The Diablo II VR Mod Puts Sanctuary on Your Floor, and Labels Its Own First-Person View a Preview

Everybody who has played Diablo II knows it from the same seat. Up and behind, about forty-five degrees, close enough to count the Fallen and too far away to see a face on any of them. I spent a good part of 2000 in that seat. This week a free mod turned up offering three other places to stand, and a clip of one of them got passed around.

The clip is the first-person one. A staff pokes up from the bottom of the frame, a zombie shuffles toward you across the dark grass of the opening fields, the toolbar rides on your forearm and the map sits in your hand. Eurogamer wrote it up today, names the author as Sergious, and filed the story under Lord of Destruction. One fix on that last part, because it decides what you need to own: the mod is called D2R VR, and it runs on Diablo II: Resurrected, Blizzard's 2021 remaster. That is also why it can exist. The remaster draws real 3D models over the old game. The 2000 original is sprites, and there is nothing in a sprite to walk into.

Four cameras, and a warning label on the famous one

The source is on GitHub under an MIT license, and the README lays out four views on the F1 through F4 keys. F1 is the camera you already know, drawn in true perspective with a separate image for each eye, so walls and hills stand up off the ground. F2 drops the camera behind your hero at the height of a person and steers it with your head. F4 is the clip.

F3 is the strange one. It lays the whole game on the floor of your room as a diorama, any size from tabletop miniature to life size, and you walk around it. With Virtual Desktop's passthrough and a color key, the black around the map gets cut out and Tristram is just sitting there on the rug.

About that clip, though. The README puts a box around first person, and the box says: "F4 is an early look, not a finished way to play the game: the weapons are not calibrated yet, so how a weapon sits in the hands and where it aims may be off for many of them." There is a Weapon Adjust tab for fixing them yourself, with sliders in centimeters and degrees for each hand. The screenshot of that tab in the repository, taken on version 0.138, lists 17 kinds of weapon. Of the ones in view, every line reads "not adjusted" except one. The axe is done.

That has moved since. The changelog for 0.140 says the author's own tuned weapon settings now ship as the defaults, and 0.141 fixed the Barbarian's left hand so his second weapon sits properly and can hit things. The preview label is still on the page.

So the view that sold the mod is the one its maker trusts least, which is about as honest as a README gets. The floor view needs no such label. Diablo has always been a board game with the board tilted toward you, and F3 just sets the board down.

Who made it, and what it wants you to try

The repository belongs to a GitHub account called natpoh, and the copyright line in the license reads BodyWalkVR. That is a product. BodyWalk VR Motion Mapper has been on Steam since June 22 for $15, with 14 user reviews as of this afternoon, and it does two jobs here: it turns your VR controllers into an Xbox pad the game understands, and its FlatVR viewer is what actually puts the picture in the headset. The mod is free and open. The pipe it runs through is somebody's business.

I do not think that is a problem. A free mod that doubles as the best demo of a $15 tool is a fair trade, and the installer adds a free BodyWalk Lite if you have nothing installed. One thing I could not settle from the documentation: BodyWalk's own pricing page lists 2D FlatVR as unlimited on the free tier and puts "3D FlatVR" behind a ten-minute trial that resets when you restart the app. The mod draws its own stereo, so that cap may not touch it. The mod's page does not say either way. It is the first thing I would check before settling in for Act II.

The other cost is frames. D2R VR draws the two eyes in turn, one game frame for the left and the next for the right, so the README asks for a 180 frame cap to get 90 per eye, and it wants Vertical Sync off, TAA off and DLSS off. DLSS is marked required. Its reason is that DLSS "builds each frame from the ones before it," and here the one before it belongs to the other eye.

It is also brand new. The first code commit in the public repository is labeled 0.138 and stamped 10:09 UTC today. By 18:29 UTC the README was describing 0.141. That last version scans for the 54 places in the game's code the mod hooks every time it starts, so a patch from Blizzard should not quietly switch it off. The credit at the bottom goes to D2R-3D, a free-camera project that appeared on September 27, nine days earlier, for the idea. The README says D2R VR uses none of its code.

How to actually play it

You need your own copy of Diablo II: Resurrected, from Steam or Battle.net. On Steam it is the Infernal Edition at $39.99. The mod ships none of Blizzard's files, and nothing you download for it should either.

You also need D2RLoader, a community mod loader, because D2R VR is a plugin for it. The README lists game build 3.3.93787 under D2RLoader 1.3.1 as the tested pair. And it is offline single player only. The warning is the project's own: "Injecting code into the game online can get the account banned." Take it at its word. Keep this away from a Battle.net character you care about.

The installer is on the mod's page at BodyWalkVR, about 50 MB. It finds your game, installs ReShade if the game has none, and adds BodyWalk Lite unless you already run BodyWalk 1.74 or newer. Note that the GitHub repository has no builds under Releases, so the program you run comes from BodyWalk's site; if you would rather compile it, the README gives the two CMake commands for Visual Studio 2022.

Then a PC VR headset, Windows 10 or 11, the video settings above, and a square game window, which the page tells you to make by dragging the edges in windowed mode. Expect fiddling. The Home tab of the settings program has a status column of thirteen checks running from ReShade down to head tracking reaching the game, green when fine and red or orange with an instruction when not. Thirteen is a lot of links in a chain.

No headset? It runs flat on a monitor too, mouse and keyboard, no BodyWalk at all, and in that mode F3 becomes first person with W A S D. Which means the cheapest way to find out what a Fallen looks like at eye level is to not put anything on your head.

Mine goes on the floor first. Forgotten Tower, table height.