with my fat fingers, I commend you. Breaking it down I have good news and bad news.

THE GOOD NEWS

*You can add the DLC yourself and it will work just fine. Also it's super simple if you have the prerequisite.
*There are workarounds to make the game playable and not give you a massive migraine and make you wanna take 100 ibuprofen. (Thank the mouth breathers at Reddit for that one.)

THE BAD NEWS

*You'll need the base game with the DLC to get the DLC. (I'm sure someone has found other workarounds, I'm just to lazy to check.
*You'll have to have patience in getting this game just right.

Now to add the DLC, (What I did and many others before me did.) Go to your library on both Fallout 4 and Fallout 4 VR. Click the settings icon for the game in your library. Select browse local game files. Do this for each game. On each game, find the Data folder and open them both. Now on the Fallout 4 (not VR) Data file, select all files with these starting 3 letters, DLC. So all files with the starting name DLC need to be copied and pasted to Fallout 4 VR Data file. Once the files copy over, your set. I booted up VR and had all the DLC. Everything is working fine. Bethesda is mega lazy for this one.

Onto the visuals, many tweaks can be made. Unfortunately, I would be typing for a long time to explain all of them, and I am lazy. So your best bet is to find guides online. Most you can find here on Steam since Bethesda dumped this on us so we have to find our own workarounds. I just adjusted in-game settings until I was satisfied. One I recommend is having TAA on. Otherwise your background like trees and terrain with have this sparkle shine to it and it hurts the eyes. (Looks like crap too) They give you the option for teleport movement or smooth movement. Smooth is always better than teleportation. You will unfortunately have to deal with teleporting in build mode, but I have gotten used to it. Some settings in-game you'll just have to fiddle with until you get them right. Some also want you to restart to see the changes. Just a game restart so it's not too much of a hassle.

I somehow had the patience for all this. And if you can, that's great. This is a good game. Certainly not a 59.99 game, but it is breathtaking being in the Fallout universe. It's one thing to play a game on a screen but to be in it, whole different story. Simply being able to peek around corners, having freedom to hold and fire your weapon as you want is phenomenal. It makes the game feel more fluid. Now if you already own 4 and the DLC, I recommend picking this up. (Not for full price though.) Grab it on sale, because the workarounds you'll have to do to get what you want do not warrant a reason to drop $60 bucks on this by itself.

Once you mod the ♥♥♥♥ outta it to take if from a half-assed port to a semi-stable VR apocalypse simulator, it's pretty fun. Especially if you are a big Fallout fan, like myself.
P.S look up Gingas VR modpack/tutorial on how to get started with her custom modpack, There are very detailed instructions, and I can recommend it.

While I am still optimistic about this product people need to know to stay away from it for the time being.

As it stands I've spent about 20 hours playing around with the configuration of this game and it is still not a great experience and a large part of that is due to laughable oversights on Bethesda's part.

Lets cover the shameful stuff first...
The DLC. There is a statement that when they started working on the codebase for fallout 4 VR there wasn't a game of the year all in one package of Fallout 4 with all the DLC available for them to work with and that is why the DLC is not included. That seemed sad but maybe plausible at the time, but it turns out it's utter bullcrap.

Fallout 4 VR is just Fallout 4 with an 88mb VR mod package. Minutes after launch it was discovered people could copy their existing fallout 4 files into the new Fallout 4 VR directory, restart the install, steam would discovers those files, verify them and you would save yourself 95% of the download. This is a great tip since almost everyone buying this already owns Fallout 4. It was less than an hour before someone who had done this discovered that because they had also copied across the DLC files in the process of doing this, that the DLC was in fact active in the game.

To clarify the DLC is almost fully functional as is. The only caveat to that is there is a potential crash when using the Automaton workbench (works for some people but not others) and there is no visible terrain textures in Nuka World and Far Harbour. Buildings render fine and you can walk around fine on the invisible terrain. So basically to include all the existing DLC all Bethesda has to do was fix a small bug with a workbench and reply textures they already had to a terrain mesh. Maybe half a days work for a single employee.

But then they couldn't resell the DLC to us? Well we don't know that will actually happen but if it does it's appalling practice. Honestly it's bad enough they resold the game to us for $60 and made existing owners redownload it. There is no reason this cannot exist as DLC on the current fallout 4 store entry. Even if they charged $60 for the DLC that still would have been immensely more convenient. To really drive this point home, save games transferred between fallout 4 and fallout 4 VR are completely compatible with each other. It is quite literally the exact same game. There was no major overhaul to the underlying game. VR is quite literally a just mod package applied ontop of the existing game.

The lack of mod support is also a baffling choice. For those wondering, just like the DLC, mods work to. There is no mod manager for the executable yet but manually editing the plugin folder something like 70-80% of the mods from the nexus that have been tried work almost flawlessly in fallout VR with the few that don't being simply not setup for the new camera mode and controls. So why no official mod support? Where is out GECK for fallout 4 VR to smooth the transition of updating the mods for the new systems? Maybe they didn't want us to see just how little work has actually been done to modify the base game?

Ignoring the questionable business decisions... At launch it was immediately discovered by everyone that the game locks itself to some fraction of the desktop resolution, not the actual resolution of your chosen VR headset. This means for 99% of people at launch the games graphical appearance ranged from looking like an ugly PS2 era game to an atari console title... I'm not even joking, some people had the game resolution lock in at 80 pixels by 80 pixels on their headset.

Day 2. Bethesda releases a beta patch that fixes the display issue by setting the default resolution to 4 times the desktop resolution... In my case this means I was running the game at 6000p. A resolution 3 times higher then what the Vive and Occulus actually support. This was downscaled to project on the headset of course so it looked great. Amazing even. Of course running the game at 3 times the necessary resolution took a toll on even the most hardcore systems and everyone was getting massive FPS drops making the game unplayable.

Day 3. The beta patch was updated to address the FPS issue by adjusting the resolution once again, one again lowering it back below resolution supported by the headset... It is not as bad as day one but we are once again back to the game looking like an ugly blurry mess of pixels.

At no point has it occurred to Bethesda to give owners of the game the option to manually set the resolution the game runs at. There isn't even an .ini file configuration option to edit this. Given the fact there's only really 2 headsets being used you'd think they could just detect which one and lock the resolution to that headsets native resolution. But I can only deduce they have no idea what they are doing.

This is made readily apparent by the games control schemes. You have two options for locomotion on the Vive. Teleporting which is locked to an 8ft range and requires pulling the left trigger... This means traveling long distance you are stuck standing there pulling the left trigger repeatedly for several minutes on end. Personally I find direct motion mode works much better. This basically uses the capacitive touch function of the left circle pad to move your character around like they are being moved by an eccentric dpad. It works tolerably but there’s a couple of major oversights that throw into question if any quality assurance was done on this setup at all.

The biggest one is middle of left circle pad is bound to various none movement related functions. I don't mean pressing the button in. I mean touching the center. This means if you are walking forward and you swipe to the other side of the pad to start going backwards, you will accidentally trigger whatever function is currently bound to the centre of the pad. You will notice this being a problem immediately upon getting your first companion, as it is the enter command mode function. So once you get Dogmeat expect to start accidentally commanding him to stay or run wherever you are looking every 30 seconds instead of whatever it is you actually intended to be doing in that instant. This a huge liability in combat because the first moment you try to back away from an enemy you are going to accidentally switch to command mode and boom, your gun is gone from your hand. You can't shoot, just tell Dogmeat to go stand over there.

For similar reasons workshop mode is infuriating. You open the workbench to start doing some inventory management, you are swiping down to scroll down the list of items in your inventory... Oops you swiped over the middle of the track pad. Now you've activated workshop mode even though you have the transfer interface open. All the controls are now bound to the horrible workshop mode configuration, not the inventory management controls and tada you are stuck. No way to move, no way to close the inventory UI... Except for one work around where one of the workshop controls also happens to coincide with the take all function, allowing you to escape... Now you get to start your inventory sorting all over again.

The actual workshop controls are atrocious. The build menu is stuck open ALL the time. You are locked into teleport movement mode and it doesn't use the same buttons you are used to. So immediately getting around is awkward and trying to do anything is hindered by constantly brushing the touch pad throwing you into new item categories you didn't want to select, constantly bringing up furniture items to be placed down when you are instead trying to select existing objects. It took me 3 painful hours to move around and scrap everything in Sactury Hills.

Any other AAA game that didn't allow us to rebind our controls would be deemed unaccaptable. It is even less acceptable in a VR title.

I still have hope for FO4 VR. But it needs a tonne of work done on it yet.

You can copy/paste the DLC from regular Fallout 4 into the Fallout 4 VR files.

Look up GingasVR. Its a pain it the butt, but she has a complete overhaul of this game. Seriously only for those dedicated to follow a 30 step tutorial to make it play crisp, look phenomenal, and fix the game breaking bugs in vanilla. (Mod Overhaul)

Tip. watch the entire video first before backing up and doing a step by step. I could have saved myself A LOT of time and patience knowing something I thought wasn't working right, actually gets fixed on a later step.

Also look up "Other Sellers". 89% cheaper.

I recommend this game with serious reservations. Straight out of the box, it's a piece of crap that was hastily thrown together by Beth as a clearly shameless cash grab, to mindlessly capitalize on the growing public interest in VR gaming. That's a harsh statement, but a fair one. Little to no thought was put in on how to make it a functional VR game in the likes of Blade and Sorcery or even their own Skyrim VR (which, it must be said, also requires heavy modding to work properly, but it's a bit better than this out of the box).

Unmodded, you are literally just a pair of controllers (they didn't even bother to give you hands) and all weapons are held one-handed, even the rifles, shotguns, and other long weaponry. It's an awful experience trying to properly aim them. Even when holding a weapon, though, you're still just a weapon literally floating in the air and an invisible camera for a head. I'd recommend not even bothering to play this for a moment without mods (aside from starting it up the first time to get the game files), and then immediately modding it with Vortex or manually before you properly jump in.

I've installed FRIK, Full Dialog VR, and Virtual Holsters so far, and I'd consider that a bare minimum to make this a fully-featured VR game. Sadly, nothing like HIGGS or PLANCK exist for FO4 VR (the modding scene for this game is very small), so physical interaction with the world is still painfully limited and will remain so, sadly. FRIK (like VIRK) gives you the ability to have a full-body avatar that lets you see your own clothing and armor, possess actual arms and legs, and aim your weapons with TWO HANDS. However, it oddly doesn't have the built-in holsters of VIRK, so you'll have to add Virtual Holsters on top of that (and I still have trouble getting it to work properly). I have many more mods for Skyrim VR than for Fallout 4 VR, because there just isn't the same variety of mods available, and they also tend to work better.

The frame rate is...atrocious, most of the time. That said, I'm running the game on a GTX 1070ti, which is just above the minimum specs for the game (with a Ryzen 7 3700x, pulling the game off of an NVMe drive) so perhaps a better graphics card would solve that issue? I'm hoping to grab something in the 30 series soon (even one of the higher 20 series would be great), so I hope to see some improvement eventually. I'm also not (yet) running any performance-enhancing mods.

So, why do I recommend this, after all the doom and gloom? Despite everything this game gets wrong, this is still one of the best ways to experience Fallout 4. It's utterly breathtaking in how it immerses the player in the world. You're INSIDE the world of Fallout, standing there and looking around bombed-out Boston and shooting Super Mutants in the face from two feet away! Get this for the experience and you'll enjoy it (after some time spent modding it into a working VR game, obviously). If Beth had spent more than a few weeks throwing this together (bit of hyperbole, but not by much), this could have been a mind-blowing, game-changing experience for the entire VR industry!

Finally, get the game on a steep sale. It's not worth full price. Beth don't deserve to be rewarded for how poorly this was made.

Now, I have to go find Paladin Danse. I left him in Arcjet Systems a few weeks ago and went off exploring the world in all its wonky VR glory , so hopefully he hasn't died of boredom waiting for me.

If like me you watched the fallout serie this week and want to go back in the wasteland, Fallout 4 VR might be what you're looking for !

The thing is, Fallout 4 isn't a good Fallout game, it's even one of the worst VR port I've played.

But, 40 hours later, I gotta say, it's worth it !

Vanilla game is awful, looks like they didn't even try to make it work, scopes don't work, weapons are not made for VR and you can't change your orientation movement.

But, after one hour on nexus, I only installed those 14 mods :
- FRIK
- High FPS physics Fix VR
- VR weapon Overhaul
- Edit right and left Grip
- Bullet time
- Contrast adaptive Sharpening
- Full dialog VR
- Pibboy VR light
- Virtual chems
- Virtual holsters
- VR recoil killer
- Better scope VR
- F4SEVR
- Fallout4Vrtools

And now the game is a fanstastic time consuming machine ! You'll get lost in this huge map, full of npcs, monsters and quest. The quest 3 resoltuin is perfect for this with an amazing image.

I can't recommend this game if you're not interested in modding it, it can be scarry, but it's definitely worth it.

Still, F4 VR isn't a perfect game, far from it, but it's nice to be in this in VR and you won't get another chance to be in the wasteland like this.

This game works with oculus devices just fine.Something i didn't know for a while because steam says it doesn't support it.You can play sitting down to do so download nexus mod smooth movement follow instructions and insert height to about (45.0) for both options.

after that there will be lag spikes when you play this is because vsynch in this game actually is a bad thing.most preferable option is to go to nvidia control panel then 3d settings and turn vsynch to adaptive this will solve the lag spikes.For others who don't posess a nvidia card look online for more help there are solutions.lastly to get rid of the blur for nvidia cards
in the control panel 3d settings turn on mfaa then in the game turn off anti-aliasing this makes the game look alot better p.sturn on image sharpening as wll for improved image quality.

this game so far is way better than i ever expected so far up there with the greats such as Skyrim,Half life,walking dead and resident evil 7