No further VR development is both expected and makes sense

Phoenix195

P
But this was true when elite was being developed. Its still true now even though there are far more VR users now than there were in 2014.

Besides, if its a financial anathema to do VR, how come a small dev house with a quarter of the resources of Frontier can just add it almost as an afterthought? How come Bethesda can chuck out two titles which were already well established and aging at the time, with VR support?

How come 100 developers are just unable to do what 25 developers could do without really trying? What does that say about Frontier? To me it speaks volumes that they value the bottom line only and nothing else.
 

knowles2

K
[VR] Amy Pendergast said:
I just want to say: Nobody of us knows how big any playerbase is here especially.

Calling any groups here a "small minority" or such is just nonsense, because we don't know and we will not find out.
The only thing we know is that there were about 12 million copies of ED sold and that's it.

Ah and consoles which can do okayish 4k are not supported officially. Just last gen. And there are "no plans for next gen". Good luck when the console edition of Odyssey drops.
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I 100% guarentee the PS5 version will use the best textures available when played on that console. An that will be somewhere pretty close to 4k.
 

Gorrister

Gorrister
CmdrPSB said:
It's just a lot less stressful to get on with it than waste time worrying and complaining about things I can't have any effect on, you know?
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Well, the players wanted space legs long enough to get them.
They will be as persistent if it comes to ship interiors and VR.
Maybe it pays out.
Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein.
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
CmdrPSB said:
There has obviously been a lot of disappointment and anger over the fact Frontier have announced they won't be developing a full VR experience for on-foot gameplay. I play in VR sometimes, and sometimes I play normally, but 100% back the lack of VR for on-foot.

The amount of development resource required to design and create a proper on-foot VR experience that also integrates properly with non-VR players is immense. Absolutely nothing to do with performance (although that's not been great so far in Odyssey but slowly improving). It's a bit more involved and requires a bit more thought than one suggestion I saw which was "oh it's the same as the SRV just change the cab for the helmet HUD". Frontier are not a global developer with offices worldwide that they can just point at and go "you 300 people are doing the VR on-foot".

Performance concerns aren't the reason you're not having it - the reason you're not having it is Frontier has a limited amount of resources and they've allocated them to create something that 95% of the player base can access and enjoy. They declined to expend massive amounts of resource on something that a small percentage will ever see. How many new players or existing players returning and buying the expansion will on-foot VR bring in above and beyond the standard experience?

There's a strong argument to end all VR support because it frees up time chasing down and maintaining issues with it which could be spent elsewhere, in much the same way the 32-bit and DirectX 10 support was ended, but as ED remains one of VR's killer apps (I've certainly not done much else with my headset other than a bit of Audioshield) maybe there are other incentives to keep it going because it retains that premier status of a "big" game which is even better in VR.

Anyway, just some thoughts, keep on going Frontier, I'm mostly enjoying Odyssey when it behaves.
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I feel like somebody might've made exactly the same arguments in opposition to the idea of flying-machines back in 1902.
 

rhiz

rhiz
CmdrPSB said:
There has obviously been a lot of disappointment and anger over the fact Frontier have announced they won't be developing a full VR experience for on-foot gameplay. I play in VR sometimes, and sometimes I play normally, but 100% back the lack of VR for on-foot.

The amount of development resource required to design and create a proper on-foot VR experience that also integrates properly with non-VR players is immense. Absolutely nothing to do with performance (although that's not been great so far in Odyssey but slowly improving). It's a bit more involved and requires a bit more thought than one suggestion I saw which was "oh it's the same as the SRV just change the cab for the helmet HUD". Frontier are not a global developer with offices worldwide that they can just point at and go "you 300 people are doing the VR on-foot".

Performance concerns aren't the reason you're not having it - the reason you're not having it is Frontier has a limited amount of resources and they've allocated them to create something that 95% of the player base can access and enjoy. They declined to expend massive amounts of resource on something that a small percentage will ever see. How many new players or existing players returning and buying the expansion will on-foot VR bring in above and beyond the standard experience?

There's a strong argument to end all VR support because it frees up time chasing down and maintaining issues with it which could be spent elsewhere, in much the same way the 32-bit and DirectX 10 support was ended, but as ED remains one of VR's killer apps (I've certainly not done much else with my headset other than a bit of Audioshield) maybe there are other incentives to keep it going because it retains that premier status of a "big" game which is even better in VR.

Anyway, just some thoughts, keep on going Frontier, I'm mostly enjoying Odyssey when it behaves.
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That might fly if a significantly smaller developer like Hello Games hadn't managed to successfully integrate VR after the initial release. The implementation isn't perfect, but at least they're trying... and they didn't have an existing group of dedicated VR players to either bring along or throw under a bus. I'm not underestimating the challenges, I'm a software developer myself (albeit of something much simpler) and I know that there can be a mismatch between user hopes/expectations and reality, but to my mind ED:O seems like a deliberate contraction of the original ambitions for the game. Besides, it's not as though the grand visions regarding the evolution of ED were figments of our imaginations - they were presented during the kick-starter and beyond. To me it looks like ED:O is a compartmentalized side-game at most (I haven't played it, so perhaps that's unfair?).

I'm sure that you're correct from a business perspective though. That said, it's questionable whether ED:O will ultimately succeed at even that - such a disastrous reception is no joke.
 

Rainbro

Rainbro
Even if everything said in the OP was true (I don't think it is) - this is a paid DLC, which has been in the works for years and which resulted in the main game being developed by a skeleton crew for a large portion of that. So if despite that we apparently still have to accept features being cut, unfinished, reduced, whatever...then that's on Frontier's management.

On-foot VR isn't some mammoth task. Non-trivial, sure, but that's a very low bar for a paid DLC. VR was just deemed non-essential, something they couldn't afford when they desperately needed all hands on deck to get the PC version in a passable state, and then onto getting the consoles to stop melting.
 

Tenshi

Tenshi
Just going to put this here.
Hello Games who makes No Man's Sky support VR now with their base building, walking around and exploration. Even EVA. They have a team of 26 people in their company total.
Frontier developments have a total of 560 people working for them, and they can't support VR anymore for their flagship game?
 

Melvich

M
I don't think adding full VR is very complicated at all, because so many other, often much smaller companies or even small independents, have managed it just fine, even in more complicated contexts.

There is no reason at all to believe it's difficult. Odyssey on foot is incredibly simplistic as an fps, so this is just not a valid excuse.

I suspect it's just a lack of ambition and ability with loss of key staff over the years.
 

Amy Pendergast

Amy Pendergast
knowles2 said:
Which I have taken they won't be taking advantage of the new controller technology or taking advantage of that ultra fast SDD or other PS5 features. Not that when you play on the PS5 that it won't be using the best available textures.
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And that would be the same as the ones on the PS4 then as it would make little sense to include PS5 textures in a PS4 version?

Edit: I don't want to burst bubbles but the PS4 version of Horizon runs not as stable on the PS5 as the PS4. They can't even do that. What makes you think that will get any better?
 

Widrow

Widrow
Melvich said:
I don't think adding full VR is very complicated at all, because so many other, often much smaller companies or even small independents, have managed it just fine, even in more complicated contexts.

There is no reason at all to believe it's difficult. Odyssey on foot is incredibly simplistic as an fps, so this is just not a valid excuse.

I suspect it's just a lack of ambition and ability with loss of key staff over the years.
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VR in itself is not that complicated if you already have a working 3D engine - I have been working with 3D engines for 25+years and VR for 5 and the problem is more the user experience - interaction with the environment is much different than keyboard/controllers and frames per second becomes more important - unless you can get 60+fps on 2x 1920x1080 most of the time you are going to have issues - For Elite it's just another layer of dooee which just right now they could probably do with keeping on the backburner - however I do hope that they will give it some love when the smoke clears (probably next year I would have thought)
 

Melvich

M
Widrow said:
VR in itself is not that complicated if you already have a working 3D engine - I have been working with 3D engines for 25+years and VR for 5 and the problem is more the user experience - interaction with the environment is much different than keyboard/controllers and frames per second becomes more important - unless you can get 60+fps on 2x 1920x1080 most of the time you are going to have issues - For Elite it's just another layer of dooee which just right now they could probably do with keeping on the backburner - however I do hope that they will give it some love when the smoke clears (probably next year I would have thought)
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Which really points to the woeful performance of their engine being the issue, given they had and indeed have a working VR solution anyway and have had for years.

Kinda suggests they knew full well how badly the game runs and made the decision based on that, rather than any 'difficult' stuff in getting VR actually working

VR is in game. Just disabled as the engine can't run well enough to give good enough frame rates. I bet they spent more time disabling it for the foot side than it'd have taken adding it.
 
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