Valve made a lot of PC gamers extremely happy this week when they announced that Team Fortress 2 would have support for a Virtual Reality mode using the Oculus Rift. Team Fortress 2 will therefore be the first game to officially support Oculus and Virtual Reality. Valve has put together their own “Tips and Tricks” for using Virtual Reality in Team Fortress 2, but here is everything you really need to know!
Will Virtual Reality be present in all Team Fortress 2 features?
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Yes, Valve has announced that every class and game mode will offer complete support for Virtual Reality and the Oculus Rift. Special in-game “hats” will also be given to players using the Oculus Rift to play the game.
How do you use the Oculus Rift with Team Fortress 2?
Well, to start, you obviously need to pick up an Oculus Rift developer kit which are shipping this month. It will take a while for non-Developer kits to fully ship out, but that process should be completed by the end of April. Valve is going to roll out support for Virtual Reality in Team Fortress 2 in the coming days, so as soon as you get your Oculus, you should be all set to start playing.
After hooking up your Oculus Rift and starting Team Fortress 2, you will need to add “-vr” to your command line options in Steam which should enable all VR functions for any Virtual Reality-supported games.
While it might be biased information since it is coming from Valve employees, it does seem like using the Oculus Rift while playing Team Fortress 2 creates an amazing user experience. Valve’s Joe Ludwig said the following about using the Oculus with the game:
When we first played an early version of Virtual Reality mode in Team Fortress we were blown away by the immersion we experienced…VR is just getting started, but it is going to have a big impact on gaming. This update will let us share that experience with more of the Team Fortress community
Will Valve add Virtual Reality support for other Steam games?
For the time being, Valve is only going to allow VR support for Team Fortress 2, but that decision came after carefully going through their game library to decide which game would be best suited for use with the Oculus Rift. Team Fortress 2 was an “obvious choice” for Valve because of the size of its community and because of how rapidly Valve updates the game.
Not all hope is lost when it comes to other games though. Valve has experimented with basic Virtual Reality features in games like Left 4 Dead and Half-Life 2 meaning that somewhere down the line, it is not absurd to think they will expand their selection of Virtual Reality-supported games.