When comparing Babel: Tower to the Gods vs Elite: Dangerous, the Slant community recommends Elite: Dangerous for most people. In the question“What are the best HTC Vive games?” Elite: Dangerous is ranked 1st while Babel: Tower to the Gods is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Elite: Dangerous is:
When Elite Dangerous come out, development won't stop. To build a game with the huge scope of Elite Dangerous, not all of it can be done at once, so the developers have adopted an approach of incremental improvement. Various game play elements are being designed as a foundation for later features. For example, although planetary landings aren't going to be available until a later update, the engine has been designed to be able to support going from lightyears away to meters away.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Variety of blocks and tools
There are a number of different blocks to be interacted with ranging from ones that can explode, ones made of ice that are slippery and ones that are invisible that you will not be able to manipulate. In order to interact with these blocks you are given a bunch of different tools such as spears, hammers, swords, axes etc. These different tools each have different interactions that can help the player, depending on what they need to do, but is still left up to the player in the end on how they want to accomplish that task.
Pro Good price for amount of content
The content in the game should last the player for a good while, as many current VR games tend to be more proof of concept over full fledged games. While this is an early access title, meaning it is not complete, for the price of $10 the content should last even in its current state. On top of this most VR titles are priced a lot higher than this, even when containing less content, so as far as a content for price comparison is concerned, Babel is a good choice.
Pro Fun theme
A Greek God like theme where the towers resemble greek structures, complete with little worshipers surrounding the towers. It can be fun to interact with the tiny people by moving or crushing them. This of course is the power wielded by a Greek God, which can be fun to decide to be a kind or vengeful one.
Pro Built with future expansion in mind
When Elite Dangerous come out, development won't stop. To build a game with the huge scope of Elite Dangerous, not all of it can be done at once, so the developers have adopted an approach of incremental improvement. Various game play elements are being designed as a foundation for later features. For example, although planetary landings aren't going to be available until a later update, the engine has been designed to be able to support going from lightyears away to meters away.
Pro Exploration at every level of detail
Full exploration of the galaxy is planned, allowing you to be able to jump from star system to star system, and fly around within a solar system from planet to planet, eventually going all the way down to a planet's surface at a 1:1 scale in a later update. Planetary landings will require a lot of details to be developed and designed, but you can still see the level of detail shift in action when flying into a planet's rings, where getting close enough show the individual asteroids within, which you can then interact with through mining, or by having a battle among them.
Pro Very realistic representation of space & star systems
Elite Dangerous uses publicly available real world star maps that we have of the Milky Way consisting of 150,000 star systems. Although in the current beta, full access to the entire galaxy is limited, in the final game, you will be able to visit any of the 400 billion stars in our galaxy on a 1:1 scale. Stars that we do know of are properly mapped in place and are of the correct type given the information we have about them. Stars we haven't collected data on are procedurally generated which allows you to explore any of the 400 billion of them.
Star systems are intelligently simulated using the "Star Forge", a generator that simulates the creation of a star system forming from its nebular cloud to determine what celestial bodies appear and what orbits they have. This feature leads to many varied and unique star systems possibly with planets that can co-orbit around each other, or with binary star systems, and infinitely more possibilities.
Pro Great Oculus Rift integration
Elite Dangerous has very good integration with the Oculus Rift thanks to its cockpit view only gameplay philosophy. All ship UIs are part of displays that appear on each side of you that appear when you turn your head, so accessing the navigation or ship menus happens seamlessly just by looking in their direction. The game also uses the direction you are looking in for targeting, so your lock on target is whatever you're head is pointing at.
By sitting in the cockpit of a ship, you are given a stationary frame of reference that helps prevent motion sickness associated with movement in game when you aren't actually moving.
Cons
Con Interface feels clunky
Actually grabbing blocks feels a bit inaccurate and is difficult to perform. Not very natural feeling, which can throw the player off. While not the main meat of the game, grabbing blocks, the portions that do have this interaction could use more polish.
There is also a tutorial that plays before starting a game, every time, which can not be skipped, this can become frustrating too and shows the lack of polish when it comes to the interface and navigation.
Lastly there are not many options to quit the game other than using the Steam menu button and even that may leave the game hanging. While this is an early access game, meaning it is unfinished and all of this may very well get fixed, it is something to keep in mind as it could also stay in this state.
Con Awkward to play in small rooms
The gameplay may be more difficult to perform if being played in a confined area as the player needs to be able to walk around the outside of large towers, which will of course be centered in ones room. This leaves the player to having only the outer areas of the room to traverse while playing, which can be difficult in smaller rooms as you may hit the walls of that room quite often.
Con Really complicated to learn
Looking up faqs and trade routes from first hand users will be the norm for figuring out many aspects of Elite: Dangerous. On top of this notes will have to be taken, which is made more difficult by the fact the game does not support in game not taking. So a pad and paper is recommended to remember all of the minutia of the game.
Con Boring
It is more a simulation than a combat game.
Con Launcher issues
I bought the game on multiple stores and were never happy how the laucher and the account linking worked.
Con "Mile Wide and an Inch Deep"
The game has a serious problem with depth and requires the user to repeat the same few fun actions over and over again. The world is massive and beautiful but feels empty. The game gets stale quickly despite being visually stunning.