Team Beef, the modding group behind a slew of unofficial VR ports of classic games, announced their next project is Tomb Raider (1996), which will bring the action-adventure game to standalone headsets Quest and Pico VR.
Unlike the version playable through CitraVR, Team Beef says the BeefRaiderXR version will be a full VR port, which aims to include everything you’d expect: full 6DOF tracking, an immersive first-person POV, dual wielding weapons, and motion-triggered actions.
The modding group, which is known for standalone VR ports such as Duke Nukem 3D, Prey, and Quake 4, says BeefRaiderXR will also release publicly once development is finished. Like its other Quest-native ports, the game is expected to come via SideQuest.
You may be asking yourself how it’s possible that Team Beef can release a port of a copyrighted game? At least in this case, BeefRaiderXR is based on the original game’s unofficial remake OpenLara from Timur Gagiev (aka ‘XProger’), whose in-browser version of the 1996 classic completely recreates the original’s game engine for WebGL. Notably, Gagiev was also the Technical Director of the official Tomb Raider I-III Remastered (2024) game, which released on Steam earlier this month.
To boot, Team Beef says its upcoming VR port “does not contain any copyrighted assets from the original game,” and that the original Tomb Raider is required to play. As usual, if you want to follow along with development to learn more, or get early access to in-development builds, the modding team runs its own Patreon.
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Awesome! I was recently thinking of going back and playing Tomb Raider. Glad I hadn’t gotten to it yet. I do wish they would take the time to go back and fix the myriad of bugs on some of their other ports, though… QuestZDoom, Prey, Quake and Raze XR are all buggy as heck. I’m sure it’s more fun to make the ports than go back and fix issues, but still…
Agreed- I strongly suspect porting is more fun that squishing bugs. I’ve nearly finished Prey (which I gave up on halfway though in 2006 for some reason) and that works well enough, but I’ve never managed to get RTCW working on Quest 3 even after multiple reinstalls and different ISO PAK files (bombs out after briefing intro), so just wish the ports got more attention to bug fixing after release.
I have to say though, Jedi Knight II was spectacular with touch controlled lightsabres…!
It takes either a certain level of obsession or the experience of having been badly burned by them for a developer to enjoy finding and fixing bugs, cleaning up code or properly documenting it, because all this does is keep things going (slightly better), while implementing new functionality that visibly changes things feels more rewarding (and appreciated).
Which is one of the reasons why there are so many open source projects with horrible UI out there, because once they perform the basic function the developers aimed for, investing more time into polishing them is tedious. And there is no money incentive like with commercial products that may sell worse if left in such a state.
I understand. It wasn’t an intention to come across as being ungrateful either, I guess I should have caviated my statement with ‘in an ideal world’. This are released for free after all.
JKII was quite polished and not a bug found (by me), but equally evolving popularity and Patreon testing might have resulted in a better output upon release.
I don’t think any developer would take your comment as ungrateful, instead they’d just agree with you assumption that porting is more fun than squishing bugs. Most developers are very aware that there are still lots of bugs to be fixed, test to be written and horrible hacks to be addressed, and are as conscious about it as others are that they should clean up, be more active or eat less junk food. It only gets annoying when people suggest that fixing bugs is easy and that developers are just lazy for not doing it or don’t care.
The first Tomb Raider titles ran on PlayStations lacking analog sticks, so they relied on tank controls with 45° turns. Which help with aligning Lara for e.g. jumps, apparently making the remaster harder to play with now also available free movement. But this of course would allow for one of the most 1:1 VR translations, with the usual snap turning VR comfort option being the original movement type, and go/stop as the only two movement speeds getting rid of any nausea through acceleration.
This is fantastic news and a poster child for the sort of game you always wished you could play in VR. I hope they include a level skip.
I also think that third person games where you watch the character as you control them work incredibly well in VR, and feel a lot more anchored in the environment than gliding along yourself at a continuous speed. In a first person game you will see the character interacting with the flooring and the environment and it will work really well, just like Edge of Nowhere did.
As I understand from the trailer, it is fpg.
Bravo to Team Beef!
Love it! But my dream is playing „Battlefield Heroes“ (still available on RisingHub) in VR one day!
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