EDO's on-foot game feels pretty good at the basic movement level--which is pretty damn important--but beyond that the omissions and strange design decisions start to pile up:
- The interface still has issues, especially with the wheels, that makes them very difficult to use on the fly. Keybindings help, but a lot of functionality needs to be left off if you don't want to make it cumbersome.
- The direct translation of ship to infantry weapon vs. defense mechanisms does not feel right at all, IMO. It only worked with ship combat because ships have multiple hardpoints and different sorts of resistances forced trade-offs in loadout selection and discouraged over-specialization. This isn't really the case on foot.
- Weapon swapping is annoying and disadvantageous enough that even after one is practiced with it, plasma and rockets still have an extreme edge, at least against NPCs, who are distressingly immobile. The Karma L-6 is the best anti-infantry weapon in the game because it's projectile velocity is competitive with plasma, it has huge damage that infantry doesn't resist well, and a significant AoE that makes near misses almost as effective as direct hits. Most combat occurring within farting distance of an ammo box also degrades it main disadvantage.
- TTKs are absurd, in both directions, mostly because of the extreme levels of scaling Frontier decided to implement. Fully upgraded weapons vs. low grade defenses (or rockets) are the only way to get TTKs that are in-line with other games or what seems intuitively plausible.
- Hit location damage multipliers based on weapon rather than the hit location itself is downright strange. A laser rifle powerful enough to blast craters in concrete or metal does the same damage to infantry whether you shoot them in the toe or the temple...unless you add the head shot damage mod which somehow lets the photons being emitted know they are hitting a person in the noggin, or something?
- Weapons automatically broadcasting simulated audio cues for potential opponents to detect is insane. There is no rational justification for this, it's unabashedly, obtusely, surrealistic. The handwavium with ship mounted weapons is understandable as there tends to be many signatures that passive sensors could pick up on in open space, but this is not the case with infantry combat. If the sensors could accurately identify the weapon being discharged, surely it could also pinpoint the source of that discharge and we wouldn't have NPCs stumble around, not knowing what hit them, as they drop like files.
- Laser recoil...what?
- Encounter/weapon ranges and projectile velocities.
- Utterly arbitrary and heavy handed "class" restrictions enabled by...
- The dumbest inventory system ever.
- Extremely limited duration of independent on-foot activity, due directly to how fast suits drain power. I have an Artemis suit with increased battery capacity and even on world with ideal temp and a full load of batteries, I still feel tethered to a ship, SRV, or energy port. Unfortunately, in PvE conflict, and especially in CZs, the same limitation, where it would actually make sense, is nearly negated by the charge ports everywhere and boxes of batteries laying around.
- Complete and utter lack of environmental interactivity, outside the extremely narrow game loops prefaced, is a terrible immersion killer. I've ranted on this topic at length, but the more I play the more absurd it feels to have a laser cutter that can't spot weld a door, harm infantry, or even be discharged, except upon pre-approved "tear here" demarcations; at least you can bludgeon people with it. More absurd are access panels that can only be accessed with a laser cutter, but are magically immune to being pried open, or being blasted open...as if the huge beam laser slung under my CMDR's FDL is somehow less powerful than that laser cutter. Barrels and crates cannot be moved, doors cannot be destroyed, windows cannot be broken. Rockets won't so much as knock over a shot glass.
- NPC AI, which is probably why half of the above exist. NPCs are blind, deaf, and dumb. They can barely navigate, have negligible situational awareness, and are completely confounded by the existence of the third dimension. The only way they can be made a threat with their current behavior is to have swarms of them and to inflate their TTKs sufficiently so that they can possible overwhelm incautious CMDRs.
I have plenty of other complaints, but this is already ballooning beyond what I'd intended. All of these things taint the whole Odyssey experience, from exploration to CZs. As others have mentioned, too many descrete components, all too disconnected from each other.
Anyway...conflict zones:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9DmJsugd8w
1.49g, high-intensity, G3 artemis with improved jump, G3 rocket with magazine size...all off the shelf. This should not have been easy, but it always is, because the NPC AI is not there yet. It also goes from easy at high-g locations, to downright comical at low g ones as I fly from ammo box to ammo box and rain rockets on robots for ten minutes then leave with 10 million in combat bonds without taking a single hit.
how heavily arena-like it all feels despite locations being on vast landscapes.
Ideally, conflicts would color whole systems, and running off to fight in one would expose one to the potential for danger almost any place at any time. I'd like to see the Frontline dropships come under attack in SC, air superiority actually be a thing, ground units travel overland to reach and hold some tactically meaningful position, etc and so forth.
However, the same problems that have always made this sort of depth difficult for ED--instancing, lack of persistence, poor integration of mechanisms, and AI that couldn't handle it anyway--are even more prescient in Odyssey.
I can grab and use an energy pack using 'circle', but don't know how to use a pack I'm already carrying.
Press seven.
Same for medkit, I guess.
Six.
