World of Warcraft Mod Makes it Playable in VR

13.04.2024 - 18:21 / gamerant.com / Dominik Bo

A group of highly skilled modders have turned World of Warcraft into a virtual reality game. Called WoVR, their World of Warcraft VR mod is now available for download free of charge.

The project itself comes from Flatscreen 2 VR, a long-time modding community with a self-explanatory name. Over the years, this collective has managed to bring VR functionality to the Resident Evil 4 remake, Amnesia, Crysis, Portal 2, and many other popular games.

The group's latest feat of engineering arrives in the form of WoVR, which transforms Blizzard's iconic MMORPG into a full-fledged virtual reality experience. The mod works with the 3.3.5a version of the game, which is the original June 2010 release and not the modern live server version of World of Warcraft Classic. That particular build incorporates the MMORPG's first two expansions, The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King.

WoVR doesn't simply make the game run on modern VR headsets, but comes with full-fledged 6DOF tracking support. Short for «six degrees of freedom,» this technique enables tracking of both the position and orientation of the headset in a three-dimensional space, so that head movements can always be accurately translated to camera actions. The initial version of WoVR, released on April 12, requires VR controllers and cannot be played with a mouse and keyboard. Flatscreen 2 VR said it might look into such a feature if the mod proves popular enough.

Be that as it may, the modding community currently has no plans to continue active development of the project. Even this initial release of WoVR was approximately a decade in the making, having been initially envisioned as a mod for the Oculus Rift DK1, the headset's very first dev kit from 2013. After years of on and off work followed by a four-year hiatus, the team decided to return to the project in January 2024. The 1.0 version of the mod that they finally delivered supports both first- and third-person gameplay, as well as a floating UI with occlusion, the ability to hide interface elements behind in-game objects.

World of Warcraft isn't the first MMORPG to receive VR treatment from this dedicated modding community; back in late 2022, the same team debuted a similar virtual reality mod for Final Fantasy 14. Instructions for downloading and installing both of those and other Flat2VR mods can be found on the group's Discord server.

World of Warcraft is an incredibly successful MMORPG that has been going strong for almost two decades. It's one of the highest-grossing franchises in history and is widely considered the most popular MMORPG ever made.