Patryk Loan has been working on a VR version of the original Witcher game for at least a couple of years now. Last time we checked in, you could walk around Kaer Morhen, but that was it. The current version, available on NexusMods, lets you play through the entire prologue, complete with combat and dialogue choices.
"Every detail, every single prop was recovered, carefully transferred from the original game," Patryk says, "remodeled and retextured, then placed where they exactly should be with detailed analyses and love." Most of the textures have been upscaled to 4K, and objects can be interacted with, including drinks. (Though not food, furniture, or weapons that are currently being wielded by NPCs.)
Rather than try to transfer The Witcher's frankly terrible OG combat mechanics into VR, Patryk replaced it with a battle system he describes succinctly: "Just swing the sword to attack your enemies". You can draw Geralt's blade from a scabbard on your back, and even throw it at enemies. (If you experience a bug where the weapon doesn't cause damage, Patryk suggests dropping and immediately catching your sword to fix it.)
While all of the dialogue is presented in first-person, only some of the cutscenes are as each one had to be completely remade. Patryk notes, "you have the ability to rotate your head everywhere at any time, so I added some extra lore-based content for almost every cutscene, and by that, I promise that even if you played the original game, the experience still would be new and refreshing." He also restored some lines of dialogue that had been cut.
The Witcher in VR supports a variety of headsets, including the HTC Vive, Valve Index, Oculus Rift, and Oculus Quest via Oculus Link. If you've got Oculus Touch controllers you can use their triggers to grab stuff, including your sword. To play it you'll need to own the original game, then it's a matter of downloading the main package, running setup.bat, then finally downloading and installing the voice over package.
The first entry in the FAQ answers the most obvious question: "Does this mod have nude scenes? - Yes, it does".
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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor
Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.
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