Valheim's community-made VR mod now has motion controls
Brute force.
After being interrupted during mining in the Black Forest for the thousandth time, you could be forgiven for wanting to beat up a Greydwarf with your bare hands - and thanks to the work of Valheim's modding community, you now can. Well, while holding VR controllers, I guess.
VHVR is a community-made VR mod for Valheim that was first released back in April, and did a pretty good job of translating Valehim's Viking world into VR (even if players could only move using a standard gamepad or mouse and keyboard). Here's our own Ian Higton trying it out at the time:
Work on the mod continued post-launch, and now VHVR has been given a game-changing update that adds motion control support. Thanks to the work of modder Maddy25 (who apparently almost single-handedly implemented many of the motion control systems), you can now interact with items in Valheim more directly. There's upper-body and finger tracking using VRIK, melee combat, bow and arrow controls, fishing, point and click building, and you can use your hands to interact with the environment. There are also custom VR controls for interacting with menus, along with switching and equipping items.
The motion controls work for Oculus Touch and Oculus Index, and the mod also has Vive bindings (although the modders noted that Vive controllers have limited inputs, and the team hasn't been able to test the motion controls with these controllers). YouTube creator Gamertag VR took the new-and-improved version of Valheim for a spin, so you can see what all this looks like in action.
It seems mod authors Brandon Mousseau and Maddy25 have plans for further improvements, such as fine-tuning the motion controls for Vive based on player feedback. The pair would also like to add room scale. "Right now the body still doesn't track where the player is in their space, so motion is limited to joystick only," the mod page explains. "This is something we're trying to find a good solution to."
All in all, it sounds like a fantastic way to play Valheim - I can only imagine how epic it would be to wield a mace against some of Valheim's most fearsome bosses. If you want to find out for yourself, make sure to check out the mod page over here.