Odyssey newcomer observations

[gwynwas]

I've been an ED player for six years but I'm an xbox refugee. I transferred my account some months ago but didn't start playing Odyssey in earnest until two weeks ago. This is what I've experienced:

• I've died more times in two weeks playing Odyssey than I did in six years playing Horizons.
• I've hemorrhaged 40 mil credits from insurance deductibles and failed mission fees.
• I lost my engineered Python twice before I learned to use a small ship. The first loss was because I took a mission to an abandoned settlement and went AFK for a bit and when I came back I had died and so had my Python. Second time I set off an alarm at a settlement for an unknown reason, I had just been looking around, and I ran to my ship only to be blown away as I was taking off.
• First time I did a salvage mission, I was jumped by scavengers who swarmed me and killed me before I got off more than a couple useless shots. The second time I did a salvage mission I stayed in my SRV but lost my shield and was killed. The third time, I returned to my cobra as soon as the scavs appeared and attempted to kill them with my four frag cannons but my landing gear got caught on the wreckage and they killed my shield and destroyed my ship with their small arms fire which surprised me more than a little. The fourth time, I stayed in my SRV and ran them all over, easy peasy.
• Went driving around on an atmospheric planet for 15-20 min but my SRV scanner showed absolutely nothing the entire time. Nothing.

Conclusions drawn:

• Vehicular homicide is the quickest and most reliable method for liquidating pedestrian targets. Additionally, it provides bonus entertainment value.

Unresolved questions:

• Will settlement turrets fire on my SRV if I wantonly run over pedestrians?
• Are there nodes on atmospheric planets?
• Can you silently kill people using the energy transfer tool in overload and under what conditions? (I've been meaning to try, but haven't yet)

 

[Spacerschoice-00]

Can you silently kill people using the energy transfer tool in overload and under what conditions? (I've been meaning to try, but haven't yet)

yes.
be really close, no shields active , actually hit the target.

 

[metatheurgist]

Settlement turrets will fire on you if you are hostile, SRV or foot. It's a harsh reaction to theft, but that's the ED universe for ya.

Whatsa Node?

 

[ferus]

• Can you silently kill people using the energy transfer tool in overload and under what conditions? (I've been meaning to try, but haven't yet)

No and yes. You can kill them silently so that no one in the settlement notices it but you still get an immediate bounty which would be revealed upon a scan.
The immediate bounty doesn't apply in 2 cases - you killed someone at an anarchy settlement or you scanned the person before and that person had a bounty on his head.

BTW, regarding the salvage missions - be aware that the "threat" is just a random and arbitrary number that means absolutely nothing.
I took a threat 1 salvage mission and I was greeted with 2 dropships with 6 scavengers in each. So at a supposedly threat 1 place I had to fight 12 scavengers at once. I can't imagine what a threat 2 or even 3 might be.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Yes - it's quite a different game to the ship side of Elite Dangerous in a lot of respects, and one of the main ones is that it's quite capable of killing you over a relatively small mistake, at least until you've got your equipment upgraded a bit. (The older games in the Elite series were like that in space, too)

Once you have your suit and weapons to G3 (which can be bought in the shops if you're lucky) the pressure's off a bit ... but until then, yes, running them over or carpet bombing the area with dumbfires is generally a lot quicker.

Are there nodes on atmospheric planets?

Yes. You're not the first person to have reported not finding any, though.

For me, if I drop down to most locations on an atmospheric planet, there are a few meteorites/outcrops in normal range, and the average quality is better than in Horizons. Wave scanner works as normal for them.

There might be some suppression of them in effect if you're near other points of interest - volcanism, settlements, salvage POIs, etc - so if you've not already tried you could just go for landing in the middle of nowhere. I filled up my raw material reserves no problem just taking minor detours while doing exobiology searches, though.

 

[ImmerseMe]

There might be some suppression of them in effect if you're near other points of interest - volcanism, settlements, salvage POIs, etc - so if you've not already tried you could just go for landing in the middle of nowhere. I filled up my raw material reserves no problem just taking minor detours while doing exobiology searches, though.

This may be what I ran in to, I had to drive for 30-45 minutes before finding materials but I was circling enormous mountains and fields of geyser things.

 

[Ydiss]

EDO's beginner experience can be extremely harsh. The funny thing is, the difficulty doesn't really change as you progress. You just learn how to mitigate/avoid it. Threat 2 missions can be way, way tougher than threat 5 and frequently are and the actual core difficulty (and rewards) of every mission never increases as you progress (it's just as difficult when you're fresh out of the tutorial mission as it is when you're experienced and fully upgraded and the pay is generally very poor throughout). FD created all of this "balance" early on and, by the looks of things, haven't touched any of it since, except to make scavengers more alert to your presence than when the expansion launched.

My girlfriend started playing recently and is getting used to all this quirk (and I stress that we're having fun playing the game together, despite these issues) but was a bit shocked when one of the first missions she took (crash site, threat 2) threw two waves of scavengers at her (around 9 total targets, 6 at once on the second wave where she faced at least one sharpshooter, so lost shields in a single hit) and the only cover she had was the crashed Eagle (i.e. none, because the scavenger AI flanks and throw grenades, forcing you to move). Quite how anyone expects a new player to survive that, I'll never know. I've been saying this since EDO launched but there haven't been many balance passes for mission difficulty/rewards. This mission was paying something like 150k credits. In my opinion, it shouldn't have more than 2 scavegers tops. And the threat system should actually work as you rank up (and ranking up should actually work as well!) so this mission type might actualy have a threat 5+ version for experienced players, throw a couple waves of scavengers at you and actually pay more than 150k credits.

When you consider that she then took a ship mission to scan a megaship and got over 1m credits with barely any risk, or scanned a couple flowers and got 2m credits, you do need to wonder if EDO could use some balancing, particularly for the new player experience.

Consider that I believe there to be no "threat 1" missions at all (definitely no combat based ones), then threat 2 should be the minimal difficulty combat scenario in EDO. This is frequently an extreme scenario (enough to blow up your Python, no less) for new players and the only content that is at all balanced for G1 equipment is the CZ content (where low and medium CZs are doable in G1 gear, but high is quite tough). Barely any combat mission (or a mission that has the chance of combat) is appropriate for a brand new player but, ultimately, becomes too easy for an experiened player without any scaling up to make things challenging/pay better.

I'd love it if FD did a proper pass of all this. The majority of "what we do" is great but new players are going to be put off very quickly.

 

[Tyres O'Flaherty]

And the surface training tutorial is really hard when you first start. I gave up on it. But, after a few CZ's, I decided to try it again and it was cake. That learning curve again, eh? I remember someone saying it was vertical - with an overhang,

But learn you do.

 

[metatheurgist]

Don't play FPS (last one I did before Ody I'm pretty sure was Alien Breed 3D), did Ody training mission second go, with a controller.