ANNOUNCEMENT Elite Dangerous: Odyssey | The Road to Odyssey - Mission Playthrough

[Aratac]

Hopefully there are some bases perched on a cliff edge that you can sit on, watching a multiple star sunset through an atmosphere, with a 12,000m snow capped mountain range in the misty distance. And no, I don't want to have to kill everyone on the base to enjoy the view.

 

[Phenom D]

I just saw Alpha playthrough and felt real need to open up this forums again.
What Im going to express is just subjective opinion and ideas, so dont get triggered if somethings not matching for you.

At first, I'm pleased to see Braben, it's been a long time since I last saw him . I'm aware this is still alpha stage in need fixing and polishing so I adjusted my opinion on following list as well.


Pros

• New type of planets looks astounding no matter if from orbit or from the ground. Light, landscape and atmosphere are really well done here. Here I'm most excited and sets my soul at peace knowing that FDev did this right so we can get proper atmospheric planets in the future DLCs.
• Spacelegs scale gives you another dimension of how ridiculously big this things was all the time. Just looking at skimmers and goliaths hovering above your heads gives you sense of scale that was so much needed in this game.
• Detailed accessories like medpacks, maintenance panels or consoles were nicely blending with enviroment so i hope for more to appear ingame.
• Helm HUD is also in my opinion easy to use and well done.
• Compound interiors also nice. Hoping that more buildings will be accessible with different purposes and options to use them. Maybe trade hubs, exploration missions or defensive missions to stop ppl from stealing core. We'll see...
• Sounds... Guys you never fail at sound effects.
  

Cons

• Deaf AI cant see or hear player passing by... They came to check the front door and stood there missing all shots... I know this could be polished in future but cmon you are presenting FPS gameplay here...
• Animation movement felt so dull... Didnt see anything like crouching which can at least resemble stealth action... The only ragdoll used in cut got stuck in stairs and wiggled uncontrolably... Player avatars hovering few inches above ground... Geez, there's lot to fix.
• Goliaths and skimmers were just placeholding immersion since biggest damage output was grenade you threw under your own feet...
• Biggest dissapointment of all... For that Neil Armstrong moment I really hoped for ships to have some kind of entrance airlock, stairs or lift just like it was showed on launch trailers etc... Even SRVs are taken into hangar bay before leaving the SRV session... Anything but the beam inside ship, right? I thought this community deserved more than this... Geez man you even pretended that guys boarded ship but ship scanner was showing that you left both on ground before leaving the planet...

Overal I'll give that 6.5/10. It's not that bad but honestly game had to be out by end of Q1 this year. This was nowhere near that... Last seconds of this mission playthrough gave me really bad feeling about connection issues in future. For a long time I'm criticising ED for using P2P networking model (multicrew issues, long latence, connection instability etc.) and I'm reasonably afraid that this is applied on Odyssey as well...

Wish you luck!

 

[Rat Catcher]

For a long time I'm criticising ED for using P2P networking model (multicrew issues, long latence, connection instability etc.) and I'm reasonably afraid that this is applied on Odyssey as well...

The networking model isn't changing according to the CMs - but by extrapolation of 'physical multicrew' action it appears the P2P code may have been polished a little.

 

[govny]

• Deaf AI cant see or hear player passing by... They came to check the front door and stood there missing all shots... I know this could be polished in future but cmon you are presenting FPS gameplay here...

to be fair they get permission to land and enter the base so it is normal that AI don't react to their presence.
I think the mistake in the demo is that developers keeps blabbing of infiltration to make it seems more intense, but the real infiltration happened only when they set off the alarm.

 

[Angus]

Hopefully there are some bases perched on a cliff edge that you can sit on, watching a multiple star sunset through an atmosphere, with a 12,000m snow capped mountain range in the misty distance.

I've seen it. It's rubbish.

;-l

 

[Gully Foyle]

In the first major Odyssey patch we'll get ship interiors and we'll discover that everything is made of oak and teak, while the AFMU consists of cabin boys running around with buckets of pitch and extra rope.

Synthesize grog and salt beef for them while using plasma rifles to fend off @Rubbernuke 's Hamburgler SRVs equipped with Grom bomb launchers.
I say after the new F1 sim, we get Planet Pirate: Buccaneers of Braben

 

[Rubbernuke]

Synthesize grog and salt beef for them while using plasma rifles to fend off @Rubbernuke 's Hamburgler SRVs equipped with Grom bomb launchers.
I say after the new F1 sim, we get Planet Pirate: Buccaneers of Braben

I can almost see the Polygon articles forming!

 

[Screemonster]

The real question on my mind is... after hearing that you're limited to carrying the number of people that your ship has seats for, what good is this multiplayer gameplay if there isn't a single ship in the game that can actually carry a full four-player team?

At least let people hang out in the planetary vehicle hangar or a passenger cabin or something even if they can't walk around the ship.

The federal dropship only has two seats, what kind of a dropship is that? I can drop off... a single guy. Great.

 

[Gully Foyle]

I can almost see the Polygon articles forming!

" After the past slavery of n00b miners debacle, Rogue Cmdrs are at it again!
It seems Legs has brought more than baby steps. A group of RP cannibal cabal of Cmdrs has taken it amongst themselves to use the scoop mechanism on the SRVs to pick up Cmrs knocked down by the new One Punch Suit Engineering introduced last Sunday."
Suspiciously at nearby stations, a wide selection of strange commodities marked frozen patties has appeared in the Sell markets"

Narb FluffflangKlang Esq.

 

[Rubbernuke]

" After the past slavery of n00b miners debacle, Rogue Cmdrs are at it again!
It seems Legs has brought more than baby steps. A group of RP cannibal cabal of Cmdrs has taken it amongst themselves to use the scoop mechanism on the SRVs to pick up Cmrs knocked down by the new One Punch Suit Engineering introduced last Sunday."
Suspiciously at nearby stations, a wide selection of strange commodities marked frozen patties has appeared in the Sell markets"

Narb FluffflangKlang Esq.

I'd love a Noob starting zone option where you start on Mad Max world and you have to escape it. It would properly ground players

 

[Cosmo]

Some comments on YouTube about the Odyssey trailer:

The comments on Obsidian Ant's video about the trailer are mixed. Here are a few top rated comments of what people think:

The Man On The Mountain
"I just want adventure, mysteries, exploration, breathtaking landscapes... Legs for pew pew, seriously, the market is saturated with that kind of sht that I don't give a single fk. I am not against combat, but with a purpose. Not more battle arenas please."

Harry Underhill
"Got to be honest, Alpha or no Alpha, as an FPS this all looks a bit generic, flat and uninspiring. If it was stand alone game the FPS element looks like one of those "made with Unity" games on Steam that doesn't get enough user reviews to give it either a positive or negative rating."

BRUXXUS
"The running animation looks a little.... weird? I’ve been pretty impressed with the character animation until this. Most people don’t run while keeping both knees bent the whole time, which is why it looks odd.
That said, I see what they’re going for and think it could be fun. The enemy AI is very concerning. That’s a deep, fundamental system that studios spend a ton of time and resources on. This is not something that they can fix in a couple weeks."

Cmdr Tiger King
"🗹 No footage of atmospheric entrance
🗹 Guards deaf and blind
🗹 Nonexistant AI
🗹 Making sure to cut exit/entree of ship
Loved it <3"

Rhonda Fizzleflint
"I understand why Ant is cautious when showing and commenting Alpha-builds and why he says things like "it's an Alpha and we might see improvements". But given FDev's track record, I am quite sure, this Alpha is exactly what will be delivered to us."

Chris Hexx
"In today's market of fps shooters this would never stand out on it's own, at least in the state I watched in the trailer.
Really hope they weren't exaggerating the improvements made. I'd take 3 years of handcrafting the Elite universe rather than a generic FPS module."

J S
"I doubt you'll see much improvement to the AI....and suspect years from now it will be one of the complaints common on the forums and threads. Its a very hard thing to get working even for devs in games that specialize in it and I highly doubt Frontier has the knowhow nor the desire = $$ to invest in this. Missions will get boring very very quick, as they will be the same over and over with no story or reason to do them in the first place. They will release this and keep it at bare minimum to make some sales/profit but that's it. Hope they prove me wrong....but I highly doubt it so expect dumb AI and expect to quickly get bored of the same cookie cutter missions and you'll not be disappointed."

Raijin Gaming
"This looks incredibly rough as far as the AI design goes. These are all the same expected traits from a developer doing ground styled combat for the first time. This harkens back to PS1 era AI coding and is evident that there isn't enough experience in the team to figure out advanced routines for them to utilize and you can fully expect this not to change by the time this launches. AI would be one of the first things tackled in design, not later, so don't expect this to work anything like modern shooters. That said, there are plenty of current day games that feature similarly simplistic AI and still have enough success on their own. Warframe is one of the, where AI enemies do routinely just stand out in the open, and if they do decide to use cover, it isn't always good cover that actually protects them. Just the same, their AI sometimes bugs out and has enemies hide behind cover and never do anything more, even if the player walks right up to them and stares them in the face. What a game with simple design for these mechanics would need to do instead is offset the poor AI with LOTS of enemies. Waves, respawns, that sort of thing. Make it more about numbers than tactics, because this dev team just isn't that cutting edge for that. It'll be a little funky to get used to, if you're a modern gamer, but it can still work."

Haunted
"Finally! Space legs! This looks awesome, looks like a completely different game, very excited to hop in and explore on foot. Seeing the chieftain and goliath fly over the players head really gives a different scale of the game too!"

 

[Danieros]

The planet for this playthrough has a 0.03 atmosphere, which makes it the highest atmo planet we've seen so far in the trailers. Since we haven't gotten a Q&A on the exact amount for the tenuous atmosphere cutoff point, this is the highest we know of (previous was 0.02).

 

[CaptainKrisu]

Boring gunplay, UI change is way too big coming from orange ship holograms, bunch of obvious cuts to hide out all the disappointing issues.. Dead on arrival

 

[Dahill]

I was happy to see one thing above all else in the preview a d I hope it stays or I will lose my mind ...
Anti-collision light on your ship...for the love of all things aviation related at all.... thank you.
Also I saw a side by side of the planet currently and in the expansion. The improvement in visuals is enough for me FPS or not

 

[BatXDude]

I'm looking forward to depressurizing buildings with people in them*

*for science, obviously

I doubt this is a feature. The alpha looks like its struggling

 

[Jibroni Gibironi]

I doubt this is a feature. The alpha looks like its struggling

Yeah, its not looking all that great really. That gameplay reveal they showed recently was about as underwhelming as anything else they've shown so far. And correct me if I'm wrong, but at this point in the games development, we should be talking BETA, not Alpha or pre-alpha.

 

[Flare Star]

so "infiltrating" and empty, absolutely lifeless settlement, with watch drones flying over your head apparently oblivious of your presence, then using an assortment of overdesigned and pointless gimmicks to solve the puzzle of the day, then walk out through a braindead collection of zombi bullet sponges ... that's it? not even in a premade demo movie it gets anywhere near exciting ...

i mean, as a hardcore fan i'll be ok with the new planets (they do look nice), but as a fps this is so pathetic that now i'm even concerned that the franchise survives at all if they dare to release this crap. it's going to be a real arxestorm. frontier you are still in time to call this off.

Agree, 100%. What hurts me the most is that pile of zombie-like NPCs.

 

[JosiahD]

Agree, 100%. What hurts me the most is that pile of zombie-like NPCs.

Which were low level NPCs if you'd noticed (not much different to taking on harmless NPCs in ships), and the Devs stated in the livestream that they scale with mission difficulty.

 

[JosiahD]

Yeah, its not looking all that great really. That gameplay reveal they showed recently was about as underwhelming as anything else they've shown so far. And correct me if I'm wrong, but at this point in the games development, we should be talking BETA, not Alpha or pre-alpha.

And the Devs clearly stated in the livestream they were playing on a previous pre-alpha build to the one currently being worked on (if I recall there was mention of various iterations of builds). What we get on 29 Mar will be a more advanced state, albeit still with work to be done (maybe a LOT of work), being alpha. Why should we be talking beta at this point? I hardly think that the typical development cycle or timeline is locked in stone - it is up to FDEV and no-one else whether they want to consider what we test is an alpha. When the game initially released we even had a gamma phase before release. For all we know, given the time left before release, we may not even see a beta, but perhaps go from an advanced alpha state (assuming the alpha will still be phased as originally proposed) to release. Just depends on what needs to be fixed (or can be fixed within the remaining timeframe before release). And it's not like we'll suddenly see improvements cease on release. But of course, the naysayers will always focus on the negatives.

Don't get me wrong, the gameplay showed there's still a lot to be worked on, but being a pre-alpha version it was always going to be rough in places. And clearly the CM team were hamming it up in terms of the comms, unnecessary attempts at stealth when entering the base etc, for effect. Whether it was underwhelming is subjective, and based on what you were expecting. If you were expecting Battlefield, COD, Division 2 or something akin to these, more fool you - this was never going to be on par with first rate FPS or 3rd person shooters. On the other hand, if one's expectations are tempered with the knowledge that this merely adds a new dimension in terms of gameplay, on a game focused on ship gameplay and mechanics, then it becomes a tad more promising. While I would love it to be a Div 2 cover-based gameplay, I'm not particularly disappointed that it's not. And I'm even more stoked there doesn't appear to be, thus far, signs of stupid invisibility and crowd control mechanics....

Not everyone is going to, nor needs to, agree with FDEV's implementation of on-foot gameplay, but that's really no different to the Elite: Dangerous we have now - it's not to everyone's taste. If one doesn't like what FDEV are doing, it's a pretty simple solution - don't buy it or play it.

 

[JosiahD]

I'm curious why he just took down the guards Sheilds then moved on to the next target. I assume it has something to do with the guy spazzing out on the stairs. I've noticed all their gameplay videos have conveniently avoided death animations...

Or an attempt to avoid the bounty that results from murder. No doubt, racking up those bounties would eat into the payment for the mission.