Like many others I was on the fence about this whole VR thing. It sounded interesting but I have never had the chance to see it in person so it was a little hard to spend $600 - $700 for a VR headset. Then I saw the recent sale on the Oculus bundle for $400. Based on all the positive feedback on this forum about VR and Elite I thought I would take the gamble and spend the $400. Ran to the store after work yesterday and picked up the bundle.



So just to setup my perspective on the whole experience I though a little background would help. I only started playing Elite about 10 weeks ago and I have logged about 300 hours into the game. When I bought Elite I already had 3 27" monitors setup with Nvidia Surround and an old cyborg joystick. After the first two days of Elite, I knew I liked it and I wanted a new HOTAS, so I ordered the Thrustmaster 1600M setup. It was a huge improvement over the old joy stick and now I no longer had to use my keyboard for anything. I could control everything from the HOTAS and I was really enjoying Elite. But as a noob I found myself checking out this forum almost every day looking for tips and information and I saw some post about VR and how great it was but I didn't think it was for me. Then I saw a post about Track IR. I read a bunch about it and watched some youtube videos and thought it would add a lot to Elite. It was a lot cheaper than VR so I order one up. I got it setup along with Voice attack. Track IR was awesome, I could look around my ship and look around at everything outside without having to turn my ship to see something. I thought it was really cool the first time I looked down and saw my hands and feet in the ship moving when I moved my controls. It made flying a lot easier because I could look around to see stuff. Now I'm really loving the game, new HOTAS, Track IR, voice attack with a cool voice pack from HCS. I figured I'm all set now, this is great.



I would still read some post about VR and how immersive it is and that its like a totally different game. But I'm thinking its gotta be like track IR but you just can't see anything else from the outside word so I don't need it. I mean sure it would probably more immersive because all you see is the game, but at the same time that makes some things more difficult. I also saw some reviews say the image isn't as sharp because the lower resolution lets you see the pixels a little bit. So I happily continued on with my setup for another 8 weeks loving the game. Then I saw the $400 bundle deal which made me start thinking about VR again. I already had a GTX1080 so $400 wasn't too bad to give it a go. Back to this forum to read about VR. I understood the cons pretty well, you notice the lower resolution and you can't see the outside world so it makes it difficult to use outside tools or grab a beer. Also some people get motion sickness but I have never really gotten motion sickness before so I figured I would be ok. Now the pro's are harder to understand since I have never see VR before. The closest demo location I could find was 90 miles away. I saw comments like you could play the game or with VR you could be in the game. "Be in the game", that sounded cool but I'm thinking Track IR but I can't see the outside world. I went back and forth but decided why not.



I had been bounty hunting all week at the CG and I was in the top 10% so when I got home I decided to get some more bounties done before I hooked up the Oculus because I wasn't sure if it would take a while to get used to before I was ready to try combat in VR. So I did bounties for an hour and landed back at the potato and turned them in for my cash. I logged out and started setting up the Oculus. I got through the setup and went through the little demo at the end. It was pretty amazing, I was in the little workshop with a robot who was handing my these disk to put in something that looked like a 3D printer. It would create these objects to play around with and I was started to understand what this whole VR thing was all about. Ok, setup was complete and now it was time to check out ED. Once if figured out how to activate it I was ready to login.



I got logged in to my ship and was blown away. It wasn't like TrackIR at all. I was not expecting the sense of scale and size that I was seeing. I probably sat there for 10 minutes just looking around. The inside of my FAS looked really cool, I saw even more stuff than I could see with TrackIR. Plus every think looked real, not flat and 2D. Once I move my ship to the surface of the station I could not believe how big it was inside. I just never got the feeling before that I was inside this massive structure, but seeing in VR is just mind blowing. When I finally decided to take off and leave the station I couldn't get over how big the mail slot actually is. Before I always felt like I was going to hit the ceiling or floor but in VR you can see how big it really is and it made it pretty easy to fly through. I left the station not sure what to do as I took it all in, again the size of the station from the outside was just as impressive as the inside. I figured I'd just do some more bounty hunting to really give this VR try. It was just amazing, the asteroids look so much bigger, the enemy ships are so much bigger, and I found flying so much easier. I really think it is because it is so much easier to judge distance in VR. I found it a lot easier to stay on the tail of enemy ships and avoid getting shot at by them. I ended staying there until I ran out of ammo in my multi-cannons. I racked up another 2 million in bounties and headed back to the station to collect. Again docking was a lot easier, I could see everything better and the station seemed so much bigger and I never felt like I didn't have room to maneuver. I didn't want to stop playing but It was getting late and I had to get to work in the morning so I forced myself to log off. I can't wait to discover ED all over again.



Thanks to all the Commanders for posting so many positive stuff about VR. Without them I probably wouldn't have given it a shot.