Odyssey is the future

[CMDR Voron]

It seems really clear to me that the future of Elite, if it has one, is in Odyssey co-op play. I am hoping that the Vanguard update will improve and build upon what is already there in this regard.

I think this is a make or break issue for this game staying profitable.

The other day I was doing a settlement raid and killing everyone when I noticed one of the settlers moving around extra erratically - then he jumped - can NPCs jump? - finally I saw the CMDR in his name. Killing a CMDR was much harder than an NPC.

It was a unique, cool interaction. Who was he, why was he here, why did he try to stop me? Can we work together? Well… we never figured that out because he had a starter pistol and the only social interaction supported by Elite is murder. So, like two freshly hatched queen bees, we just immediately tried to murder one another.

The most fun I’ve had in Elite has been playing with a family member and doing Odyssey missions. Because you can just jump into your friends ship and do a coop missions, it greatly reduces the amount of time wasted trying to synch up play.

If FDev can start organically creating more situations like that and get them on YouTube, I think they’re sitting on a gold mine. To be clear I do not mean videos like Neebs Gaming or the like, where they play empty games and fabricate situations that would never occur.

In addition to this, the Odyssey missions and combat have fundamentally good utility and better power scaling, with a low ceiling. So if I convince one of my friends to play with me, he can just hop in, start scanning NPCs or popping locks. Even if he wants to do combat, his weapons still work well enough, it’s just more difficult. He doesn’t need to go grind for 500 hours just to step into the arena, unlike ship play, where you essentially never find power parity.

For these reasons, the best use of Odyssey gameplay is to act as the starting area for players who have not yet acquired their own capital and assets. Odyssey should not be separate from the main game, it should be the starting point.

I really hope FDev realizes this and starts putting more elbow grease in to integrate Odyssey content.

 

[PilotB]

You nailed it. The best use of Odyssey gameplay is to get enough cash to buy a nice medium and then never touch it again. Which is why it's the new tutorial and once you're done you'll have credits for a cobra and never need to touch it ever again unless you actually want to.

It's clunky and tacked on the side. You might want to take some g1 weapons out for a spin before you say they work well enough. Though the weapon design is setup to play with a friend. It'll feel way better when one guy takes laser and 1 takes kinetic and you're just double teaming dudes on coms than if you're solo weapon swapping left and right. You can bypass the engineering by flying around the bubble randomly until RNG graces you with the items once you have some credits to skip to a more functional g3. The engineering unlock is a huge RNG fest, the progression and gunplay are both sub optimal.

If you started playing with a friend you could just as easily just hop into a big ship give them a turret to go get them some side credits before you both zoom around in stock vultures visiting high grades and smuggling landmines. The ship gameplay is more refined and as an experienced player you can have them in a ship or multicrew in moments and a tiny amount of planning ahead with or without touching the odyssey content. Engineering isn't required at all for many ships and gameplay loops so you can slowly work up to it.

There's more than a little elbow grease required redeem on foot content.

 

[Jinx Chrome]

You nailed it. The best use of Odyssey gameplay is to get enough cash to buy a nice medium and then never touch it again. Which is why it's the new tutorial and once you're done you'll have credits for a cobra and never need to touch it ever again unless you actually want to.

I disagree with your statement. Without Odyssey there would not be walkable concourses, planets with tenuous atmospheres, (more) lifeforms, Spire sites, settlements etc.
Odyssey is not ground combat! If you think differently, switching to the non-Oddy version shows the massive difference.

 

[PilotB]

I disagree with your statement. Without Odyssey there would not be walkable concourses, planets with tenuous atmospheres, (more) lifeforms, Spire sites, settlements etc.
Odyssey is not ground combat! If you think differently, switching to the non-Oddy version shows the massive difference.

I'd be very happy if walkable conrources were removed they're an utter waste of time. We could have had atmospheric shaders and lifeforms as horizons content and had more interesting planets. Settlements are part of the on foot loop and I've given up completely on it they've no value to me without a complete rework of on food mechanics from crime to combat.

There's more stuff than just on foot content in Odyssey but I and many people consider when people say Odyssey they're talking about on foot content and you could cut it all today and I'd not miss any of it except maybe the lazy credits from plants and that could and should have been scannable from ships but they had to force walking.

 

[Jinx Chrome]

I'd be very happy if walkable conrources were removed they're an utter waste of time.

Some players (including me) see it differently. You don't have to go on concourses.

We could have had atmospheric shaders and lifeforms as horizons content and had more interesting planets. Settlements are part of the on foot loop and I've given up completely on it they've no value to me without a complete rework of on food mechanics from crime to combat.

I like them. And they are more than 'crime and combat' to me.

There's more stuff than just on foot content in Odyssey but I and many people consider when people say Odyssey they're talking about on foot content and you could cut it all today and I'd not miss any of it except maybe the lazy credits from plants and that could and should have been scannable from ships but they had to force walking.

Then you can switch to the base game - all Odyssey content gone. You have to admit that there are players who actually have fun with exobio, ground combat, settlement gameplay and just enjoy standing on a concourse, watching the traffic in a space port. I don't demand to remove parts of ED just because I don't play them.
Variety of game play is key for a good experience.

 

[londonx]

It seems really clear to me that the future of Elite, if it has one, is in Odyssey co-op play. I am hoping that the Vanguard update will improve and build upon what is already there in this regard.

I think this is a make or break issue for this game staying profitable.

The other day I was doing a settlement raid and killing everyone when I noticed one of the settlers moving around extra erratically - then he jumped - can NPCs jump? - finally I saw the CMDR in his name. Killing a CMDR was much harder than an NPC.

It was a unique, cool interaction. Who was he, why was he here, why did he try to stop me? Can we work together? Well… we never figured that out because he had a starter pistol and the only social interaction supported by Elite is murder. So, like two freshly hatched queen bees, we just immediately tried to murder one another.

The most fun I’ve had in Elite has been playing with a family member and doing Odyssey missions. Because you can just jump into your friends ship and do a coop missions, it greatly reduces the amount of time wasted trying to synch up play.

If FDev can start organically creating more situations like that and get them on YouTube, I think they’re sitting on a gold mine. To be clear I do not mean videos like Neebs Gaming or the like, where they play empty games and fabricate situations that would never occur.

In addition to this, the Odyssey missions and combat have fundamentally good utility and better power scaling, with a low ceiling. So if I convince one of my friends to play with me, he can just hop in, start scanning NPCs or popping locks. Even if he wants to do combat, his weapons still work well enough, it’s just more difficult. He doesn’t need to go grind for 500 hours just to step into the arena, unlike ship play, where you essentially never find power parity.

For these reasons, the best use of Odyssey gameplay is to act as the starting area for players who have not yet acquired their own capital and assets. Odyssey should not be separate from the main game, it should be the starting point.

I really hope FDev realizes this and starts putting more elbow grease in to integrate Odyssey content.

When I was playing the Alpha, in the more confined game world, I was often in a one-on-one with another player trying to power down a Settlement while I was trying to Power it up. I am hoping Vanguards and future updates are belated steps into realising that glimpse into some fun emergent gameplay (I am speculating here that PowerPlay2.0 will eventually dynamically drive concentrations of player activity like in the Alpha and Thargoid War! I would imagine therefore that Odyssey will be merged into the basegame at some point.

 

[Inscydeus]

I would imagine therefore that Odyssey will be merged into the basegame at some point.

It would be nice, but it can't be due to the difference in age ratings.

 

[Riks]

Cant they just up the age rating at this point? It's lame that it holds back more interesting gameplay choices but then again, has FDev talked about Odyssey content ideas since the release? (Though it is technically new content, the powerplay download data isn't exactly new mechanics for on-foot combat.)

 

[Jinx Chrome]

Cant they just up the age rating at this point? It's lame that it holds back more interesting gameplay choices but then again, has FDev talked about Odyssey content ideas since the release? (Though it is technically new content, the powerplay download data isn't exactly new mechanics for on-foot combat.)

I wish they could but I think this isn't possible from a legal point of view. Not to speak about the outcry (from players way above that age )

Personally, I do not understand the criteria of those rating systems at all. The rating system looks very arbitrary to me, i.e. killing thousands of innocent human traders or millions of aliens which you can't see because they are sitting in space ships: rating 12, but killing one wanted baddie on foot: rating 16. Smuggling and trading weapons, slaves and narcotics, being part of antidemocratic factions etc.: Rating 12. Utterly ridiculous.

I'd even like to see a rated 18 mode where we and FDev don't have to worry about such rules any more and the content could be a bit more adult-oriented. Mass Effect and Dragon Age did that very well.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Personally, I do not understand the criteria of those rating systems at all. The rating system looks very arbitrary to me

Absolutely. If anything it's worse than arbitrary, because the more you sanitise atrocities and pretend that they were absolutely fine, the lower the age rating gets.

Hence the situation where "treating slaves as just another type of cargo" - in the proper 17th century slave trader mindset - is no problem at all for Elite Dangerous' 7 rating, but Imperial surface bases must all be staffed by free citizens because showing even the more regulated Imperial Slavery in person would require an 18 rating...

I wish they could but I think this isn't possible from a legal point of view.

I think they could probably legally get away with (and not even have much customer outcry) this way:
- base game only: stays PEGI-7, but is now restricted to Legacy servers only, no longer sold separately on PC
- Odyssey: stays PEGI-16, is changed to be a free expansion for existing players (but they do have to click the "I am 16" button) or the new base game license, runs on Live servers
- <Next>: also PEGI-16, takes Odyssey's place as the paid expansion, requires Odyssey (and comes with it for existing customers if you hadn't already bought/obtained it for free)

Existing non-Odyssey players would get booted back to Legacy but wouldn't have to pay to fix that, could still play a version of the game, but Live would still only have two options of basic+expansion (and a single age rating)


Another option which might fit with likely expansion timescales without having the issues around kicking people back to Legacy:
- stop selling the base game
- as above, make Odyssey the new base game (and a free "I am 16" upgrade for existing customers)
- wait 9 years for everyone who hypothetically bought the base game at age 7 to now be 16
- remove the old base game entirely and force-upgrade everyone still on it to Odyssey (no-one notices)

 

[Morbad]

Personally, I do not understand the criteria of those rating systems at all. The rating system looks very arbitrary to me, i.e. killing thousands of innocent human traders or millions of aliens which you can't see because they are sitting in space ships: rating 12, but killing one wanted baddie on foot: rating 16. Smuggling and trading weapons, slaves and narcotics, being part of antidemocratic factions etc.: Rating 12. Utterly ridiculous.

It's a reflection of obtuse cultural mores that simultaneously celebrate impersonal, systemic, injustices while engaging in performative hyperbolic condemnation of individual ones.

People have been commenting on the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of this for centuries, but the one common thread of censors throughout the ages is that they have no sense of much of anything, let alone their own irony.