Lone Echo II has arrived in the Rift Store - trailers, reviews and impressions

Btw, the dynamic shadows are truly awesome. First I thought some shadows were too blurry - but that was due to the shadows being affected by multiple light sources. Here are some examples:

Blurry and faint shadow due to multiple light sources - see the shadow on the floor

Another blurry and somewhat faint "double-shadow" (see how the hand is projected twice) due to multiple light sources

Very sharp shadows due to a single and very strong light source

Close-up - maybe slightly more blurry than before due to light diffraction closer to the surface  

Not sure I've ever seen more impressive shadows in a VR game. Surely we've got true RTX shadows in 2D games, but not sure that these impressed me more than the Lone Echo 2 shadows 🙂

Enjoy some of the awesome music from Lone Echo 2 here:

The sound is amazing using either Rift CV1 or Index - I think CV1 wins the music due to deeper bass, but Index wins for voices. Dr. Harlans' voice is beyond incredibly awesome using the Index speakers - simply sounds real. And Olivia's voice often sounds as if she's standing right next to me. But back to the music 🙂

Seems like 50 devs at Ready At Dawn (=RAD) helped make Lone Echo 2 - the team is here:

Soruce: https://twitter.com/RAD_Studios/status/1448010175416180738

Sure that's a smaller team than the 80 devs at Valve making Alyx, but still is quite a large team. Congrats to RAD for making the best (or maybe second best, Alyx isn't that easy to beat) PCVR experience! I hope they enjoyed the well-deserved champagne! 😄

I just beat all the signal relay missions. It was pretty easy with the Thruster upgrades.

Btw, did try res 250% yesterday - and it did look a lot more awesome than 200%. Unfortunately my performance tanked - but would really love to experience this game using res 300% to get rid of the TAA blur 🤓 - and one could dream of res 400% 😁 - I'd need something much faster than my RTX 3090 for that though 😢 

Also Ben from RoadToVR ran into performance problems with his 2080 Ti, and he too confirmed the temporal antialiasing (TAA) blur using lcd hmds - like his Quest 2 hmd:

"Even without improved graphics, it would have been great to see more significant optimizations to the game so that most everyone could enjoy it at its best presentation.

Oculus recommends a GeForce GTX 1080 GPU and an Intel i7-6000 CPU, or higher. Unfortunately the game struggled a bit at times on an RTX 2080 Ti and an i7-6700K at Medium settings and 2x MSAA. Worth noting: I was playing the game on Quest 2 via Oculus Link, which means it was rendering at much higher resolution than if I had been using Rift S, plus Oculus Link uses some extra resources to work.

Do yourself a favor when starting Lone Echo II: disable Temporal AA, then find the highest setting that will still run the game at 4x or 2x MSAA. The game unfortunately suffers a lot from aliasing, but the Temporal AA solution adds a significant blur. Using 4x or 2x MSAA will show more jaggies but everything will be much sharper."

https://www.roadtovr.com/lone-echo-2-review-oculus-rift-quest/

The problem is that Ben does not have enough gpu power to lift the res so much that TAA gets significantly reduced. I find the game unplayable using res 150% and lcd, because 4xMSAA does not help enough at that res and jaggies will be everywhere - and the TAA blur is really bad. You need to reach about res 200% with TAA - and to avoid MSAA, because MSAA costs way too much performance. Using lcd, I've often been thinking that I'm using to minimum hardware to be able to enjoy the game, and no I'm not trying to be funny. I would so much appreciate a RTX 4090 or whatever is faster than the 3090. Even using Rift CV1 ss 2.0 I get stuttering in the larger locations. I can't remember any games where I could not get solid 90 fps with the Rift CV1 ss 2.0 (17 mill pixels) - other than Lone Echo 2. Normally I can use Rift CV1 ss 2.5 (27 mill pixels) with no problems at all. 

You may occasionally encounter an unmedicated dude on top of his manic episode stating that the game runs perfectly on his GTX 1060 laptop. Maybe I do live in a parallel universe, but I'd advice not to take the hardware requirements lightly when starting this game.

To me a recommended gpu is not the GTX 1080 like the devs write - it clearly would be a RTX 3060, or better a 3070. 

I also had to drop to 200% recently due to an area near the Astrea completely tanking my fps. Seems a good overall spot. I agree, any lower and blur becomes an unbearable issue. I have motion smoothing forced off and mostly stay 80 fps steady.

There's a reason Ben didn't specifically call out LCD panels. I've seen people with oled headsets complaining about TAA in other games that I've had issues with. I've also seen it first hand in both my O+ and Quest 1 over link. For whatever reason, CV1 doesn't suffer from it or at least to the same extent. 

That said, the blur is why I tried to stay at 250 but game kept saying Nope! And that's with my 3090 overclocked but I have a close to base version so probably not much faster than a stock FTW.

I hear ya. FPS is FPS to me so if it gets me even a couple, in VR that could be huge. But I live in an area with cheap electricity. My pc stays on 24/7 lol.

This game is a **bleep** masterpiece despite its flaws. Yes it can be tedious, yes it has some issues with texture pop in, yes its performance is not great, but overall it's an incredible experience imo. Really love the voice acting, and there's some great dialogue, especially on the main quest. (Yes there's some that tends to drone on). Really love the Apollo parts. Don't want to get much into spoilers but I've made a lot of headway on the main storyline and I didn't want to stop. 

I think this is now my favorite VR game I've ever played and one of the top moments in gaming for me period. It's a bittersweet moment as it's an end of an Era for Oculus. No telling when or if they will get back to pushing the boundaries of graphics like this I just hope someone picks up the torch and runs with it in the future.

Yea it's always hard comparing games when they release far from each other. It's been a year and a half since Alyx and the first time I played through Alyx I was blown away. It was amazing to play through both from a nostalgia for half life and the continuation of the story, to the actual game itself being incredible for so many reasons. From exploring City 17 to the combine fights, to that whole ending sequence...it's really hard to say Lone Echo 2 is better than that.

But, I have loved space games since I was a kid so for me this is like a continuation of those old adventure games from back in the day. IE Space Quest or The Dig. It reminds me of those a lot but you're actually carrying out the actions in first person...in VR instead of just typing some command lines. So that has a huge nostalgic pull to me too. Lone Echo 2 has a lot more dialogue than Alyx, a very strong story, and some incredible areas that make me favor it by a hair over Alyx but they're both masterpieces to me.

Just finished Lone Echo 2. Ending was phenomenal albeit predictable. Loved that whole sequence though and the art team really outdid themselves. As I said, with all of its warts and bugs and issues, game still is the most incredible experience in VR. If you're on the fence, do yourself a favor and jump in. Was a big bang for the Rift games to end on that's for sure.