I'll expand a bit on that immersion theme.Having to remove your helmet to drink water because you are dying of thirst is just annoying in a space game to be honest. Especially when your drinking animation breaks every other time you try or die by falling through the floor instead. In a space game I want to feel spacey things, not that “I am human”.
Of course ED absolutely nails it in VR, there's no comparison with anything else, and yeah it's a cockpit sim which is kind of the golden use case for VR, still it's one of the best examples of how VR transforms and even transcends the original medium.
EvE, had its few moments when I was in deep space, going for rare resources (and blueprints, for one memorable run) but mostly you are detached from the action and the game itself is mostly a graphical shell for an economic management sim. A really, really good one at that, granted, but it's not aimed towards immersion.
NMS never did it for me, maybe because of the survival game aspect (which I am not too fond of), also the unrealistic ship movement, and FPS-like character movement, all being very "video-game-like" in a way, result in zero immersion. The proc gen engine is pure genius though, I have to give it that.
Of course now there's DCS (with full VR support) and MSFS, both cockpit sims too so indeed one could say "it's easy" still, pure awesomeness, provided one has a monster PC to run them (with a high res headset, like those 8K ones or the HP Reverb G2).
As for SC, it has its few moments: approaching a ship and getting a sense of scale, getting through the clouds to a planet surface and land there, good stuff, but all falls really flat on its face once things start moving and even worse, interacting... Ship and player movement are jarring, everything is bouncy and weightless, there's that constant contact jitter coming from a quirk of CE's physics engine showing they still run on the original 2008 tech.. Look, even non-sim games have way more realistic physics nowadays (Control !). And yeah of course the constant bugs, Z-buffer issues (been there from the start, that's CE crappiness shining through..) rip apart any hint of immersion.
(edit) I didnt mention Thief, System Shock 2 and other Warren Spector games as I talked about them in a recent post (and Amnesia, SOMA..) which are all the most immersive games i've ever played.
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