Despite using the Oculus Rift VR headset in the past to demo Elite: Dangerous, Frontier Developers has confirmed that the game will not officially support the device. Instead, it will have official compatbility with the Steam VR.
This was was revealed when gamers saw that the official Elite: Dangerous store page lacked mention of the Rift. When Eurogamer pressed Frontier for a reason, the developer responded: ”We’ve supported VR for a few years now, and Elite Dangerous is arguably the world’s leading VR-ready game. We want to give players the best possible VR experience however they play - it’s something we talked about with Digital Foundry recently - and that means focusing our efforts.”
The studio concluded, ”Right now, we’ve chosen to focus on SteamVR. We haven’t cut an exclusivity deal with any VR manufacturer, and we’re still working with Oculus on Rift support.” The statement seems a little peculiar when, as mentioned, the Rift was used to demo the game a few times in the past.
This rift with Oculus was hinted the day before the device began pre-orders two and a half weeks ago, when community manager Zac Antonaci posted to Elite users, ”With the news that Oculus are starting pre order of their consumer version tomorrow, I wanted to just make a quick post to confirm that we are still actively working with Oculus but currently the only SDK we are able to officially support is 0.6.”
It’ll be interesting to see if Elite:Dangerous gets user-made mods to support the Rift VR after the device is released.
