Elite: Dangerous is the fourth instalment of the sandbox space sim series Elite, and due for release later this year.

As it’s been almost 20 years since the last Elite, younger viewers could be forgiven for being unfamiliar with the series. 1984’s Elite is widely credited as being the grandfather of the ‘open world/sandbox’ game. Some might even go so far as to say that blockbuster titles like GTA might not even exist if it weren’t for this ahead-of-its-time game.

Elite takes place almost entirely in the cockpit of a spaceship. The premise is that you are a pilot in a vast procedurally generated galaxy. You can become a trader, a courier, a pirate, a bounty hunter or any combination of the above. You can upgrade your ship and buy new ones to help facilitate whatever it is you’d like to do. Elite gives you no direction beyond “make your way in the galaxy”.

Elite Dangerous was funded by a Kickstarter campaign back in early 2013 and it has made rapid progress since then. Higher tier backers were given access to Alpha builds of the the game, but Alpha access is still available direct from their site for anyone who missed the Kickstarter and would like to get involved before the final game is released. On the 10th of April, Elite: Dangerous opened up access to the single player combat Alpha to all Premium Beta Kickstarter backers – those who chipped in £100 or more. Alpha backers, at £200 or more, have been enjoying the development of Elite for some months now, including this single player module. Recently, creator, David Braben mentioned that almost 10% of these backers were playing Elite using an Oculus Rift. This figure is encouragingly high, but not totally surprising. You might reasonably expect that early adopters of the one would be early adopters of the other. Especially considering the obvious synergies between the Oculus hardware and Elite’s core gameplay.

I was recently able to have a go on this single player combat module with an Oculus Rift on a friend’s PC. There are nine different combat scenarios to try. Starting with simple target practice, moving on to one-on-one duels, then facing off against multiple ships. One scenario has you make use of stealth tactics, another has you assault a large “Anaconda” class freighter. The later scenarios have you fighting waves of enemy ships or getting embroiled in an inter-factional conflict. These scenarios increase in difficulty as you progress and they showcase different weapon load-outs as well as different ways to approach combat. Of course they reflective only a small but central component of what the final game will involve but they act as a tantalising taster.

Ambushing the unfortunately named freighter “Big Score” in the Supply Strike mission, is one of my favourites. Trying to evade it’s powerful beam weapons as you engage its fighter escorts before turning your missiles on it, is a thrill. Being in the midst of a massive space battle in the”Factions” scenario is just incredible to watch on the rift. The much talked about stealth system – based on a mechanic of trying to minimise your ships heat output, did not come into focus as sharply as I had hoped it would, in the mission “Predator and Prey”. It was not totally clear to me how far my attempts at stealth were effective; how close I was to being detected or if I was just sufficiently far away from the dangerous mercenary ship that you are supposed to avoid.

Elite: Dangerous is gorgeous and one of the nicest looking games on the Rift. The ship models are of an incredibly high quality and some of the lighting effects are breathtaking. Your cockpit looks very realistic, thanks to visual effects on the glass of the windows and it’s great being able to look around, although it could certainly do with a pilot avatar. The holographic displays work well, and the classic radar is still as useful as it ever was. One of the loveliest little touches is how panels blow out, in true Sci-Fi fashion, as you take hits. It is even possible for the windows to smash, sucking out all of the oxygen from the cockpit, giving you two minutes before you asphyxiate. The visuals, combined with the realistic changes to the sound effects, are so compelling you’ll feel in real peril – as if you really do only have moments before you die a cold death in the vacuum of space.

As this is just an Alpha build, it is prone to crashing and has a few technical issues with regard to Oculus support. The occasional crash is no big deal, and to be expected. Luckily it seemed to happen most often at the start of a scenario so it wasn’t frustrating in the sense of losing progress. Some of the issues with the Oculus implementation are somewhat strange – for example, when I first booted the game up, the Oculus was set as a duplicated monitor. This worked absolutely fine until it inexplicably stopped working after a couple of plays, after which the game only seemed to support setting the Rift as an extended display. The menus almost always, but not consistently, failed to display the right offset for each eye making them completely unusable, quite aside from resolution issues. Once in play, however, there were no real issues with the display or head-tracking. Comfort-wise, I experienced no nausea or disorientation in play, even as I barrel-rolled past asteroids or got knocked into a wild spin after clipping one of them. My friend, who had never tried VR before also reported no feelings of sickness, even after several hours of play. This is a really good sign for the game.

Playing Elite: Dangerous with a DK1 is a really thrilling experience and well worth doing if you have access to both. It’s really close to being perfect, but there are currently a few issues that prevent it from being the definitive way to play the game. Luckily most of these issues are rectifiable, and hopefully fixed for the final release.

Firstly, the perennial problem of the DK1’s screen being low resolution. On the whole it’s not a problem but it can sometimes be very difficult to see the thin line to target when you are using ballistic weapons. This is exaccerbated by the targeting reticle being slightly off – sometimes your lasers will seem to hit a little to the side of the target dot. This may be to do with the reticle itself being situated at a different depth of field from the target. It is easily corrected for, but off-putting nonetheless.

When playing without a Rift, you have access to UI side-panels to your left and right. The left panel allows you to see a list of visible contacts, while the right allows you to fine-tune things like weapon firing groups. What is strange is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to access these in Oculus mode. It is potentially tricky as controls change contextually when you are looking at these menus so you wouldn’t want to accidentally select them when freely looking around. However, they seem to be positioned such that looking at them would be a pretty deliberate movement. Presumably they will be added in time, and the combat Alpha doesn’t really need these menus so it does not significantly detract from the experience as is.

The other issue, that is more fundamental, is that Elite Dangerous is a complex game, skirting the edge of being fully fledged Sim. As such, it requires lot of different control keys – far too many for a gamepad. If you’re playing with a keyboard and mouse, you’re going to need to peek out of the bottom of the Rift to check where you’re fingers are from time to time, at least until you’re well accustomed to the controls. If you really want to get the most out of Elite: Dangerous you may need to invest in a costly flight stick to ensure full immersion and to hope to attain a true sense of presence.

Is the Elite: Dangerous combat build worth £100 on it’s own? Well, no, obviously not. While it is a far more polished VR space sim than anything else you’ll find right now, it is not without it’s share of implementation issues. The limited selection of combat scenarios will not hold your attention for that long, although to be fair, I would have loved to have a longer time with them. it should be noted that backing the game is about more than just getting early access – if you have the disposable income and want to support the creation of Elite, you probably won’t regret spending the money. Furthermore, on May 30th the full premium beta will be released for these backers, this will be much closer to the final game; featuring, trading, a whole galaxy to explore and that classic Elite sandbox gameplay loop. Even then, though, you may be better off saving your money at least until you can play the game on your DK2, with it’s HD screen, and until further improvements to have been made to VR support and general stability. When the full game is released at a standard price, later this year, there is no doubt that it will immediately become one of the must-have games for Rift owners.

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