Free Titanfall 2 VR Mod Turns Decade-Old Shooter Into Standout Virtual Reality Experience

In the mod, players run along walls, fire a scoped anti-materiel sniper rifle and climb into a Titan, moving the machine's large arms with their own hands and looking around the cockpit. The Verge's reviewer wrote that they expected VR Titanfall to bring nausea, but instead found it comfortable, feeling simulator sickness only when pushing the analog stick too far and turning the Titan too quickly. The reviewer compared the experience to Capcom's Resident Evil 4 VR, describing both as comfortable full-length conversions of older games.

Juarez told The Verge he sees mods as a way out of a cycle holding VR back. "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," he said. "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."

In his Discord channel, Juarez put the same argument more bluntly, telling fans that "a large reason I made this mod is out of spite because most VR developers have completely lost the plot," that "the only VR games I'd recommend to any adults are literally like 5+ years old," and that "I'm here to make games I want to play, not slop geared towards kids."

Juarez is not only a player. He said he worked on Gorilla Tag, Zenith: The Last City, Synth Riders and Desktop Portal, a 2020 competitor to Virtual Desktop. He also watched Meta shut down Echo Arena, one of his favorite games, and left his job at the VR studio Another Axiom after its Echo successor Orion Drift did not become the game he wanted. This year he started his own studio, Iteration Three, to build another Echo Arena successor called No Shot.

The Titanfall 2 mod is a side project. In August, Juarez released a VR mod for Big Walk, and in September he announced he would take on Titanfall 2 if he could make it feel like "a true native VR experience, without any jank." He said he had been a fan of the game since its original release years ago.

Much of the work went into custom interactions and reload animations on top of the stereo 3D view and VR hands. Juarez said he split apart the game's existing animations and sound effects and connected them to VR inputs: grabbing a magazine over the shoulder places it in the palm and plays a hand animation so it appears to be grasped, while custom hitboxes govern where a player grabs the weapon, such as to rack the slide. The number of guns in the game required heavy iteration, he said. He added that he is proudest of interactive moments that were previously cutscenes.

Juarez credited the original team for much of the response. "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," he said. The mod relies on the community mod loader Northstar to integrate, and Juarez acknowledged using AI tools as well, while saying "basically all the game design stuff is still down to me."