VR support 'not at launch' for Odyssey

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

No chance. Nothing is taken away from the existing "product". At best, something is added under unexpected conditions, but hardly anything that a halfway useful lawyer would not immediately tear up in the air. A laughingstock, really.

So more like, we can give you legs and the ability to use them but we're going to have to remove your depth perception?

As a real life scenario this seems acceptable honestly. Your choice, depth perception in a wheelchair or the ability to walk, pick one....

 

[Zieman]

For all we know, galnet maybe being replaced with something else, that's why it may not have any future. We'll have to wait and see.

Would be nice if they told if that is the case.
Without the useless fluff 'very exciting thingie coming', please.

 

[Old Duck]

A laughingstock, really.

Laughter is good for the soul, and we could all use a good laugh right about now.

 

[Old Duck]

It would fail. We don't own the game, all we own is a licence to play it. Fdev own it, it's their property and they have the right to change it as they seem fit.

Ah yes, good point, I forgot about the EULA.

Saying "I Agree" to a EULA is like selling one's soul to the devil.

Frontier - sexy but evil, LOL.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Would be nice if they told if that is the case.
Without the useless fluff 'very exciting thingie coming', please.

Yes it would, but I'm assuming they have a marketing plan which they will follow.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Laughter is good for the soul, and we could all use a good laugh right about now.

Curious: In your particular case, it was only recently (pre-Rift S) that you had 'quit - minus rage' as the game was no longer scratching whatever itch you had.
You discovered VR and were understandably awed by just how good it is, then started down the slippery slope of discontent once again.
You 'acquired' a Fleet Carrier via the generosity of members of the community, once more discontent is creeping in...

Do you not wonder if, at the very start of being dissilusioned, it would have made sense to realise that something is missing, rather than 'getting all of the toys' and discovering it really is still the same game you were getting bored with?

It has been interesting following your posts since 'not quitting' so not taking a poke at you, just wondering where you'll go at the next 'crossroads'

 

[VR Mr Teatime]

Odyssey is a separate product.

Is it a standalone product? can you quote a source?

 

[VR Golgot]

Is it a standalone product? can you quote a source?

I didn't say a standalone product. I said a separate one. It's a DLC (as defined on the Steam page etc). It's not even available to purchase yet. So we can't really claim to have had content robbed or removed from us in that context.

LEP owners perhaps could make a claim (and I am one). But none of the marketing material / point of sale stuff that I've found makes overt reference to VR support. So it's a pretty major stretch.

 

[Kelster87]

Wouldn't it be easier to start a class action lawsuit? Maybe that's an American-only thing. Removing functionally (over and over again) from a product after consumers purchased it surely warrants at least a court hearing.

Though I guess Odyssey would be tricky as DLC. Perhaps one could compare it to an automobile, in that "If you want us to install air conditioning, we'll have to remove the radio."

I considered legal action and realised that the right options were not available in the UK. After discarding non-effective methods, I was left with stock price. This should be fun.. And the worst result is I end up down some cash and up some FDev stock - oh, I suppose I'd end up owing HM Government some cash too..

 

[Old Duck]

I considered legal action and realised that the right options were not available in the UK. After discarding non-effective methods, I was left with stock price. This should be fun.. And the worst result is I end up down some cash and up some FDev stock - oh, I suppose I'd end up owing HM Government some cash too..

Isn't manipulating stocks illegal?

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I considered legal action and realised that the right options were not available in the UK. After discarding non-effective methods, I was left with stock price. This should be fun.. And the worst result is I end up down some cash and up some FDev stock - oh, I suppose I'd end up owing HM Government some cash too..

"WORST CASE" is you end up with FDev stock for a 25% discount... If you could set up Buy Orders at 75% face value and Sell Orders at 90% value... you would be devaluing the shares AND making a profit.

 

[Old Duck]

Or you can give that money to me to finance the "Old Duck Atmospheric Planet Mod"

 

[Rat Catcher]

I considered legal action and realised that the right options were not available in the UK. After discarding non-effective methods, I was left with stock price. This should be fun.. And the worst result is I end up down some cash and up some FDev stock - oh, I suppose I'd end up owing HM Government some cash too..

If you have sufficient £millions (or AU$) available for investment you could end up with a majority share and dictate exactly what you'd like the company to do

Of course, if your plan is to just knock share prices down, that is one way to finally kill off the game

 

[rhiz]

Yeah, the talk of legal action and stock manipulation is a bit silly – of course they’re covered from a legal perspective and the game that we’ve paid for will continue to function as it does currently. That said, much of my time investment in the game was motivated by the vision presented by FD about what it would become, and this aspect of the game as a “work in progress” was heavily emphasised. The game that I bought was “made for VR from the ground up” and the fact that space-legs was envisaged from the outset meant that the logical assumption was clearly that VR players would be catered for. Since both VR and the ambition to add space-legs were there at the outset, they’ve had plenty of time to grapple with the challenges (even if only conceptually).

https://web.archive.org/web/20180630214523/https://www.elitedangerous.com/en/made-for-vr/

I don’t really buy the “quality concern/not at launch but maybe later...” fluff. This smacks of a hard-nosed tactical decision to me. Where I do think that they are acting genuinely unfairly is in the lack of timely communication and the vagueness of their announcements. Myself and others recognised the clues early last year (others may have raised concerns earlier). It seems certain that the decision had been made at that time (probably long before). I’m a general VR enthusiast so will always invest in gear, but I’m sure that many players invest significant funds for the sake of Elite VR alone. Here’s one of the contributions to the thread that I started in April 2019:

“I wish FDev would throw us a bone on this one, eg "Yes, all the 2020 secret stuff will work in VR". My eight year old PC is being pushed to its limits and is now becoming a bit unreliable. I would also like to try the Rift S but I am loathe to upgrade my kit unless I know that VR will persist into the new 2020 update...”

So, while there’s no question that they’ve acted legally we can debate whether or not they’ve acted fairly and make judgements about their design decisions and ambition (compared to the original vision of the game).

 

[VR Murgle]

Sure, but that’s your look out as a consumer. They gave you ways to mitigate it (and you therefore can’t sue them ).

If the product gave you ear pain, or some other significant discomfort, at first contact that could put you off the product then the comparison would make some sense here.

But it doesn’t...





It can significantly reduce it. To use my anecdotal experience, I couldn’t play any classic FPS in VR with smooth locomotion for too long, due to nausea. The introduction of controller-relative motion (gesture influence on direction) meant I could play them just fine. So I did. For years.

Several years down the line, after playing a ton of games, I finally pushed through the smooth turning nausea playing the GTA V mod. Because I was motivated to.

The point is that people have varied responses to nausea causes, and varied motivation levels to push through them.

Given that any sizeable nausea response to a 'product' is a big negative for marketing it, that many gamers are looking purely for an entertainment system, and that VR wants to grow to be mainstream...

It’s unsurprising that the VR industry tries to mitigate nausea on first contact. Regardless of your opinions on that front

The last quality paid PCVR title to launch with first person character motion but without motion controller support was probably the Early Access release of the Subnautica port on the Oculus Store in March 2016.

This should probably tell you something. But apparently it won’t

And that's where it goes wrong, you don't push through the nausea, you take a break. Put down the headset step away from the PC. If you learn the signs you can avoid nausea all together and stop before you regurgitate your lunch. You ease into it, train yourself through short sessions over multiple days.

It might not be the manly way to do it but it works and all while suffering only mild discomfort.

Oh and Nintendo went back to regular controllers after the Wii despite the success of their console and Microsoft gave up on the Kinect and since then no one has tried to get gamers to play standing up.

Probably doesn't mean anything though so carry on.

 

[VR Golgot]

And that's where it goes wrong, you don't push through the nausea, you take a break. Put down the headset step away from the PC. If you learn the signs you can avoid nausea all together and stop before you regurgitate your lunch. You ease into it, train yourself through short sessions over multiple days.

It might not be the manly way to do it but it works and all while suffering only mild discomfort.

Yeah that’s what I did initially, but progress was limited. (Possibly because I was doing it in particularly intense games like Windlands). So I just went off and played games with more accessible systems...

In the end with GTA I bulled through it more easily because I was always half way there from other experiments.

Oh and Nintendo went back to regular controllers after the Wii despite the success of their console and Microsoft gave up on the Kinect and since then no one has tried to get gamers to play standing up.

Probably doesn't mean anything though so carry on.

Few VR games are trying to make gamers play standing up. You can play seated wherever possible. (Exceptions being games which are selling themselves on the aerobic workout normally). You can play seated with motion controllers in a ton of games. (Here’s two examples where I did so just the other day: Djinni & Thacko (tower defence), and Mini Motor Racing X). I could probably play the majority of my standing games seated with motion controllers if I wanted to. I just don’t want to

Kinect failed primarily because it didn’t work very well . (It’s actually very cool for exercise games though as it goes ). The Wii did just fine, but it’s not really a patch on VR.

Maybe standing VR will fail for the reasons you state. Personally I think having your whole upper body 'in the game', and then inhabiting a first person view on your feet, ups the immersion to such an extent that it’s always going to be part of VR’s appeal.

But it’s all academic. Your whole anti-motion-controller stance really is peeing in the wind for now, because the market has adopted them wholesale, and made them the norm for big ticket titles. Even for PSVR, where they don’t come as standard.

Weird as it is, this is the world we’re currently living in

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/gmj48x Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/gmj48x/man_seen_at_phoenix_international_airport_playing/

 

[Captain N]

I think by this time there are more VR gamers "trying to make" games let them stand up than the other way around... See what happens any time someone releases a game where standing roomscale either isn't supported or is poorly implemented.

Seated play has the obvious problem, how do you turn without relying on buttons and joysticks? The answer is you don't. It's like driving around in a wheelchair. Constraining and unimmersive! It's always a compromise in terms of immersion, even if you can ignore the dissonance between you being seated and your avatar standing.

Motion controls outside VR had the problem of connecting between what you saw on the screen and what your hands were doing. The visuals were 2D, while the controls were 3D. They were difficult to use for anything that requires accuracy and thus largely useless for any non-casual type of game. VR solves this with 1:1 connection between the visuals and physical space. The likes of Wiimote and Kinect were ahead of their time, but display technology was lagging behind. The only use case for motion controls that existed before VR and actually worked well, that I can think of, were good old light guns. And that's because it basically boiled down to a simple 2D pointing device.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Ah yes, good point, I forgot about the EULA.

Saying "I Agree" to a EULA is like selling one's soul to the devil.

Frontier - sexy but evil, LOL.

That being said, and EULA is not always legally enforceable

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I think by this time there are more VR gamers "trying to make" games let them stand up than the other way around... See what happens any time someone releases a game where standing roomscale either isn't supported or is poorly implemented.

Seated play has the obvious problem, how do you turn without relying on buttons and joysticks? The answer is you don't. It's like driving around in a wheelchair. Constraining and unimmersive! It's always a compromise in terms of immersion, even if you can ignore the dissonance between you being seated and your avatar standing.

Motion controls outside VR had the problem of connecting between what you saw on the screen and what your hands were doing. The visuals were 2D, while the controls were 3D. They were difficult to use for anything that requires accuracy and thus largely useless for any non-casual type of game. VR solves this with 1:1 connection between the visuals and physical space. The likes of Wiimote and Kinect were ahead of their time, but display technology was lagging behind. The only use case for motion controls that existed before VR and actually worked well, that I can think of, were good old light guns. And that's because it basically boiled down to a simple 2D pointing device.

Even working within the constraints of a seated VR experience with character locomotion and rotation controlled by buttons and or joysticks rather than movement of the players body, seated VR is still far more immersive than 2d.

 

[Red Rocket]

If VR isn't supported at launch does Fdev understand the review backlash that will happen. I have seen a lot of games ruined by negative user reviews and only a small percentage of players actually do reviews. Upset gammers can be very vocal making a game developer scramble to save a newly released game survive.
Then there is the professional game reviews that will definitely mention that the VR support was dropped, who knows how they will react to that and effect their score.
Being a Steam user I rely 100% on user reviews to make my final decision to purchase or not because I find users normally give a accurate account of the game of interest.
I believe there will be a large backlash coming at release out side of this forum.
Not only will Fdev lose sales from VR users not buying because of lack of support but also lost sales from negative reviews.