In recent months I’ve taken to driving in VR like a duck to water, sometimes in the most unadvisable ways such as throwing cars and trucks at high speeds into dodgey corners. There must be something wrong with me that when I first reviewed EA Sports WRC I did say I was hopeful for the upcoming VR update, a thing I’ve already said is psychotic enough as is. I remember watching crowds part like the Red Sea, watching these light, nimble beasts of power, speed, and agility dance on the precipice of cliff edges. What’s wrong with me that I want to do that in VR?

Now I can, as announced last week via EA’s news section on its website, though it wasn’t until Monday the news came to Steam. Alongside the 1.8.0 patch, the beta of the VR option on PC is finally available as of 11 AM BST this morning, the 30th of May. The patch itself isn’t that interesting. There are fixes here and there, updates to an interior, adding telemetry, and other things, you can check out those details for yourself. What is interesting are the details on VR requirements, platforms, and other such elements.

Available to everyone with capable hardware on PC, there is no experimental branch to jump on or DLC to pick up, it is in the main game to boot. Only available on Steam, Epic, and the EA App, there is no plan for a console release, “Beta or otherwise.” Several headsets are supported, including Meta Quests 2, 3, and Pro, with the Oculus Rift S and Oculus CV1, the Valve Index as well as the HTC Vive, and the HTC Vive Cosmos and Vive Pro 2 are “partially supported.” Some others may be supported if those headsets use OpenXR, though there is no “guarantee [of] full functionality.“

Requirement-wise, VR specs are equivalent to the recommended specs: an i5 10600K/Ryzen 7 3700X, Radeon RC 5700XR/RTX 2070, and of course, 16GB of RAM with 95GB of storage. There are listings for optimal performance on specific headsets, though those are a lot more specific with preset suggestions. There are also several comforts and more advanced settings, which you can find in the FAQ.

Despite a rocky launch last November, Codemasters’ EA Sports WRC has seen noted improvements with this VR Beta being the latest feature. What I fail to see is that if the VR update is only now releasing, almost six months on from release, where does the next release go? Graphically the games already look great, mechanically they are sound, someone will complain about the sound engineering because they always do about Codemasters, and so on. The best I’ve got is an update to the year’s calendar and stages, otherwise, you’ve got a solid platform with 2023’s EA Sports WRC, now with VR capability.

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