How to Play Quake 3 Arena in VR

quake 3 arena

Thanks to the hard work of Team Beef, you can now play Quake 3 Arena in virtual reality.

Released in 1999, Quake 3 Arena is a famous multiplayer-focused first-person shooter developed by id Software, the studio behind the Doom series.

id Software released the full source code for Quake 3 in 2005 at QuakeCon, and the game’s fan have been keeping it alive since then. Team Beef’s VR port, called Quake3Quest, is based on ioquake3 and ioq3quest.

To play Quake3Quest, you need a reasonably capable PC, the Meta Quest 2 headset, and a copy of Quake 3, which you can get on GOG. You also need to enable developer mode and have SideQuest set up and running.

Quake3Quest is currently in open beta, and you can find the latest version on the official Discord server. To play Quake 3 Arena in VR:

  1. Download the latest version of Quake3Quest.
  2. Launch the SideQuest desktop app on your computer and click the Download icon.
  3. Open the downloaded Quake3Quest APK file.
  4. Put on your headset and navigate to Unknown Sources.
  5. Start ioquake3 two times in a row.
  6. Go back to your computer and locate the folder where Quake 3 is installed.
  7. Use SideQuest or File Explorer to copy all PK3 files to /ioquake3quest/baseq3 on your Quest and overwrite the existing files.

You can now play the entire single-player campaign and join six official VR-only multiplayer servers (three for the EU, three for the US). Full locomotion is supported, and virtually all maps run flawlessly at 72 Hz (you should keep dynamic lighting disabled for optimal performance).

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