Drone races in VR? Motocross? Sailboats? Virtual tourism? (Patreon)

All in a single game? And set in one of the most beautiful cities of the world? Complete with piers and sea lions?

Either I'm dreaming... or it's Watch Dogs 2!!!

Since we can no longer enjoy GTA V, here's Ubisoft's answer to it. In my personal opinion, WD2 is one of the best open world games ever published. A very interesting story with lots of humor and memorable characters; an incredible setting, where even the iconic San Francisco fog was modeled and recreated just for this game; fun missions that can be played in lots of different ways, from super stealthy to rat-a-tat-tat machine gun mayhem; all kinds of vehicles to drive, in streets and freeways, off road, on water. Need I say more? I don't think so... There's some serious fun to be had with this one, guys!!! Just watch the embedded video review by Ian Higton of Eurogamer if you want proof of that (don't forget to like and subscribe to their channel, as the work they're doing is nothing short of awesome).

And folks: thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your continuing support. It's amazing that after more than six years I'm still able to do this. I never expected the ride to be so wild and exhilarating, and I'm so curious to find out what's down the road yet!

Changelog

Besides adding support for Watch Dogs 2, release 12.7.2 of the R.E.A.L. VR mod fixes yet another problem that was introduced by the latest official update to Atomic Heart. There will no longer be a spurious 2D window replicating the game's UI in front of you during interactions with NPCs :-)

Games list

As usual the mod archive is common for all 25 supported titles, and the updated list is now:

• Atomic Heart

• Cyberpunk 2077

• Dark Souls: Remastered

• Elden Ring (with its massive Shadow of the Erdtree DLC)

• Far Cry 4

• Far Cry 5

• Far Cry 6

• Far Cry New Dawn

• Far Cry Primal

• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

• Ghost of Tsushima

• 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

• Watch Dogs 2 (new)

All games implement AER v2.

Setup

I developed and tested the Watch Dogs 2 mod using the Steam version of the game; other editions should also work (Ian Highton in the video above plays with the Ubisoft Connect version for instance), 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 WD2 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_Dogs2\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 "WatchDogs2.exe" executable file.

Finally run RealConfig.bat. It will perform a few required operations (including the v-sync fix for NVIDIA drivers, and a game-specific flickering fix discussed in its own section below). It will also allow you to choose a quality level suitable for your system, from Low to Ultra, and according to that choice it will 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 2 it should automatically display in your VR headset. You'll still need to tweak a few things in-game though, 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 2 can deal fine with the required square aspect ratios, even though the UI might look a little weird in places. You will be able to select the resolution you prefer from the game Settings> Video> DISPLAY menu itself, without any hassle. Just make sure that "Window Mode" is always set to "Windowed".

Since this game is a resource hog, and every pixel that you can save counts, I also implemented the "Target pixels per degree" control which can be found in the "R.E.A.L. VR" main overlay tab. The idea is that you first select the best square resolution your GPU can afford from the game menus, then with the Target PPD slider you fine-tune the rendering size with the mod matching exactly the aspect ratio required for your headset; this way you'll be able to squeeze out as much performance as possible, without making your card render pixels that can never be seen in VR.

The mod will 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.

As usual though some cutscenes were prerendered by the developers and stored as movies; they will appear as if projected on a virtual 2D screen in VR. They are quite rare fortunately!

Game options

You can set all graphics and gameplay options in the game menu according to your preferences and to 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:

• Settings> Video> DISPLAY> Window Mode = Windowed

• Settings> Video> DISPLAY> V-Sync = Off

• Settings> Video> DISPLAY> FPS Limit = Off

• Settings> Video> QUALITY> Depth of Field = Off

• Settings> Video> QUALITY> Motion Blur = Off

The game offers a lot of different choices of Anti-Aliasing, but in my opinion only two of them give good results, so they are the ones RealConfig will preselect for you: SMAA is very lightweight and sharp, but only works acceptably at higher resolutions; TXAAx2 is much better at getting rid of jaggies and provides a very stable image, but it is prohibitively expensive at high resolutions so RealConfig will only choose it for the lowest resolution presets.

Input

You'll want to use a gamepad to play Watch Dogs 2 (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 2 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 "WD2" 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. Another thing you can do is tweak the "HUD scale X" and "HUD scale Y" sliders in the same tab, with changes visible in real time during gameplay.

Performance

Short version: If you have been waiting to break open your piggy bank in order to buy a shining new RTX 4090, this is the time to do it []-D (I don't get any commission from NVIDIA, haha)

Long version: Okay, not everybody will want to invest that kind of money into VR. But let me tell you, with a 4090 and a Quest 3 or better headset, San Francisco is basically going to look like real life O_O

Keeping lesser cards in mind, RealConfig offers 5 different presets for the quality/performance tradeoff. After that initial choice, you can fine-tune everything from the game menus; there's a very detailed guide by NVIDIA that explains the impact of each graphics option at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/watch-dogs-2-graphics-and-performance-guide/

Be careful, because this is one of those games where it's easy to get sucked into an endless cycle of tuning and tweaking instead of playing. The feeling of "I'm sure I can squeeze out a few more fps without losing too much in quality" is constantly there, because Watch Dogs 2 will make your GPU sweat and beg for mercy, even though almost eight years have gone by since it was released.

If you're interested, I'll make a specific post where you guys can discuss your settings. In the meantime I'll give you mine, which you can apply verbatim if you have an RTX 4090 and a Quest 3.

I play with the headset refresh frequency set to 72 Hz, to ensure stability and to reduce the VR load on the system. [I also play using the Link cable by the way, because for some reason or other wireless is never working 100% reliably, and there's nothing I hate more than achieving perfect image quality on the PC just to have it smudged by a stuttering video codec before it reaches the headset. Or having chop-chop-choppy frame rates during frantic combat because the encoder is bottlenecked by the Wi-Fi.]

I set the AER v2 timing to 1/3 rate (the default for Watch Dogs 2 in the mod), which means that the game only needs to hit a stable 48 fps for the VR render to be fluid, without any missing frames. And with a 4090, since I only need 48 fps, I can use the no-compromise Ultra settings while at the same time pushing the resolution up to around 27.6 pixels per degree, which for the Q3 translates to a render size of about 4352x4512 (that's more than twice the number of pixels needed for 4K gaming by the way!). At this pixel density TXAAx2 is overkill and way too costly, so I leave the Anti-Aliasing option set to SMAA. You can also try with AA off, for a cleaner image but with a few more jaggies.

Of course all of that is a totally subjective choice. Some of you will prefer to trade some visual quality for more fps, using 1/2 rate AER v2 at 72 fps, or alternatively set the refresh frequency of the Q3 to 90 Hz and use 1/3 rate at 60 fps. I definitely don't recommend legacy AER for this title, because the game is too resource-intensive to hit 90 fps at the super-high resolutions needed for modern headsets.

Camera

The game was designed to be played in third person, except for driving which is natively possible in first person too (with decently modeled car interiors, although nothing to write home about). But as we know, the tendency for Ubisoft in recent years has been to pull their game cameras farther and farther away from your character, as though immersion was a thing to be feared and carefully avoided. Go figure.

So I wholeheartedly recommend that you also install the WD1-like Cameras mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogs2/mods/11) which brings the camera back to the closer position it had in the original Watch Dogs, even though for some reason it messes up the vehicle cameras a little. Ian Higton had this third-party mod installed for the video review embedded at the top of this post.

Another 3rd party mod you might want to try is the FirstPersonCamera (https://www.nexusmods.com/watchdogs2/mods/9) which is quite fun, although you probably wouldn't want to play the whole game this way. Just don't try to walk backwards :-D

Sadly with the Watch Dogs series mods are activated or deactivated by replacing files, so you cannot easily mix them, and you can't toggle the camera during gameplay.

Since both of those third-party mods cause some clipping of the camera into the face of your character when in first person (either in cars or on foot), I applied a default forward offset of 0.1 meters to the camera. You can further tweak the camera offsets to your liking in the "WD2" overlay tab.

Flickering with modern NVIDIA cards

Generations of GPUs came out after the game was released, and at some point NVIDIA introduced an unsafe optimization in their drivers that broke some old code. For Watch Dogs 2, that results in an annoying flickering issue with the skybox and with some textures and shadows. NVIDIA themselves refuse to fix the bug, laying the blame on Ubisoft (who in turn seem to have zero interest in updating their game). Luckily one of the experts at guru3d found the root cause and came up with an easy workaround (https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/nvidia-geforce-game-ready-536-99-whql-download-discussion.448933/page-8)

The workaround seems to work for most people and most situations, although not in all cases. And unlike similar solutions which had been found earlier, it has negligible performance impact.

Before that workaround was discovered, I had independently developed my own fix for the issue, which is more general and guaranteed to work 100% of the time, but unfortunately has the side effect of making the weather transitions in the game abrupt instead of gradual.

So what I decided to do is the following. RealConfig will automatically install the third party workaround by patching the NVIDIA driver profile for the game [please understand that all credit for the finding goes to Guzz and to the other gurus over there: I just automated the steps]. In the unlikely case that you're still experiencing flickering, you can go to the "WD2" tab of the mod overlay and turn on the "Stronger flickering fix", which will activate my fix too.

Updates and known issues

There is a known issue when you use a couch to advance the game time and save. Most of the times, if you are playing in VR, Marcus will never wake from his nap and the game will be stuck on a black screen. If that happens to you, just bring up the mod overlay, navigate to the "WD2" tab and press the wakey wakey button. After a couple of seconds the alarm clock will sound and your character will be fresh and rested, ready for more mayhem :-D

Enjoy San Francisco and the hacker's life!!!