Yesterday Elite Dangerous, the popular multi platform space simulator, announced that the game would be releasing support for the HTC Vive coming Holiday 2015, in time for the Vive’s release. The support will come via a free update.
“Frontier’s Elite Dangerous is an excellent example of a team leveraging the versatility of the Vive and Steam VR,” said Valve’s Chet Faliszek. “Players take the helm of an amazing starship experience, and we look forward to showing it for the first time on Vive at EGX.”
Frontier, the game’s developers, will be showing the demo on the Vive for the first time at EGX this week from Thursday the 24th until Sunday the 27th.
We reached out to Oliver Powell, one of the developers at Frontier developments who has been working on the Vive support for the game to learn more:
How will steamVR support be implemented?
We’ve been working with Valve on SteamVR support for a while and we’ll be adding it to Elite Dangerous in a free update before the end of the year.
How does the experience differ from the Rift experience?
Valve will tell you about the positional tracking offered by SteamVR, but for us Elite Dangerous is a great experience on Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Vive has a fantastic OLED screen and high framerate, which is a marked improvement over the Rift DK2 most players are using, but we’re looking forward to working with future revisions of Rift. Whatever headsets we support, we’re looking to make it the best experience possible.
How do you make use of the hand tracked controllers?
Our SteamVR update doesn’t include support for the SteamVR controllers, but it’s something we’re investigating and something we’ll support if it makes for a better experience.
Do you take advantage of Room Scale?
Elite Dangerous is a seated experience, so you don’t need to worry about getting up and walking around!
Will Vive players be able to play with/against Xbox/Oculus players?
Oculus, yes; Xbox One, no. We don’t support cross-platform play between PC and Xbox One, but Rift and Vive are just treated like any other peripheral in the PC space. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer a controller on a 1080p TV, a mouse and keyboard on a 4K monitor or HOTAS flight sticks and a VR headset – everyone can play together on PC.
Are there any new doors opened up by Vive support?
We hope supporting Vive right from launch will help drive the ongoing success of Elite Dangerous AND the success of virtual reality. To be successful, VR needs incredible gaming experiences, and for us Elite Dangerous is a truly spectacular gaming experience thanks to the size and scale and how natural that world feels in VR. It just feels totally natural on a VR headset, and it’s almost certainly the closest most of us will ever come to actually exploring our own galaxy!
Will there be any form of exclusive or new content specifically for the Vive version?
Elite Dangerous is Elite Dangerous, and this is just another way to play. Vive functionality will be integrated into every PC copy of Elite Dangerous, and it’s there if you want to try it. We hope you will because we’ve worked hard to make it great!
