Tons of missed opportunity for meaningful missions.

[smbell]

It's a shame that more wasn't done with the missions and the progression of a settlement during the missions.

Take the "Restore" missions for example. That's a really cool gameplay mechanic, but it should have been a part of something greater for mission progression in order to give the missions a purpose...

For instance, once you restore the power, it should be fully restored for any subsequent missions. Then the missions can be something like restore the warehouse so weapons production can begin. Restore the communications array so it can communicate with other settlements etc. All these lead up to a fully functional actual live settlement that evolves. You get to see the progression of the settlement when you return.

During this whole time, scavengers and the enemy factions will be popping in making the missions challenging and possibly take over the settlement or cut the power again. This gives repeating the mission a reason to exist, not just a grind fest of restore the power over and over and over again.

Just like the rest of the space gameplay. There is so much opportunity there, yet nothing done with it. I really hope the missions can take on a life and purpose instead of just repeating the same 4 types over and over again. There was a huge missed opportunity to make them part of a greater string of events.

 

[lefty1117]

For a taste of what it could look like, do the new tutorial mission. Probably the best overall mission(s) in Odyssey

 

[devilronin]

For a taste of what it could look like, do the new tutorial mission. Probably the best overall mission(s) in Odyssey

looked like a standard restore mission to me, i ended tut while in the ship, were there more after that?

 

[Murfelton]

It's a shame that more wasn't done with the missions and the progression of a settlement during the missions.

Take the "Restore" missions for example. That's a really cool gameplay mechanic, but it should have been a part of something greater for mission progression in order to give the missions a purpose...

For instance, once you restore the power, it should be fully restored for any subsequent missions. Then the missions can be something like restore the warehouse so weapons production can begin. Restore the communications array so it can communicate with other settlements etc. All these lead up to a fully functional actual live settlement that evolves. You get to see the progression of the settlement when you return.

During this whole time, scavengers and the enemy factions will be popping in making the missions challenging and possibly take over the settlement or cut the power again. This gives repeating the mission a reason to exist, not just a grind fest of restore the power over and over and over again.

Just like the rest of the space gameplay. There is so much opportunity there, yet nothing done with it. I really hope the missions can take on a life and purpose instead of just repeating the same 4 types over and over again. There was a huge missed opportunity to make them part of a greater string of events.

For a single player game, they could create an arc like this. However, in multiplayer, you could have people restoring/removing power to settlements all the time, and in fact, you have multiple people running the same mission at the same time. The settlement states are tied to the BGS in some fashion (that I don’t understand).

My guess is that if they stored the state of the settlement in a fashion that made sense in the real world, there wouldn’t be a lot of missions available, and then things could get out of sync. E.g., you take a mission that depends upon power being up, but somebody else powers down the settlement before you arrive. You might fail without having a chance, which won’t make players happy.

 

[FurryFailure]

I've been saying it for a long time and will continue to reiterate it - Elite Dangerous needs scripted dynamic missions that are hand-crafted and added to a list of generations, where you work with AI and follow set goals, paper trails, and hunt bad-guys, while it would glorify the repetitiveness of Elite's missions it adds flavour, and there is room for a story mission and side missions at key locations or at key milestones (Take Permits and Rank-ups for example, or Engineers). Easier said than done as all things are.

To me it seems FDev rely too heavily on procedural generation and prefer a copy-paste "Fetch Quest" method, in short, you get poorly placed repetitive missions for the same old scrap of rewards. Find Man, Interdict, Kill, repeat, no flavour, no charm.

Odyssey provides a very large potential for such missions that are more hands-on than kill man, scan cube, leave, it has the potential for each mission to be somewhat scripted instead of a random box being placed, or scanning a datalink at a poorly generated crash site, among other activities such as exploring caves to mine, rescue, or salvage (Take Star Citizen for example).

Take what I said with a grain of salt and passion. I love Elite and have extremely low expectations for it, and zero hope for it, but I thoroughly enjoy playing it all the same from time to time.
I haven't fully experienced Odyssey as I suffer from performance issues and crashes, most of what I understand comes from forums and my mate streaming it to me.