Elden Ring Developer's Forgotten PS2 Classic Now Playable In VR
25 Years Later, Fans Are Bringing A Forgotten FromSoftware Classic To VR
Via LaunchBox.Kings Field doesn’t get brought up much when talking about FromSoftware games, but then again, pre-Souls games rarely do (outside the diehard fans). But the studio owes a lot to its debut series, a grueling first-person dungeon crawler with an opaque story told through grumbling, miserable characters. It set the mold for the studio, later inspiring Hidetaka Miyazaki when developing Demon’s Souls, so it’s always a treat to see the community revisit these classics and keep them alive through ambitious mods like Kings Field VR.
It’s part of a wider project from YouTuber and Reddit user PenguinVR to make several PS2 and PSX games playable in virtual reality through an emulator. In a recent hour-long video, they showed several games — from Ace Combat 5 and TimeSplitters to Kings Field and Shadow Tower — being played through a Meta Quest 3, running as smoothly as an official port. It’s incredibly impressive what they’ve achieved so far, but the headline is that Kings Field 4 is now ready for beta testers.
“We modified the PCSX2 emulator at the render pipeline level - not a screen-capture trick, not a post-process warp - and built a per-game profile system on top of it, so every supported title gets VR treatment tuned to that specific game,” PenguinVR dev explained in a Reddit post announcing the beta. “A lot of the PS2’s most atmospheric games run at 20fps native - and 20fps content on a 90Hz compositor is normally judder soup. We solved that pacing problem; those games sit clean and comfortable in the headset.”
It Even Works With The Steam Machine And Steam Deck
PenguinVRLab is compatible with the Steam Deck and Steam Machine, and you can even attach a disc drive and play a PS2 game directly from a physical copy (good luck with King's Field 4 though, it sells for up to $250 these days).
As with most emulation projects, to avoid the team receiving a stern-worded cease and desist letter from publishers, PenguinVR requires you to provide your own BIOS and games. Kings Field 4 might be supported, but a copy isn’t supplied in the beta, just the tools to run it in VR - which are readily available now on GitHub.
Aside from asking the community to help test the newest addition to the project, PenguinVR has a few key goals they're working towards, as laid out in the roadmap:
- Sim configuration tool to bind your wheel, stick, or HOTAS to the game before launch and verify every axis and button live.
- Reverse engineer and rebuild dead servers for Madden 2004 & NCAA 2004.
- Using the funds from Patreon to translate Japanese games into English through professional human translators.
It's an ambitious undertaking, but more than anything, it’s a novel way to freshen up the classics all these years later without sacrificing their old-school charm. And something tells me that the unnerving liminal spaces of Kings Field will only be creepier to explore in VR.