In a Skype interview with Ars Technica, Frontier Developments founder and CEO David Braben was finally able to make the formal announcement he’s been waiting to make. "We’re going to be on the Oculus store," he confirmed. "We’re supporting [the Oculus Rift runtime] one point naught and the consumer release at launch, which is March 28."

There has been quite a lot of discontent brewing in the Elite: Dangerous fan community when it comes to VR support. Though Elite was one of the first big titles to fully support the developer kit versions of the Oculus Rift, that support has gotten muddy in the last year—Frontier Developments hasn’t kept Elite directly compatible with the fast-evolving prerelease Oculus Rift SDK, forcing Rift DK1 and DK2 owners to go through some contortions to play the game in VR.

The company has added SteamVR support, and it’s currently possible to play Elite via SteamVR with Rift DK2 and Vive/Vive Pre headsets. Until today, however, Frontier hasn’t issued any formal, clear statements on exactly what is and is not going to work as of the March 28 launch day for the Oculus Rift.

The official announcement had to be timed to coincide with Oculus’ own announcement on Elite support, and the timing required Frontier to be somewhat circumspect in what it could say publicly prior to today. Although David Braben had previously said multiple times that Frontier was "working closely" with Oculus, he has now explained the full scope of what "working closely" means.

"We didn’t announce we would be there at launch until now, but now we’re doing it! I don’t deny I’ve been itching to announce it," he said.

Elite: Dangerous will show up as a launch title on the Oculus Rift store when the store goes public on March 28. The Oculus store will offer the same "deluxe edition" currently available on Steam, and it will include native support for the Rift via the 1.0 runtime and SDK. Further, Rift support will arrive on the same day to all existing customers via a free update.

Pick your storefront

This will mean that as of the end of March, there will be three ways to buy Elite: Dangerous—directly from Frontier, via Steam, or through the Oculus store. Braben confirmed to Ars that all three different buying options will include full Rift 1.0 support as well as full SteamVR support for the HTC Vive (though there might be an odd edge case with using SteamVR and the Vive with the Oculus store version of the game). The Oculus store version will be launchable from directly within the Oculus store for customers who might prefer that option, but the actual VR experience will be identical across whatever storefront you use.

There has been some speculation in the Elite fan community that the delay of the game’s 2.1 patch until June has meant that full native VR support for the Rift won’t arrive until the summer. Braben quickly dismissed that idea. "We’ve been doing continuously, without fanfare, the odd 2.06 or 2.07 updates," he said. "It’ll be another like that. We are doing these sub-point releases where we find a problem and fix a problem, and in this case, we’ll also fold in support for Oculus."

Elite: Dangerous currently supports the Rift DK2 directly via the deprecated Oculus 0.5 runtime or through SteamVR with the Rift’s updated 0.8 runtime. Frontier tells us that the 1.0 native support and the consumer version of the Rift provide tremendous jumps in visual fidelity and tracking smoothness over the prerelease development versions—and that the better-balanced consumer version of the Rift is far more comfortable to wear than the DK2.

A headset in every home

HTC Vive fans shouldn’t feel left out, either: Elite already natively supports SteamVR and the Vive, and it will continue to do so. (Anecdotally, I can confirm that the game indeed works effortlessly with the Vive Pre.) It’s inevitable that consumers will side with a favorite VR headset—perhaps some folks prefer how one feels on their head versus the other or are swayed by one VR headset’s exclusive content—but Elite will work very well on both.

And that led to the first of two questions that Braben wouldn’t answer: which VR headset does he prefer for use in Elite? When we asked, he paused for several seconds. "Both parties have treated us very well," he said with a Cheshire Cat smile. (We expect we’ll form our own opinion on Elite in the Rift versus Elite in the Vive in the next few weeks, once we have final hardware in hand for both headsets. Stay tuned.)

The second question, of course, was whether or not console players can join PC players in VR—we asked, specifically, if Elite might be coming to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR. The only answer Braben would offer on that was a quick, cryptic "no comment."