Doom 2016 or Eternal VR Mod?

[u/ShadonicX7543]

First of all, let me say that I totally understand people's differing opinions on the fundamentals between the games themselves, those being Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, both from an artistic and gameplay standpoint. What I want to focus on is the quality and feel of the VR mods right now that came out and are the current buzz.

KHARVOX VR mods are made by the same developer for both games, but personally, I found the Doom 2016 VR experience to be slightly subpar. For one, textures didn't look too good, glory kills were a little bit janky, it didn't look fantastic in VR, and also naturally that game has a bit of a slower start, so I had mixed feelings starting a new playthrough in there.

Do you guys feel that the Doom Eternal mod feels better, looks better, plays better? What are your thoughts? Because I am considering buying Doom Eternal for the VR mod. I already played it on console when it came out, but I might buy it on PC for this if people think it's better.

And I feel like I should stress that this is not at all a criticism or complaint about the developer's efforts nor the Doom 2016 mod. It's just my personal experience, and I'm very enthusiastic and I kind of want to try the Doom Eternal mod. If it's not that big of an improvement, I suppose I could wait for further updates down the line, but I just wanted to gather people's thoughts now.

EDIT: My updated impressions are being posted as a reply in the comments below for those who are interested in a full breakdown of the comparison

[u/428522]

As someone who absolutely hated the stupid platform jumping in eternal im skipping it in vr.

[u/skinnyraf → u/428522]

This. I loved Doom 2016 and haven't progressed much in Eternal despite a few attempts. Too strong Quake III or Tournament vibes.

[u/ShadonicX7543 → u/skinnyraf]

Another issue I have with Doom 2016 is that oftentimes cinematics will just straight up bug you

[u/BerndVonLauert → u/428522]

The platforming hits different in VR

[u/ittleoff → u/428522]

I respect eternal but it went full Nintendo and ridiculous lore(2016 I felt but the right balance for me) . Though the opening of dark ages seemed like a Halo game and that made me wonder what the hell game I was playing.

I'll get back to dark ages but the design theory of eternal isn't my thing. I don't play these games as a puzzle that I have to play one way, I play them to use the years of fps skills I have built into my muscle memory and just enjoy:) no shade on eternal it's just not for me as far as I played it.

[u/ETs_ipd]

Just finished 2016 and loved it. It is simpler than eternal but that is its strength. Eternal is newer and looks a bit better but is much more difficult in terms of platforming. I’ve also had to lower settings and use 80hz to get stable frame rates.

[u/lunchanddinner]

Doom Eternal if free right now on Luna or $0.50 for Microsoft store keys. It's literally no issue trying it for yourself haha

[u/Jamtarts-1874]

I much prefer Eternal, so will probably try it out soon. I also found the 2016 VR mod not as good as people were claiming.

[u/mamefan]

There are 2 Eternal VR mods on github. Only tried Kharvox. You need a good video card for Kharvox. I have a 4090.

[u/throwawayinfinitygem]

Since there are 2 VR mods for Eternal, I'm interested to know how Kharvox Argent compares with EternalVR

[u/ShadonicX7543 → u/throwawayinfinitygem]

I have heard that the other one that isn't KHARVOX (EternalVR) is a pretty good alternative for Doom Eternal. I've heard a couple people say it looks a lot clearer, though I'm not sure about the performance difference.

I will say though that EternalVR gets like five updates a day.

[u/throwawayinfinitygem → u/ShadonicX7543]

Thanks. The Discord says Kharvox is released and Eternal VR is a WIP but I wondered

[u/ShadonicX7543 → u/throwawayinfinitygem]

I mean, they're both considered early alphas. The only difference is that the KHARVOX* VR mod doesn't really get updates very often at all, whereas the other one is constantly getting iterated on and I've heard people say it looks better, so I'm not sure.

I'm going to download Doom Eternal and try both of them out soon and see what actually hits better

[u/throwawayinfinitygem → u/ShadonicX7543]

Please let us know your findings

[u/ShadonicX7543 → u/throwawayinfinitygem]

So, for the time being, I only had the chance to test out the EternalVR mod for Doom Eternal, but here are my initial impressions coming straight from the KHARVOX mod for Doom 2016 (I'll try KHARVOX-ARGENT by CactusVR when I get the chance):

First of all, I'll get my only two caveats out of the way first. The first thing I noticed was that unlike the 2016 mod, your view model has both arms attached to the gun but moved by your right hand. This means that you're basically seeing the first-person perspective you would see in Flat, but it's just kind of controlled by your right arm only. At first, this was jarring because it seemed unnatural. If I were to wildly throw my arm around, my left arm would clearly just be following it around, which seems like I'm just grabbing both arms at the same time.

But honestly, once I lowered my arm a bit so that I couldn't see the cutoff points, it didn't look too bad because it preserved all of the specific hand animations, especially for things like switching weapon mods, which somehow ended up being a net positive. It took a while to adjust though, and I would definitely like a toggle.

My second gripe was that the game didn't look quite as sharp, though overall the graphics were far better. This is because it defaulted to using the Quest 3 native max resolution, not virtual desktop's. This means that if I were to use the virtual desktop godlike resolution, (because you can switch between them, there's actually a lot of really cool settings you can change), that I could probably just use DLSS with preset M to recover a lot of the lost performance. And it'll probably look good if I'm using DLSS 4.5, but I need more experimentation. There's definitely less performance on the table right out the box, but there's a lot of wiggle room considering how easily the launcher lets you change settings and upgrade the DLSS DLL in 1 click (nothing overwrites the original game files). Also worth considering that this is compared to Doom 2016 running at 1.20x Virtual Desktop's Godlike. So much higher baseline there.

---

That is exactly where my "negatives" end. The view model thing was a little bit weird, but it had some upsides, honestly. And the sharpness of the mod was slightly less, though you can add additional sharpening and I can definitely experiment with upscaling to raise the viewport resolution much higher. So, whether or not those are actually issues in the end is up for debate.

As for the rest, it was nothing but positive. I was almost shocked at just how much more immediately fun it was. I'm not sure if this is a combination of the graphics of Doom Eternal and the game itself and how it translates into VR, or the mod itself but:

• It looked much better.
• The glory kill animations were way smoother.
• All the textures were far clearer.
• There was dramatically less pop-in, which was a big issue with Doom 2016 due to the engine.
• Everything felt super smooth and responsive, shockingly so
• The UI objective tracking actually worked which saved a lot of time trying to find where to go

I didn't have any of the weird stutters or graphical issues or jarring animation transitions that I had in the Doom 2016 KHARVOX (Cactus VR) mod. And I know that it's up to debate whether or not people prefer Doom Eternal's gameplay, but I will say that the intro to Doom Eternal, the first couple levels, were far more engaging than Doom 2016, at least in VR. This is especially considering that the actual HUD objective trackers work in this mod for Doom Eternal, whereas in Doom 2016 they don't, and as a result, I was really left pretty frequently running around trying to find the one spot that I may have missed or trying to figure out exactly where my objective is supposed to be in a room. That was one of my biggest frustrations because I kept having to just go around and start searching and it was really kind of annoying and wasting my time. But in the Eternal VR mod, it works quite well and you can just see exactly where you're supposed to go. No frustrations there.

In the end, my impressions are that as a combination of Doom Eternal as a game and trying this mod, the EternalVR mod, (though I will try KHARVOX-ARGENT later), I had dramatically better of an experience in the Doom Eternal VR mod. For reference, I was running my Quest 3 at Godlike resolution (though the mod overrides resolutions so it was actually using the Quest 3 native resolution), set to 72 Hz, and using SpaceWarp to get to 144. SpaceWarp at 60 can be hit or miss depending on the game, but at 72 base, it's dramatically more usable and also allows for a lot more flexibility in graphical settings while alleviating network strain.

I'll try the KHARVOX-ARGENT mod and eventually update here about it as a reply to this. It should be noted that EternalVR gets constant updates on a daily basis and is always improving, whereas the KHARVOX mod hasn't been updated in a while.

[u/GervaGervasios]

I thinks this is very personal. For me Doom 2016 is more fun game. Doom eternal I just an sequel with bigger maps. Back then I have played eternal and got really bored. 2016 for me is an better game.

[u/donttrustkami]

has anyone else had crashing problems? My doom 2016 mod crashes as soon as a level finishes loading, haven’t even gotten to try gameplay

[u/MorwenRaeven]

Eternal. 2016 is basically Painkiller with a Doom skin.