A free mod for Titanfall 2 makes it one of the best VR games ever

Titanfall has a special place in my heart. I've never felt such a rush in gaming since — leaping into the air with a jump pack, running on walls, summoning a giant mechanized battle suit that falls like a meteor from the sky, then letting one of its giant hands stuff me into the cockpit for a supersized skirmish.

How could that possibly work in virtual reality? It sounds like a formula for pain, nausea, distress. But no: Titanfall 2 VR is one of the top five VR games I've ever played — despite being a free mod, released by a solo developer, who's only spent a single month working on it so far.

Now I'm running on walls, blasting bad guys from every angle, shouldering a scoped anti-materiel sniper rifle nearly as big as Cloud Strife's infamous Buster Sword, all in virtual reality — and, yes, leaping into a hulking Titan to dish out damage while snatching enemy missiles out of the air.

I can look around the cockpit and move the Titan's giant arms realistically with my own two hands. I can look down and watch my feet do the wall-running. A few hours in, I only feel the familiar twinge of simulator sickness if I shove the analog stick too far and turn my Titan too fast.

The entire experience immediately brought me back to Capcom's Resident Evil 4 VR, one of the only other full-length classic AAA games that has ever been remade for virtual reality and a completely comfortable experience for me. Why have so few decade-old games been given this treatment? Why aren't dedicated VR games this good?

That's what Jordan “CircuitLord†Juarez would like to know, too.

“VR has sort of been stuck, where developers and studios can't commit to larger Triple A style games because they're WAY harder to make for VR and the playerbase is so small, but the playerbase is so small because there's no large or Triple A games being made,†the mod's developer tells The Verge.

“I think mods like this are a great way to jumpstart and hopefully break that loop to show studios how much fun VR really can be.â€

In his Discord channel, Juarez is somewhat less diplomatic about his reasoning, saying things to his fans like:

Juarez isn't just a disgruntled VR fan — he's a developer who had a front-row seat to the trend of kids becoming the primary customer for VR games. He says he worked on Gorilla Tag, the poster child for kids messing around in VR, as well as Zenith: The Last City, Synth Riders, and the 2020 Virtual Desktop competitor Desktop Portal.

He also watched Meta inexplicably shut down one of his favorite games, Echo Arena, and he quit his job at VR studio Another Axiom after its Echo spiritual successor Orion Drift didn't turn into the game he'd hoped for. This year, he started his own solo studio, Iteration Three, to build his own Echo Arena successor, No Shot.

This fall, he decided to try a side project: Could he make existing games more playable in VR? In August, he revealed a VR mod for the popular Big Walk. In September, he announced he would do Titanfall 2 if he could manage to make it feel like “a true native VR experience, without any jank.â€

“I played Titanfall 2 years and years ago when it came out originally, always was a huge fan of it,†he tells me, and says a lot of the work was building custom interactions and reload animations, in addition to the obvious stuff like giving you a stereo 3D perspective and adding VR hands:

A specific example: the manual reloading for guns. The process involved basically splitting apart the existing animations and sound effects in the game, and hooking them up to VR related triggers instead. When you grab the magazine from over your shoulder, it positions it in your palm and plays a given animation on that hand to make it look like it's grasping it. The gun itself has custom hitboxes I've set up for grabbing different parts of it, for example where you grab to rack the slide. This all took a TON of iteration given the large amount of guns in the game.

He says he's most proud of some special interactive moments he added that were previously cutscenes, like this one (warning, spoilers!):

But, he tells me, Titanfall 2's developers deserve the credit. “A lot of the praise I'm getting really should be going to the developers who crafted the amazing environments, sound effects, and story that so many people are now experiencing for the first time.â€

He's also standing on the shoulders of Titanfall 2 community mod loader Northstar, which he uses to help integrate the mod. And yes, he did take advantage of AI too. While “basically all the game design stuff is still down to me,†he says, “AI has been really helpful on the reverse engineering side of things and for speeding up the development process in general.â€

Juarez's work on Titanfall isn't done: He says he's getting a ton of requests to add multiplayer modes with private VR servers and is currently working on that.

He's also still patching the single-player campaign, which isn't yet a perfect experience; occasionally I'll try to look through a scope that'll display as black rather than see-through, and I've had a few issues trying to pick up certain difficult-to-reach weapons. He recently tweaked it so Titans will turn when you aim your weapon far enough to the right or left, instead of just with a joystick.

If you've got a PC and headset and want to try it for yourself, it shouldn't be hard. Titanfall 2 is currently (and frequently) on sale for just $5, and the campaign is already quite playable on relatively modest PC hardware. Some say they've gotten it to run with an Nvidia GTX 1080 or a modern midrange RTX 3060 laptop GPU, since Titanfall 2 was always a very well-optimized PC game.

You also don't have to jump through many hoops to install it. The mod works with all three PC versions of Titanfall 2 and does practically everything in three clicks, though you do need to sign into the EA app and make sure SteamVR is running before you put your headset on.

When I put on Meta's VR Glasses, and when I reviewed the Steam Frame, I couldn't help thinking: I wish we'd had this awesome new hardware before companies stopped investing in VR games!

But now that we live in the recomp revolution, when pissed-off gamers and laid-off developers are channeling that energy (and a lot of AI) into breaking games free of their shackles, I wonder if this is the future of VR. Labors of love, and spite, standing atop the shoulders of those who came before.