GRcade

Bethesda Softworks marketing chief Pete Hines announced today that Fallout 4 will debut on the HTC Vive virtual reality headset in 2017.

The company made the announcement at its press and fan event tonight ahead of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the big game trade show this week in Los Angeles. And at the event, Hines said that Bethesda is also showing both Doom and Fallout 4 in VR in demos at the show. Hines made no announcement about whether Doom would be released on VR headsets.

This HTC Vive announcement is big, as Fallout 4 was Bethesda’s most popular game ever with more than 12 million copies sold at last count. The move is a major endorsement for VR, which is a fledgling platform.

AMD's corporate vice president Roy Taylor has said that Bethesda's upcoming Fallout 4 VR title will be a "ground-breaking VR title" that will change the industry.

Speaking at VR World Congress, Taylor likened Fallout 4 VR to "the Mario, the Sonic the Hedgehog" of the VR industry. "It will change the way we think about VR," he said. "It will be an industry changer."

Fallout 4 VR is currently due for release sometime this year, with Bethesda vice president Pete Hines saying earlier this year it will be playable at this year's E3 conference.

Taylor also said that wires are one of the biggest challenges the VR industry faces today, something that AMD hopes to rectify with its newly announced partnership with Nitero, a chip manufacturer specialising in wireless VR.

"They're an inhibitor to what should be giving great freedom of movement," said Taylor. "One of the most important things we do next is get rid of those pesky wires. I'm very pleased to tell you that AMD has come up with a solution."

Using multi-gigabit transmission and integrated bean forming, Nitero has been specifically tailored to transmit stereoscopic video at "unheard of latencies." At the moment, Nitero is targeting next-gen VR devices rather than the current gen headsets, but when the technology does eventually arrive, it says it will offer integrated wireless that will completely revolutionise the consumer experience, so much so that "they'll never tolerate wires again".