Watch Dogs in VR!!! (Patreon)

[See the bottom of the post for updates]

"My love is winter, my love is lost..." What's better than driving a sports car through the streets of Chicago at night, with The Smashing Pumpkins blasting on the radio? Ah yes, doing it in VR from the comfort of your home!

Release 12.1.0 of the R.E.A.L. VR mod, attached at the end of this post, adds Watch Dogs (the original game that started the franchise) to the list of titles that we can play in VR. Also included is a fix for Grounded to restore the R.E.A.L. mod functionality after the latest official update. Kudos to Grounded's developers by the way: they are really going above and beyond, keeping it fresh with huge updates that deliver a lot of free content!

IMHO, the Watch Dogs series is one of the most underrated ever. And if I say so myself, this release might turn out to be one of my best mods yet. The original game is old enough (2014) to run amazingly well on modern hardware, and yet Chicago looks astounding in it. Both gameplay and story are super interesting; it's actually one of my favorite games ever, together with its sequel set in sunny but foggy San Francisco.

I have to say that I'm really happy with the conversion, as both hacking and aiming work very smoothly and seamlessly based on where you're looking, so that the game almost feels as if it was native VR. That is also helped by the fact that it still has TXAA antialiasing instead of the now-fashionable TAA, so the image is perfectly stable and sharp.

Give this one a try, no matter whether you played it flat back when it came out! Stomping and exploding everything with your huge spider mech is just one of those experiences that must be had in life []-D

Games list

As usual the mod archive is common for all 23 supported titles, and the updated list is now:

• Atomic Heart

• Cyberpunk 2077

• Dark Souls: Remastered

• Elden Ring

• Far Cry 4

• Far Cry 5

• Far Cry 6

• Far Cry New Dawn

• Far Cry Primal

• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

• Ghostrunner

• Ghostwire: Tokyo

• Grounded

• High On Life

• Hogwarts Legacy

• Horizon: Zero Dawn

• Horizon Forbidden West

• Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered

• Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

• Stray

• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

• Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

• Watch Dogs (new)

All games implement AER v2.

Setup

I developed and tested the Watch Dogs mod using the Steam version of the game; other editions should also work, but if you encounter issues please upload your RealVR.log file somewhere so we can try to sort them out. Also, make sure that your video drivers are updated to the latest version, even though WD1 is an older game.

Run the game flat (not in VR) at least once, so that it can generate its config files and you can check that it works correctly. Then quit out of it and extract the mod archive into the "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Watch_Dogs\bin" folder. Note that you might need to customize the path if you moved your Steam library or own the game from a different store, but it will always be the one that contains the "watch_dogs.exe" executable file.

Finally run RealConfig.bat. It will perform a few required operations (including the v-sync fix for NVIDIA drivers) and preselect graphics settings that are known to work well in VR. Remember that running RealConfig is mandatory; if you omit this step the mod will not work.

At this point, the next time you launch Watch Dogs it should automatically display in your VR headset... after a while. For reasons known only to the developers, the game takes a full minute to start up on my system, even in its pristine form and without any mods. And it doesn't seem to be doing any useful work during that time: it's just Ubisoft's "systemdetection64.dll" library, creating and destroying hundreds of D3D11 software devices with no apparent purpose. First time I see anything like that.

Anyway. You'll still need to tweak a few things in-game, in order to get the best possible experience.

Setting the resolution

This time too, I was able to mod the custom resolutions needed for VR directly into the engine. Watch Dogs can deal fine with the required square aspect ratios, even though the UI can look a little weird in places. You will be able to select the resolution you prefer from the game Options> Display menu itself, without any hassle. Just make sure that "Window Mode" is always set to "Windowed".

Watch Dogs will also remember the resolution you set across sessions, so once you find the right compromise between detail and fluidity you should be able to play the rest of the game without touching the resolution again.

Cutscenes

Most cutscenes are fully 3D and allow you to look anywhere without restrictions. There can be subtle black bars above and below, which work correctly in VR and give that "cinematic" look without overly restricting your field of view.

Some cutscenes however were prerendered by the developers and stored as movies, so there's nothing I can do about them: they will appear as if projected on a virtual 2D screen in VR. One such movie (quite long and unskippable) is shown right at the beginning of the game.

Game options

You can set all graphics and gameplay options in the game menu according to your liking and how powerful your GPU is, but there are a few settings that you must leave to the defaults preselected by RealConfig in order for the mod to work properly:

• Display> Window Mode = Windowed

• Display> Widescreen Letterbox = Off (this is for gameplay, not cutscenes)

• Graphics Quality> Motion Blur = Off

• Graphics Quality> Depth of Field = Off

In the Display menu, I also recommend setting "GPU Max Buffered Frames" to 3, Textures to Ultra unless you're low on VRAM, and Anti-Aliasing to TXAA 2x. With TXAA 2x or 4x (those were the days, before TAA spread like a pandemic) the image will look perfectly stable, and you won't need to play at super high resolutions just to smooth out the edges. If your card can't keep up with a steady 60 fps though, try SMAA for a cheaper compromise.

Input

You will want to use a gamepad to play Watch Dogs (XInput-compatible controllers like the ones from Microsoft are the best for my mods). Keyboard and mouse sort of work too, but there might be issues, like mouse clicks activating other windows at random or some entries in the game menus being unreachable with the cursor; thus, in order to have a smooth experience, using a gamepad is highly recommended.

Don't worry about console-player syndrome: in my mods aiming is gaze-driven and extremely fast, intuitive and accurate, so even if you're used to playing FPS with your mouse, give your gamepad a chance ;-)

Gameplay

The Watch Dogs mod fully supports 6 DoF tracking, i.e, the camera will follow your head rotation and movement. There's a big difference from most other games in my VR modding collection though: "hacking" (targeting NPCs and world objects with your phone) is also gaze-based, which makes it very quick and intuitive, almost as if the game was a native VR experience. But that also means that the HUD is always headlocked, because to all intents and purposes you're constantly aiming, even when your weapons are not drawn.

The crosshair will remain properly aligned as long as you don't move too much (physically, in real life) from your home position. Of course you can always recenter the view, which in all my mods is performed simply by shaking your head "no" once.

All weapons should work correctly, even those with telescopic sights.

In the "WD1" tab you can change the world scale, from small adjustments to playing with dolls or giants, and even force the game to render to a 2D virtual screen in case you should find a section too hard to play in full VR.

Since some elements in the UI can sometimes be a little hard to read, you can optionally bind the 2D virtual screen toggle so that it's quickly activated/deactivated by pressing both gamepad thumbsticks.

Updates and known issues

No known issues at the moment.

Update 2: Release 12.1.1, attached below, fixes an issue where the UI would become larger during in-game phone calls, which caused some elements to become unreadable. Also, the problem with the game not entering VR for AMD graphics card users should be solved now (please give me your feedback on this because I cannot test it directly).

Update 1: No changes from my side, but for those of you who are brave enough to want to try the experience in first person, there's a third-party mod at https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogs/mods/51/ that changes the on-foot camera (all credit goes to the author). The usual warnings apply: the game was never meant to be played in first person, so the camera bobs with the character's head, reverses abruptly when you try to walk backwards, and it clips through Aiden when you run (this last problem can be alleviated if you move your chair back a little in real life, recenter the view, and then return to your normal home position so that the camera will be pushed forward).
Unfortunately 1st person cannot be toggled in real time: to go back to 3rd you need to restore the backed-up files from the original installation.

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Enjoy this beautiful, underrated game! Playing in close-up third person, having digital trips, driving with the bumper cam or in first person, surfing surveillance cameras... and it's got a meaningful story too :-D