There aren't very many truly AAA VR games, and even those that are designed from the ground up like Half-Life: Alyx, are short and have no way near the budget of the big major non-VR releases we see elsewhere. That's why when AAA games are ported to VR it can be a big deal. The unofficial Alien Isolation VR mode was the first and it was fantastic, if a little broken. For something a bit more contemporary, Red Dead Redemption 2 now works in VR and its glorious.
Developer Luke Ross has previously released this sort of first-person VR mod for GTA V and now he's back with one for Red Dead Redemption 2 and the experience is an impressive one. That game looks gorgeous already, but up close and personal it's something truly special. It was reportedly a bit more complicated to make the transition than it was with GTA V, but he got there in the end.
"Red Dead Redemption 2 is much more advanced than Grand Theft Auto V from a technical point of view," Ross explained on his Patreon. "The graphics APIs it supports (Vulkan and DX12) are similarly more complex than DX11, on which Grand Theft Auto V was based. I had to create a whole new framework for VR injection; basically everything I had built for the Grand Theft Auto V mod was now useless and needed rewriting from scratch."
Controls are limited to the Xbox Controller still, but you can look around the world as if you're there. Think of it as a 3DOF experience, rather than the 6DOF ones that are typically found with more bespoke VR games.
If you want to try this out yourself, you'll need to be a member of the Patreon and have a very powerful GPU on hand. This game is already quite taxing but at VR resolution and frame rates, it's a huge resource hog. If you have the hardware though, it could be the best looking VR experience yet.
