Right, here goes!
First for the bad news relating limitations: I was unable to get Steam overlay or Screenshots to function in the test. For one, had to download a seperate launcher from Frontier just to get the beta working. And it seems like they have disabled screenshots. Which makes me sad, but I am also a lazy person so I did not attempt screenshots with a 3rd party app.
The fact that the launcher is not the default launcher meant that Steam Overlay was not working and attempting to get it to work was not successful.
Bottom line: No screenshots.
On to the actual game: I started off in TZ Arietis with a friend. Sold all my assets and bought a Federation Gunship. It's a big hunk of metal, and flies as such. My wing also had one. So we fly to our closest planet that we could land on. It shows this in the navigation panel, a blue ship icon appears next to the planet's name.
Regarding the UI: A lot of things have changed or been added to the GUI, so I would recommend you all stick to the default color style of the GUI. My wing was having issues seeing certain notifications. And when you approach a planet, the red coloring helps a lot with knowing when you are about to crash.
So we approach the planet, and there seems to be 3 transitions. The first one is planet orbiting. This seems to be capable whether you have Horizons or not. So at the least you can Orbit a planet while your Horizons brethren have some fun on the surface. This transition is seamless and smooth. Once you've gotten close enough to the surface it changes to the Planetary Gliding, this is not quite seamless, as it does the usual effect of loading the next stage. The same as when you approach a station. So once you are gliding, the game start chowing memory and Vram like crazy. At one point I was using all the memory I had available, which was about 7GB not including Windows services.
So keep this in mind, Elite might run smoothly on your system right now, but Horizons is going to take away from that. I went from buttery smooth 60Fps to choppy 40-30Fps. In Gliding it was still okay in general. I stayed around 59Fps. Getting closer to land, depending on the detail it never went below 55Fps. Landing was easy enough, after figuring out how to do it. As soon as you do land the transition is automatic from flying to cutting the engines. All you have to do is deploy landing gear.
So after that I was stupid and could not figure out how to deploy my SRV, mostly because I never watched the streams or guides. I wanted to figure it out myself. Which happens to be very obvious. Just motion to the center console and you will see the options there.
Here comes the biggest bummer for me. Changing to the SRV was awesome. The vehicle unfolds as it exits your ship and it all looks really cool. Entering back into the ship is just as easy. But as soon as the vehicle touched the surface my FPS went from the 50-40Fps range down to a constant 16Fps. It really does use a lot of resources.
I played around the with graphics a bit, and I'm really hoping that once this is released it will be a lot better. But I was able to get a reasonably good 40Fps without downgrading graphics too much. Basically went from Ultra pre-setting to High. This still needs some tweaking.
So then it was setting up the SRV, it's controls work well enough with a supported flight stick. It was fun to drive. The physics work really well. The guns are nice. I could not figure out scanning. Even though I had it assigned to a button and tried it in many different situations and places.
The cities / bases and other points of interest are amazing. Planetary stations are displayed the same way as stations, they have their own contact within the navigation panel. After you get used to flying around it gets easy to find a station on the planet. All of this works great.
There seems to be a lot of new missions on normal bases and for 1.5. So most players who do not have Horizons will still see many new things.
I'm going to test it a bit more and perhaps tonight I'll see if I can get some screenshot app to help me out. But for now, the hype is real for me and I feel like this will be what I wanted from it.
