Finally decided to jump on this yesterday, after finding my old nexus account. Before playing with the ini, and taking the performance mods in, I gave it a couple of hours out of the box untouched. Both performance and looks were fairly poor, more to do with the lighting, and a plastic static map painting aesthetic look which became awfully obvious when first exiting the vault looking over the wasteland. When entering concord that changed a little, less of the map painting look in the town, the frames were just about keeping up. Some of the integrations of the controls and VR interface I like, the pip boy on the arm is fantastic, it sets itself apart from the rest of the engine with clear sharp visuals and natural control with the vive controllers.
Have to say from the off though I was impressed with the immersion, the initial run to the vault grabbed me in, exiting the vault even more so. The stand out moment for me so far was that death claw creature that popped out of the road, I literally missed a heart beat when it jumped in my face as I was busy shooting raiders, not noticing it's arrival.
Despite the performance problems it has, mostly due to purposing Bethesda's clunky engine, it's very much is a standout experience. The visual scale of the landscape makes it that alone, with a vibrant world active around you adding to that.
After playing with a ini file and having 20 minutes with it in game, ill say frames are tighter, the colour glare isn't so overbearing, and there's less of the plastic bit map look. Now just the process of trawling through performance mods one at a time to see how tighter we can get things.
All said I can see why it's easy to hit on. Performance out of the box is poor, VR interactions are limited, and lack a lot compared to what's recently been achieved in revisiting other older games. The positive that hits all of that in the face though is the ever willing community to slap Bethesda down, picking up their slack effort. I think we'll get there in the short term with those efforts, and we'll move to something better down the line with another game.
