LOS ANGELES—I didn't go into this year's E3 thinking that the virtual reality sector needed another danged shooting game. Shooting galleries are already a dime a dozen on every consumer VR platform. At this point, the genre needs something special to stand out.

It needs Doom.

My 10-minute demo with the series' first official VR offering, Doom VFR, did not convince me that this was a must-have, gotta-buy-headset game. But it did rise above the growing VR-shooter fray to thrill and exhilarate. For my jaded eyes, that is no small feat. However, Doom VFR's speed, accessibility, and quality cast a pretty giant shadow on the other Bethesda VR offerings that I played this E3, Fallout 4 VR and Skyrim VR.

I appreciate that RPGs scale to VR differently from shooters, and I also appreciate that these are incomplete, "teaser" demos. But I definitely walked away from those RPGs with more questions and concerns than wide-eyed excitement.

Hurt me plenty

Let's start with the Doom stuff. Doom VFR's 10-minute demo only barely resembled the Doom VR demo that debuted at last year's E3. That one was a rudimentary, "shoot enemies in a Doom hallway" slice. The most noticeable update to this year's demo is a "dash, warp, and kill" control suite that we can expect in the game's final version.

The Doom series has always (er, almost always) been about fending off tons of enemies, and that's impossible without fluid motion. Doom VFR delivers this on HTC Vive with a touchpad system that walks the fine line between speed and comfort. Tap any edge of your left wand's touchpad to quick-dash in that direction; hold the touchpad button down to slow time and bring up a "teleport" arrow. The dash system is, quite frankly, bleedin' awesome. I could have my right hand (equipped with a gun) out and blasting, and I can still dash backward and sideways, quickly and comfortably, without having to take my aim or attention away from the monsters that began approaching.

I have never played a VR shooter that lets me comfortably and consistently strafe. Sold.

Meanwhile, teleporting greater distances now has a Doom-specific twist. Shoot an enemy enough to nearly kill it and its body will start glowing white. If you've played the 2016 Doom reboot, you know that this is an indicator that a "glory kill" melee attack is available. Instead of waving your hands around in VR, however, teleport directly onto a glowing monster and you'll automatically rip it to bloody shreds.

Using this control system, I was able to easily pump a lot of shells and plasma into a variety of Doom monsters, all rendered and scaled so that they looked tall and bewildering. I felt like I was a sixth grader taking senior-year classes... only, you know, at Hell High School. (The Cacodemon kept shooting flaming spitwads at me.) Like in last year's reboot, I had to manage health and armor both with on-the-ground pickups and glory-kill bonuses, and this demo offered five weapons: plasma rifle, shotgun, chaingun, machine gun, and piddly pistol.

With all of that at the ready, I ran, dashed, and blasted through a stereotypical underground Doom hellscape. The worst part was that I couldn't hold down a "run" button to more quickly move between empty sections. I hope "run" is added because the teleport feature may be helpful for players who want to get their bearings during frantic gunfights, but its short leash means it's not a great long-traversal option just yet.

I could also walk onto boost pads to get bounced around the level, which was admittedly a little disorienting. But that made me hopeful that Doom VFR will support rocket jumping. Worse was when I side-dashed off of platforms when I didn't intend to. (id Software staffers insisted this dash issue will be fixed before the game eventually comes out.)

I'm also curious how Doom VFR's intensity and detail will scale to PlayStation 4 VR (not to mention its controllers and tracking systems). I only got to test the game on PC via HTC Vive.

Pip-Boy deserves better

Fallout 4 VR has been advertised as the same "full game," only now designed for the HTC Vive. This build is much farther along than the Fallout VR teaser I played at last year's E3, which makes sense, since the game is now slated to launch this October. That doesn't mean Fallout 4 VR feels entirely ready for hours and hours of apocalyptic questing and looting.

My 10-minute demo landed in the game's near-opening setting of the Red Rocket Truck Stop, just outside the city of Concord. With a canine companion, I was able to freely walk around by pressing my left Vive thumbpad and pointing in a walking direction. I could look one way and walk another, and this didn't make me feel queasy; in fact, all motion felt comfortable enough, whether walking normally or inside of helmeted power armor. (The power armor helmet UI looks pretty rad in VR, I have to say.) Pressing my right thumbpad let me pick through various guns and weapons, and I needed these almost immediately, thanks to the mobs of enemies that the demo kicked up for testing's sake.







I was then told to test the game's VATS time-frozen aiming system, which could be accessed from pressing one of the wands' menu buttons. Doing this slowed time down and let me teleport and shoot at particular body parts while time ran down, so long as I had VATS points to spend on these actions. This felt sort of odd considering that I could now just hold my ironsights up to my face and use the thumbpad to move around pretty well (though, admittedly, nowhere near as fluidly as Doom VFR). But it worked, and for those who would rather have their VR gunfights slowed down and given more strategic options, this might be a real alternative.

I was eager to bring up Fallout 4 VR's Pip-Boy menu system by holding up my left wrist, and, sure enough, I could do so. But actually switching between menus and selecting Pip-Boy options was an absolute chore. Bethesda elected not to turn Pip-Boy into a touchscreen device, so you can't use your hands to tap on-screen options the way PC players can essentially do with a mouse. Instead, you have to use the thumbpads like arrow keys, and this proved to be a really wonky way to repeatedly tap through menus. (The major exception was collecting loot on the fly, which was as simple as pointing a Vive wand at a downed enemy and tapping a "collect-all" shortcut key.)

Fallout 4 VR's weapon and settlement-building options are mapped to the thumbpads as radial shortcut menus, and these were effective enough in the middle of gameplay. But it all felt decidedly ancient and unclever compared to the "floating iPad" systems that other VR adventure games have delivered in the past year or so. Instead of optimizing menus to take advantage of HTC Vive's hand-controlled simplicity, Fallout just feel unnecessarily complicated and slow.

Bethesda needs to trim as much complication and clutter from its UI experience as possible before launching this game, because Fallout 4 players will spend a large amount of their time managing skill trees, maps, and various inventories. That may require a slightly less authentic Pip-Boy, and I hope Bethesda is willing to bend the game's logic for the sake of hours of headset-bound adventure.

Skyrim VR, meanwhile, felt incredibly thin, and that wasn't just because the demo was intentionally limited. While playing the PlayStation VR-exclusive game, I was allowed to walk around a single mountaintop and use two PlayStation Move wands to swing swords, cast spells, and shoot arrows. Sword swinging was the only action that felt competent at all. Aiming arrows was difficult, as a bow-and-arrow hand motion lacked the precision I've seen in other VR archery games. (Pulling your hand too far back in any PlayStation VR game can result in its camera system losing track of your hand, after all.)

And, in my tests, spellcasting was unwieldy. I had to rely on a sort of auto-aiming system, which was fine when enemies were directly in front of me but meant I couldn't hold my hands out and feel like I was in true control of where spells flew at faraway enemies. The PlayStation Move wands also felt incredibly clumsy to use for motion. Walking around felt simple and comfortable enough, but I had to rely on the wands' very small "face" buttons to rotate. These are always a pain to press down and keep track of, and having to depend on them for hours of questing seems brutal.





Between these issues and Skyrim VR's very, very reduced fidelity in VR mode—seemingly set to the PC equivalent of somewhere between "low" and "medium"—I felt nowhere near transported by the sheer act of battling and traversing. What's more, the demo didn't even have a UI system to test in terms of inventory menus or on-screen indicators (health, arrows, mana).

Should Bethesda tune these and other issues sufficiently, of course, I could see myself enjoying a compromised VR return to Skyrim. I can deal with some lower fidelity if I at least feel comfortable blasting magic, moving around, and going full-on Minority Report with the UI. There's also the question of exactly how the VR game will feel while using a traditional DualShock 4 controller as opposed to Move wands, a query Bethesda was unable to answer this week. We'll have to wait until November of this year to see if everything gets polished enough to deliver a true VR dive into the Elder Scrolls series.