So the big new thing is what the community calls "space legs", the ability to actually play your commander as a person outside of the pilot or vehicle seat. But there is more in the video that is not explicitly stated there: It seems like landing on planets with an athmosphere would be possible. The graphics of the environment seem to have significantly improved. And I think even the ship models look a lot improved to what they are now.
I personally am very excited about the improved graphics and the athmospheric landings. Space legs are not important for me personally, but it is a very much requested feature by the player community. And I can see possible ways to have fun with this new gameplay myself. I am somewhat neutral to that change myself at this point in time - how much I will like it will depend much on the details how they can/must be used.
Some players noticed though, that on Steam this upcoming extension is listed without VR-Support and asked on the forums about that. And Frontier answered (which is great in itself, given how quite they were over the last year). The answer is: "No VR support at launch of the expansion".
Wow, that is a second bomb dropped. This time one that really hit me hard. I love the VR-Experience of the current game. A spaceflight sim is just the perfect environment for the combination of VR and me. And Elite:Dangerous today has it implemented in a great way. Some of the newer features seemed to get not much VR-love (FSS-Scanner, I am looking at you!), but the overall game experience is just mindblowingly good.
But I guess the VR-market just did not develop enough over the last years to still be worth implementing for. It is an understandable decision, commercially, to not implement for what is still a niche market as it seems. It might backfire, if VR grows but in the end it is a strategical decision and in this case it seems to be made against the implementation of VR-capabilities.
There has been a clarification afterwards, that you will still be able to play the current version in VR, even if the upgrade does not support it, but to me this is pointless. Another important puzzle piece making this game so good is the community. And keeping the VR-Players on Horizon and giving the 2D-Players Odyssey will de-facto split the community - and therefore not be an option.
I assume it will still be possible to fly together, sure. But I also expect there will be an incentive to upgrade (after all Frontier must sell the new expansion, cause that is their business). So I expect, like with the horizons upgrade before, there will be something you need to stay competetive in the new expansion. In horizons it was engineers. Sure you can play without them, but who does, honestly?
Also there will be community events that require the new expansion - and thus those not having it, because they want to play in VR, will be left out.
At this point I am very disappointed by the announcement to ditch VR, as you can probably tell. Will I leave the game because of that? I don't know yet. It is still a long time until the expansion is actually there and we don't know much about it yet. I will have to wait and see. I guess it is still a long way away - my believe in the announced date is not strong.
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