Star Wars: Squadrons in VR is not for the faint of the stomach—after playing for some hours of Squadrons on my monitor, I wasn’t made for how different it would feel doing barrel rolls and flying in VR.
My cockpit felt huge. I could look straight up to see the TIE Fighter I was trying to hunt down, and I had to sit up straight to look at the instrument panel down the nose of my X-Wing. The peripheral vision is an advantage in battle, but it also felt like details overload. I found it very hard to track other human pilots in multiplayer game.
If you’re looking to play Star Wars: Squadrons in VR, here’s what you need to know before you jump into the game.
Star Wars: Squadrons VR Oculus setup
If you have Oculus Quest, connect it to your PC with a USB C cable, turn it on, and put it on; you should get a prompt to allow Oculus Link with your PC.
Now the headset plugged in, boot up Star Wars: Squadrons and hit Esc to open the options menu. Here you will see a VR Settings menu if the game found your headset. In the VR settings menu, you’ll see a button to “Toggle” VR. Click that button, and the game should prompt on your headset. You’ll need to hit Spacebar to confirm the switch to VR mode.
This process doesn’t always go smoothly, and I had to figure out some fixes the hard way.
- The important thing: Make sure you have the game set to Borderless mode. You can do this in Options > Video > Screen settings. When I attempted to switch to VR in Fullscreen mode, Squadrons crashed to desktop every time.
- If you get a black screen when you toggle VR: On the Oculus Quest, try unplugging the headset and plugging it back in, then enabling VR again. The game got “stuck” for me trying to make the switch, but this fixed it.
Here are some things to be aware of if you’re trying to play on an Oculus headset:
- Some players have criticized about blurriness in VR. VR isn’t as sharp or detailed as it is on my monitor but didn’t look blurry.
- The Steam version reportedly does not use the Oculus SDK natively but works through SteamVR. If you have poor performance, consider returning and getting on Origin instead.
- Despite strong hardware, some systems are having trouble getting the game to run well, especially in VR. You may just have to wait for patches or driver updates to fix this. In the meantime, you can lower the graphics settings.
Star Wars: Squadrons VR Index/Vive setup
According to player reports it hasn’t been a trouble-free launch. The Valve Index has some important advantages over my Oculus Quest. The higher resolution and the 120 Hz refresh rate (vs the Quest’s 72 Hz) should be a great deal for anyone not use to of VR motion sickness. But hitting a steady 120Hz, especially in VR, is also much more of a difficulty for your hardware.
You should be able to play Squadrons from inside SteamVR Home, but there seem to be issues currently stopping it from running well for many of the gamers.
- Some Steam players are reporting the game being locked to 60 Hz or 30 Hz, even when Squadrons are set to run at 144 fps. This seems to be a bug with many people that will likely need a patch to fix.
- One solution is: Running the Vive Index at 120 Hz, but then limiting the in-game framerate to 60 fps. While not perfect, this bypasses the high FPS performance issue.
- Also, make sure to review your SteamVR supersampling settings. A higher setting like 200% could mean an even greater performance hit since you’re rendering more pixels.