Odyssey rehab 1.0

[babelfisch]

I would add, disable the sprint limitation while in the hanger. Running the distance from the blue circle of a large ship, like the Cutter, to the hanger entrance is not exactly fun or entertaining. At least let us sprint the whole way!

I need to think about this one.

I agree that we shouldn't needlessly waste time in the hangar.

But wouldn't it make more sense to add a new disembark option?

• disembark to hangar
• disembark to concourse

What about the 'space is big - say no to micro jumps' committee? They would probably argue that hangars are big and therefore important for immersion...

If we could directly disembark to the concourse people would rightfully ask why we even have hangars in the first place. I guess as long as there is no gameplay involved it would be fine if they are optional?

Potential gameplay could be to escape from the authorities after you assassinated someone, but I guess that's just wishful thinking. It would be awesome if station gameplay could be expanded beyond taking missions and trading.

 

[Old Duck]

Your list isn't entirely fair though.

Regarding VR Support, NPC crew and ship legs there is no real difference between Odyssey and Horizons.

There is one HUGE difference - performance. I'm not playing any game in VR that has crap performance, and my rig can just run Horizons in VR with high to ultra settings. No VR means no ship legs (as in, I literally walk around my ship cockpits and bridges in Horizons using VR), and no VR means no real need for my copilot, because the action of looking over to the seat next to me to see my lovely copilot is much more natural in VR than it is on a 2D display.

Now if Odyssey can someday match the performance of Horizons in the same exact scenarios (for example, flying my ship in a resource extraction site) with the same graphics quality (none of this checkerboarding, subsampling, blobby shadows nonsense) that would be a literal game-changer IMO. Until then, Odyssey threatens to take more away from my own personal gameplay than it offers to add.

 

[babelfisch]

There is one HUGE difference - performance. I'm not playing any game in VR that has crap performance, and my rig can just run Horizons in VR with high to ultra settings. No VR means no ship legs (as in, I literally walk around my ship cockpits and bridges in Horizons using VR), and no VR means no real need for my "NPC" crewmate, because the action of looking over to the seat next to me to see my lovely copilot is much more natural in VR than it is on a 2D display.

Now if Odyssey can someday match the performance of Horizons in the same exact scenarios (for example, flying my ship in a resource extraction site) with the same graphics quality (none of this checkerboarding, subsampling, blobby shadows nonsense) that would be a literal game-changer IMO. Until then, Odyssey threatens to take more away from my own personal gameplay than it offers to add.

In that case I am not sure if it's fair to have VR support and performance as two different items on that list.

You could also say that Odyssey removes flying ships, because flying a ship with bad performance is not much fun... I hope you get my point, it's not important anyway.

 

[Badmiker]

Agree with all of this.

The FPS integrates really badly with ship gameplay; not being able to access ship menu from station, and vice versa, is prime example. Why not have more options from the station lift; to outfitting, to cartographics, to trading centre, to 'contacts' offices? Wouldnt have to require any great extensions to gameplay but you could see the engineering/trading happening, for example.

Why dont we have a ship showroom; you can peer throught the windows at some outposts and see a showroom so how cool would it be to wander around a selection of ships?

For local/player factions; having an office where you could go to see the current standing orders would make the game more alive.

Unfortunately Elite is a mess of unrealised potential and Frontier have a history of fire-and-forget-features so, despite how reasonable or sensible these suggestions are, I cant see it happening. Now if there was a 'feature' tracker which engaged the community and suggested good developments...

 

[SergMx]

If I were asked what is more important to me, ship interiors or going into space in a spacesuit, I would always choose the latter.
I would be able to climb into a crashed ship and find something, pick an asteroid, walk around the outpost and weld the hull on my ship.

 

[Old Duck]

You could also say that Odyssey removes flying ships, because flying a ship with bad performance is not much fun...

I would definitely say shout that loud and clear if Odyssey performance is so bad that it prevented me from even flying at a locked 60 FPS ultra settings on my current PC when playing on a monitor rather than VR.

 

[Northpin]

You could also say that Odyssey removes flying ships

Apex does that, indeed.

I need to think about this one.

I agree that we shouldn't needlessly waste time in the hangar.

But wouldn't it make more sense to add a new disembark option?

• disembark to hangar
• disembark to concourse

What about the 'space is big - say no to micro jumps' committee? They would probably argue that hangars are big and therefore important for immersion...

If we could directly disembark to the concourse people would rightfully ask why we even have hangars in the first place. I guess as long as there is no gameplay involved it would be fine if they are optional?

Potential gameplay could be to escape from the authorities after you assassinated someone, but I guess that's just wishful thinking. It would be awesome if station gameplay could be expanded beyond taking missions and trading.

While i do accept that space is big and the supercruise timers make sense and that micro-jumps should be reserved only for carriers, i'm not that sold on running the hangars.
When i was sold on Elite, i was sold on the flying a ship in a 1-on-1 scale Milky Way.
Running the hangar, not so much - heck, even the rebels on Yavin 4 had carts to move around the hangars. Wait, that's another universe, my bad.


So, what would make sense is to allow me to take on-foot missions without having to disembark.
That is to access the station on-foot mission terminal while in my ship on the pad.
They dont really need to add new disembark options.

 

[Old Duck]

Your list isn't entirely fair though.

An important distinction worth reiterating is that you're looking at it from a "I own Odyssey and this is what I think would make it better" perspective, while I'm looking at it from a "I don't own Odyssey, and what changes in Odyssey would make me change my mind about Odyssey" perspective.

The only reason I'm overly concerned about it is that someday I might have Odyssey forced on me, albeit a "light" version. If that update "taketh away" from those things I listed as Horizons features that I enjoy, well that just sucks.. FWIW, the changes you propose (especially performance and visuals) would go a long way to making Odyssey Lite an upgrade rather than a downgrade.

 

[Northpin]

The only reason I'm overly concerned about it is that someday I might have Odyssey forced on me, albeit a "light" version.

I really hope they keep the Horizon client as a legacy client for as long as possible.
Someone said they kept MacOs logins for like 2 years after Mac support was dropped... so there is some hope.

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

That's all for today. I probably missed something important like hooning. I'll gladly add anything to the list as long as it's reasonable. And yes, I decide if it's reasonable or not, this is a thread and not a democracy after all.

So arguably the most criticized feature of Elite Dangerous which we all know is "a mile wide and an inch deep"

Odyssey made that wider and in doing so thinned the gameplay experience out even further. Personally I'm happy with Engineers and the gameplay loops as a way to learn the mechanics of the game because there is a lot to learn but what's missing still is using what you've learned to play, learn, explore, influence in any meaningful way.

To best summarise then "a mile wide and a mile deep" where exploration unlocks knowledge that can be used, Thargoids and Guardians aren't simply random repeated content, things beyond ships can be built and destroyed, players and groups can be hunted in Open mode, long distance travel can be automated, community goals not based on volume/quantity, skill based challenges, a story to unlock, the ability to truly help or harm a faction... basically anything other than credits, modules and new scenery for photo opportunities.

 

[Old Duck]

I really hope they keep the Horizon client as a legacy client for as long as possible.

They almost feel like two different games to me, so even if I do someday buy Odyssey on sale, I would want the option to log into Horizons, unless some MAJOR changes are made to Odyssey between now and then.

If they go this route (keeping Horizons as-is), I hope they at least try to allow ships in space to instance together between the two clients. I get why it won't work down on a planet surface, but space is "equal" in both clients IIRC, so it's at least theoretically possible, is it not?

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

There is one HUGE difference - performance. I'm not playing any game in VR that has crap performance, and my rig can just run Horizons in VR with high to ultra settings. No VR means no ship legs (as in, I literally walk around my ship cockpits and bridges in Horizons using VR), and no VR means no real need for my copilot, because the action of looking over to the seat next to me to see my lovely copilot is much more natural in VR than it is on a 2D display.

Now if Odyssey can someday match the performance of Horizons in the same exact scenarios (for example, flying my ship in a resource extraction site) with the same graphics quality (none of this checkerboarding, subsampling, blobby shadows nonsense) that would be a literal game-changer IMO. Until then, Odyssey threatens to take more away from my own personal gameplay than it offers to add.

Honestly res sites are pretty easy in Odyssey. I have better numbers in Odyssey in ice rings than I did years ago in Horizons. Frontier must have done something between then and now. The asteroids also look different so that's a hint.

 

[Northpin]

If they go this route (keeping Horizons as-is), I hope they at least try to allow ships in space to instance together between the two clients. I get why it won't work down on a planet surface, but space is "equal" in both clients IIRC, so it's at least theoretically possible, is it not?

For space only, yes
But planets are different in Odyssey and i dont know how they can mix those - especially when someone can drop from supercruise to normal space and still reach the planetary surface even if they have to fly some tens of minutes

Maybe they could set the breaking point as the exclusion zone for each planet? But again i dont how how it would work since landable planets have no exclusion zone

How did the base game and horizons used to work back then?

 

[zombieapocalypse]

I need to think about this one.

I agree that we shouldn't needlessly waste time in the hangar.

But wouldn't it make more sense to add a new disembark option?

• disembark to hangar
• disembark to concourse

What about the 'space is big - say no to micro jumps' committee? They would probably argue that hangars are big and therefore important for immersion...

If we could directly disembark to the concourse people would rightfully ask why we even have hangars in the first place. I guess as long as there is no gameplay involved it would be fine if they are optional?

Potential gameplay could be to escape from the authorities after you assassinated someone, but I guess that's just wishful thinking. It would be awesome if station gameplay could be expanded beyond taking missions and trading.

Good points. At the moment, I find the concourse to be little more than a glorified 3D menu. If I could access the same services from my ship, I wouldn't even bother disembarking. The 'immersion' novelty wore off very quickly for me, especially as all the concourses look more or less identical (and are rather bland IMO). Some gameplay would be cool and could lend itself well to smuggling scenarios.

 

[Old Duck]

Honestly res sites are pretty easy in Odyssey. I have better numbers in Odyssey in ice rings than I did years ago in Horizons. Frontier must have done something between then and now. The asteroids also look different so that's a hint.

I wish Frontier would give Odyssey a free fly week like Star Citizen has. Performance in Odyssey is a game of Russian roulette. Some people have no problems with performance on older hardware, while others suffer terrible framerates and graphical downgrades on much newer hardware. I've seen folks in this forum with identical hardware to my own say they get bad performance, so I'm not ready to roll the dice with actual cash just yet.

Disclaimer - anything less than a locked 60 fps (vsynced to my 2D display) is "bad performance" on my PC. I don't need or even want higher (except in VR), but I'm quite bothered by anything lower, especially if it's jittery, stuttering, or lagging.

 

[Old Duck]

For space only, yes

Space is all I need. These days my favorite dish in the Elite Dangerous buffet is wing-based spaceship combat (hence my latest sig), and while there were plenty of people to wing up with during the last bounty hunting CG, it was clear in system chat that the player base was divided between Horizons and Odyssey.

 

[bruce1337]

If I were asked what is more important to me, ship interiors or going into space in a spacesuit, I would always choose the latter.
I would be able to climb into a crashed ship and find something, pick an asteroid, walk around the outpost and weld the hull on my ship.

And how will you be able to 'climb into a crashed ship' without ship interiors?

 

[Fost]

Ring shadows...

 

[GJ51]

Medium

Gutamaya
Saud Kruger

and

Panther Clipper

 

[ebbrell]

Panther Clipper would be a great ship to transport material back and forth from a carrier. T9 holds lots but a ship with more even if slower would certainly help on and off loading large qtys of goods.