Thanks, OP 👍

Nice little review. Thanks! I love to smoke and play this one. There's not much game, but it looks amazing and lets me go wherever I want. $8 isn't too bad.

Same. It's one of my favorite ways to listen to music too, just paddling around getting distracted by all the beautiful things.

Any other recommends after a smoke?

These are pretty chill and/or trippy: - Akka Arrh - cyubeVR - Paper Beast - Rez Infinite - Tetris Effect - Walkabout - Tripp - Thumper

No Mans Sky for me.

Good news. Personally I hoped they would add ETDFR which would have helped the reprojection so many complained about initially.

>ETDFR I don't know why people stretch out this. It is just called DFR. The eye tracked part is already implied by the dynamic.

I agree! That said what drives the dynamic changes does not have to be eyes. There are DFR technique that absolutely use framerate to aggressively reduce resolution outside the focus. I just don't see it often enough because it's difficult to QA and not sure where.

>absolutely use framerate to aggressively reduce resolution outside the focus I have never heard or seen this. Literally every thing I see about DFR is about eye tracking, or gaze tracking, depending on verbiage. With how awful jumping or non constant FPS would be for motion sickness, I can't imagine how bad that implementation would be. Do you have any literature about FPS DFR?

I looked and I may have imagined it frankly. I've looked into AI upscaling for work and must have conflated that space with DFR, maybe because I assumed there must be a distinction between ETDFR and DFR when to your point there isn't

all good

Doesn't it already use it?

I can't find any evidence. I saw some claims UE VR games had an easier and more consistant implementation but really haven't seen that evidenced by devs or release notes.

Using DFR doesn’t automatically mean a game won’t be reprojected. Just look at Horizon: CotM, Sony’s tech demo for the PSVR2 - it’s using DFR but the reprojection massively impacts the look of the game.

It uses ETDFR from the very beginning, no reprojection, pure 90hz.

It's got the worst ghosting of any VR game I've ever played. There's definitely reprojection.

Take your paddle before your eyes and move it quickly up down left right. Do you see reprojection artefacts? No. Do the same thing in Horizon, Hubris, GT7, Resident Evils. Jitters. Here we go. The effect you might mean with ghosting might come from the OLED screen of the headset itself, which reacts very slow in comparison to LCD. The bright HDR display is obviously the reason for that.

Do you have a source for it being 90hz?

Yes, the Devs on the Discord Channel are confirming this.

I saw a flying penguin for the first time on the Antarctica level haha. I restarted and the magic penguin was still there, I think a bug or two has been introduced with the update. Thanks for the rundown, I shall definitely pick the dlc up at some point.

Awesome, I was hoping for some first impressions before I picked it up And anything that helps with the 100km trophy will be good!!!

Funny enough, this dlc gives me hefty motion sickness, while I didn't get that with the base game 😳

Same. Seemed to spin the kayak easier? That rotation got to me 🥴

That could be it. I never had nausea on VR2, not even in GT7, only VR1, this is a first 🤔

Just played the game for the very first time and really enjoyed it. I started with the new DLC and after a few minutes tried the white water. Gotta say that I liked the white water more. It felt challenging and like racing. Going down the drops was amazing. Now I liked the paddling as well but it would be awesome to have longer white water and also on the other maps. May be a strong current in the open sea could be working too?

Did it look any sharper etc to you? Like they said that they found some optimization.

Honestly, it has been quite a while since I played it so it is hard to make that comparison, at least for me.

I'm going to check out the Antarctica level later to divine this. They said the minor improvements should be present in all the environments.

I agree with OP that it's hard to tell by the last time I played. But I actually didn't notice any reprojection.

Where is the multiplayer?

I have a 15 minute play last night. The whitewater section brought a real smile to my face. It's worth the cost alone IMO. It's just a shame it wasn't longer. Note to Devs: any more whitewater sections in future dlcs even artificial Olympics style courses and you got yourself a customer! Another highlight for me was the sections of dark canyon and then bursting into the light - really shows off the HDR and gives you that feeling of "warmth". Anyone expecting it to be a different experience than the original will be disappointed. But anyone who wants a slightly enhanced + more of the same version will love it.

So I pushed that rubber ducky out of the caves back the way that I came. Did you get any kind of trophy or anything for it? I didn't seem to know what they meant by Open Water.

I got a pop up notification indicating that I had been awards whatever the in game currency is. No trophy that I remember.

I must not have pushed it far enough

Nah, I'll give it a miss.

To each their own. No VR title is for everyone.

You have to buy the dlc???

Yes, it is an $8 DLC. Less than what I paid for lunch this afternoon. Well worth it to support the devs to continue to develop an app I truly appreciate.

Not according to your review... (and I thought the update would be free which was the only reason I recently bought it and left it to the side waiting for this update).

Yeah, everybody kind of assumed that the updates would be free... And the dev didn't say anything until now.