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

Saw this review yesterday in the Rift Store, and although I could have been writing it, it wasn't me, lol:

"For me this game is just a massive crash fest. When it runs (which is rarely for > 10m) it is superb. I have a 10900k and a RTX 3090 and it runs amazing on highest details, but it just crashes so often it completely ruins it. This is the ONLY vr game I have issues with, HL Alyx no problem, DCS no problem etc etc. Please fix!"

I do get more than 10 min though - and yesterday I stayed in the same location for long, and the game did not crash - but as soon as I started moving in the asteroid field the game crashed. So seems to be a problem with streaming textures. 

Still it's my favorite (VR) game of all. I can live with the flaws. Does feel like the devs more or less have abandoned the game, not a single patch in spite of massive problems does not look good. Some say Facebook cut close to all funding for the game after its release, but only rumors - would explain the lack of patches though. 

They're pretty active on the echo games discord. They just got back in from a post release break and are collecting and reviewing logs and such now. I imagine a patch in the near future.

I'm curious what's causing it because I've seen people crashing with the exact build I have and I never got a single crash and played 8+ hours one day. I also didn't have the close up texture streaming problem I see people complaining about. But I did on distant textures.

Well, I didn't say they were curing cancer in there. I just said they were pretty active and just returned from a break which was on monday. They've posted 12 times in the last 3 days in the Lone Echo 2 section and indicated that they are collecting logs and looking into issues now. Just passing along why there hasn't been any patch activity yet. They went on a break after release.

I really found it close to an appalling behavior with the total lack of info about Lone Echo 2 during the Facebook Connect 2021 - or PCVR for that matter (or do let me know if I missed a presentation covering the game and/or PCVR). Not one word from Carmack or Zuckerberg. Quest 2 users use tons of PCVR games as the Steam Hardware Survey shows. And Lone Echo 2 is not just any game. 

I used to say that Alyx is the most impressive and immersive computer generated experience available on this planet - but now I think Lone Echo 2 won that title. 

Thus Lone Echo 2 is not just a game, but the greatest computer generated experience I can think of. Compared to Lone Echo 2, Quest versions of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Population One and Blade & Sorcery are dust. And I totally mean insignificant dust - these less than mediocre games deserve absolutely no attention compared to Lone Echo 2 - I can already feel my hypertension rising just thinking about it. 

Lone Echo 2, the fresh and newly released greatest game on the planet, getting no attention by its sponsors 2 weeks after the Lone Echo 2 launch is impossible to forgive - in my mind. Why Meta/Facebook/Oculus is trying to kill the VR king of content (= Lone Echo 2) is quite hard to understand as the game works perfectly with Quest 2. And Lone Echo 2 probably is the most expensive VR content ever created by Oculus - probably even more expensive than Asgard's Wrath. 

Btw, found a few more shots - to show some great moments:

I nearly captured the full planet here - and you can see the incredible amount of polygons/assets

Floating above the rings of Saturn never gets old - and beyond the horizon infinity stretches its wings...   

I feel I get out a lot - and I'm getting tons of bright sunlight too - in Lone Echo 2 🙂 Btw, this tram contains a sub-quest - and there are tons of sub quests in Lone Echo 2. Already played more than 16 hours, feels like I'm only 50% through the game

The cargo transporters simply look awesome - and you can grab onto one and ride it to new locations

A shot showing your legs. How many VR games can you count with this level of immersion? - Where you have a full body? With this level of ultramersion textures? Alyx only had hands! 

I do understand that many have issues with Lone Echo 2, I get crashes too, and you really need a RTX 3080 or better to enjoy the game - but that does not change the fact that the Lone Echo 2 experience massively transcends close to all other VR experiences - if your rig can handle the game.  

Had a great time with the Rift CV1 ss 2.0 (High details) yesterday. Interestingly, there are details I don't notice with lcd, but with oled. Also Rift CV1 works better with lower res than lcd, because CV1 does not get very blurry when res decreases when using TAA.

Index still wins, also distant objects are easier to see with the higher res, and then there's fov and sound - but if some still use CV1 they are getting a different but not inferior experience.

Lone Echo 1 was very crashy for me, using a RTX 3080, and was a real test of patience to play to the end.  Great game though and worth the trouble.  I’m not too far into Lone Echo 2, but so far no crashes.  I have the graphics on high setting and it looks great with the Reverb G2.  But I’ll have to see how it holds up later in the game where the graphics seem to be more taxing.  Just glad that so far, it’s been playing very well. 

i had a ridiculous problem... i moved the game from one drive to another (ofcourse using the built-in oculus feature) and i lost the savegames................. no words....... is there any kind soul that could zip his game files and share to me? I just took the automated tram ingame, so i suppose quite the beginning. but i do not want to start again all over.
Files are located in YOUR LONE ECHO INSTALLATION > Software\ready-at-dawn-lone-echo-2\_local\saves\slot1 
Thanks a lot for any help.

Thanks! that was very kind from you.

Actualy i tried searching before posting, no luck.

Thank you again.

Saw this new review in the Store - and to me it nicely captures the game's current situation:

"Beautiful Nightmare

Well, what to say.... Such a beautiful story destroyed by bad graphics with lot of bugs. Where to start? My rig is I9-10850K, 64GB RAM, fast nvme for os, another nvme for data, RTX 3070, Quest 2 with link cable (or airlink, doesn't matter). You put all settings to high - game is not playable, glitch after glitch, crash randomly several times. Memory usage on 3070 is almost full (7.9 from 8GB) and this is first problem- you would need 24GB on card maybe to get textures loaded in full i presume. GPU utilization over 90%. On opposite side you switch all to low- game crashes less BUT graphics is just very bad. It's much worst than Echo 1, textures not loading, you are not able to read text etc. Don't know what had been done to original game engine but something went wrong, why reinvent wheel? When all settings are on LOW - GPU utilization is around 70% and 7.1GB memory usage on card. Funny enough CPU utilization in both settings is less than 20%... I bought this game for story and hoped for better graphics (long develop time). Story line feels strong for now but technically this game is broken. Devs knows that... looks like they had either tight timelines from oculus, something is broken inside their team or they focused or other more important(money, money) projects. Do not recommended in this state, unfortunately 😞 "

Checking RAD - they've gone silent on Twitter - not a word since the game launched Oct 12:

https://twitter.com/RAD_Studios

On RAD's Homepage, Lone Echo 2 doesn't even exist - no trace of the game:

https://readyatdawn.com/

https://readyatdawn.com/games/

And we get no patches, although it's evident bugs are plenty, even extremely severe bugs. 

In some ways it's like the game doesn't really exist - no support apart from some meaningless chatter in RAD's Discord channel. 

Seems to me that all funding has been removed, no resources available for fixing the game at all. Or maybe it'll come if the game sells enough copies and reach some milestone - which might be difficult with all the bad reviews due to severe game crashes. Right now there're only 268 ratings in the Store - that's much less than Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond (which has 359 ratings in the Rift Store and 1516 ratings on Steam - so that's about 2,000 ratings, and if I remember correctly Medal of Honor did reach a lot more than 300 ratings the first month - and of course Steam mattered).  

I'm not convinced Lone Echo 2 lacks optimization, but maybe - on the other hand the graphics are so extreme I really consider a RTX 3090 close to the minimum for the game - and this way RAD may have made another game for the top 1% of the PCVR players... 

If RAD can't fix the crashes, at least they should implement a new way to save your game more frequently. Can't be that hard - unless you're all out of funding. 

May i say something? He got some serious deep issues with his PC.

Game runs fine on my 2080ti - Ryzen 7 (very much less than his pc), with some fps dips in heavy environments, but if i put lightning on medium it is fine again. Graphics are NOT that intensive.

VR gaming really needs a clean and functional PC. If someone have no clue how to mantain a PC healty, it is his problem.