Mod allows Vive owners to play Rift exclusive Robo Recall

Epic Games’ new Oculus Rift exclusive Robo Recall is now up and running on the HTC Vive thanks to a fan-made mod.

Robo Recall was released for the Rift last week. It’s free to owners of the Rift’s new Touch controllers, or can be purchased by anyone else for 22.99. The game is perhaps Rift’s biggest exclusive to date, ranking alongside the likes of The Climb and Superhot VR.

Now one of the developer behind ReVive, a program that’s dedicated to allowing Rift games to run on HTC Vive, has released a standalone mod specifically to address Robo Recall compatibility.

The RoboRevive mod actually uses SteamVR’s Unreal Engine plugin, and not ReVive, to circumvent the platform lock, and can be freely downloaded from GitHub.

There are a few compromises in the transition, however. For instance, RoboRecall is designed for use with Rift’s front facing configuration. The fact that Vive uses a room-scale 360 degree design causes a few issues, although Epic has said that an update is in the works for 360 degree Rift users, and that should also solve this problem for Vive. A mod is already available that claims to address the issue, too.

There are also the button differences between the Rift’s Touch controllers and the Vive wands to contend with.

ReVive has a strong community behind it and has already made a large portion of the Rift library accessible to Vive owners. An update to the Rift software last year blocked ReVive (be that through design or accident), although such was the outcry that the move was soon retracted.

At DICE last month Oculus even went as far as to suggest that it was taking steps to make Vive compatibility with Rift titles even better. If that’s true, it represents a significant strategic shift from a company that has to date tried to reinforce its market position with a string of exclusive titles.