Fallout 4 VR

Fallout 4 VR
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher	Bethesda Softworks
Platform	SteamVR
Device	HTC Vive
Operating System	Windows
Type	Game
Genre	RPG, Open World
Input Device	Tracked motion controllers
Play Area	Standing, Room-scale
Game Mode	Single-player
Release Date	December 12, 2017
Price	US $59.99
App Store	Steam
Website	https://fallout.bethesda.net/en/games/fallout-vr

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Fallout 4 VR is a virtual reality version of the 2015 open-world role-playing game Fallout 4, developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. It was released for Windows PCs through Steam on December 12, 2017, with the HTC Vive as its launch headset and a price of US $59.99. The game contains the complete base game of Fallout 4, with its combat, crafting and settlement-building systems reworked for motion controllers, but none of the Fallout 4 add-on packs.

Bethesda first announced the project at its E3 2016 showcase for release on the Vive in 2017, and it was one of three Bethesda VR conversions released in late 2017 alongside Skyrim VR and DOOM VFR. HTC bundled a copy with every new Vive sold from October 2, 2017, ahead of the game's launch. Reviews were generally favorable: the game holds a Metascore of 78 on Metacritic and a Top Critic Average of 81 on OpenCritic. Bethesda's last feature update, version 1.2, shipped in April 2018; the game remains on sale on Steam at its launch price as of September 2026, and a community modding scene built on the F4SE VR script extender continues to add features such as a full-body avatar.

Reviewed 20 September 2026. Release date, price, platforms, update history, review scores, awards, sales report and the F4SE/FRIK modding claims checked against Bethesda, Steam, HTC, Road to VR, UploadVR, Metacritic, OpenCritic and GitHub sources. About review dates.

Gameplay

Fallout 4 VR is played in first person with two tracked motion controllers. The player takes the role of the sole survivor of Vault 111 in a world destroyed by nuclear war, and the VR version includes every quest, character and location of the base game. The Steam listing requires a SteamVR headset and supports standing and room-scale play.

Locomotion and comfort

The game defaults to teleportation: pointing the controller places a blue teleport node, and long teleports drain the character's action points. A "Direct Movement" toggle enables smooth locomotion from the left controller's touchpad, and a "World Rotation" snap-turn option, with an adjustable angle and transition, lets players in smaller play spaces turn without physically rotating. A vignette setting narrows the view during movement for comfort. In its review, Road to VR described three schemes in practice, teleportation, free locomotion and snap turning, and its reviewer settled on free locomotion after finding the default teleport system tedious over long distances.

V.A.T.S. and the Pip-Boy

The Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) was redesigned so that time slows rather than stops. The player keeps control of the camera, can move around a target and aims at body parts in real time while enemies move in slow motion. UploadVR's review found that body-part targeting became chaotic with motion controllers because the highlighted targets shift as opponents move.

The Pip-Boy wrist computer is worn on the player's left arm. Raising the arm and turning the wrist displays it, its size can be scaled, and an optional "projected" mode shows the menus in front of the player instead of on the wrist to reduce arm fatigue. Road to VR praised the way the Pip-Boy integrated the game's 2D interface into the world, while UploadVR and IGN both found the Pip-Boy's interface clumsy to operate with motion controllers.

Combat, crafting and building

Weapons are aimed and fired with the primary controller, and the controllers' side grips handle grenades and reloading. Road to VR found gun combat satisfying, especially with heavy weapons such as the Fat Man launcher, but criticized the lack of intuitive holstering, two-handed weapon handling and manual reloading, and noted that optical scopes did not work at launch. Scope support was added in update 1.1.31.0 in January 2018. Workshop mode, the settlement-building system, uses a carousel interface with 3D representations of each item, and Road to VR considered base building one of the parts of the game that worked best in VR. Entering Power Armor scales the player's viewpoint up so that the world appears smaller.

Development

Bethesda announced Fallout 4 VR at its E3 2016 press conference, where it showed a playable demo on the HTC Vive and committed to a 2017 release. The demo used teleportation on the left controller and put weapons on the right, and it did not yet include the building system or V.A.T.S. In a November 2016 interview with Glixel, reported by UploadVR, game director Todd Howard confirmed that the studio was converting the full game rather than a shortened version, and said the team was "not so worried about how many we're going to sell or what the market is".

The game opened Bethesda's E3 2017 showcase on June 11, 2017, with a release target of October 2017 for the Vive and no word on Oculus Rift support. Bethesda said on Twitter that it planned to support "as many platforms as we can"; UploadVR linked the absence of a Rift version to the lawsuit that Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax Media had brought against Oculus. At QuakeCon in August 2017 the company moved the date to December 12, 2017.

Speaking to UploadVR at QuakeCon, Bethesda marketing executive Pete Hines explained the missing add-ons: Skyrim VR was built from that game's complete edition, which already contained its expansions, while no equivalent edition of Fallout 4 existed when the VR team began, so it started from the base game alone. Asked whether the add-ons might be added later, Hines replied "I don't know." No add-on content was released for the VR version in the years that followed.

The game was developed for standing and room-scale play with Vive controllers. UploadVR's review noted that the game ran on the Oculus Rift with Oculus Touch controllers at launch through SteamVR, but with problems: the map was effectively unusable and menus were hard to navigate because the interface assumed touchpads.

Release

Platform	Release date	Notes
HTC Vive (Windows PC, via Steam)	December 12, 2017	Launch headset; US $59.99; the Steam listing shows December 11, 2017
Other SteamVR headsets	April 27, 2018	Update 1.2.66.0 added "support for additional SteamVR-compatible headsets and motion controllers"

Starting October 2, 2017, HTC included a redemption code for Fallout 4 VR, which it valued at US $59.99, with every new Vive purchase; the code became redeemable at the game's launch. The minimum PC specification listed on Steam is an Intel Core i5-4590 or AMD FX 8350 processor, 8 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD RX Vega 56 graphics card, with an Intel Core i7-6700K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, 16 GB of RAM and a GTX 1080 or RX Vega 64 recommended, and 30 GB of storage.

A PlayStation VR version was never announced. Asked about one at E3 2018, Hines said "I don't know whether or not that will ever happen, like what the technical implications are", adding that he was not aware of it being "in the cards".

Updates

Version	Date	Main changes
1.0.33.0	December 12, 2017	Fixed resolution scaling tied to desktop resolution and a Workshop menu crash; set the default supersampling value to 1.0 and documented the fRenderTargetSizeMultiplier ini setting
1.1.31.0	January 30, 2018	Added scope support, an overall world-scale setting, a fixed Pip-Boy size option and a minimal Power Armor HUD; improved V.A.T.S. targeting; many rendering and crash fixes
1.2.66.0	April 27, 2018	Added support for additional SteamVR-compatible headsets and motion controllers, a toggleable Workshop palette, fixes for the Power Armor jetpack on analog-stick controllers, and performance improvements

The F4SE VR script extender, which mods depend on, targets Fallout 4 VR runtime version 1.2.72, a later executable build than the 1.2.66.0 patch notes describe.

Mods

Fallout 4 VR shares its data format with Fallout 4, and a VR build of the Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE VR) allows plugin-based mods to run on it. The most extensive VR-specific mod is FRIK (Fallout 4 VR Body), an open-source F4SE VR plugin maintained by RollingRock and ArthurHub that adds a full-body avatar driven by inverse kinematics, per-weapon position adjustments, a physically interactive Pip-Boy, and hand and finger poses. It requires F4SE VR and the VR Address Library and is released under the GPL-3.0 license.

Reception

On Metacritic, Fallout 4 VR has a Metascore of 78 out of 100 from 27 critic reviews, described as "generally favorable", and a user score of 5.1 from 88 ratings. On OpenCritic it has a Top Critic Average of 81 and a "Strong" rating, with 62 percent of 14 critics recommending it.

Outlet	Reviewer	Score
IGN	Dan Stapleton	7.9 / 10
Road to VR	Scott Hayden	7.5 / 10
Gaming Nexus	John Yan	9 / 10
COGconnected	Derek Miller	84 / 100
Hardcore Gamer	Chris Shive	4 / 5

Road to VR gave the game 7.5 out of 10, with sub-scores of 8 for gameplay, 7.5 for immersion and 7 for comfort. Its review praised the size of the open world, the draw distance and visual detail for a game running at 90 frames per second, and the base-building mode, and criticized non-functioning scopes at launch, the limited object interaction (no manual reloading or stimpak injection), floating status bars, the lack of hand presence and the artificiality of the non-player characters when seen from a VR viewpoint. UploadVR's Tal Blevins did not assign a score and called the game "good, but not the amazing experience I was hoping for"; he found the emotional impact of the world and its companions stronger in VR but reported low-resolution, muddy textures, a distracting starfield effect, building pop-in and slowdown during explosions. IGN's Dan Stapleton scored it 7.9 out of 10, writing that the game "lets you experience the post-nuclear future in a much more intimate way" and that the controls worked "fairly well for moving and shooting, but poorly for using the Pip Boy's clunky interface".

Before release, Fallout 4 VR won Best Virtual Reality Game at the gamescom award 2017 in August 2017, where it was nominated alongside Ace Combat 7 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR. According to the research firm SuperData's Virtual Reality Industry Report, Fallout 4 VR was the top-earning VR game on PC in 2017 despite launching in December; GameRevolution reported the SuperData figure as US $4.7 million in 2017 revenue.

See also

• Skyrim VR
• HTC Vive
• SteamVR