Release 6.0.1 supports Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade! (Patreon)

And what a mouthful of a name that is []-D

Amazingly, after all the requests I got for it in the past few months, none of you guessed the title! You guys didn't really believe I could pull it off, huh?

Many people thought of Spider-Man Remastered, and trust me, I'm thinking of it too :-) But my time machine has been acting out again, so I was unable to fetch the game from the future in order to support it in my VR framework. And as much as I love you guys speculating I might have gotten an early copy to work on... we're nowhere there yet. We (as in this Patreon, but also the VR community at large) still have a long way to go before having a VR conversion available at launch becomes a priority for publishers.

Sooo... Tifa! And cities in the sky! And combat where the camera moves so fast that it feels like you're riding the Formula Rossa!! What's not to like? Howlongtobeat.com reports that a completionist will be captured for almost 90 hours by this game, but they don't know yet about the new "VR completionist" category. It took me forever just to get to Chapter 3 :-)

A recommendation for new Patrons, especially if you haven't spent much time in VR yet: this is probably NOT the first game you want to check out. Seriously. But if you insist, remember: you never want to program your brain into believing that VR is associated to physical illness. That kind of self-hypnotic conditioning is extremely hard to remove later. So, the moment you start feeling queasy when playing a VR game, drop it immediately and go do something else in real life until you feel completely okay again. Only at that point should you return to VR and play some more. If you follow that simple rule, you will find that your gaming sessions become longer and more gratifying each day, and you'll have developed your "VR legs" in no time.

Amazingly, for such a modern title with awesome next-gen graphics, FF7R renders with spectacular performance in VR. On my rig I can keep a steady 90 fps in every area (even outdoors with lots of NPCs around) at the maximum resolution available. BTW, if you're using a Quest 2, you will get much better quality if you toggle the headset refresh frequency to 90 Hz (see this post for additional details).

Quick Setup instructions

Installation is quite simple; just one more step than usual because the game defaults to using DX12, but that brings stuttering and frame pacing issues for most people (even in 2D), so for this title in VR I only support DX11.

• Make sure that the game was run flat (i.e., not in VR) at least once, so that it could create your user profile.
• Unzip the archive attached at the bottom of this post into the folder where "ff7remake_.exe" is (mind the underscore). On a standard Steam installation the folder will be at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE\End\Binaries\Win64". When you extract the zip, be careful to preserve the folder structure. In other words, don't move anything around manually, don't flatten the folders, and don't put the mod into its own subfolder: RealConfig.bat must end up at the same level as ff7remake_.exe. If you are from the future, and returning to this post to update to a new release, you might be asked whether to overwrite existing files, in which case you should answer yes to all.
• Run RealConfig, which will automatically select graphics settings known to work correctly in VR and finish installing/configuring the mod for you. NOTE: if you omit this step or ignore any errors that the batch file reports back to you, the mod won't work correctly, even if you are just upgrading from a previous release.
• Finally, and for this title only: you need to add "-dx11" (without the quotes) to the launch options for the game. If you have the Steam version, right-click on the game name in your Steam library and select "Properties"; then from the GENERAL tab put -dx11 into the LAUNCH OPTIONS box. If you have the Epic version instead, the menu you need cannot be reached from the library; you have to click on the icon for your account in the top-right corner of the Epic Games Launcher, choose Settings, scroll way down until you find the section for the game, click to open the branch, tick the "Additional Command Line Arguments" and put -dx11 into the text box. That should be easy enough. but hopefully some YouTuber will show how that's done in an installation tutorial.

Known issues

The game is huge, and there might be something in later levels that doesn't work correctly. Just yesterday I discovered that the darts minigame in 7th Heaven uses a special zoomed camera that doesn't translate to VR, so I had to make a last-minute fix. In the next days/weeks I might be able to fix other issues as I progress in my playthrough and find out what doesn't work.

But in order to keep you from getting stuck if some peculiar game behavior makes a section of a mission or activity impassable in VR, I pre-emptively added a new control to the overlay mod. If you navigate to the "FF7R" tab in the mod overlay (which in this game can be brought up by clicking both thumbsticks on the gamepad), you will find a checkbox labeled "Force 2D virtual screen". When that is selected, the mod will allow the game to render normally, with the native 16:9 aspect ratio it wants, and will capture the output to a virtual flatscreen visible in your headset. So you will be able to pass any problematic point without ever leaving VR or needing to change resolutions or things like that.

Speaking of rez, once again I managed to mod the custom square resolutions needed for VR directly into the game menus, so you can select them seamlessly without leaving FF7R. You will notice however that the maximum available size is 2976x2976 pixels, instead of the 3920x3920 that I usually offer. That is due to an unfortunate choice by the game developers, where an important computational step in lighting was by design limited to a maximum image height of 2160p. Past that size, the engine starts hallucinating bright green lights everywhere.

I managed to tweak the hard-coded buffers in order to allow for a square resolution of about 3K, but past that limit everything breaks down hopelessly. I might be able to further improve the fix in the future, but for now that's the best I can do (and even with the fix, a few sporadic green flashes remain in some cutscenes).

And a final "known issue": the game commands a pretty steep price. I'm sorry about that, I imagine it might be a nuisance for some people. But I believe it's worth every penny. Hopefully there will be some sale in the upcoming weeks, fingers crossed!

Other mods

As usual, I cannot guarantee that the VR conversion will cooperate nicely with every other mod, as there are simply too many to test and new ones come out each day.

However, if you want to install other mods, you should know that I already unlocked the engine so that it will load user .ini files from the "Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor" folder. That way you can add your favorite custom options (for instance editing the Engine.ini template I put there) without the need for third-party mods. Again, be careful because mixing and matching options, especially if you're not sure what they do, could break VR and/or make it act strangely.

Additionally, my mod automatically disables Motion Blur and Dynamic Resolution Scaling for FF7R, as they don't work correctly in VR.

Have fun!! Kill many monsters!!! Save the planet!!!