Zero [HU][VR] replied to Has anybody tried the vr mod? January 10, 2022 @ 8:16:16 am PDT

I'm at the end of my second playthrough in the VR mod, so here's a little more in-depth review of it:

It works completely fine. It's customizable enough, and it ran well for me.
We played on dedicated servers both time, so my computer wasn't running the world. I use a Rift CV1 and a 1070, and my framerate was good enough. It dropped significantly in a base with a lot of objects.

There are a lot of differences compared to desktop.

The first, main thing is combat. It's completely different, as attacks don't have initial delay, and also their trajectories are not fixed. I don't know if damage is related to arm movement speed, but it seemed that most of the time I killed mobs faster and in fewer hits than my buddies playing on desktop. We don't have the "third attack does double damage" mechanic, but at the same time it feels like we do more damage overall. The rythm based combat system is all gone, you can just step in, swing your weapon and immediately step out of enemy attack range, making combat much easier. On the other hand, doing a dodge roll is almost impossible.
Blocking with shields is also completely different. We don't have the blocking animation, our shields are always active. If you carry a shield, and an attack or a shot comes from the shield's direction, it will be blocked. We don't need to raise it, but also we can attack with the shield raised. The downside is that I never in a hundred hours figured out how to do a successful parry. The mod's manual states that we need to move the shield in the attack's direction, but I couldn't actually do it.
Atgeirs are fun, we don't have the spinning attack, but the reach is enough to hit anything beyond enemy attack range.
Archery is different also. We do see a predicted trajectory, so aiming is easier. Also as far as I can tell, drawing time doesn't affect accuracy, so we can fire arrows as fast as we can physically pull out arrows from the quiver on our back, nock them, pull then release. If I'm not mistaken, the farther we pull back the string the more damage the shot does.
So all considered, combat in VR is much easier.

Building, on the other hand, is much more tedious. It's pretty damn hard to precisely point at the exact place where you want a block to be placed. In some positions, especially when building a tall roof from a scaffolding, I had to find the exact cubic centimeter in the air in front of me to place the block where I wanted. A lot of times the miniscule movement while pressing the trigger was enough to misplace a block.

Mining is way more tedious than on desktop. Not only because we have to swing the damn pickaxe, but because on desktop the character animation hits the ground and mines down by default. In VR we have to crouch to even reach the ground, and for some reason the decrease in the terrain level is less than on desktop. But it's also more precise, it's easier to hit what you want to hit, and also you can mine with side to side and upward swings too.

Sneaking is tiring. There's a button (well, joystick flick) for that, but I don't really like artificial crouch in VR, so I didn't use that. And because of physical crouch, I didn't sneak that much.

Sailing is pretty nauseating, especially in a storm. I put the points in the iron stomach perk right after getting VR, and I can handle pretty much everything now, but sailing was close to getting me sick again. Also we can't reliably hold on to the bow of the longship or the mast, as even a slight sideways movement of our head makes the character let go of the handhold.

One other small perk compared to desktop is that both our hands are fully functional. We can gather crops or fill smelters with both hands simultenaously.

In conclusion, I consider it an excellent VR mod, it makes the game more immersive and fun. Honestly, I wasn't really interested in Valheim until the release of the mod. Now it's climbing the playtime list and is getting close to the top.
3:13 am, March 24, 2022
Zero [HU][VR] 0 comments 0 likes