Bethesda had previously announced that it would release not one, not two, but three VR versions of its biggest franchises by the end of this year. Rather than disappoint headset hopefuls with a last-minute delay, the company has gone ahead and announced firm release dates for all three.

Mark your calendars, real or virtual: Doom VFR will land on both the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR on December 1. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR will launch exclusively on PlayStation VR on November 17. And Fallout 4 VR will round out the company's 2017 VR schedule by launching exclusively on the HTC Vive on December 12.

Bethesda has not announced plans for any of those games to appear outside of their announced platforms. While it's likely that at least one of the three games will flutter out to another platform, we at Ars Technica would bet cacodemons to cacodonuts that Bethesda has no intention of releasing a game on an Oculus-branded platform any time soon. Or ever.







None of the games will be available as a free upgrade to owners of existing non-VR versions, by the way. This might be the hardest cost upgrade to stomach for owners of Fallout 4's PC edition—as we can imagine an era in which someone would just, you know, mod VR functionality onto the existing FO4 PC codebase. (Based on my E3 impressions of FO4VR , I'm already curious whether that would be the better route for the project to have taken.)

Bethesda has yet to confirm whether FO4VR will at least include all of the game's existing expansion content in its $60 price tag, and the current Steam listing for the game is coy on that front: "Fallout 4 VR includes the complete core game with all-new combat, crafting, and building systems fully reimagined for virtual reality."

Skyrim VR will include all of that RPG's expansion pack content, at least, for its $60 price tag. Doom VFR, on the other hand, appears to be a slimmed-down version of the Doom 2016 reboot—and is priced accordingly at $30. I had a very good time with the HTC Vive version of Doom VFR at E3, noting at the time: "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."

This news precedes the ongoing Bethesda-ing of id Software's annual QuakeCon Expo in Grapevine, Texas, which will include demos of the publisher's other major Holiday 2017 releases (Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, The Evil Within 2, Dishonored 2: Death of the Outsider) alongside a giant series of Quake tournaments old and new.

If you can't get to Grapevine's Gaylord Hotel starting this Thursday, you can watch the Quake World Championships all weekend long on sites like Twitch. (Or you can, er, pay to access the new Quake Champions game, which launched on Tuesday in a "paid early access" period before its free-to-play version becomes publicly available at some point next year. Pay now or wait for the free version and be pestered about microtransactions either way? We've seen this sort of thing before.)

Listing image by id Software