Thoughts on the Odyssey Announcement

Frontier, the company behind Elite:Dangerous, dropped quite a bomb this week. They put out the first announcement of the upcoming "new era" of the game with the "Odyssey" release. Watch the trailer, containing pre-alpha footage from the new game engine:

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.

Virtualize Everything

Working in IT, the trend to virtualize everything can not be ignored. For example, all Google has is a single Raspberry Pi dangling from the wall outlet in some californian office building - everything else you see are virtual machines running on that bugger, and we all really hope they have a spare SD-Card somewhere.

Following this trend I decided to virtualize my reality. Last week I got my Oculus Rift S delivered and started testing it for example for playing Elite: Dangerous. Sure, there are other uses, but honestly: Who cares?

The setup started with some anger management requirements on my side, as my f...riendly USB port just wouldn't work with the headset. I sure have a USB 3.0 controller and why the f...rag does the headset always complain about the port not being usb threeish enough for it to run. That makes no sense. Well it didn't at first, until I learned that some of my ports are obviously on another controller, that is USB 2.0, of which I did not even know I owned it. Put it into a port marked as actually being USB 3.0 and it workes like a charm.

After some setup (log in to facebook! Aye! --- Measure your room for your safety! Aye, it's facebook, nobody has privacy concerns there --- Look, what the cameras are always seeing, when you are playing! Wait, what? this device is connected to my Facebook account; ah, whatever. --- and so on) it worked. The setup, though somewhat concerning for the IT-savvy, was excellently guided and easy to do.

And then it began: Find out how to start the game in VR. I expected this to be very hard, so put on my headset, ready to wrangle Steam and watch growing blue bars for hours. Okay, Steam, how do we go. And steam said: "Oh, you are wearing a VR headset. Should we start your game in VR mode?". Ah, yes. That's it, it worked. Instantly.

And then, the game is in 3D, you can look around and it feels as if you are in the hangar. For the first time I got a sense of scale in the game. And my Spaceships are huge. Not big, literally huge - I was blown away and just had to stare at my ship for a few minutes in awe before entering the cockpit.

And since then I spent all the time of rather dull flight looking around and it is so much better. I start noticing the details of my spaceships, and the level at which these are done in game is amazing. For example the "Krait Mk2" I own, is from now on and forever the "Hobo Ship" in my mind. Cables are just fixed to the ceiling with Ducttape or lying around openly.

This red cable going into that vent opening there? Why? I mean this is a space ship and this kind of cable management raises questions about the quality of the ship that is supposed to keep me alive at multiple times the speed of light in space.

But VR does more: It tricks your brain. Looking down, I got to see myself in game and my first thought was: Hey, you've lost some weight, this is great. Only a few seconds later I noticed, I am not looking at real-me, but some digital dude. 

I have a joystick and a thruster on a table - and these in game move precisely the way I move the real things. So the brain totally believes what it sees.

You may notice on that last picture, that the zipper of the jacket is a bit of to the left at the bottom. You won't be believe how often I already tried to shift it into the middle by pulling my real-world sweater sideways. 

As a summary: VR is fascinating, though expensive. And I feel a followup purchase of a new and better graphics card approaching - My GTX1060 can handle it, but in some situations reaches it's limits.