Hello, and first of all thank you for taking the trouble to read my post. It's been a year since Odyssey was released, right now there's a sale on Steam and I ask the question that others have asked before: Is it worth the purchase?
As I said, I understand that the question has already been asked in the past. However, I also understand that time may have made things better or worse for Odyssey. Based solely on Steam feedback I shouldn't buy, but a lot of that feedback is already months old.
On the other hand, reading the forum I don't perceive much affection for Odyssey either.
What do you recommend me? I appreciate your time.
There are some who could put disparaging Odyssey on their resume and they are quite vocal, I won't say pay no heed as there are legitimate complaints to be made against Odyssey but it's not hard to discern if you look for it. No-one is saying Odyssey is perfect, but then neither is Elite overall, or any other game you may think of, for that matter. Below is my opinion for your consideration.
What counts for me and possibly others that enjoy the expansion, is that it brings an entirely new perspective to the game and shifts the avatar from just being your ship to being an actual commander. As you may know already Elite is a continuously developed game so what you see is not end of it, so while some seem to not enjoy the onfoot aspects of the game, many due to wanting to keep Elite a pure cockpit simulator, the onfoot missions are what one would mostly expect them to be in a game such as this (ie; not COD etc), thus far I've enjoyed it as I think it's intended to be, an extra layer of content to be experienced within the context of the main game. And there will be additional features added as indicated by Frontier.
The new planetary tech is an excellent upgrade barring, for some, getting rid or fixing some Horizons type anomalies that produced out of whack results, which some have grown fond of, which is fair enough. For me, the upgrade of thin atmospheric landing and just better and more realistic terrain more than makes up for this, but again, I hope that FDev do at some point get with this segment of the community to 'restore' maybe a few of the most visited planets that are missed the most, if possible. It has definitely encouraged me to explore more and getting first footfalls is cool, along with the pokemon type aspect of hunting and scanning biological specimens. It's pretty chill with some excellent vistas to take in. The 'Armstrong moment' isn't quite there yet and I hope Frontier address the blue circles to move towards actually entering a doorway before the fade. I am also one who looks forward to ship interiors, though I'm fully aware that Frontier said that they were not a planned feature of the Odyssey expansion so I'm going to wait for them, like I have already waited to get onfoot activities added to the game since day one too, along with all the other cool planned features we all know and want.
Performance is definitely still a sticking point for some (many?), which is still (quite rightly) getting ongoing updates, though has definitely gotten better. And while my performance on a mid-spec 2020 laptop with 2060/i7/16gb/SSD produces acceptable performance mostly between 60-144fps @ 1080/Ultra, there can be dips at settlements that hover more around the 40fps. However, other people with much better specs than mine report things like 10fps with top tier gpus etc.. It is quite the conundrum actually, with all things considered. But the best thing to say is to try it and see how it is on your system. It seems that the expansion benefits from newer processors, which may explain why I'm doing ok for the most part, so that may weigh in your decision, or if continuously having an onscreen fps counter doesn't spoil one's immersion, but then that immersion is completely ruined if it dips by anything greater than 5 percent, even if it's not perceptible.
The bottom line is that if you like/love Elite, this is definitely a worthy expansion to get, and will be the basis for all future expansions so at some point it will have to be gotten to become compatible with any newer expansion like full atmospheric worlds, ship interiors or whatever else that may be in the pipeline, and with it being on sale right now, it's probably a good bet to get now as any other. So I say get it.
