I thought they had indicated that it would be playable in VR, just the first person stuff would be shown on a virtual screen much like a cutscene would be. Not sure what happened to that.
They are literally tacking on another badly integrated, unneccesary game to the spaceship core game. Gah.
What I heard that the plan is to do the walky bits in a sort of theatre mode in VR.
Morphologis (known for the “An architect reviews” series) has a look at the current Odyssey alpha:
The view of the launch pads within the station is pretty awesome. Still early days. But the environments outside of ships look good.
Wait, they went through all this work to add space legs and you can’t even walk around your ship?
I don’t think they said they’re not doing ship interiors, just that they won’t be there at launch.
Much like they said for VR support (though now at least we get flat virtual screen for on-foot rather than nothing).
The Odyssey PC launch is less than 30 days away. Nice.
Exactly what I felt.
Everytime I get exposed to the 90s Verhoevenish ultracapitalistic bland society (minus the irony) the game offers, it feels like a tackled childish fanfic thrown over the beautiful space exploration game beneath. Those videos are dreadful to me.
Launch trailer:
I remember hearing throughout the 90s that David Braben was working on another Elite. Since I hadn’t played the originals, I didn’t give it much than a cursory acknowledgement until I played I-war, and saw how much better Newtonian physics based space sims could be compared to the arcade/world war 2 fighters model of popular space sims like Wing Commander and Star Wars. Then I finally started paying attention. A new Elite you say? But it seemed like vaporware. Until it finally wasn’t. And it turned out to be amazing!
My dream is for ED to reach parity with Frontier and let me fly in (proper) atmo, like they promised years ago. It’s not quite Star Citizen levels of vapourware, but it’s not far off either. I don’t want to get out of my ship. I want to do more interesting things in my ship.
I liked the part about how this new mode helps you appreciate the scale of the settlements, structures, etc by being able to go inside them. That’s something I’m encountering in Microsoft Flight Simulator a lot these days. When I fly over a building on the edge of a lake, mountain and river, I think “what scale is this building in real life? Is this a small cottage, or a resort hotel built in this beautiful spot?” It’s kind of tough to tell in the air from a thousand feet up. So sometimes I do take a drone down to see for myself, just so that I can adjust the scale in my head of what it would look like from the ground.
This.
You know what really helps you appreciate the scale of things? VR. Which is not supported in Odyssey. :P
Same! I don’t really care about getting out the ship but I love flying over the surface of planets and landing at bases - but I guess someone at marketing has determined FPS and multiplayer stuff is what is maintaining their audience or something…
My guess is that they just found anything except lifeless worlds to be too hard a problem to solve. How to make beautiful terrain, water, clouds, trees, grass, etc. I know No Man’s Sky has it, but whatever systems ED is using might make it a much harder problem.
Also my guess. But I wish they’d kept trying instead of doing Odyssey.
Full atmospheric planets are still on the roadmap as far as we know. Horizons gave us lifeless worlds & Odyssey gives us tenuous atmospheric worlds. Odyssey gives us plant life as well. You can certainly interpret this as putting in the foundations for more detailed worlds later.
Yeah, I watched this video on Exo-Biology in Odyssey from that article I posted.
It’s not impressive, but maybe it’s one more step towards full atmospheric planets one day.
Definitely a step in the right direction. I agree.
Except these “foundations” are basically the same gameplay with a slightly different skin - there doesn’t seem to be a material difference between these new plants and scanning biological sites before, and tenuous atmospheres basically amount to a different lighting effect. This is the same not very exciting discovery mechanics as before but in a new dress.
Tough crowd in here! I didn’t even want “space legs” personally, but I do appreciate the enormous amount of work that seems to have gone into this update. My biggest problem with the game is how much of a grind it can be. Fully (or even satisfactorily) engineering a ship takes absolutely forever for example, and that’s just one ship!
I haven’t been able to test the new update yet, other than doing the tutorial, as the server completely shit the bed yesterday evening. As expected, I guess. Maybe I can have a good look tonight.