Dude, will you take five minutes and read this? There's a lot of things that are intertwined that coalesce into why I am so brutally critical of Odyssey and so determined to get VR into a game that I seemingly despise. I know on the face of them those two postions might seem paradoxically opposed to each other, but I'm going to explain to you why they are actually two sides of the same coin, but it's a complex issue so it's going to take a good few words to explain, especially if I am to describe it in such a way that anyone reading this, be they a VR player or someone who has never donned a headset will understand..
Odysey has a lot of faults, and the current VR implementation exacerbates them:
- Having the on foot stuff rendered in a floating FLAT screen in 2D that looks like looking at a through a letterbox from inside a brightly light room, that is often brighter than the scene on display, actually hinders playing the game.
- Because of the fact the floating flat screen is rendered at a distance it doesn't fill the field of view, it is thus effectively much lower resolution than native VR would be.
- As a result of the virtual flat screen's effective downsampling of the game scene a lot of the details are little more than a blurry mosaic, lassuming you could see them with the eyes natural dynamic range being saturated by the overly bright "grey burqa". This creates the potential for players to experience eyestrain trying to squint through the mosaic and or the dynamic range.
- The limited perceived resolution arising from the floating flat screen, combined with Odyssey's inherent system demands creates a scenario where you are roasting your PC and still the on foot sections look something like a PS1 game. This happens because VR is inherently demanding, and Odyssey is so seriously un optimised its like demanding cubed.
- It's made worse by the fact that this Grey Burqa --> "virtual flat screen" doesn't move with head motion creating the very motion sickness it was meant to prevent, so it isn't doing any good.
So we're now talking about a game that roasts the PC to render what looks like low res mess from the nineties / early naughties in such a way that it induces motion sickness syptoms like headache and nausea. This all stems from a design design to nix the native VR that is still in the game*. (Explanation of VR still in the game in the following inline spoiler)
FYI in the early days of Odyssey if you went into the vanity camera in VR on foot it switched the display mode from the grey bubble and virtual flatscreen to actual VR with stereo 3D display and head tracking. And a lot of players were essentially positioning the vanity camera on their avatars visor and playing like that, however it didn't show huds or gun sights or stuff like that, and IIRC it's been removed in subsequent updates. And having that sort of play through experience with it's perceived low res, roasty hot over worked computer, headache and sickness and or eyestrain from squinting to try and see through the mosaic, breeds nothing but contempt for this expansion.
The alternative of having to tab out of game screen to main menu into settings, disable the VR, remove the headset, play the on foot stuff on monitor, go to ship, settings, enable vr, don headset, spend 5 minutes faffing about to get it back in the optical sweetspot and recentred, then go fly, next planet / star port when I want to leave the pilots seat, go back to menu and start this whole rigmarole again. You can probably picture how much fun that would be over a couple of hours of mission running? Yep, it's a massive impediment to the enjoyment, so even this option is detrimental to my game experience.
A final option is to just play the game on monitor, for all it's faults VR is immersive AF, and really puts you in the game, leaving VR behind moving forward with Elite would be a massive downgrade in experience.
Whatever way I look at it, as a result of the way VR is implemented in Odyssey playing Odyssey is not an enjoyable experience, and that is why I am so disdainful of EDO.
So now we've covered the reasons behind the "hate", lets close this out by asking why I keep bleating on about how they should give us proper VR headlook on foot minus hand controls. I believe that a decent VR headlook on foot would solve most of those problems I listed earlier. Specifically, in order:
- Doing away with the floating screen and its grey surround resolves the dynamic range issue
- Rendering the game view direct to headset as first person headlook removes the current effective downsampling we experience
- Removing the floating flat screen and its associated perceived downsampling of the game removes the eyestrain inducing need to squint through the mosaic currently experienced by VR players
- Actually seeing the game rendered at native resolution would make the unoptimized unrealistic system demands more palatable
- Restoring actual headlook, with head tracking would resolve the nausea triggering disconnect between the head movement of the player and the absence of movement of the rendered view portal into the game world.
So yeah, TLDR: my "hating on Odyssey" isn't just sour grapes, or being a narcisistic troll, it's based on the level of frustration I experience when I try to play EDO because of how badly the VR implementation we currently have impacts my player experience. And my insistance on VR headlook on foot? That is because I genuinely believe it would mitigate most of the irritations I currently experience with Odyssey as I have explained above, if nothing else, just read the two sets of bullet points.
