DOOM The Dark Ages VR Mod Released by Luke Ross

Virtual reality modder Luke Ross has released a new R.E.A.L. VR mod to bring DOOM The Dark Ages to VR devices. To have access to it, you’ll need an active subscription to his Patreon at the VR Friend tier, which costs $10 monthly. Of course, this would also provide you with access to all of Luke Ross’s prior VR mods, such as Elden Ring, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Dark Souls, Death Stranding, and more. The modder had previously released VR ports of Take-Two’s Mafia: Definitive Edition, Grand Theft Auto V, and Red Dead Redemption 2, but a DMCA takedown notice from the publisher forced him to take those down, to the great disappointment of the VR community.

As usual with his mods, VR gaming YouTuber Bearded Banjo was able to check out the new DOOM The Dark Ages Mod beforehand and published an enthusiastic video report of himself playing. Bearded Banjo described the experience as ‘fast, frantic, and sometimes overwhelming’. The mod supports head tracking and head-based aiming, but motion controls are unavailable, so you’ll have to stick with using the gamepad. Banjo said the gameplay was captured on a PC equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 while using a Quest 3 connected via wired link.

The experience was smooth overall, even though he couldn’t get NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution to work with the mod for the time being. This could be fixed in a future update by Luke Ross. As a side note, the VR modder posted the results of his experiments with Optiscaler, which is a great boost to those wishing to play his VR mods on an AMD GPU:

Thanks to that mod, in almost every game that supports DLSS upscaling, you can substitute AMD’s FSR implementation and have it run effortlessly on AMD hardware. But from the game’s point of view, the video buffers will still be produced in DLSS format, and that means that my R.E.A.L. VR mod can intercept them and fix the disocclusions by translating the calls to work in stereoscopic mode, thus getting rid of the shimmering around nearby objects and NPCs.

You can read our DOOM The Dark Ages review (non-VR) here. The game has reached the 3 million player milestone much faster than DOOM Eternal. However, the jury is still out on whether it was financially more successful, as most of those are likely to have played the game on Game Pass. According to Ampere Analysis estimates, over two million players checked out the game on Xbox while player numbers on PC and PlayStation 5 were around half a million, definitely lower than anticipated, at least on the PC platform.