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

Just patched and tested the game. Performance feels the same. Had a long session, about an hour, and tried to stress the game loading many locations, and eventually the game still crashed. Maybe it's better than before, but need to test it more. 

Just saw this Lone Echo 2 review, which greatly fueled my hypertension, lol:

I don't usually consider other persons for unintelligent, idiots or imbeciles, but sometimes our views upon specific matters just differ greatly. Like here. Unfortunately that user is not alone, even well-known reviewers have done something similarly:

"Lone Echo 2 feels fantastic to control and is very comfortable to play both standing and seated, but up to this point, I’ve described one mechanic in an eight-hour story-driven VR experience."

Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/lone-echo-2-review-oculus

So Lone Echo 2 is short as a demo - and just 8 hours for $40?! 

I hope pyroth309 can forgive me for providing a few details about his savegame - after a severe problem I got his savegame which was about same location as my previous savegame. I noticed Pyroth309 spent about 11 hours to get to this location (about 70% through the game I assume). Maybe my old savegame had even more hours, I don't remember. But Pyroth had completed many subquests - and later I tried another similar savegame, same location, but with no subquests done. Game time was at only 7 hours in that savegame. So a massive difference of 4 hours - and I think Pyroth is much faster than me to complete the subquest, because I spend too much time floating around checking textures and ... stuff 🙂 

My point: This game is only a "demo" or 8 hours long if you hurry through the game and do no subquests at all. If you don't hurry, the game may easily be at least 16 hours. I'll probably need 24 hours - and that's not even counting all the quests I have to do twice because the game crashed and didn't save. Note that the game time measured is the lowest time you have - every time you die, you go back and that time is not measured. The more you die, the more uncounted game time you have. I have a lot of uncounted game time 🙂

It greatly annoys me having a reviewer from IGN telling the world that Lone Echo 2 is a short 8 hours experience, when the game has so much more to offer. Instead of thinking the reviewer is plain wrong, maybe there're are also things the developers could have done better. Maybe by showing how many of the subquests you found and completed when leaving certain sections of the game. Problem is that most subquests are hidden - you only find them by exploring. The more you explore, the more subquests you get. If you don't explore and just follow the main quests, the game may indeed be completed in 8 hours and you may have no clue that you missed most of the game.

In short - explore - find all the subquests - complete all the subquests - and Lone Echo 2 might really not be much shorter than Asgard's Wrath 😉

Forgot a few things - I'm not done complaining about reviewers I strongly disagree with 😇

Let's take the puzzles - RoadToVR wrote:

"There’s rarely any consequence for dying, the puzzles are never challenging enough to give you a “eureka!” moment, and the game’s single enemy feels more like a nuisance than a threat."

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

Fun thing, same reviewer enjoyed the much dumber and more repetitive puzzles in Alyx, lol. 

I think the problem is, like I wrote in my last post, this reviewer never played the large amount of subquests. I've had a few Eureka moments already. Sometimes I just overlooked things, but one puzzle took me a long time to solve - and some are just very difficult involving many ticks and frequent dying (so you have to start all over again). When you do the subquests, their level of difficulty differs greatly. Some are even close to insanely hard to complete, to the point were some persons have been complaining on Reddit that such hard subquests should not have been included in the game. Dying has great consequence, might cause you to start all over in a difficult subquest - and not completing subquests means you will miss out on many upgrades. When you complete subquests, you get to upgrade more or less all your equipement - like being able to reach more distant objects with your force-field etc - thus making the game easier. Some subquests may not really be solvable before you've upgraded your trusters or other equipment. If a subquest is too hard, try doing other subquests first and come back later. Now, RoadToVR didn't mention that, did they now... 😉

Again, reviewers hurrying through the game constantly going for the main quests have no clue about the puzzles in Lone Echo 2, sadly. Many subquests are much harder than puzzles in Alyx, and some are similar. Puzzles in the main quest pathway are often very easy to solve - you have to go looking for the hard ones. 

Feels like there're several reviewers doing a lot of harm to the game by writing statements which simply aren't true if you take the time to fully discover the game. 2c. I'm done ranting .. for now 😇 

Once I got the unlimited thrusters, I found the antenna linking pretty trivial.

I do get the feeling that Lone Echo 2 was rushed for release - many are still experiencing severe crashes. Reviews have come to a stand-still in the Oculus Store - only 340 reviews. These reviews were posted within the last week:

"Completely unstable, constant crashing,

This game has become unplayable. I have reset any overclocks, shut down any other monitoring programs, stopped geforce, no oculus debug overclock, etc ..... updated to the latest update. Having played Lone echo without crashes and Medal of honor, there is a significant problem with this game. Playing on a RIFT S with a evga ftw 3080, i9-900k, 16gb ram, more than enough for this game. UPDATE uninstalled and reinstalled. LOST ALL PROGRESS..... Im done buying VR"

"Chrash fest, unplayable

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!"

"Great story, disappointing optimisation
Having played the first Lone Echo and loved it, I bought LE2 thinking it's the same engine so will run exactly the same. I have to admit, I was wrong. So very wrong. LE2 runs spelling on my system (i7 10750, RTX 2060, 16gb ram), unlike the first which ran fantastically and looked beautiful. LE2 had to be low everything and even then it crashes with regularity.
I really wanted to love this game, but with everything set to low it looks like something the dog had dragged in.
If there is an optimisation patch that impetus this, I will review my score here but until then it has to be a low score from me. So disappointed :("

I've stopped playing the game for now - hoping for another patch. I actually can play for 30 - 60 minutes, but constantly being worried about reaching the next save point before the inevitable crash is getting to me. Also I'm not in a rush, it's not like there's anything better arriving soon - even if Hitman 3 might be awesome. 

This the last game I wanted to purchase for PC before the app broke :(. So many awesome originals that could have had sequels with great teams. I really wish Oculus would reconsider their PC strategy. 

Btw, last night I played for an hour with no issues - I just did increase my Win10 virtual memory to 64GB (on a fast Samsung 980 NVMe drive). But need to test it more. It's not normal for me to be able to play for more than 30 - 40 minutes without crashing. 

I got inspired as Bonelab devs recommended 64GB virtual memory cache, but shortly they reduced it to 32GB - having 64GB taken from your drive is quite a lot, lol. Then again, Lone Echo 2 could be the one game needing just that when pushing the in-game Ultra+ settings I do 🙂

OH

MY

GOD

I'VE FIXED IT!

Well, it was an unbearable journey. I guess it was years of struggling with it? Well, finally I am able to play it without crashing every 5 minutes. At least on my setup.

I play on an i9 9900KS + 32GB DDR4 + 2080Ti. It doesn't matter on what kind of drive I have it installed on because I've tried everything... HDD, SDD, NVME, PCI-E Corsair NX500, whatever!.

And then, I fiddled with some hardcore stuff...

I've been testing with several things, that's why you see some things in non-default settings, but the guilty party is the "Threaded optimization" option. By default it is set to "Auto", but magic happened when I turned it to Off.

And it's real. I was able to play for hours without a single crash. So go ahead and try it. I'm sure AMD drivers have something similar to turn off, so give it a try and let us all know how it goes.

Even with the errors and the crashes, Lone Echo 2 is the most impressive computer game I have ever played. It does not feel like a game - I'd rather describe it as the most immersive computer-facilitated experience I've ever had, second best is Alyx.

I think I've been here for 30 to 40 hours now - I consider it some sort of home, lol - but I love it here:

I never get tired of just being here

Some more scenic views:

I prefer the non-violent adventure content in Lone Echo 2 compared to Alyx, which basically is a (horror) shooter. For the content, Lone Echo 2 has some interesting puzzles - can you find the 4-digit key code here?

More physical puzzles can be to get things done in a very tight space - like what I'm doing here (no spoilers, if you can't see what I'm doing, I won't explain it 🙂)

What's fascinating is the extreme amount of side quests in the game. I have not even upgraded my equipment to 50% of the max yet - but having been here for 30-40 hours is also due to the game crashing making me repeat some side quests many times:

I'm only 44.4% optimized - when solving side quests, you can upgrade weapons and equipment

Took me some time to realize that you cannot solve all side quests from the start - some need to be done after doing other side quests first. As a rule of thumb, if a side quest is very hard, then you're not ready yet and need to upgrade more. And some side quests are impossible to do before reaching a certain amount of upgrades. The game is not holding your hand, so you need to constantly evaluate if you're ready for certain side quests.

If the ticks are giving you too much trouble, you're not ready and need to upgrade more - here's one frozen tick 

Remember to scan every drone - they may contain information helping you upgrade equipment and get more info about the story 

Check all asteroids for hidden entrances - there may be many 

A problem with Lone Echo 2 may be how side quests are found. It's not like all side quests automatically are registered when you're in a specific location. No, you need to find and activate the side quests yourself. Only when you find that hidden passage on the darkest part of a lonely asteroid some side quest will be triggered and available - if you don't explore an entire location  thoroughly, you may miss out on many side quests and never know it - and thereby miss out on much of the game's content. This may add much replayability for those rushing through the game the first time. 

Here're some secret or nicely hidden place and persons - whenever I read that some dude completed the game in 8 hours, I'm thinking:

"Did you find the outpost base so far away that you're losing signal and cannot travel any further?"

"Did you find Dr. Enfield and listened to the story?"

"- and did you find Melbourne?"

If you don't complete all side quests, you're seeing maybe 20% of the entire game or so. Also many side quests are difficult, some to the extreme, and just figuring out how to solve them may take much time. 

Graphics are not seen better in any VR game, not even Alyx. Like in Alyx, you have proper volumetric lighting:

See how my hand reflects the light - this requires a lot of calculations, so this kind of light you don't get in standalone Quest games, not even Red Matter 2

The light reflected by the boxes is almost blinding in-game

The real-time shadows are simply amazing, even shadows from my hand-held tools are shown

Fog effects (dust clouds?) are amazing too

Easily the best textures in any VR game - or a close tie with Alyx - but faces are the best ever in Lone Echo 2

The game has not even gotten 500 votes in the Rift Store. It would be a great move if Meta got the game on Steam. I'm betting that the game has sold very badly and could sell so much more on Steam, like what happened with Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond. Or maybe sales will pick up later when Meta hmd users get faster rigs - this is a very demanding game. Can't wait to get back! 🙂 

I finally finished Lone Echo 2 - and it was an amazing game all the way to the end. Of course if you want to shoot bigger things than ticks, Lone Echo 2 will disappoint - but it's more an adventure game than an action game. 

I took a few screenshots to remember the game and Liv :-) 

and you can see the tiny blood vessel in the white of her eyes :-)

The closing of Ready At Dawn studies was indeed the killing of a sacred animal. Meta has nothing even remotely close to the quality content made by Ready At Dawn. The only VR content better than Lone Echo 1-2 is Alyx.