After months of early-access alphas and betas and gammas(?), Elite: Dangerous is officially out today. I've been playing various incarnations of Frontier's space-sim off and on for a while now, and I dig it.
I started back in August, when I went deep into my VR immersion tank and played a bunch of the game with an Oculus Rift. I'm going to be playing a lot of the final game, both while using Oculus Rift and on a regular screen, and will be writing about it for Kotaku. For now, however, since the retail version just came out and I'm drowning in year-end stuff, I've bumped up some impressions I wrote back in August.
A lot of things have changed since I wrote this, of course: The Oculus implementation is now much better and much easier to use, with lower latency and better head-tracking, which makes it a lot easier to play for extended periods of time. The game is generally a lot less buggy. The galaxy is much bigger, and there are lots of new types of missions to undertake. There have been a ton of small and large tweaks to the economy, navigational controls, and that kind of thing, too. And there's a whole story mode, which I have yet to even try.
I'll have more on the final game soon. In the meantime, if you're playing... see you out there.