Turn Elite Dangerous into a complete game (what to do after Odyssey)

[AnimatedDust]

In contrast, FD already is taking a huge risk by Odyssey itself. It adds gameplay very different to the games current focus.

Actually, the giant leap for the game (in the right direction I might add) was Horizons with the ability to land on planets and SRV combat.
I was under the impression that people liked what Horizons had to offer and Odyssey is the much awaited sequel to it. You can't expect Odyssey to be as good as standalone fully fledged futuristic FPS games out there (Planetside 2 comes to mind), people will nevertheless play it and accept it as it is.

 

[Sylow]

Actually, the giant leap for the game (in the right direction I might add) was Horizons with the ability to land on planets and SRV combat.
I was under the impression that people liked what Horizons had to offer and Odyssey is the much awaited sequel to it. You can't expect Odyssey to be as good as standalone fully fledged futuristic FPS games out there (Planetside 2 comes to mind), people will nevertheless play it and accept it as it is.

After the first short enthusiasm, Horizon actually generally gets lukewarm reception at best. Yes, there is Buckball racing, but list anything else on planets which people are really happy and enthusiastic about. People rarely do base assaults and even when they were new, players quickly rather found ways to cheese them than to actually do them. And after that, not much really spectacular ground content was introduced or found. Merely guardian ruins are also a nice oddity, but usually players just spend one gaming sessions there and then are done for it.

I hope that Odyssey turns out better. My optimism is limited, but hey, perhaps we are lucky. At any rate, i think that Odyssey all by itself is quite a risk FD is taking. They don't need to stack up the odds further against them by changing other well established mechanics.

Mind you, i would welcome new things. Even if they would be as simple as giving chained missions some flavour text and thus some story, instead of being as barebone as they are now. Unlike some others, i would also welcome a massive rework of engineering blueprints and effects, taking away plenty of their power, with my logic being that before engineers a lot more different ships and loadouts were viable, while now, with the current state of engineering, we have some so vastly superior loadout options, possible only on a limited number of ships, that a lot of former options now merely are fooling around.

So no, i don't generally oppose change. But i think the direction given in this thread is not the right one. I'd want to reinforce (and in some aspect resurrect) the games strength, instead of giving them up in the hopes of being able to copy some other games strong points.

 

[RamirezKurita]

Actually, the giant leap for the game (in the right direction I might add) was Horizons with the ability to land on planets and SRV combat.
I was under the impression that people liked what Horizons had to offer and Odyssey is the much awaited sequel to it. You can't expect Odyssey to be as good as standalone fully fledged futuristic FPS games out there (Planetside 2 comes to mind), people will nevertheless play it and accept it as it is.

To be honest, the planetside stuff added in Horizons is the weakest part of that expansion for me. I have far more interaction with and get more mileage out of NPC crew than I do the planetside stuff from Horizons, despite it probably taking a tiny fraction of the development resources. The SRV stuff I only every bother with for engineering materials and it might as well not exist the rest of the time, while most of the rest of Horizons I interact with or have to consider in almost everything I do in the game.

Expanding a game is one thing, but it is not generally a good strategy to spend a large amount of time and effort on integrating what's essentially a spinoff game. I personally find that resources are better used to improve the game we have and build on existing foundations, rather than building the foundations to a neighbouring structure and claiming it's part of the same project. There's a good reason why minigames tend to only be small in scale compared to the main game.

 

[askavir]

Actually, the giant leap for the game (in the right direction I might add) was Horizons with the ability to land on planets and SRV combat.
I was under the impression that people liked what Horizons had to offer and Odyssey is the much awaited sequel to it. You can't expect Odyssey to be as good as standalone fully fledged futuristic FPS games out there (Planetside 2 comes to mind), people will nevertheless play it and accept it as it is.

To me Horizons and planets were a gigantic leap forwards in ED. I couldn't even imagine the game anymore without planets, and if it the game still had just space-only stuff I would probably already put the game in the drawer long ago.

Space exploration is all about the quest for finding awesome planets and awesome things in planets. The mysterious abandoned bases, the guardian ruins, the thargoid sites, the geo/bio sites, the planetary ports, driving the SRV on these sites, this kind of stuff is where the game truly shines IMO and I hope this gets expanded more and more, with more things to find and do in planets, mnore reasons to stick around a planet for long, with intra-planet activities like intra-planet trading, surface mining, search and rescue, salvaging/scavenging, etc. Flying over planet surfaces is also several orders of magnitude more satisfying than flying in the nothingness of space.

Spoiler

I'm not that fussed about combat, but I'll gladly take a nice air to ground bombardment mission against a surface installation with AA artillery and defending NPC fighters, dropping boots to the ground to finish off the assault, or even just dogfighting other ships over terrain at low altitude any day over just dogfighting in the boringness of the void.

Additionally I'm very looking forward to the long-missing injection of life that Odyssey will bring to the the galaxy in the form of station interiors, settlements, planetary poret interiors, npcs, mission givers, stores, faces, voices, a warm home-feeling place to return to after a long flight of months long expedition.