Deep Rock Galactic is a cult-favorite PC co-op game where teams of up to four players dive into perilous caverns in search of precious minerals while battling hordes of alien bugs along the way. And now the game is soon to see the first release of a mod that makes DRG fully playable in VR.

Original Article (November 5th, 2021): Developer Ghost Ship Games this week launched a major update to Deep Rock Galactic which adds new weapons to the game for the first time, alongside new missions, enemies, cosmetics, and more.

Hidden deep in the update’s huge list of patch notes was this valuable gem:

ENABLED VR PLUGINS

Speaking of modding, we have enabled the SteamVR and OculusVR plugins to allow modders to play with them. Have fun!

While this doesn’t mean that the game can be played in VR just yet, it does mean that modders can tap into those VR plugins to begin experimenting with adaptations that could make the game fully playable in VR.

This small addition to the update appears to be thanks in part to Reddit user Elliotttate, a member of the Flatscreen to VR Mod Community, who got the attention of the studio through a post in the Deep Rock Galactic subreddit which asked the developers to enable VR plugins so that VR modders could try adapting the game. As the post explained:

For an UE4 game, the one essential ‘piece of VR modding’ that we need first from the developers (that currently can’t be ‘modded in’) is just to include the VR plugins in the project when building. It takes two minutes to do and has no negative consequences for the shipping version of the game. Recently, we asked the Mechwarrior 5 developers (PG) the same thing, they added it and now have a full VR mod for it!

In fact, modders have now already triggered the plugins to verify that the game can be rendered correctly in VR.

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Of course this is extremely early work. Getting the game to play well in VR will need to go well beyond simply rigging up the game to take input from motion controllers. Anyone who knows Deep Rock Galactic knows that it’s a game with lots of erratic player movement and comfort will be a huge challenge—not to mention figuring out how to balance the game’s vast number of quickly moving enemies to not be completely overwhelming in VR.

Luckily the game also recently added official modding support; as long as VR input, rendering, and interfaces can be made to work correctly, it should be relatively easy to experiment with VR-focused content and balance changes and then distribute them to players via the existing modding system.