One of the bigger surprises to come out of Bethesda’s E3 conference was the news that the publisher had been secretly working on virtual reality demos of both Doom and Fallout 4 for the HTC Vive. While the Doom demo may never be more than a demo, Bethesda’s marketing boss Pete Hines confirmed Fallout 4 for Vive would get a commercial release in 2017.
The two demos were available for attendees of Bethesda’s post-conference shindig, so as soon as they started booting everyone out of the auditorium I did one of those super cool walk-run things through the crowd and managed to get myself to the front of the queue for Fallout 4 VR.
The demo was confined to Sanctuary Hills’ Red Rocket gas station – the location in the game where you first meet Dogmeat. After I had strapped on the headset I was given two minutes to explore the building and take pot-shots at the scenery with Fallout 4’s signature 10mm pistol.
With no enemies to shoot – not even a crummy little Radroach – my targets were limited to a few rows of bottles and a couple of unlucky mannequins – hardly the most exciting of prey. Generally, aiming and shooting in VR is pretty satisfying, especially if you manage to hit a bunch of targets in quick succession, but in the Fallout 4 VR demo it all felt very barebones. The 10mm pistol is not the most thrilling weapon at the best of times, but here it had infinite ammo, so there weren’t even any of those cool reload mechanics you see in other VR shooters.