Let's do the Dark Souls again! It's just a jump to the left

Now that I know which song is playing in your brain, let's get down to business with the first new/old game that release 17.0.0 of the R.E.A.L. VR mod supports. The game is on the longish side (HowLongToBeat reports 62 hours for completing Main+Extra), but even just the title is a mouthful: Dark Souls II - Scholar of the First Sin. DS2 SotFS for friends.

Those of you who are not rocking a 4090 (and all of us who are not in the elite of a dozen or so YouTubers who were sent an elusive 5090) will be happy because this game was made back when FromSoftware still knew how to write performant engines, which means that it will run as smooth as butter at the full frame rate of the headset. No need for frame interpolation or anything like that :-)

Note that the SotFS edition (including the original game plus the DLCs) is the only one I can support. The old DSII was 32-bit and DX9, and it won't work in VR.

The latest updates for DS2 will be added at the bottom of the post!

Games list

As usual the mod archive is common for all my VR conversions (29 are currently available, plus the game in the next post which will be out in a few minutes). Here is the updated list, complete with information about which special features they support:

• Atomic Heart [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Cyberpunk 2077 [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Dark Souls: Remastered [AER v2]

• Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin (new) [AER v2]

• Elden Ring (with its massive Shadow of the Erdtree DLC) [AER v2 + DL(S)SS when NVIDIA DLSS is enabled with a third-party mod]

• Far Cry 4 [AER v2]

• Far Cry 5 [AER v2]

• Far Cry 6 [AER v2]

• Far Cry New Dawn [AER v2]

• Far Cry Primal [AER v2]

• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade [AER v2]

• Ghost of Tsushima [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Ghostrunner [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Ghostwire: Tokyo [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Grounded [AER v2]

• High On Life [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Hogwarts Legacy [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Horizon: Zero Dawn [AER v2]

• Horizon Forbidden West [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Star Wars Outlaws [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Stray [AER v2]

• Uncharted 4: A Thief's End [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Uncharted: The Lost Legacy [AER v2 + DL(S)SS]

• Watch Dogs [AER v2]

• Watch Dogs 2 [AER v2]

Please note that all trademarks belong to the respective owners, and that no copyright infringement is intended or condoned. And of course, you'll need to have a legit copy of the original games that you want to play in VR.

Setup

I developed and tested the Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin 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, always make sure that your video drivers are updated to a reasonably recent version.

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\Dark Souls II Scholar of the First Sin\Game" folder. Note that you might need to customize the path if you moved your library or own the game from a different store, but it will always be the folder that contains the "DarkSoulsII.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 DS2 SotFS it should automatically display in your VR headset. Read on to find out how to get the darkest and most intense experience in VR!

Resolution and HUD

You will need to play in windowed mode. The high resolution needed for VR can be set very easily by bringing up the mod overlay and looking for the "Target pixels per degree" slider in the main "R.E.A.L. VR" tab. Set it to a value approximately in the range 20-30 depending on your GPU (if you have an NVIDIA card, the mod will try to guess a sensible PPD default the first time you launch it), then press the "Adapt resolution" button to set the game resolution to your preferred value. The target PPD you choose will be remembered and re-applied automatically across sessions.

From the same place you can also select the aspect ratio, picking among a few values that the game supports. Normally for "round" FOV headsets like the Meta Quest 3 you will want to use a square aspect ratio (1:1). Please also note that although the game can sort of adapt its own HUD, it will do so by resizing the original 16:9 texture to the output window aspect ratio, so everything on the HUD will appear to be squeezed horizontally. I think that the pixels saved during rendering by choosing a square A/R are well worth the deformation of the HUD, but if you cannot stand it and want everything in the menus to look as it does in flat, just choose a 16:9 aspect ratio.

NOTE: see the "Updates and known issues" section at the end of the post for a bug in the game's lock-on system that can randomly be triggered when you change resolution.

Cutscenes

Most cutscenes are fully 3D and allow you to look anywhere without restrictions. I removed the letterboxing (horizontal black bars above and below) because it wasn't working correctly in VR, so the full field of view will be accessible.

Some cutscene segments however were prerendered by the developers and stored as movies (notably the initial one when you first start your adventure) so there's nothing I can do about them: they will appear as if projected on a virtual 2D screen in VR.

The cinematics quality is mostly very good, but as usual there will be some missing props, invisible walls, levitating characters and so on in the parts of the scene that you were never supposed to see in the flat game.

Game options

You can set all graphics and gameplay options in the game menus 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. Specifically, under Video Settings:

• Full-screen must be set to Windowed

• Resolution can be left at 1280x720 (the actual window size will be forced by the mod to the value you selected in the R.E.A.L. VR overlay)

• Auto-detect best rendering settings should be Off

• Motion Blur and Camera Motion Blur must both be Off

• Depth of field I recommend setting to Off, as it doesn't make much sense in VR (although it works correctly).

Input

It's best to use a gamepad to play Dark Souls II (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.

Interface

Similarly to my Elden Ring and Dark Souls: Remastered VR conversions, this mod for DS2 implements my Quick Menu system:

You can bring it up at all times during gameplay by pressing Back+Start on the controller (Select+Start with a PS-style gamepad) or Pause on the keyboard.

The Quick Menu behaves in a very special way: it will freeze action while it's open (something the original game never allows you to do, not even while you're navigating its own menus) and it will immediately react to buttons or stick actions on the gamepad. Basically it's meant to be a collection of shortcuts that lets you make the most important changes to the VR mod configuration instantly, especially when muscle memory has set in and your fingers already know where to go, without navigating complex menus and breaking the flow of the game.

You can still access the traditional R.E.A.L. VR mod overlay, either by pressing A or Cross when in the Quick Menu, or by double-clicking on Back+Start instead of single-clicking. The full overlay is needed if you want to set the automatic save backup interval for example, or change the world scale.

As you can see in the picture above, from the Quick Menu you can do all sorts of things like:

• removing the overlay itself while keeping the game frozen, to take your time observing epic moments in the action from any perspective in full roomscale;

• selecting your favorite VR render mode, in case your GPU is really old and you need to scale down to Legacy AER or even Mono rendering;

• fine-tuning the camera positions (more below on the various cameras I implemented);

• choosing between 4 immediately available and fully customizable camera presets (see my Dark Souls: Remastered post for a full explanation of how presets work);

• finally, the Quick Menu gives you immediate control over the game speed.

Unfortunately there is no tourist mode this time, because I was unable to find a reliable way to prevent enemies from being aware of you :-(

Special VR cameras

Like other Souls games, the original flat version of DS2 only has one distant camera, which usually hovers about 3-5 meters behind your character and can get even farther during combat or fast movement; the original camera also has the peculiarity of shooting up in the sky whenever you get close to a locked-on enemy, which I find extremely annoying in VR because it forces you to look down toward your feet to see the action, as if you were sitting on a drone.

I left it in for purists (although you can fine tune its position using the offsets shown in the Quick Menu), but the default for the VR mod is my "Closer" camera, which is about half the distance and won't swing up wildly every time you approach enemies.

Then, if you want to actually be in the thick of action, there is the "R.E.A.L. close" camera, which gives you an over-the-shoulder view that allows you to see everything without feeling left behind.

And last but not least, I implemented a full first person camera, which however has a peculiarity: it won't be immediately usable at the start of a gaming session, and it will just appear like a weird 3rd person (the mod overlay will label it as "1st person N/A"). To make it work correctly you will need to aim at least once, for instance by zooming in with your bow. The reason for this quirk is that in DS2 aiming is the only action that you perform in the first person perspective, and until you do that for the first time, the components needed for the first person camera won't be available yet.

On the plus side, once it's loaded in, the 1st person camera is smooth and behaves quite well, although of course it will make the game even harder :-) But if you are into Dark Souls games it's because you can't resist an insane challenge, right?

Updates and known issues

I'll post new information here as it becomes available.

Known issue 1: I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this when I first wrote the post. There is a bug in the game's lock-on system that can randomly be triggered when you change resolution at runtime; it is very easy to spot because as soon as there are multiple enemies in your vicinity and you try to lock on to one, the lock target will keep jumping from one enemy to the next, about twice per second, which makes combat almost impossible and also tends to spin the camera around. As far as I could tell, this is a bug with the game itself and not with the mod, because it happens even if I remove all my patches to the code.
I was unable to fix it, but there is an easy workaround: just change the resolution again (even by a slight amount) and the game will recompute its camera structures, which can randomly result in the bug manifesting or not. If the issue is still there, rinse and repeat until it stops happening. Luckily the bug doesn't occur when the resolution is set on game launch, but only when you change it dynamically, so once you have found the resolution that you like you won't be affected again for the rest of your playthrough.

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Final note, a.k.a. the icing on the cake: from our initial testing, it looks as though you can play online while in VR! But beware that FromSoftware's official position is that "players found to be violating the EULA by using cheats, hacks, mods, etc. will have restrictions (permanent or temporary) placed on their online profiles/accounts."

Offline mode, on the other hand, should be as safe as it always was.

If you decide to try your luck and play online, please understand that you're assuming the full risk and responsibility. I added a disclaimer and an explicit request for acknowledgment of the ban risk to RealConfig (the mod installer). While being able to play online in VR would be awesome, I don't want anyone getting banned due to this.

Let me know how it works for you!!!
And see you in a few minutes for the second game ^_^