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Fallout 4 VR is one of those experiences that just has to be seen to be believed. Yes, there are plenty of games in VR that equip you with a gun and let you shoot up monsters and all that, but here, it’s just different. The world that Fallout 4 VR gives you to explore certainly isn’t as pretty as its Bethesda counterpart Skyrim VR, but it houses the same type of mysterious wonder just in a much darker and more depressing way. While the Fallout 4 VR launched in a truly unplayable state, the patches that have been added have made the game far more stable with a ton of QOL improvements that make the experience overall so much better.
Starting out in Fallout 4 VR can be a little intimidating, though, and it doesn’t help that the majority of conveniences that most VR games have now aren’t afforded here. To fix that, we have the wonder of mods to make everything better. Whether it’s new guns, better scopes, new lands, new characters, new quests, or new mechanics, Fallout 4 VR has so much potential just waiting to be unlocked. Let’s explore the best mods in Fallout 4 VR.
Fallout 4 VR Optimization Project
Anyone that’s played Fallout 4 VR will tell you that it is an apologetically messy experience. One of the biggest issues facing the game from the get-go was the stuttering gameplay that didn’t seem to improve, no matter how much you turned down your graphics options or tweaked settings in the Steam menu. The reason for this is that the game was simply put together poorly. The stutters so many players faced were from objects being poorly implemented into the game and all treated as individual pieces and that stressed-out so many systems trying to render the world of Fallout 4 VR in your headset all at once.
What Fallout 4 VR Optimization Project does is fix those oversights by using precombined objects that maintain visual clarity, while adding a ton of performance to your game as well. With this mod, you should see a severe reduction in stutters, performance hits, and most of all, complete crashes.
The terrain you travel on will now be navigatable, and you’ll no longer find your game to be a stuttering mess as you try and do things as simple as climbing over a rock. While there are some mods that remove the troublesome pieces of the environment that the game decided to launch with, they mostly seeks to leave the vanilla game intact while making the experience much smoother. This is a must-have mod for anyone worried about visual performance.
Improved Reflex Sight Reticle Visibility- VR
Somehow, Fallout 4 VR managed to launch as a VR First Person Shooter without having looked at any other VR First Person Shooters. Despite the wealth on hand to draw from like Pavlov VR or Onward, Bethesda launched the game with some of the most unwieldy VR gunplay I’ve ever seen. Not only was it incredibly inaccurate, but the scopes were completely unusable, and the reflex sights for the guns were so hard to see through that you might as well have not even bothered with them. Improved Reflex Sight Reticle Visibility- VR changes all of that and shows us that a little bit of care can go a very long way.
While it doesn’t affect every gun in the game, this mod changes the majority of reflex sights in the game to be actually usable. The retexturing work here is a thing of beauty and now if you actually aim down the sights to shoot at something, your reticle will not only line up perfectly, but you’ll have crystal clear clarity from the variety of reticules you now have access to. Keep in mind that plenty of guns still will only have iron sights at the start, but once you get to a Workbench, you can start adding the sights to them to make aiming more fun, and Fallout 4 VR just an overall way better experience.
More Accurate Weapons
The majority of VR shooters base their weapon’s accuracy on whether or not the person wielding them is skilled or not. This is because these games were built from the ground up with the intent to create a realistic gun shooting experience for the player. That was the main goal, so the result has everything a player could want like recoil, manual reloading, and more to keep the experience as immersive as possible. Fallout 4 VR has not been afforded that luxury because it’s a port of a game from 2016, forced into VR with little optimization or QOL improvements to make the VR experience a great one.
One of the biggest casualties of all this is the accuracy of the guns in the game. See, in Fallout 4, you’re playing an RPG, and like the main games in the series before it, your hit chance percentage was never fully based on your aim, but rather a series of numbers being calculated behind the scenes. This would come up with a percentage of a chance of your bullets hitting or not. What this would often result in is you firing right on target and not hitting your enemy more than half the time. For this reason, the Fallout series was always considered miles behind every other shooter out there.
With More Accurate Weapons, that lack of control is now a thing of the past. The Random Number Generation or RNG that controlled your shots behind the scenes is now completely removed. The recoil is also lessened when aiming down the sights as well, giving you a better chance to land consecutive shots compared to the all-over-the-place nature Fallout 4 VR came with.
Now when you’re aiming for a headshot, the only person determining whether it will hit or not is you, no mysterious number generator. This leads to so much more satisfying VR gunplay here. Now, this mod will make some stats useless as you’ll be overriding a core feature of some of them, but honestly, who cares? Amp up the difficulty so the enemy is just as dangerous as you are play this Fallout 4 VR how it’s meant to be played.
Full Dialog VR
I swear, sometimes it’s like Bethesda wants the players to make their games for them. If it wasn’t already apparent by the massive leaps and bounds that Skyrim VR is with mods vs without, Fallout 4 VR takes the cake. One of the simplest and most obvious features they needed to get working right was the dialogue in the game and yet, something so simple was messed up so terribly at times making it a chore to converse with anyone in the game.
Often your dialogue choices would get blurred or blocked by random objects in the game world as if it was a physical object and not just a HUD popup. This would be endlessly annoying and could often lead to you choosing the wrong path in a certain mission and having the story play out completely differently because of that.
With Full Dialog VR, this problem is completely fixed. You get that part fixed, as well as having more clear options to choose from in the game now which will lead to far more sensible conversations and go a long way toward making your character actually feel like a real person. This is a must-have for Fallout 4 VR.
Pipboy VR Light
In the vanilla version of Fallout 4 VR, the Pipboy light is a helpful little light source for your to navigate areas with in the dark. That worked well enough in Fallout 4 on flat screens, but in VR, that darkness is so much purer and literally in your face, so that faint glow of green isn’t going to do much of anything to help us out.
Pipboy VR Light introduces three options for the distance that the light shines as well as the size of the light itself. You can also choose to have the light come from your Pipboy hand, or you can have it appear flashlight style. These options are all able to be mixed and matched, and whichever combo you like will be playable. This is such an obvious addition to the game that it’s mind-boggling it didn’t exist in the first place. You’ll now be able to explore the dark depths of subway stations and all other manners of creepy locations without worrying about getting lost in the total darkness down there. This is another must-have mod, without a doubt.
Contrast Adaptive Sharpening For VR
When players first turned on Fallout 4 VR for the first time, one of the biggest thoughts was that it unanimously looked offended. Blurred textures, low-quality visuals for the environment, and a weird overall unclear look to everything consistently made players wonder if they had the right graphics settings on or not.
The reason for this is the graphics for Fallout 4 were never properly converted to VR, so you had the resolution of a game meant to run on flat-screen shoved into VR without any care being taken to scale it properly and the result was a blocky and blurry mess that had everyone adjusting every setting under the sun just so they could play the game.
Contrast Adaptive Sharpening For VR is a godsend in this regard and all your issues of blurry and bad-looking graphics will be fixed with this mod. By inputting a sharpener, all those blurry edges that were making your eyes strain will now look smoother, and the biggest impact is on the characters as they now look phenomenal up close and almost like a current-gen VR game should. Installing the mod is pretty simple, but be careful to follow the instructions on the mod page as there are a few things to take note of as is suggested by the mod author.
Pipe Guns Glow Sight Fix
Now the mod I mentioned above might seem similar, but that’s really for players who have gotten a couple of hours under their belt and have been upgrading their weapons and finding some advanced ones.
Early on in the game, you’re going to be subjected to wielding lowly Pipe Guns, and while they get the job done, they don’t come with anything resembling an accurate aim down sight. That’s actually not true, they do come with sights called Glow Sights, but the joke of everything here is that they do not glow at all. What you end up with are iron sights that are completely dull looking and do not even clearly show you where your aiming point will be. The result has you shooting inaccurately and making your life far more difficult in Fallout 4 VR.
Pipe Guns Glow Sight Fix is the cure-all to these issues. This mod aims to put the Glow back in Glow Sight, and thankfully, it does that with flying colors. Now all the Glow Sights you can find in the game will shine a bright green when so you no longer have to guess where you’re supposed to be aiming. Some of the sights that you’ll find in mods aren’t the most realistic due to them being too sophisticated for the post-apocalypse, so for those who want to keep things in the lore of the game, you’ll be utilizing Glow Sight weapons a lot, and that makes this mod a must-have.
Kabuto VR
If there is one iconic image from the Fallout universe, it is the Power Armor. This futuristic creation is what’s donned by the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 4 VR, although plenty of enemies have their own versions as well. When you get into the armor, your perspective changes a bit in your HUD, and it seems like you’re actually inside the armor. The problem is that the HUD seems way too wide, and you can’t really get the sense of the type of armor you’re getting into as all the insides look exactly the same, regardless of the armor you’re wearing.
Kabuto VR changes all of that and gives a unique look to the inside of every kind of armor you can find in the game. To make it even more immersive, your view is now heavily restricted as well, so for those of you that love running around in Power Armor, you’re going to really feel like you’re suited up in an unstoppable killing machine.
Getting into the Power Armor in the game now actually feels like you’re getting into a suit of armor. The Immersion here is immeasurable and while Power Armor isn’t for everyone, for those who want to stand up to Deathclaws 1 on 1, you’ll be in Power Armor a good amount of the time and this is an essential mod for those players.
FRIK Full Body With IKÂ
When you first boot up Fallout 4 VR, you right away notice something very wrong. You have no body and no hands. This is an alarming feature off the bat because VR games have gone to great lengths to, at the very least providing you with hands so that you know the location of your hands within the game world. Bethesda felt this was unnecessary and instead provided you with an experience comparable to being the invisible man. While that’s cool and everything, we are not invisible in Fallout 4 VR, and because of that, we should have a damn body!
FRIK Full Body with IK has arrived to solve this problem in the best way possible. Not only do you now have hands, but you also have arms and an entire body. These aren’t just for show either as each limb has full Inverse Kinematics implemented to animate them based on where your controller is as well as your headset.
This is a game-changer in so many ways as now your disembodied hands are fully visualized, along with the ability to see what outfit you have equipped as well. The Pipboy is now activated by physically pressing it in-game instead of just pressing a button on your controller, and this feature comes closer and closer to making Fallout 4 VR feel like a new VR game. If you’re sitting, you can activate arms-only mode which will only animate your arms.
While FRIK is amazing, it is technically still in an early edition so there are definitely going to be some bumps that need be ironed out. Much like VRIK in Skyrim VR, it will need some optimizing before it’s in its final form. One other amazing edition to this mod is the Smooth Movement feature. This mod takes away all of the pebbles and little rocks that cause you to stutter every 5 seconds while out in the Wastleland, and the result is a far smoother experience that makes exploring the world way more enjoyable and much smoother feeling as well. This mod bundle is a must-have for every player. It’s how Fallout 4 VR was meant to be played.
Bladed Weapons Redux For VR
Fallout 4 VR provides the guns in boatloads, but for those that like things a little more up close and personal, there are also tons of melee weapons to find in the game. There are spiked bats, batons, sledgehammers, and tons more that you can modify to make some truly gruesome and damaging creations.
Those are blunt weapons, though, and they make sense within Fallout 4 VR’s melee system as you can bash enemies with them and swing at them from whichever angle you please. Bladed weapons, however, fair a bit worse as you’re limited to the same motions as you are for blunt weapons. If you want to stab an enemy while using a knife in Fallout 4 VR, that option is basically off the table.
Bladed Weapons Redux For VR gives you more options for bladed combat by making it so that anytime you’re using a bladed weapon. You simply have to hit the trigger to cause damage. That means stabbing, slicing, any kind of contact with an enemy will cause damage as long as you have the trigger pulled. This will have to be used in moderation by the player, of course, but if you can hold off abusing the somewhat overpowered nature of this mod, you’ll have a way better experience using bladed weapons in Fallout 4 VR.
Virtual Holsters
The entire reason VR was created was to be more immersive than a normal flat screen game would. In the normal Fallout 4 VR, you would go into your Pipboy to equip your weapons, which is fine because it’s a game played with a controller. That is how that’s supposed to work. In VR, mechanics need to be changed to fit the VR experience. Virtual Holsters fulfills that in the best possible way.
This mod provides you with 7 invisible holsters that can be repositioned anywhere you’d like. This makes it, so you no longer have to navigate your Pipboy or the annoying favorites wheel to select what you want to equip. With Virtual Holsters, if you want to draw your gun on somebody, you do it in real-time, and I can’t say enough about how much this adds to the Fallout 4 VR experience. While we can’t dual wield just yet, this adds so many cool scenarios, like when an NPC suddenly decides to turn on you and you draw your weapon before they can even take a shot. It’s an epic mod that is a must-have for anyone seeking more immersion in Fallout 4 VR.
VR Recoil Killer
It is hard enough to aim in VR as is. Often the controller is too light, the hand-to-hand simulation is too inaccurate, and your head movement is usually not what it would be without a headset on as well. To make things even more difficult for you, Fallout 4 VR decided to add an absurd recoil to all the weapons in the game.
This is fine in the normal version of Fallout 4 because, with a controller in your hand, you can steady the gun soon after the recoil hits to prepare your next shot. In VR, though, that is not the simple task you’d think it to be, and it will have you moving your hand around to awkwardly find your initial aim for some of the guns.
With VR Recoil Killer, that crazy kickback is completely gone. While it may seem unrealistic for guns like The Fat Man to not have any recoil to them, something that ruins your aim should not be tolerated in a game that relies on just that to survive. This is a must-have mod for those who have troubleshooting in Fallout 4 VR.
Virtual Chems
I love Fallout 4 VR, but the amount of missed opportunities this game is guilty of is so egregious that it is hard to believe it was greenlit in its original state. With that being said, there is a serious disconnect between the item collection in this game and the actual use of said items. When you pick up items in Fallout 4 VR, you at least see them in front of you can pick them up.
When it comes to using them, though, it’s just a press of the button in your Pipbo menu. It might be convenient, but it sure isn’t immersive, and it takes you right out of the feeling that you’re actually there. Virtual Chems is an incredible mod that takes the immersion in Fallout 4 VR to a whole new level by letting you equip your stim packs, jets, and all other consumables in the game to virtual body slots.
Once they’re equipped, you physically can grab them, and depending on the item. You can inhale it, ingest it, or, my favorite, inject it. Those ultra-valuable Stim Packs that you live on in the game now take on a new flavor as instead of quickly freezing time by going to your Pipboy, you now literally pull one out and jam it into your neck to heal.
This is obviously something you have to do with a good amount of caution as you could hurt yourself if you smash the controller into your neck, but if you can manage to control yourself in the heat of battle, this mod is an excellent addition that should’ve been in the game to begin with.
Fail’s Sensible NPC Health VR
In vanilla Fallout 4, you can aim for specific parts of the body when taking your shots. This is a system that plays out even more when you enter VATS to slow down time and take your shots. The problem is that for human enemies, often a headshot does not equal a quick death. We know it’s a videogame, but it’s one that plays off a realistic world and when a helmetless raider is eating five headshots from a pistol, it’s hard to take the world you’re in seriously.
Not only does Fail’s Sensible NPC Health VR change the damage points for humans, but every enemy in the game is going to be tweaked in multiple ways. Super Mutants will now be an absolute terror to early-level players, but they’ll become much more manageable as you level up. This mod isn’t as simple as making everything stronger or weaker though as the tweaks go very deep and different level creatures will now take different strategies to take down.
This goes for bosses too, so if you’re trying to take down Kellogg, for example, a couple of well-placed headshots will get the job done. Conversely, though, he will be that much more dangerous, and you need to utilize cover and smart tactics in order to take him down. Some might think this makes the game too easy, but I’ve found it makes it a far more realistic feeling which ultimately makes the experience much better.
VR Lasersights
We’ve already discussed how hard it can be to aim guns in VR and how Fallout 4 VR especially fails in making it a seamless experience. While the above mods I’ve suggested will definitely help your accuracy a bit, no mod will come close to making you as accurate as VR Lasersights will. Every gun in the game is now able to receive VR laser on it that will pinpoint where your shots will be from here on out.
This isn’t a fully working laser though so you won’t be seeing your sight appear on the characters you’re aiming at. Think of this as something that you can see and nobody else can because that’s how Fallout 4 VR treats it. Despite the less than immersive parts of the mod, it is incredibly useful and makes lining up the crazy shots you’ll try to make and when you see the laser on an enemy’s head before taking them down, you’ll realize where the value in this mod comes from.
Fallout 4 VR FPS Fix
As I’ve detailed above, there are plenty of different ways to try and fix the weird stuttering nature of Fallout 4 VR. You can sharpen things, remove objects, combine objects and everything you’d like to make things seem smoother, but that’s only putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. See, until you actually fix the performance of the game, all the shine and bells and whistles that you put in place to improve things graphically won’t actually change all that much. That’s where Fallout 4 VR FPS Fix comes in.
This actually fixed the FPS in the game itself. That means the skipping and freezes that are all over the place in Fallout 4 VR will now be greatly reduced and while it isn’t going to guarantee you a constant 90 FPS or anything like that, it will consistently smooth out your FPS so that you don’t have to worry about your visuals constantly jumping around while you play. This is a must-have mod that just makes the overall experience so much more enjoyable to play and should be the first mod you activate any time you start a playthrough.
FAQ
Question: Do the Mods Work With DLC?
Answer: Unless it’s explicitly stated on the mod page, these mods will all function flawlessly in DLC additions as well as the base game.
Question: Is There a Mod in the Vein of HIGGS (Hand Interaction and Gravity Gloves) for Skyrim VR for Fallout 4 VR?
Answer: Unfortunately, right now, the closest thing we have to HIGGS in Fallout 4 VR is VRIK. While this gives you a full VR body though, you will not be getting the physics that come along with it. Fallout 4 VR is just a less popular game than the giant that is Skyrim VR and because of that, some of the more sophisticated mods haven’t been made for it yet.
Question: Do Vanilla Fallout 4 Mods Work in Fallout 4 VR?
Answer: Yes, with a few exceptions. If any mod changes something animation-wise in the base game, then I would strongly advise you to not try it in Fallout 4 VR. The reason is that the mechanics from Fallout 4 do not really compute in Fallout 4 VR. It’s a separate game, so trying to put in something like a cover mechanic to Fallout 4 VR would break a lot of things, so if you want to use mods from Fallout 4, stick to graphics mods, companion mods, gun mods, and quest mods, and you should be totally fine. You can also use enemy mods as well, just be sure to stay away from things that actively change how the game works.Â
Conclusion
Fallout 4 VR is an incredible achievement. Although it doesn’t have the rabid fanbase that Skyrim VR has, it gives you the same kind of experience of exploring a mysterious new world and has just as much personality to boot. For those who love VR shooting, by applying these mods, you will have a fully functioning VR shooter that has more content than any other game of its like out there. It’s a fantastic experience that gets expanded upon a ton by mods, and once you apply all these fixes, the once-maligned Fallout 4 VR will become the post-apocalyptic journey of your dreams.
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