Fueled by frustration with the state of VR gaming, a developer has turned Titanfall 2 into a native-feeling virtual reality experience.
Leaping into a jump pack to sprint across walls before dropping into the cockpit of a mechanized titan feels just as visceral as it did years ago. Except now. the towering machines feel heavy enough to touch. and the scope of an anti-materiel rifle feels massive against your shoulder. The experience is one of the most compelling virtual reality games currently available. yet it wasn’t built by a major studio. It is a free, fan-made mod developed by one person over the course of a single month.
The project belongs to Jordan “CircuitLord” Juarez. a developer who spent his career working on titles like Gorilla Tag. Zenith: The Last City. Synth Riders. and the Desktop Portal tool. After watching the decline of favorites like Echo Arena and feeling disillusioned by his work on the project Orion Drift at the studio Another Axiom. Juarez walked away. He launched his own solo studio. Iteration Three. and began work on No Shot—an Echo Arena successor—while turning to a side project that addressed his growing frustration with the VR industry.
“The only VR games I’d recommend to any adults are literally like 5+ years old. ” Juarez noted in his Discord. adding that he produced the mod out of spite because he feels many developers have lost the plot. opting for content geared toward kids rather than robust. AAA-style experiences. His goal was to prove a point: that existing high-quality games could be ported into true. native-feeling VR without the jank that often plagues modded projects. He believes this approach could help break the loop where studios avoid large-scale VR development because the player base is small. while the player base remains small due to a lack of substantial games.
Building the mod required extensive reverse engineering—a process Juarez accelerated by utilizing AI tools—alongside the Northstar community mod loader. To achieve a native feel, he painstakingly split apart original game animations and sounds, hooking them into new VR-specific triggers. The reload mechanics are a highlight; players must manually grab a magazine from over their shoulder and rack the slide on the weapon themselves. While he is currently working on private VR servers to support multiplayer requests. the single-player campaign remains his primary focus. though minor issues persist. such as occasional opaque scopes or difficult-to-reach weapon pickups. He has even implemented a system where Titans turn based on the player’s weapon aim. rather than relying solely on joystick movement.
Despite the technical overhaul. Juarez is quick to shift the spotlight back to the original creators. noting that the environments. story. and sound effects belong to the architects of Titanfall 2. The barrier to entry for players is remarkably low. The base game is frequently available for $5. and the mod requires only three clicks to install on any of the three PC versions of the game. It runs on modest hardware, including an Nvidia GTX 1080 or a modern midrange RTX 3060 laptop GPU.
This trend of revitalizing decade-old classics might represent a new path forward for the medium. By breathing fresh life into established. well-optimized titles. independent developers are demonstrating that the future of virtual reality may not necessarily lie in the hands of the studios that abandoned the format. but in the hands of those willing to break its shackles.
Titanfall 2 VR mod Jordan Juarez virtual reality gaming news Iteration Three PC gaming Northstar