New Odyssey on-foot missions are a good step in the right direction: they've got a good amount of variability, most of times they can even be failed if the player is not good enough and they really exploit every way you can interact with new odyssey settlements.
Of course they've got issues too: for example they are completely disconnected from the "flying" side of the game (I understand it's been done to make Apex shuttles enough to complete most of them but... come on, this is a space-sim!
) and they feel just like "jobs" more than little adventures, especially the ones given by contacts (which should be different but they are just a slower way go get the same missions you can get from terminals).
Another big issue with missions is balancement, which affects especially people that do missions for BGS reasons, they will probably stack many simple missions because it's faster and more effective influence-wise than getting one single long, complex and hard mission, which is a damn shame because more complex missions should be much more advantageous to take instead of the very simple ones (which should be how a new player "breaks ice" with the game).
So, let's try to propose some simple aspects that should change to make missions better and the ability of the player more relevant than their stoicity in grinding as many fast and simple missions they can.
1. INFLUENCE REWARD
Right now we usually see how many very easy missions (like data delivery) give up to 3/5 INF and many others just give 1/5 because they have not the "influence award": this is most evident in data delivery missions because with a very small personal investment (usually a few thousand credits) you get the maximum result for your faction.
I think that the "influence reward" should be no more, and influence should be assigned accordingly to the actual difficulty and time spent on a mission. To make things more balanced the maximum of 5/5 feels too low, because the hardest and longest mission will be easily topped by some player doing 6 easy ones.
One way to solve this problem should be to double the regular influence reward from a scale of 1-5 to one of 1-10. This could be very easy to adapt to the current game, considering that you could count the current 5 influence points as 10 by making them "half points". Ability vs stoicity.
2. PERSONAL REWARDS
So: more credits are good, more reputation too, commodities (possibly rare commodities to stock to your carrier) and materials too. They just need to be rebalanced always considering the difficulty of the mission itself and how much time is spent. A delivery mission shouldn't pay that much unless there's the serious issue of the ship itself being attacked, or avoid scans, another good variable could be a bonus to complete the mission in a certain ship for lore reasons (like: hauling stuff in an imperial ship to avoid suspicions imperial space etc). With this in mind we could finally ignore the easy missions, because a difficult one, if completed, would give a significantly bigger reward.
3. VARIABILITY AND GAME INTEGRATION
As I said before, one of the best things in Odyssey is how the new missions really make you interact with new settlements in many different ways, basically all the ways you can. Some of them even have some good variations (like following a murder contract target to their crash site etc) and failure is a real possibility. Too bad in regular Elite Dangerous we have no interactions with installations and megaships (or very limited ones, like scanning their flying plan, which is... almost insulting, to be honest), scenarios are completely ignored etc. I think that making players interact with the whole game using missions would be the best thing you could do, because factions should be interested (for example) in Guardians tech, or sending you to abandoned settlements to know more about thargoids, or trying to get intel from generation ships etc. The game is so wide, missions just explore a minimal part of it. We could have rescue missions, space larceny missions, escort missions... all things the the game already has... in scenarios (but almost nobody do those).
4. MULTI-STEP MISSIONS AND DIFFERENT PATHS TO SUCCESS
Once upon a time we had multi-step missions, then we had chained missions and now it seems we just have tip-offs. This is bad, very bad for game longevity, it seems very strange that when you deliver a package, or take some important piece of information you get no subsequent step to that mission: it makes missions grindy and repetitive, there's no creativity behind that, no meaning to the actions a player does. Another interesting thing would be to have different paths to complete a mission, for example: let's say you've got to deliver some cargo to a certain system, but the mission dealer knows for sure that you will be attacked (possibly by competent NPCs, for a time): you should have the possibility to chose to kill the group that will attack you before you even dock with the cargo, but to gain the location you will have to do something different, like interacting with an installation or a settlement, or you could just take the risk and resist the interdictions of the wing of enemies that want your cargo.
5. COMPETENT NPCS
Ok and now the final and most important part: ok, somebody said once that NPCs should be at our disposal, I'm basically cool with that but NOT with mission NPCs: they should be something else, especially at higher ranked missions. Engineering is not precluded to anybody anymore, if you take a mission I expect to find NPCs to a comparable level to the player: that's the reason why the contact looked for a competent CMDR in the first place, right? The game needs to be harder at higher levels, when it's usually harder in the beginning to become almost banal when you are elite. Elite missions should be the ones that pay best, you can of course take lower level missions and have fun with those, but rewards should be far smaller, both for influence and personal rewards. To have this kind of variability we should probably have even more missions to chose from, possibly well listed to see which ones are the hardest (aka with the best NPCs playing against you).
Ok and that's all, I would love to hear other players' opinions about that.
Of course they've got issues too: for example they are completely disconnected from the "flying" side of the game (I understand it's been done to make Apex shuttles enough to complete most of them but... come on, this is a space-sim!
) and they feel just like "jobs" more than little adventures, especially the ones given by contacts (which should be different but they are just a slower way go get the same missions you can get from terminals).Another big issue with missions is balancement, which affects especially people that do missions for BGS reasons, they will probably stack many simple missions because it's faster and more effective influence-wise than getting one single long, complex and hard mission, which is a damn shame because more complex missions should be much more advantageous to take instead of the very simple ones (which should be how a new player "breaks ice" with the game).
So, let's try to propose some simple aspects that should change to make missions better and the ability of the player more relevant than their stoicity in grinding as many fast and simple missions they can.
1. INFLUENCE REWARD
Right now we usually see how many very easy missions (like data delivery) give up to 3/5 INF and many others just give 1/5 because they have not the "influence award": this is most evident in data delivery missions because with a very small personal investment (usually a few thousand credits) you get the maximum result for your faction.
I think that the "influence reward" should be no more, and influence should be assigned accordingly to the actual difficulty and time spent on a mission. To make things more balanced the maximum of 5/5 feels too low, because the hardest and longest mission will be easily topped by some player doing 6 easy ones.
One way to solve this problem should be to double the regular influence reward from a scale of 1-5 to one of 1-10. This could be very easy to adapt to the current game, considering that you could count the current 5 influence points as 10 by making them "half points". Ability vs stoicity.
2. PERSONAL REWARDS
So: more credits are good, more reputation too, commodities (possibly rare commodities to stock to your carrier) and materials too. They just need to be rebalanced always considering the difficulty of the mission itself and how much time is spent. A delivery mission shouldn't pay that much unless there's the serious issue of the ship itself being attacked, or avoid scans, another good variable could be a bonus to complete the mission in a certain ship for lore reasons (like: hauling stuff in an imperial ship to avoid suspicions imperial space etc). With this in mind we could finally ignore the easy missions, because a difficult one, if completed, would give a significantly bigger reward.
3. VARIABILITY AND GAME INTEGRATION
As I said before, one of the best things in Odyssey is how the new missions really make you interact with new settlements in many different ways, basically all the ways you can. Some of them even have some good variations (like following a murder contract target to their crash site etc) and failure is a real possibility. Too bad in regular Elite Dangerous we have no interactions with installations and megaships (or very limited ones, like scanning their flying plan, which is... almost insulting, to be honest), scenarios are completely ignored etc. I think that making players interact with the whole game using missions would be the best thing you could do, because factions should be interested (for example) in Guardians tech, or sending you to abandoned settlements to know more about thargoids, or trying to get intel from generation ships etc. The game is so wide, missions just explore a minimal part of it. We could have rescue missions, space larceny missions, escort missions... all things the the game already has... in scenarios (but almost nobody do those).
4. MULTI-STEP MISSIONS AND DIFFERENT PATHS TO SUCCESS
Once upon a time we had multi-step missions, then we had chained missions and now it seems we just have tip-offs.
This is bad, very bad for game longevity, it seems very strange that when you deliver a package, or take some important piece of information you get no subsequent step to that mission: it makes missions grindy and repetitive, there's no creativity behind that, no meaning to the actions a player does. Another interesting thing would be to have different paths to complete a mission, for example: let's say you've got to deliver some cargo to a certain system, but the mission dealer knows for sure that you will be attacked (possibly by competent NPCs, for a time): you should have the possibility to chose to kill the group that will attack you before you even dock with the cargo, but to gain the location you will have to do something different, like interacting with an installation or a settlement, or you could just take the risk and resist the interdictions of the wing of enemies that want your cargo.5. COMPETENT NPCS
Ok and now the final and most important part: ok, somebody said once that NPCs should be at our disposal, I'm basically cool with that but NOT with mission NPCs: they should be something else, especially at higher ranked missions. Engineering is not precluded to anybody anymore, if you take a mission I expect to find NPCs to a comparable level to the player: that's the reason why the contact looked for a competent CMDR in the first place, right? The game needs to be harder at higher levels, when it's usually harder in the beginning to become almost banal when you are elite. Elite missions should be the ones that pay best, you can of course take lower level missions and have fun with those, but rewards should be far smaller, both for influence and personal rewards. To have this kind of variability we should probably have even more missions to chose from, possibly well listed to see which ones are the hardest (aka with the best NPCs playing against you).
Ok and that's all, I would love to hear other players' opinions about that.
