Wolfenstein II VR Mod Released

Machine Games’ shooter sequel, Wolftenstein II, now has a VR mod.

Released over the weekend, the mod is the work of developer Helifax, and represents their first full VR mod having previously worked on 3D conversions of games like Doom Eternal. Check out some gameplay from a build of the game captured in January below. You can download the mod from here, though you’ll of course need an actual copy of the game first.

Wolfenstein II VR Mod Released

Rather then full motion controls or a gamepad-based system, the mod uses a gesture-based system that allows you to aim with some physicality whilst not turning the experience into a fully motion controlled shooter. Essentially the right motion controller will serve as the right thumbsick for aiming, though your head will still have a full 6DOF of control.

If you’re impressed with the mod you can contribute to Helifax’s Patreon campaign. It’s been a busy few months for VR mods, with developer Luke Ross also just revealing work on an Elden Ring VR mod. We also recently spoke to some of the modders behind Half-Life: Alyx’s best fan-made campaigns.

This isn’t Wolfenstein’s first brush with VR, of course. There are numerous mods for other games in the series, including the classic Wolfenstein 3D and even a means of playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on Quest. Bethesda and Machine Games even released an official VR spin-off, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, a few years back. That said, it wasn’t very inspiring.

Are you going to check out this Wolfenstein II VR mod? Let us know in the comments below!

John Carmack Hopes For id VR Ports On App Lab With Microsoft Approval

John Carmack hopes there’s a path to getting the popular unofficial ‘ports’ of id Software games like Quake onto Oculus App Lab, with some help from Microsoft.

Facebook’s Consulting CTO for Oculus had a brief exchange with modder Simon “DrBeef” Brown on Twitter discussing the possibility of bringing the developer’s community-made VR ports of classic games to App Lab.

The exchange started with DrBeef stating that him and Team Beef “intend to get some of the ports listed on App Labs [sic]”, starting with Quake.

Team Beef are behind a plethora of VR ports of classic 90s games such as Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and many more. These run as standalone VR ports that can be sideloaded onto Oculus Quest.

The games’ engines are ported over into VR and shipped with community-made “shareware” versions of the original assets for legal reasons, so that the content can be legally distributed online. Users who want the authentic experience can transfer in the original textures and assets on their own, using a purchased version of the original games for PC.

App Lab is Oculus’ new method for easy distribution and installation of non-Store Quest content, providing an easier method than traditional sideloading and with less strict content restrictions. That being said, the nature of Team Beef’s VR ports might make an App Lab listing legally complicated.

DrBeef said on Twitter that the App Lab listings for these classic ports would use the shareware versions of each title and tagged Carmack asking him what he thought. You can read his response below:

In another follow-up tweet replying to Carmack, DrBeef indicated that he would “postpone the App Lab application for now and hope that things progress in our favour.” DrBeef and Carmack are referring to Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax Media, which includes the studio behind the Quake franchise, id software.

Microsoft could hypothetically give their blessing for the ports to be listed as App Lab apps once the acquisition is finalised. However, until then, it looks like we’ll be installing the ports through traditional sideloading methods.

Many of Dr Beef’s port are available to install through using SideQuestYou can read more about how to get started with sideloading here. 

Wolfenstein 3D Now Available On Oculus Quest With QuestZDoom

Popular sideloaded Oculus Quest game launcher QuestZDoom has been updated to include Wolfenstein 3D, now playable on wireless standalone VR.

QuestZDoom released back in May last year, created for Oculus Quest by community modder Simon ‘DrBeef’ Brown and others. The app is a launcher that lets you play free versions of DOOM and other iconic 90s games in VR, using an adapted engine that brings the games to life in full roomscale VR. Users who legally own the original games are also able to transfer their original WAD files  into QuestZDoom, to use the original assets and get the proper authentic feel.

At launch, QuestZDoom included the original DOOM from 1993, as well as DOOM II, Heretic and Hexen. There’s also support for a bunch of games mods as well, such as Brutal Doom and more.

This week, QuestZDoom was updated to include support for Wolfenstein 3D, a first-person shooter originally released by id software in 1992 for DOS. Much like the other included games, this version of Wolfenstein 3D is a “careful fan recreation/mod”. It will be included with the latest version of the QuestZDoom launcher and engine, so all you need to do is update via SideQuest if you’ve already got the QuestZDoom installed.

If you’re new to the world of sideloding and QuestZDoom, be sure to check out our guides on how to sideload content onto the Oculus Quest and how to install and use the QuestZDoom launcher and engine. Following those guides should get your Quest ready to go with Wolfenstein 3D and the other included games.

QuestZDoom is just one of many ports from DrBeef and other community modders that bring classic game titles to wireless VR on Oculus Quest. Some of the other ports include Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom 3 and the original Half-Life, all of which are available to sideload via SideQuest.

Return To Castle Wolfenstein VR Livestream: New Oculus Quest Mod!

For today’s livestream we’re playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein in VR using a brand new Oculus Quest mod! If you’re curious about how we livestream the way we do then look no further than this handy guide for general tips and this guide specific to our Oculus Quest setup.


There’s something special about replaying an older game in VR with updates visuals that just never gets old to me. Checking out DOOM on Oculus Quest was a real nostalgia trip and now getting to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein in VR with updated textures, one of the all-time classic FPS games on PC, is just really surreal. And not to mention an absolute blast! Check out our original story and 10-minutes of gameplay here.

Our Return to Castle Woflenstein VR livestream is planned to start at about 11:00 PM PT today and willb around an hour or so, give or take, depending partially on how long my small toddler child decides to behave. We’ll be hitting just our YouTube and I’ll likely be streaming from a Pimax 5K+ using two Index controllers. I’m flying solo on this one.

Check out the Return to Castle Wolfenstein VR stream embedded right here and down below once live:

You can see lots of our past archived streams over in our YouTube playlist or even all livestreams here on UploadVR and various other gameplay highlights. There’s lots of good stuff there so make sure and subscribe to us on YouTube to stay up-to-date on gameplay videos, video reviews, live talk shows, interviews, and more original content!

And please let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next! We have lots of VR games in the queue that we would love to show off more completely. Let’s get ready to lock and load!

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Watch: Return To Castle Wolfenstein Oculus Quest Mod Available Now On SideQuest

A mod for Return To Castle Wolfenstein runs smoothly on Oculus Quest in standalone VR mode and is now available to download.

The free mod includes a fully playable demo but you can upgrade to the full game which is available on Steam for $5 as of this writing. There’s two-handed weapon support and smooth locomotion with snap turning turned on by default. There’s also a teleport option as well alongside other options. The mod is brought to you by prolific modder Simon Brown (aka DrBeef) working with BaggyG and VR_Bummser to make the transition to VR go as smoothly as possible for the well-loved first-person shooter which originally released in 2001.

Here’s some exclusive gameplay of the game running on Oculus Quest:

The mod is available now on Sidequest and you can find instructions for how to install it, as well as the VR controls you’ll use, on the RTCWQuest.com page. You can also find more information on the Discord for the modding group.

Originally released less than 20 years ago using the Id Tech 3 engine, Return To Castle Wolfenstein may represent one of the newest PC games that’s likely to get a successful port to the original Oculus Quest and its fairly limited mobile processor. DrBeef previously brought the original 1993 Doom game to Quest as well as the original Half-Life game from 1998, among others.

Facebook, of course, is working on a new Quest that’s likely to have more powerful specifications than the current headset. We’ll be curious to see, then, if future standalone headsets pique DrBeef’s curiosity and might enable to porting of newer and more robust PC VR games to standalone wireless VR.

Article originally published on August 18 and updated August 20 to note the mod’s availability on SideQuest. 

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This Half-Life: Alyx Mod Turns The Game Into Wolfenstein 3D

The next Half-Life: Alyx mod to make the rounds pays tribute to the early roots of the first-person shooter (FPS) genre, bringing Wolfenstein 3D into VR.

The mod, from Grandmasterethel, brings the first level of the classic shooter into VR, complete with Alyx’s established set of mechanics. You’ll still be using the same weapons and fighting the same enemies from the core game, but classic textures and enemy placements remain the same. Even the secret areas can be activated, and we’re big fans of swapping out dogs for Antlions, too. Take a look at some gameplay below.

To get the mod (thanks to VHS Productions for bringing it to our attention) you’ll need to download the new Half-Life: Alyx launcher from JetLennit, which is available here. Then download the map from here, open the launcher and click and drag the map file into the launcher. From there, drag the file again, this time over the halflifealyxlauncher.exe file and let go.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the classic Wolfenstein brought into VR. Back in 2018 modders developed a VR version of the game that uses the original guns and enemy models. Of course, there’s also an official VR game in Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, though it doesn’t really share its roots with the original series and is pretty short.

As for Alyx, this is the second impressive mod we’ve seen this week. We also checked out a fun wave-based survival shooter called XenThug. In less impressive news, people are modding the game to be played without VR but, so far, the results don’t look very promising.

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Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot VR Does Not ‘Officially Support’ Oculus Rift, But Works ‘At The Moment’

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot releases on July 26 and will not have official support for the Oculus Rift on Steam.

If you’re curious to know what we thought of Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, you can read (or watch) our full review right here. We weren’t very impressed. It has some good ideas and leverages one of the most well-known IPs in the entire game industry, but still comes up underwhelming.

Another disappointing part of its launch is the lack of official Oculus Rift support. According to Jerk Gustafsson, Executive Producer at Machine Games, in an interview with UploadVR at E3, he had the following to say:

“Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot will be compatible with the Vive, WMR, and also released on PlayStation VR playable with the Move as well as the DualShock pad,” says Gustafsson. “The game works on Oculus, but we don’t officially support it so we can’t really say if it’s gonna hold but at the moment it works and is compliant.”

As of this writing I’ve played all the way through Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot on PSVR and tested it on Rift S. From what I’ve seen it seems to work okay, but the lack of official support is still a sign that if there are issues or if a future patch alters something then it may break support in some way. DOOM VFR is in the same boat with no official support and the last I checked controls were still a bit wonky.

The rest of the interview mostly discusses their excitement for VR in developing Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot. You can watch the entire thing embedded just above this paragraph.

Let us know what you think of the game when you get a chance to play it!

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Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot Review: Nazi-Killing Machines

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot is only the second made-for-VR game from Bethesda and this time it brings the iconic Nazi-killing franchise to the immersive realm. Here’s our full review.

I’ve killed a lot of virtual Nazis over the years. Between all of the Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Wolfenstein, and other game franchises that have pitted players against Germany’s darkest piece of history, I’d wager the body count is probably a hundred thousand or more by my hand alone from all of the years added up. But with that being said, to Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot’s credit, I can say that it certainly provided brand new ways to murder Nazis that I’d never experienced before. Which is why it’s such a shame that those ways were mostly underwhelming.

In a big change for the series, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot actually puts you in the shoes of a hacker this time around. The game takes place in Paris in 1980 as you aid the French resistance against the Nazi regime. Your mission is to take control of Nazi war machines and unleash them on unsuspecting forces to wreak havoc and try to disrupt their conquest.

On paper, Wolfenstein in VR sounds like an excellent concept for a game. The Wolfenstein franchise  is respected and has received a modern revival with the latest series of games putting it back in the public conscience. Killing Nazis has never been as visceral and satisfying as it is in the most recent Wolfenstein games.

But every other Wolfenstein game has always put your boots on the ground and handed you a rifle to get your hands dirty the old-fashioned way. A modern interpretation of that concept in the immersive realm of VR could have been powerful and intense, but what we’ve got instead feels mostly safe and lacking teeth.

In Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot you don’t even actually fight Nazis directly at all; you just hack into robots that do the killing. It’s like being a remote drone pilot of hulking metallic beasts hungry for flesh. And perhaps this is more revealing of my mindset than it should be, but after playing Wolfenstein: The New Colossus and drowning my screen in blood, Cyberpilot just feels overly tame. Most enemies just catch fire before falling to the ground, evaporate after being electrocuted, or are too far away down on the ground to really see any gory details. Call me a sadist, but in a Wolfenstein game I want some up-close carnage and blood. If Bethesda will publish DOOM VFR, which has lots of that, it seems odd to neuter Cyberpilot when compared to its other Wolfenstein counterparts.

Wolfenstein Cyberpilot Release

Cyberpilot is only about three hours long, give or take, and a good chunk of that occurs outside of the virtual cockpit back at a research facility base. You’re bound to a chair and all you can do is pull a lever to raise or lower an elevator to different floors and reach out to interact with objects around you. The developers broke up the action with some light puzzle solving and a bit of exposition, so it’s not just pure action all the time, and it’s a good balance. I found myself more endeared to the characters than I expected due to the entertaining writing and quality voice acting.

In some ways though, Cyberpilot almost seems like a game that existed in a concept phase previously and was shoved into the Wolfenstein universe to capitalize on the IP rather than actually being built from the ground up with the franchise in mind.

Comfort

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot has a good selection of comfort options. You can customize turning speed, as well as whether it’s smooth or snap-based. Forward movement is smooth only, but there is an FOV dimmer to help alleviate motion sickness. The cockpit’s design also does a good job of grounding your perspective. Interestingly, if playing with motion controllers, you can rotate your view either using the buttons/touch pad on the controller, or by physically pointing your hand to rotate view. I found myself preferring buttons so I could still aim without my view rotating.

It’s a shame that the action-packed levels are basically just linear corridor shooters that pose little threat. Flying the small, more agile, drone around that could cloak itself and hack computers ended up being a highlight of the game instead since it offered something quite different from the rest.

Even the moments of action that do exist feel artificial in a way that’s hard to really describe.  The best way to put it is that you can never shake the feeling that you’re not actually in the mech and are instead just hacking into the cockpit from afar. Perhaps that’s a testament to the game’s immersion, but it ends up seriously harming Cyberpilot’s fun factor. It all just sort of ends up feeling like a superficial shooting gallery.

Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot has all of the right ingredients to be an exciting VR game focused on murdering tons of Nazis, but ends up feeling like it’s just too safe with far too little content. Mechanically it works well and there are some quality moments of fun, but just as the world starts to get interesting it’s all over.


Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot releases on July 26th on SteamVR with official support for Vive, Windows VR, and Valve Index, as well as on PSVR, for $19.99 on both storefronts. This review was conducted on the PSVR version of the game using two PS Move controllers, but it does support DualShock 4 as well. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.

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‘Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot’ to Launch on PSVR & SteamVR Headsets in July

Bethesda quietly released the official street date for their upcoming VR game, Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot, which is targeting both PSVR and SteamVR headsets.

The game is set to launch simultaneously on the PlayStation Store for PSVR and on Steam July 26th for $20.

Although the Steam page only lists HTC Vive as a supported headset, the game’s website also mentions Windows VR headset support as well. It’s also extremely likely that Oculus Rift is supported too—providing the studio hasn’t added any unprecedented headset checks to artificially lock out Rift users.

As with Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR, Bethesda tends to professionally ignore Oculus products despite offering defacto support for Rift thanks to Steam’s OpenVR API. There’s a whole story about that, but we won’t get into here.

Image courtesy Bethesda

We got a chance to go hands-on with Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot at E3 last year, and while visually impressive, the demo seemed to be more of a surface look at the game, as it didn’t offer much depth in gameplay outside of controlling the Nazi Panzerhund and roasting Nazis alive with the integrated flame thrower.

We’ve also seen other mechs besides the Panzerhund in recently published images though, so we assume there’s also going to be some sort of vehicle progression.

Image courtesy Bethesda

Here’s the story in case you missed it: it’s been 20 years since the events of The New Colossus. You’re a hacker in the 1980s living in the series’ alternate WW2 history where the Nazis are still jackbooting around Paris. As a cyberpilot, you take control of Nazi mechs in aid of the French resistance by slaying Nazis.

Check out the trailer below:

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