But it works so hard to push me away every time I try and get into it. I played both the original Elite and Frontier Elite II to death back in the day, I am absolutely the target audience for this game; space exploration, mining, trading, fighting, all in a living universe with the Thargoids a constant threat? Absolutely fantastic. But I'm not even getting in sight of any of that before I want to rip my Quest 2 off and throw it out of the window.
And first impressions last, right? Well, the first run in is glitchy as hell, really a terrible, terrible start for a game trying to encourage people to stick around. The screens are 2D, low res, flickery, the system analysis rings repeatedly glitch and freeze, and I'm sat there in a pseudo-2D/3D environment trying not to be sick and praying it'll all be over soon. It isn't.
After putting up with that hideous introduction, I'm through a couple of menus attempting to setup a commander using keyboard and mouse that I can't see because I'm in VR, so I'm forever fumbling around, which continues into a tutorial where I just about manage to escape the station after more fumbling with the keyboard, all the way through to a scanning "quest" where I cannot for the life of me find the keybinding menu option to set "scan" to my hotas.
And I'm done.
I hear that retention rate is incredibly low with this game, and I can totally believe it. But it should be so good! The original games didn't just draw in space nerds, it was playable AND played by everyone that had a computer! What happened?! And if ever there was a game born to be played in VR it's this! There should be switches to flick, buttons to press, menus to poke at in mid air so that I never have to remember a single, detestable, keyboard shortcut, I mean, what year IS this?! And who would ever buy a spaceship in the distant future where you are forced to press "T" for this, and "R" for that, and "J" for the other, and "K" for lord knows what. It's utterly insane! And don't get me started on those hideous bunions. Is it really so hard to design and model normal feet for goodness sake?!
So, after that rant-of-love, any chance any of this gets sorted out? I wouldn't even mind if all of my ships had identical interiors if it meant I could see my hands and actually use them in the simulation it is trying so hard to be. Think DCS in space. It could be incredible. It could get vastly more VR users playing and actually keep them playing. It could actually give access to the awesomeness that lies just the other side of that tutorial that many of us will never get to witness. It could even remove those ridiculous feet! I can only hope...
And first impressions last, right? Well, the first run in is glitchy as hell, really a terrible, terrible start for a game trying to encourage people to stick around. The screens are 2D, low res, flickery, the system analysis rings repeatedly glitch and freeze, and I'm sat there in a pseudo-2D/3D environment trying not to be sick and praying it'll all be over soon. It isn't.
After putting up with that hideous introduction, I'm through a couple of menus attempting to setup a commander using keyboard and mouse that I can't see because I'm in VR, so I'm forever fumbling around, which continues into a tutorial where I just about manage to escape the station after more fumbling with the keyboard, all the way through to a scanning "quest" where I cannot for the life of me find the keybinding menu option to set "scan" to my hotas.
And I'm done.
I hear that retention rate is incredibly low with this game, and I can totally believe it. But it should be so good! The original games didn't just draw in space nerds, it was playable AND played by everyone that had a computer! What happened?! And if ever there was a game born to be played in VR it's this! There should be switches to flick, buttons to press, menus to poke at in mid air so that I never have to remember a single, detestable, keyboard shortcut, I mean, what year IS this?! And who would ever buy a spaceship in the distant future where you are forced to press "T" for this, and "R" for that, and "J" for the other, and "K" for lord knows what. It's utterly insane! And don't get me started on those hideous bunions. Is it really so hard to design and model normal feet for goodness sake?!
So, after that rant-of-love, any chance any of this gets sorted out? I wouldn't even mind if all of my ships had identical interiors if it meant I could see my hands and actually use them in the simulation it is trying so hard to be. Think DCS in space. It could be incredible. It could get vastly more VR users playing and actually keep them playing. It could actually give access to the awesomeness that lies just the other side of that tutorial that many of us will never get to witness. It could even remove those ridiculous feet! I can only hope...
