It took less than a day, but thanks to the effort of some users over at the Oculus Rift subreddit, you can now play Alien: Isolation with the Oculus Rift support that was implemented by The Creative Assembly themselves and disabled for the consumer release.

Here are the instructions on how to enable it yourself:

1) in ENGINE_SETTINGS.XML (found in the DATA folder) change the stereo options to:

<Setting name="Stereo Mode"> <Quality name="Rift" precedence="4"/> <Quality name="Off" precedence="4"/> </Setting> 

If this is does not work delete the line <Quality name="Off" precedence="4"/> but you may have to change "Rift" to "Off" in the XML if you want to use 2D again.

2) Set the Oculus to extended mode.

3) In the oculus configuration utility pause the service.

4) Start the game, play and enjoy. When done, do step 5.

5) To play the game normally (revert it back to 2D), reactivate the service by opening the display mode and set it to "direct to rift" and voila

I played the first hour of Alien: Isolation with the DK2 earlier today and it works great. You can watch how to set up everything yourself at the 59:25 mark if you are still having trouble getting it running yourself.

The cutscenes appear on a screen in front of you, and menus float. If you lean in too close to something, your screen darkens. Full positional tracking is in effect, so you can lean around corners and zoom in on objects. I am very impressed with how easy it is to setup and how well it all works. My main issues involve the HUD and not always being able to read instructions or controls. I haven't had any issues with motion sickness or anything. I am playing on a GTX 660 and Intel Core i7 3770 and everything was smooth. I just went with the default options for everything. You can press in both bumpers on the 360 controller to reset your view.

I plan on recording as much of the game as I can, which may not be much more if I end up getting too scared. I am not a fan of horror games, and playing them in VR makes them a far more intense ordeal. It is exciting to play a full, proper video game with the Rift, though.

Let me know if you have any questions or trouble setting Rift support up.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing this information!

@patrickklepek I think you know what you need to do. Hop to it! :)

I find it super weird that they didn't ship with Rift support considering that everytime it was shown prerelease it was on a Rift.

Pretty sweet. I'd like to try it but I don't want to drop $50 on something I'd most likely only play for an hour or two. Maybe I'll pick it up when it hits a steam sale... I also might if they officially support the oculus.

It still stumps me that they didn't try to put out support for this on release. It's cool you can do that now though. I really want to try it out at some point.

Oh man, so awesome the devs left this in and so easy to enable. Been playing a few hours normally, and so far it's spooky as shit and I just love the sound design. High-res textures are great and I hope those hold up with the Rift. Will try this with my DK2 tonight! I know it probably gets tedious later on but the first few hours have been really well done. I hope it goes a lot longer before I run into any other life. The whole game could just be those fucking noises in the vents and swinging lights as far as I'm concerned. :)

Hmm, I really need to work out how to extend the Rift cables 10 feet or so if that's even possible. Have to sit way too close to my TV now in an uncomfortable chair to use it.

You might have some luck with that, though Oculus advises you don't since it may introduce latency.

tl;dr Sorry for the long and rambling post, I may have had my mind blown just a bit. ;)

Holy shit, this is what I have been waiting to see on my Rift. The difference between a high-budget game and the typical Rift tech demo is amazing. @patrickklepek: go try this ASAP. You literally have to change one word in an XML file, about the best possible "hack" you could hope for, just need a add a couple simple batch files to use as launchers to run each version.

I wondered if the detail high-res textures would show up OK, and actually they are probably even better than on my TV. The reason is you can get right up where your face is inches away from some panel, and there is high-res writing you can clearly read. I don't think I could read all this stuff on TV. Also, you can just move your head to get a closer look at all those papers and books and such, that you would normally use a Gone Home-style zoom button for. I'm not sure how to check my framerate in Rift mode but it mostly seems to be doing ok on my 770 card. I noticed the video settings in this mode are dialed back a bit, I didn't want to mess with them assuming the developers did that on purpose. Motion blur, DoF are disabled, for example. (I hope they go back to max in normal mode.) It's not a solid 75fps in some areas but it's better than I expected. Will need to pick up a new 980 card soon. DK2 is 1080p/75fps and Carmack is talking like consumer needs to be at least 1440p/90fps... I bet the $300 GPU I will buy in 3 or 4 years is going to do a lot more than blow my mind!

So anyway, the right analog stick has up/down motion disabled and only controls left/right. To look up and down you just move your head which is pretty great. Your neck might complain a bit however! ;) This left/right motion is where any motion sickness can creep in. Moving your view with the stick at the same time as you move your head can be rough. This is a fundamental VR control problem and I am sure someone will eventually work out the best way to control this stuff. But at least it's just left/right, if they hadn't taken out the vertical axis you'd be sick in no time. Thanks to Charles for mentioning the way to recenter your view (hit LB+RB), I'd have never figured that out and it's essential. Also, the main menu is kinda messed up and hard to use, it's much too close, it's like sitting in the front row of an IMAX. I think this might just be some other bug in the SDK, it seems to differ depending on where the headset was at the time of launch. But once you start the game it's fine after a recenter.

The sound in this game is great, probably the most important element actually. In VR mode, sound is of course based on where you are looking, which is just super cool. And you can peek around corners, or kinda peek into those little windows in the doors to see what's in a locked room. If you get too close your vision blacks out, I assume this is to indicate you've banged your head into the wall and they don't want to clip the scene. A loud banging sound effect would be amazing here. They could even do stuff like if you lift your head up too fast while hiding under a table, you might bang it into the bottom of that table and boom, you're spotted. :)

Yeah I have tried a high-quality extension and can't even get a picture. :\ I know they use a specialized chip to keep their cable so tiny. Also their use of 75fps is out of spec for HDMI I believe, may be too much bandwidth for some cables. They also do specifically say everything is tuned for the cable length so yeah I'm gonna forget about extending it... oh well, time to rearrange the furniture I think. :)

I was on the fence with this game and whether to buy it now or wait for a better price, but this news has really pushed me over the edge. It baffled me that after such a positive showing at E3 they decided not to officially support the rift.

Will Smith recently did this for tested.com in case you missed it.

I played for three hours with my DK1, and it was really decent.

My system is pretty subpar, but even with a low frame rate and low resolution, I was still enjoying it a lot with the rift. I also seem to be one of the lucky ones, as I tend not to experience any motion sickness, even with extended play sessions.

It makes me wish I had a DK2!