Back in September last year, we reported on the odd possibility of Creative Assembly's fantastic entry in the waning ALIEN videogame franchise - Alien: Isolation - eventually having its original VR mode officially added back in. It didn't happen back then, but someone made it happen last week - in a sense.
Coming off the heels of the lackluster, buggy mess that was Alien: Colonial Marines, Creative Assembly needed to convince the world that their take on the franchise was something a little more robust. Though they certainly managed it with the final game, a demo released prior helped set things straight.
With the demo releasing during the early days of the Oculus Rift development cycle, Creative Assembly teased players with support for the Oculus SDK within the Alien: Isolation demo, meaning anyone with an Oculus development kit could enjoy one of the first AAA VR horror experiences with relative easy. When the final game shipped, however, the VR mode was missing - likely due to having no time to properly test the functionality before its final release.
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Many petitioned to get the VR mode re-instated, but all requests fell on deaf ears. Though it was known the prototype VR mode code was still present in the final version of the game, it wasn't compatible with the consumer Oculus Rift HMD that eventually came to be. Recently, however, a lone modder by the name of Nibre managed what others couldn't - or wouldn't. Available in an alpha state right now, anyone with a consumer Rift headset and a copy of Alien: Isolation can inject Nibre's VR mode into their game through Githhub for the tech savvy.
Though it's still early days for the mod, panning your vision in-game is now handled through head-tracking. Locomotion and inputs, however, are still tied to a controller. It's a site down VR experience, but still a damn scary one at that. Nibre hopes to add other HMD support and varied control options in the future.
