With Frontier now working on fixing Odyssey I find myself wondering if it will continue Frontier's trend of getting it to work and not evolving the idea into a more flush out system within Elite. We have already seen this with Fleet Carriers, Multi-Crew, Powerplay, the bounty system, etc. It's like they come up with an idea on paper, do the bare minimum to get it to work and never revisit the feature to evolve it after launch. Odyssey should have not been in development yet. Instead, they should have taken a year to revamp some of these current gameplay mechanics and evolved them into more flush out systems. What's the point of having entries in a database when you can't visually see the impacts in the game. Odyssey will be the same... they will get it to a playable state and then they will move on to something else. The following are just some of the gameplay elements I want to see more fleshed out with Odyssey:
Open, Private and Solo
Elite may be set in one galaxy but really it's 9. Why the hell isn't crossplay been added, it should have been added when you were working on beyond. There should also be a serious discussion about scrapping private and solo modes. The game is supposed to be an MMO you don't give the player base a choice. I want to feel some sense of danger when I leave the landing pad. Instead, I feel too safe for a game that has dangerous in the title. If you're afraid of getting gank, then work on your skills to become a better pilot and hold your own. You should be constantly looking over your shoulder every time you fly.
Oh and to the content streamers who think that think taking away private and solo will ruin their ability to create new content... You have a whole galaxy to make your video content in.
Fleet Carriers
With the number of fleet carriers sitting in the bubble, it is a pain to navigate in some systems. They should have been tied to squadrons only with a percentage of each member contributing to the buying and upkeep. Each squadron member owns a % and there is a buy-in cost to join that squadron then each week the squad works towards getting the funds to pay off a certain amount until they pay it off and officially own it. Frontier even came out and said not everyone needs to buy a fleet carrier so why isn't it just tied to squadrons? Also, why can't I be a pirate and rob, damage or even blow up other players fleet carriers? It would give cmdrs more incentive to do something with them instead of leaving them sitting in a system parking lot...
Ship Interiors
Why do you think we want ship interiors??? For me, it's so I can board and steal other players ships. I've watched so many Star Citizen videos of people stealing other peoples ships and it looks like the best fun ever. Why can't we do that? It's a space sim... it would happen in the real world. Star Citizen is still in Alpha but they still produce a better make your own adventure gameplay loop. Imagen rolling in with a sidewinder and rolling out with a corvette would be awesome. Especially in a cross-play open world.
You could even throw in a new module that pins the location to the original owner so they could retake the ship. If the pirate takes a ship to a non-anarchy system the ship is immediately seized and the pirates cmdrs are arrested. You might think boarding a ship on foot is a waste of time but when you are getting shot at the rush of getting to the cockpit and getting the hell out of there is a lot better than what you have now.
On Foot
Honestly, if I can't rob other players is it really a space sim? I honestly don't know what I want on foot because the stuff I have seen isn't that great. I'm not excited to step on a planet because the Armstrong moment isn't there. If I saw another player I can't shoot them and steal their weapons... though you could ID tag every single piece of equipment/weapons and allow me to go to an independent system to have the tags switch over to me so I can sell or use their equipment/weapons. Also can't board another players ship and steal it.
There are no interesting living creatures in a universe that seems pretty dead. Not every creature needs to breathe oxygen. It would also give the explorers something to catalogue and provide a new gameplay loop where other cmdr could hunt or capture them for other players/NPCS.
CMDR Bounties and the Bounty System
Why can't we put bounties on other CMDR Heads? It would be a fun little system in a fully open galaxy. It would give other CMDRS more of an incentive to hunt other CMDRS heads and hopefully make them better pilots. All bounties should be prepaid with a million-dollar limit on the specific cmdr head and be lodge at the nearest station. Grand theft auto does it so well and it works. It's a space sim and your crime and punishment system does not work. Make it human-based.
It's also really hard to track a CMDR with a bounty on his head. You should make it that if he is spotted by another player or an NPC his location is imminently updated on the bounty board which can be accessed in real-time in the ship of the bounty hunter. Make it a class 1 module.
Player based crimes like murder should leave your wanted status for life until you are captured or kill by another human player. When you wake up on a prison ship you are given the choice of running out your sentence in real-time, using a prison ship mining vessel to mine for materials with the value of the material knocking off a certain amount of time and finally transporting prisons in a prison transport ship to a prison colony on the surface while trying to outrun enemy ships that will try to highjack and rescue high valued targets on board. You could also allow other players to help the CMDR escape adding a bounty not only to the current prisoner himself but to the Cmdr who busted him out of the system.
VR
To be honest I think frontier would have had this in development from the start. The reason why I think it got dropped is that they couldn't get it to work. The game is clearly not optimised which sucks and you are ticking off the players who have been playing it on PC a lot longer than me. They deserve VR on foot, a good chunk of them have been playing since the beginning and telling them it's not happening because your focus on the storm that will be the console release is not fair to them.
Cross-Play/Platform
I want to see is Cross-Play/Platform. I want to be able to play with players on PC/XBOX/PS. A few PS4 players in my squadron are looking to play with others on PC but have no luck because our player base squadron plays mostly ps4. There also should be a rework of the way instancing works to get more players into a single active instance, instead of spreading them across multiple instances.
The other thing is I want to be able to use my account login on other platforms like with most MMO's. I don't want to restart my journey because I'm on another system. Yes I know I can get frontier to do a one-way transfer but in all seriousness that doesn't work. No one in their right mind wants to sink another million hours into another account. I started one on XBOX and within a day I was like what... why can't I log with my PS4 ACCOUNT all the login/account data would most likely be on frontier's servers. FFXIV: A Realm Reborn does it... why can't Elite.
Power Play
This is a war between two factions. There are a billion things you could do for example have conflict zones spawn closer to the main star and with each victory have the winner get a small amount of percentage of the map. Slowly turning the map from red to green as you fight your way further into the system. Have conflict zones within starports where the player has to not only take out enemy fighters and cmdrs but also breach the starport defences as well before they are allowed to dock and taking the station on foot. The players defending the station could defend the station from incursion but also help high valued targets escape on foot and then in a ship.
Also, why can't I assassinate targets like AISLING DUVAL, ARCHON DELAINE, ARISSA LAVIGNY-DUVAL, DENTON PATREUS, EDMUND MAHON, FELICIA WINTERS, LI YONG-RUI, PRANAV ANTAL, YURI GROM, ZACHARY HUDSON, ZEMINA TORVAL? You could make this assassination mission near impossible. Giving player based squadrons within the superpower having to coordinate multiple attacks on multiple fronts to get the job done. When they are taken out they could be replaced by a successor or if there is no one the power that took them out takes control and the powerplay modular is lost forever. It would also require the defeated power to protect their power player at all times in case of an assassination attempt.
