The best way to describe the sometimes thrilling and sometimes nauseating Skyrim VR experience is as an incredible chair. Just imagine yourself in a movie theater, reclining in an enormously luxe, obsidian-black leather seat. The design is contoured perfectly to align your neck and spine, while the arm rests make you feel weightless, as if you’re lying on a California King sized cloud. Then, the movie starts. The 50-foot screen is playing one foot from your face. Suddenly, arm and neck restraints burst from the chair and you sit there, your arms bound and your eyes brutalized in luxuriant agony.
Because however well realized the world in Skyrim VR is, it’s still just elaborate armchair tourism. Whether using the PS4 DualShock controller or Playstation Move controllers, I’m still sitting in that chair, just like I was in 2011 when I bought the PS3 version of the game. While walking through the towns or exploring a field, I feel more like a disembodied camera than an actual person occupying space. It feels like a missed opportunity. The same way a Google Daydream user experiences the Taj Mahal, the game gives players a novel way of exploring Skyrim without actually inhabiting it.
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Skyrim VR is probably the best of the “the same thing but in VR” titles, but hopefully it signals the end of them. Because while there are many technical limitations to creating VR games (to say nothing of our limited ability to even stomach playing them) developers need to start thinking natively in VR now if VR is to stand on its own as more than a landing spot for cash-grab re-release in an industry in love with redundancy.For the record, there are a lot of things wrong with VR beyond the fact that even the best VR games tend to be better without the VR, and I've blogged about them extensively. Still the fact that VR still doesn't enable any quantitatively new experiences, and only allows for qualitatively enhance experiences like Skyrim VR, might be one of its biggest problems, and developers do need to start thinking natively in VR if they're ever to figure out what VR technology is actually good for.
Which is why it's... awkward that there's no money to be made in VR development, and thus no budgets to speak of for the native in VR/exclusive to VR applications that Fussell is calling for. Which probably means that it not only won't happen, it can't happen... unless VR suddenly takes of in spite of a total lack of native VR content, of course, but that seems unlikely.
So... VR is still not a thing, and it will clearly take more than yet another half-hearted Skyrim port from Bethesda to change that.