The burning question at the top of every Oculus Rift owner’s mind ever since E3 this year has been: Will DOOM VFR and Fallout 4 VR work on the Oculus Rift, natively, through Steam? Bethesda has been careful with their language ever since these games were announced and the Store pages clearly list only HTC Vive. But now, at long last, we finally have the answer to the first half of that question: No, it does not appear that you can play DOOM VFR with an Oculus Rift, at least at this moment. After we published our full review of the PSVR edition of the game, Bethesda sent us a download code for the Steam version. Officially, the Steam Store Page only lists HTC Vive as a supported headset and it looks like that was intentional.
Anyone that’s tried playing a Vive game with a Rift successfully in the past probably assumed it would “just work” with the Rift, but we’ve found otherwise. When I load the game up on my Vive I get a series of splash screens and logos, photosentitivity warnings, and a loading screen. After that the main menu appears. When I try it using my Oculus Rift however, the game boots me back to the SteamVR Home space in between the loading screen and the main menu.
It never finishes launching the game.
To understand the situation you have to know that Bethesda’s parent company, ZeniMax, is currently undergoing an ugly legal battle with Oculus’s parent company, Facebook. We’ve covered that case and ensuing trial plenty but we don’t know if that was a contributing factor to preventing Rift access to the game. Ideally, support will arrive sooner rather than later.
Have you tried playing DOOM VFR on a Rift yet? Let us know down in the comments below! We will continue updating this story once we find out more.
Tagged with: Bethesda, doom, Doom VFR
via Mint VR