I’m often thinking ‘the only thing that would improve this video game is having it strapped directly to my face’ and thus does the world of mods provide. Elden Ring, premium game of the year candidate, has gotten makeover from Luke Ross, a developer who has been making unofficial VR support for all sorts of games over the past few years. He’s worked on Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA5, and several others.
The main difference here is Elden Ring – and FromSoft’s catalog in general – really doesn’t take to being in first-person. At a nice, wide, third-person angle you can just about see what’s going on. Up-close-and-personal it’s a mess of clipping in and out of things, stuff in your way, and monstrous animations that weren’t really meant to be seen from this angle. That’s the first thing UploadVR says to accompany the gameplay footage uploaded today.
Luke, not being a fool and having done this a few times now, knows and understands that. Thus he’s introducing several camera modes with a range of zoom-in to see what works best for players. You might be thinking that third-person is about as bad as having a mess of textures in your face, but it works better than that. Depending on implementation, it can give a sense of being an observer of the world in a much more real way.
Despite the obvious jankiness of the fighting in the above video, the moment of stepping out into the first area and looking up at the Erdtree is as impressive as ever, if not more-so. It’s unlikely that a full thousand-hour run of Elden Ring is going to be fun with the ol’ sensory deprivation helmet, but as an oddity and an experiment it seems very valuable.
To this end, Ross has enabled a ‘tourist mode’ option that can be turned on to force enemies to ignore you as you wander the lands. That probably makes this the absolute best tool for taking up-close screenshots of Elden Ring, as well as getting virtual hugs from Fia. Someone will, of course, probably beat it within the week in first-person using a pair of bananas for controllers or something.
Ross and his R.E.A.L. VR mods are available through Patreon, with this one coming in before the end of the month according to PCGamer. That’ll cost you around $9.50, so consider it your coffee for the day.
Written by Ben Barrett on behalf of GLHF.
