ANNOUNCEMENT Odyssey: Update on VR and Ship Interiors

[C'tri]

Hey team this is great news I'm delighted by! Thank you for sharing c:

A question about the screen we'll get in Oddysey whilst on foot.
I'm assuming the PoV is controlled by your input devices (KB/M in my case) rather than HMD motion.
I'm hoping that the size / distance of the screen will be cusomisable
I'm wondering if the screen will be a 2D render, or a 3D window onto the world? (and will that be customisable too?)

This is already the best case I was hoping for seamless integration between VR and Pancake mode - having the option to continue inside the HMD is full on "YES" territory. If the screen has the option of being 3D rather than 2D, I may enter a state of euphoria.

Any clarity you can share on the specifics would be well received, and a "We don't know yet, but appreciate your feedback" is just as fine. Happy to wait for details, you guys are proving that you're listening, and I thank you for it.

 

[Scubadog]

So, nothing new. There continues to be zero reason for me to get Odyssey. I'll stick to Horizons. I don't want to walk around my ship, a station or a planet. I see no reason to pay for content that brings absolutely nothing I care for. If I'm able to continue the game as-is in Horizons, then I'll just stick with that.

 

[Juniper]

It's an extant part of the game - once accepts it or doesn't dock.

But the reason it exists is precisely for the same reason that people want to get up off their seats, walk to the doors, and exit their ships.

It gets annoying, sure, but people accept it because it adds immersion.

Same with walking in your ship.

 

[SCiARA]

It's only going to be the pad. I bet you won't be able to open doors

"fingers in ears" lalala stop it lalala

 

[Frostydelic]

So this expansion will be more suitable for people who already have VR headsets?

Jeez.

At least make the interiors of the cockpits, gosh.

 

[Chiendeguerre]

"playerbase"

Who does? Exctly WHO represents the "player BASE"??? I'd bet real money if you ... You know what, I'm going to do a poll on Reddit.

 

[thistle]

once we've discovered we can't do more than step onto the pad and walk around the exterior of the ship, I reckon people won't even bother after a few goes

Apart from the internal locations we will need to visit to get missions/social hubs etc?

 

[Robert Maynard]

Like the pointless refit animations that we have to sit through when changing our ships loadout. The act of climbing into or out of your ship is a completely different thing

Different players find different aspects of the game to be immersive / tedious. I'd expect that players would enter / leave the ship much more often than visit the outfitting screen.

 

[[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos]

So, nothing new. There continues to be zero reason for me to get Odyssey. I'll stick to Horizons. I don't want to walk around my ship, a station or a planet. I see no reason to pay for content that brings absolutely nothing I care for. If I'm able to continue the game as-is in Horizons, then I'll just stick with that.

As a matter of interest, what would you have wanted in the next update?

 

[VR tazbert]

All you people with annoying VR avatars, you can get rid of those now

Is this better?

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

It's game first - as it has been from the beginning.

Yes I agree. It's a game and never has been a simulation. An MMO with an ELite desktop theme. Definitely not an Elite game though.

Some might find the prospect of a repeated walk to and from the cockpit to be immersive - however they've managed this long since release without it. Adding it, without any to skip it, for all players would very likely be badly received by the player-base as a whole.

They've managed this long since release without it because there was no choice (other than to not play the game).

There is such a thing as a toggle - an option for which a programmer could add to the game "Enable ship/SRV-to-ground transition? Yes/No" from which a player could at least have a choice to either be able to get up and walk out of their ship/SRV or just the time-saving but ultimately low-effort fade-to-black.

But I guess low-effort fade-to-black wins out on spending money on dev time.

 

[nash]

Can we finally confirm that PSVR support is not coming to Elite Dangerous then?

/me still waiting for closure

 

[Rock Hunter]

Twenty two pages in I imagine most have stopped reading so this is for the Devs; thank you.

I‘d hoped for VR support to allow me to continue flying and driving in VR on the surface of the (pretty cool looking) new thin atmosphere planets. The walking about I could take or leave initially but this delivers more than I expected and all that I had hoped for. It concerned me that Horizons (and VR) would be left behind like the Base game with no real access to future content which would no doubt be Odyssey based. This is great news IMO.

With regard to ship interiors, I think it’s only logical that you concentrate on delivering game play for ‘legs’ over providing for our curiosity around our ship interiors. As great as that will be it isn’t as necessary as content - imagine the uproar if we could look at our ships for a bit but do very little in stations or on surfaces with regard to missions and/or general activity.

Looks like I’ll be straight in with an Odyssey purchase.

 

[CMDR Trentor Z]

how is it a struggle? work and life gets in the way, then you (well me) try to skim over to catch up and things get missed

Sorry, I meant how are ship Interiors available?

 

[Robert Maynard]

But the reason it exists is precisely for the same reason that people want to get up off their seats, walk to the doors, and exit their ships.

It gets annoying, sure, but people accept it because it adds immersion.

Same with walking in your ship.

There's no need to accept something that doesn't yet exist.

Some want to get up off their seats, certainly. Not everyone would be enthralled with an unavoidable 10 to 30 second trundle through their ship from the cockpit to the boarding ramp, every single time they boarded or disembarked their ship.

If walking through the ship became possible then I'd hope that it'd be able to be avoided at the press of a key, for those for whom such a change became tedious rather than immersive.

 

[moogleslam]

Providing clarity is good, but still mega disappointed not to have a full VR implementation. Can't you at least say you'll commit to adding it in the future?

 

[Crank Larson]

The statement is deliberately ambiguous of course. How we can understand what "Not at launch" means to Frontier?

Maybe it would be useful to look at what has happened after they have used that phrase in the past.

Elite Dangerous on PlayStation®4 FAQ :: Frontier Customer Support

Answers for some of the most common questions about Elite Dangerous on PS4™.

support.frontier.co.uk

c) that's the last we'll hear of it

PS4 VR wasn't technically possible, I suspect. There is unlikely to be such a technical limitation for ship interiors... I try not to read more into statements than is stated.

This seems a particularly circular conversation...

 

[Juniper]

Can we finally confirm that PSVR support is not coming to Elite Dangerous then?

/me still waiting for closure

I believe they said that when they said "not at launch" for PSVR.

 

[fennster]

So this expansion will be more suitable for people who already have VR headsets?

Jeez.

At least make the interiors of the cockpits, gosh.

I don't understand this. Why is it more suitable for VR users and what do non-VR users miss out on?

 

[Viajero]

EDIT: Ah ok, I see, you’re contesting the use of the word policy.

I think the key point is, Agony Aunt was arguing that this was always the proposed plan. When that is not what they’d said. IE:

Before: Best not to expect to fly under blue skies in VR.
Now: Expect to fly under blue skies in VR.

"Best not to expect" indicates a possibility as small as it may be (otherwise I suspect it would have been expressed as something along the lines of "do not expect at all"). So not a change in policy, just one of the possibilities being considered materializing.

Either way I think we are close to saying the same thing, except maybe I would correct a bit your simplification:

Before: Best not to expect to fly under blue skies in VR. We are looking at it. There may be a split but we do not know yet where that may be.
Now: Now we can confirm where the split is.