Elite Dangerous (game) : My first VR experience... wow!

in #games5 years ago

The good news is that this is something that anyone can buy This is already available to purchase on STEAM (the other one). I have honestly never experienced anything as awesome as this and I will be the first to admit that vast majority of people will also not be able to try it because the system requirements are incredibly high.

elite-dangerous-logo-100265165-large.jpg

A childhood friend of mine became a highly-sought after robotics automation engineer and makes a ton of money (he deserves it) and just happens to have never fully grown up just like me. Therefore he spends a tremendous amount of time and money on video games but i think he has reached the pinnacle with this one.

You really feel like you are in space. If you turn your head in any direction, you are now looking out the window or at a console that it is that direction. when you look down you can see "your" hands moving in accordance to the controls, the light from a nearby sun accurately casts shadows inside your ship. When you land and take out your rover you need to be looking in various direction in order to follow the path. The headphones also indicate sound in particular directions and completely block all sound from the real world. It is a completely immersive experience.

maxresdefault.jpg

Even though my friend was "driving" (the game has a seriously huge learning curve) I found myself forgetting that I was actually sitting in a chair in his game room and started reaching for the controls in the virtual ship. I found myself wanting to brace for impact when we were landing and at times i was kind of freaked out such as when we were approaching the rings of a gas giant planet.

Gas-Giant-Planetary-Ring.png

There is no way these images can do the experience justice. If you move your head at all your point of view changes in the game as though you were truly sitting in that ship.

Now for the bad news: First off the Oculus Rift headset by itself is going to run you between six and seven hundred dollars. The performance rig you will need in order to run this game seamlessly (including RTX-2080 VPU) will cost around $3000. There are very few laptops on the planet that possess the power necessary to run it - my laptop costs around $1300 and doesn't even come close. You could spend less, but then the game (and others like it) would experience performance issues and well, that would ruin the experience. If you think this is a silly amount of money to spend on gaming trust me when I say that I agree with you, right until i took a test drive.


still pretty impressive even without the VR

Also, the game isn't necessarily fun as it is awe-inspiring. I didn't actually play because the controls are so difficult so this isn't my opinion, this is based on the opinion of my pal who has been playing it since launch. Basically, it is a sandbox game and there is no real objective. Except for missions where you hunt down smugglers and criminals, there isn't much variety in gameplay and soon the "oooh wow, look at that" wears off on you. I think that the game does the best job of showing what VR technology is capable of (it's capable of nearly making me fall out of my chair) and this makes me very hopeful for the future.

review score intentionally withheld

Sort:  

I've been including VR in my stories for some years now, so I am glad to see it coming alive....

If the first efforts have impressed you so much, I can just imagine how awesome they will soon become. I guess arcades will then have them, so that we can all afford to experience being in a virtual world.

arcades, yes. I suppose that is what it would take. I hadn't thought of that but it is a good idea. I would imagine the games / experiences they have would need to be considerably less complicated than Elite Dangerous.

"If you move your head at all your point of view changes in the game as though you were truly sitting in that ship."

This sounds great, I love space.

VR headsets make me scared for the future because of how accurately they marry up with human simulation theory

well in the meantime they are a lot of fun :)

Great. I love game. I love playing games a lot especially action games because it is always fun and I am sure I am not the only one on steemit who love playing games also if only the system requirements is not that high. People will get engaged in it. Playing games is always fun to me and will always be

Posted using Partiko Android

To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.36
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70846.59
ETH 3567.69
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.79