So, I have been using the Dk2 now for couple of nights (some 15 hours I guess, 7000 ly exploration in Elite). Guess this thread is good as any to give my first impressions
I'm blown away. The feeling of the space surrounding you is so believable that your mind is fooled you are actually piloting a spaceship in real space. What perhaps most took me by surprise was the sense of the size of what you can see. Jumping to a star, the size of the globe is staggering. The cockpit (Asp) is just wonderful. The 3d positioning of the HUD elements, the curvature of the wind shield, the moving shadows and light show of colors depending on your situation....just bliss. It is so much easier to get a sense of where you are related to other objects in space, for instance if you jump to a binary system you can actually move your head to locate the other star with cues from the radar instead of selecting the star from the contact list and have the compass to guide you where to point your ship. One cool thing is that if you look at a planet for instance, the target reticule is light up and you can hit the target forward button, and it is selected. No need to turn the ship to obtain a target lock. 15h for that 7000 ly exploration trip (usually do 1k per hour if not scanning) is explained by just the joy of scanning anything, fly close by and study the planets. Nothing beats the feeling of orbiting a gas giant with rings, skimming close to the plane of the rings and observing the sun slowly lightning up the surface of the giant.
I did a brief round of tutorial scenarios. Landing and taking off in the rift...just a big grin on my face. Flying through the slot...while never been an issue, in rift just so enjoyable and really effortless as you have such a good sense of the size of your ship and its relation towards the station. Zipping close the the station making wild and crazy maneuvers just so intuitive now. Can't wait to finally start to learn flying with assist off, should be a rewarding experience. The ability to track enemies with you gaze and have a proper sense of distances is a game changer regarding combat.
Right, while I'm totally enjoying myself, there are issues of note that are quite obvious. The resolution is very poor. If you look for it, you can make out individual pixels (well, frankly, you don't have to look hard for that). Text is sometimes hard to read, helps to lean closer. This moving your head around is physically more demanding than just sitting in one place staring at the screen. Prolonged use does tire up your eyes, watering them up making it difficult to see, things get blurry but then again, so does it without rift when I get too tired. Wearing glasses works with the rift but initially it took me quite some time to adjust the headpiece properly so it didn't press the glasses in my eyeball....System map is pretty bad, hard to make out what the info is, hard to tell what kind of planets are in the system (you need to zoom in on the planets to figure out if earth-like etc). Galactic map is pretty cool though, just a tad hard to navigate. The whole map is in 3d, you can look behind your shoulder and see systems in 3d space mapped out on the galactic plane. Selecting systems is the hardest part, can't just point and click with the mouse but have to move the cursor on the dot-stalk thingie protruding from the star.
I have a pretty decent computer (i7-4770k@3.5GHz, GTX 780Ti, 16GB ram). No idea how the dk2 works out of the box, I did all the tricks found on the VR part of the forum prior playing with it. Got greenish UI, SweetFx, supersampling etc going on. No idea what FPS I get but out in the galaxy on my own, haven't had any juddering etc issues. Couple of times I guess something crashed on the driver side of things as frame rate and graphics quality went sour and had to quit the game. Not a biggie considering the hours I have put in already.
TD; DR Got Dk2 for couple of nights and loving it.
