Damn this frustratingly close to the game I wanted it to be. But unfortunately for me it's just far enough away in too many places to be anything other than a fairly awful experience all round. First post here, so "hi", but I've been a longtime ED player along with a friend, albeit lapsed a bit recently. Been dabbling a few hours a week here and there for a while, but Odyssey had us both hyped to fully dive back in! Got on today for the first time, and it's been a frustrating experience for both of us!
Terrible User Experience #1
The usual Elite Dangerous saga to begin with: I run a Warthog HOTAS setup, so I have a bunch of custom key-binds. Luckily they weren't obliterated by this update (yay), so that's good. But it seems that since I have my key-binds set as "custom" no default key-binds were applied for on-foot mode. So before I could even start the tutorial I had to go through and map all my keys, despite not knowing what keys would be needed and with what frequency, which made it difficult to guess which keys were best-suited to which commands. I don't know if I could've safely changed the "custom" setting from the drop-down, but past experience with Elite Dangerous wiping bindings made me too terrified to touch it, lest it switch the other modes to the same selection and wipe out my carefully crafted custom key-binds.
Terrible User Experience #2
Having knocked off the tutorial mission (no complaints there - nicely done) I took an Odyssey on-foot mission. Landed my Asp-X near the base, because the landing pad was too small for the Asp-X (my fault I didn't pay attention to that, but I was excited to give on-foot a proper try and I didn't think it would matter coz I now have legs to walk with!). Literally first time out on-foot outside of the tutorial. I wandered around the outpost, wondering how I should go about completing my mission. Before I got too far I was stopped by an NPC and told that I needed to submit to a scan. I waited around for a while but nothing much seemed to be happening, so I ambled casually and unthreateningly off (no weapons out or anything) and immediately garnered a massive security response. Since I was getting shot at, you can believe that I shot back! Sadly a large section of the security team were killed in action before one of the local workers sneakily pulled a gun on me and shot me between the eyes - last time I trust those buggers! At which point I found myself on the respawn screen. I was only given the option of re-spawning on a prison ship. 50 light years away, as it turns out. With no personal ship available from the prison ship and only Apex Interstellar as a means for getting back to my previous system. That's... not fun.
Terrible User Experience #3
Naturally I needed to get back to my ship and my Wingman, since I didn't fancy playing "Elite Dangerous: Solo Prison Simulator", so I headed to Apex Interstellar and the galaxy map. The map told me that I had the expected 2 stored ships in the system I died in (Varani, for reference). One of my ships (surely the Asp-X I left parked on the surface of Varani 6) was supposedly "stored" at Varani 6 where I died according to the System Map UI, but none of the bases on-planet had a stored ship listed (makes sense, since I was never able to actually store the ship!). So I booked a trip to the same base where I died (Markey Metallic Base) because surely my Asp-X was still sitting next to the outpost where I left it, and I'm the only one with the keys. Sat through the trip. Landed. Disembarked. My ship had vanished and my Apex Interstellar ride was sailing off into the distance leaving me all alone on a big planet with only some grumpy security forces for company.
Worth noting here that one thing I could've tried but forgot about until after this whole saga was to see if I could summon my ship while I was on the surface. I wonder if it had naffed off and was floating around in orbit summonable from the surface. If that was the case, it definitely needs to be super-clear that's the case because it absolutely isn't!
Terrible User Experience #4
Anyway as far as I could tell at the time I was completely stuck on a planet without a ship or an Apex Interstellar to be able to leave again. I later found out that you can order an Apex Interstellar pickup with the Insight Hub, but tbh I didn't even know that existed at the time. In the keybindings the action is listed as "Access Panel", but the tutorial doesn't mention it, as far as I've seen, so I had no idea it even existed. As far as I could find at the time, I was completely stuck. Argh!
Terrible User Experience #5
Luckily for me, I was playing with a friend and we were in a Team. Phew! He was in-system anyway (naturally) with a ship big enough for two, so he kindly came to rescue me and give me a lift back to civilisation. Only he couldn't find me. Despite being in a Team we were somehow not in the same instance. So I'm on-foot, in a Team, and he's flying around in the same Team but neither of us has any sight of the other despite ostensibly being in the same location. Cue much logging in and logging out until something clicked and we wound up in the same instance again and he could pick me up in his ship. I don't know what causes this, but this is something I can remember happening when we used to play more regularly and it continued to plague us throughout our play-session today. With all the other stuff that has been given attention why has this not been fixed by now?
Terrible User Experience #6
Anyway, eventually we manage to get instanced together and I clamber aboard into a spare seat and we take off. Only the second he hit Supercruise to take us to the nearest starport the game crashed! When I load back in, I'm back on-planet with no means of escape (that I knew of) and we're also not in the same instance. Again.
Terrible User Experience #7
Frustrated beyond measure I then took it out on the poor locals before ultimately dying again and finding myself back onboard the prison ship. Cue another Apex Interstellar flight, only this time I hitched a return flight to Friedrich Peters Dock in Varani instead, where I know there are shipyard facilities, in the hope that I can summon my missing Asp-X to me (for a cost of course). When I arrived I went to the ship seller and initially I could not retrieve my ship. Presumably this is an actual bug - only one of my many ships was listed which clearly was wrong ,so I exited the screen and then when I came back to the ship seller I had an information panel telling me that my selected ship (the Asp-X) was elsewhere and I could (finally) retrieve it, waiting another five minutes for it to arrive.
Terrible User Experience #8
Having got both of us back to the same place (Friedrich Dock) my friend had a bounty. He had to hand himself in from Friedrich Dock where he went to prison. Cue another Apex Interstellar trip (hs first, our Teams third) back to the Varani system. I assume someone on the FDev team is getting a cut from all these Apex Interstellar trips, coz I can't think of a single other good reason why they'd be having us use this shuttle service so much! When he arrived he was unable to get back into his ship (attempts to go to the hangar were met with "no usable ships" messages), and the shipyard panel stated that his current ship was at this location but inaccessible. Despite having docked at Friedrich Dock in his ship 15 minutes earlier and disembarked it before handing himself in and being carted off to prison. He wound up buying a new ship and then he was able to switch to his other ship that was now no longer inaccessible!
Terrible User Experience #9
We then headed out to another system. However when we got there we had the same issue we'd had in the previous system - where are the Team/Wing Odyssey Missions? A grand total of over 130 possible missions across two systems and not one is a Wing/Team mission. What's the point of playing with friends (if you can get yourself into a shared instance) if you can't play together in the same mission? Before the whole prison/stranded/ship mess we'd both picked up a couple of missions on Varani 6 thinking we'd each do our own missions with the help of the other person. Only I had accidentally killed the assassination target of one of my friend's missions while defending myself from the onslaught of security guards, resulting in him failing his mission!...
(My) Solutions
Because I don't just want to moan, I'd like to offer some constructive suggestions on how these things could be fixed for others to discuss, these are my personal take on solving these issues (in order of terrible experiences):
1) Apply some default bindings to on-foot mode regardless of the user's binding setup.
2) Prison ships should exist in every system! If you're going to forcibly spawn me away from my original spot... well first, why? That's literally not a thing in any FPS any more. Secondly, if you really must do that don't make it any more painful than it has to be. There's already a punishment for dying. Don't tack on "time wasted getting back to where you were" as well. There's a balance to be found between "realism" and "fun", and this isn't fun. And games are supposed to be fun! Additionally, it would be good if there was more than one level of security response. From "you need to submit to a scan" to "I'm going to blow your head off and now you're a criminal with a fun ride on Apex Interstellar in your future" in one easy to accidentally trigger step is also not fun.
3) To me this is a super-serious issue and needs looking at urgently. Players can and will die frequently on-planet, and will very likely have some kind of criminality attached to them at the time. Ships need to stay put, or it needs to be really easy to recover them. Having something like 100m credits worth of upgraded Asp-X pull a vanishing act on me was not enjoyable at all, even if I did ultimately resolve the problem.
4) Tell players about the flipping Insight Hub/Access Panel! I don't know if there's a later tutorial that I haven't found yet that covers it. Or maybe I just missed a mention of it in the main Odyssey tutorial. But I should never have reached the point where I was on a planet, without a ship, and no apparent way of resolving the situation.
5) This really should be sorted by now. The game is an MMORPG. Playing with friends is part of the game. The odd glitch is probably something people can accept. But in a 6-hour play session a frankly unacceptable amount of time was spent trying to get in the same instance as the person I was playing the game in a Team with.
6) ¯\(ツ)/¯ crashes happen sometimes. I'm a developer myself and of course these things happen - I submitted a crash report. Hopefully someone will look at it and whatever caused it will be fixed.
7) This just seems like a bug around the Ship vendor that needs fixing.
8) See #7 & #2 really
9) In my worldview, this is a simple one. The Team leader picks the missions. All Team Members get the same missions. Rewards can be shared or instanced to each individual (the latter would be fairer imo), but I don't understand why this far into the life of ED this in-game system is still so bad. Frankly I actually don't want to play the game on my own. I really want to play the game with one or more friends. But if my friend(s) and I can't team up to do missions together then really what's the point in playing in a group?
Terrible User Experience #1
The usual Elite Dangerous saga to begin with: I run a Warthog HOTAS setup, so I have a bunch of custom key-binds. Luckily they weren't obliterated by this update (yay), so that's good. But it seems that since I have my key-binds set as "custom" no default key-binds were applied for on-foot mode. So before I could even start the tutorial I had to go through and map all my keys, despite not knowing what keys would be needed and with what frequency, which made it difficult to guess which keys were best-suited to which commands. I don't know if I could've safely changed the "custom" setting from the drop-down, but past experience with Elite Dangerous wiping bindings made me too terrified to touch it, lest it switch the other modes to the same selection and wipe out my carefully crafted custom key-binds.
Terrible User Experience #2
Having knocked off the tutorial mission (no complaints there - nicely done) I took an Odyssey on-foot mission. Landed my Asp-X near the base, because the landing pad was too small for the Asp-X (my fault I didn't pay attention to that, but I was excited to give on-foot a proper try and I didn't think it would matter coz I now have legs to walk with!). Literally first time out on-foot outside of the tutorial. I wandered around the outpost, wondering how I should go about completing my mission. Before I got too far I was stopped by an NPC and told that I needed to submit to a scan. I waited around for a while but nothing much seemed to be happening, so I ambled casually and unthreateningly off (no weapons out or anything) and immediately garnered a massive security response. Since I was getting shot at, you can believe that I shot back! Sadly a large section of the security team were killed in action before one of the local workers sneakily pulled a gun on me and shot me between the eyes - last time I trust those buggers! At which point I found myself on the respawn screen. I was only given the option of re-spawning on a prison ship. 50 light years away, as it turns out. With no personal ship available from the prison ship and only Apex Interstellar as a means for getting back to my previous system. That's... not fun.
Terrible User Experience #3
Naturally I needed to get back to my ship and my Wingman, since I didn't fancy playing "Elite Dangerous: Solo Prison Simulator", so I headed to Apex Interstellar and the galaxy map. The map told me that I had the expected 2 stored ships in the system I died in (Varani, for reference). One of my ships (surely the Asp-X I left parked on the surface of Varani 6) was supposedly "stored" at Varani 6 where I died according to the System Map UI, but none of the bases on-planet had a stored ship listed (makes sense, since I was never able to actually store the ship!). So I booked a trip to the same base where I died (Markey Metallic Base) because surely my Asp-X was still sitting next to the outpost where I left it, and I'm the only one with the keys. Sat through the trip. Landed. Disembarked. My ship had vanished and my Apex Interstellar ride was sailing off into the distance leaving me all alone on a big planet with only some grumpy security forces for company.
Worth noting here that one thing I could've tried but forgot about until after this whole saga was to see if I could summon my ship while I was on the surface. I wonder if it had naffed off and was floating around in orbit summonable from the surface. If that was the case, it definitely needs to be super-clear that's the case because it absolutely isn't!
Terrible User Experience #4
Anyway as far as I could tell at the time I was completely stuck on a planet without a ship or an Apex Interstellar to be able to leave again. I later found out that you can order an Apex Interstellar pickup with the Insight Hub, but tbh I didn't even know that existed at the time. In the keybindings the action is listed as "Access Panel", but the tutorial doesn't mention it, as far as I've seen, so I had no idea it even existed. As far as I could find at the time, I was completely stuck. Argh!
Terrible User Experience #5
Luckily for me, I was playing with a friend and we were in a Team. Phew! He was in-system anyway (naturally) with a ship big enough for two, so he kindly came to rescue me and give me a lift back to civilisation. Only he couldn't find me. Despite being in a Team we were somehow not in the same instance. So I'm on-foot, in a Team, and he's flying around in the same Team but neither of us has any sight of the other despite ostensibly being in the same location. Cue much logging in and logging out until something clicked and we wound up in the same instance again and he could pick me up in his ship. I don't know what causes this, but this is something I can remember happening when we used to play more regularly and it continued to plague us throughout our play-session today. With all the other stuff that has been given attention why has this not been fixed by now?
Terrible User Experience #6
Anyway, eventually we manage to get instanced together and I clamber aboard into a spare seat and we take off. Only the second he hit Supercruise to take us to the nearest starport the game crashed! When I load back in, I'm back on-planet with no means of escape (that I knew of) and we're also not in the same instance. Again.
Terrible User Experience #7
Frustrated beyond measure I then took it out on the poor locals before ultimately dying again and finding myself back onboard the prison ship. Cue another Apex Interstellar flight, only this time I hitched a return flight to Friedrich Peters Dock in Varani instead, where I know there are shipyard facilities, in the hope that I can summon my missing Asp-X to me (for a cost of course). When I arrived I went to the ship seller and initially I could not retrieve my ship. Presumably this is an actual bug - only one of my many ships was listed which clearly was wrong ,so I exited the screen and then when I came back to the ship seller I had an information panel telling me that my selected ship (the Asp-X) was elsewhere and I could (finally) retrieve it, waiting another five minutes for it to arrive.
Terrible User Experience #8
Having got both of us back to the same place (Friedrich Dock) my friend had a bounty. He had to hand himself in from Friedrich Dock where he went to prison. Cue another Apex Interstellar trip (hs first, our Teams third) back to the Varani system. I assume someone on the FDev team is getting a cut from all these Apex Interstellar trips, coz I can't think of a single other good reason why they'd be having us use this shuttle service so much! When he arrived he was unable to get back into his ship (attempts to go to the hangar were met with "no usable ships" messages), and the shipyard panel stated that his current ship was at this location but inaccessible. Despite having docked at Friedrich Dock in his ship 15 minutes earlier and disembarked it before handing himself in and being carted off to prison. He wound up buying a new ship and then he was able to switch to his other ship that was now no longer inaccessible!
Terrible User Experience #9
We then headed out to another system. However when we got there we had the same issue we'd had in the previous system - where are the Team/Wing Odyssey Missions? A grand total of over 130 possible missions across two systems and not one is a Wing/Team mission. What's the point of playing with friends (if you can get yourself into a shared instance) if you can't play together in the same mission? Before the whole prison/stranded/ship mess we'd both picked up a couple of missions on Varani 6 thinking we'd each do our own missions with the help of the other person. Only I had accidentally killed the assassination target of one of my friend's missions while defending myself from the onslaught of security guards, resulting in him failing his mission!...
(My) Solutions
Because I don't just want to moan, I'd like to offer some constructive suggestions on how these things could be fixed for others to discuss, these are my personal take on solving these issues (in order of terrible experiences):
1) Apply some default bindings to on-foot mode regardless of the user's binding setup.
2) Prison ships should exist in every system! If you're going to forcibly spawn me away from my original spot... well first, why? That's literally not a thing in any FPS any more. Secondly, if you really must do that don't make it any more painful than it has to be. There's already a punishment for dying. Don't tack on "time wasted getting back to where you were" as well. There's a balance to be found between "realism" and "fun", and this isn't fun. And games are supposed to be fun! Additionally, it would be good if there was more than one level of security response. From "you need to submit to a scan" to "I'm going to blow your head off and now you're a criminal with a fun ride on Apex Interstellar in your future" in one easy to accidentally trigger step is also not fun.
3) To me this is a super-serious issue and needs looking at urgently. Players can and will die frequently on-planet, and will very likely have some kind of criminality attached to them at the time. Ships need to stay put, or it needs to be really easy to recover them. Having something like 100m credits worth of upgraded Asp-X pull a vanishing act on me was not enjoyable at all, even if I did ultimately resolve the problem.
4) Tell players about the flipping Insight Hub/Access Panel! I don't know if there's a later tutorial that I haven't found yet that covers it. Or maybe I just missed a mention of it in the main Odyssey tutorial. But I should never have reached the point where I was on a planet, without a ship, and no apparent way of resolving the situation.
5) This really should be sorted by now. The game is an MMORPG. Playing with friends is part of the game. The odd glitch is probably something people can accept. But in a 6-hour play session a frankly unacceptable amount of time was spent trying to get in the same instance as the person I was playing the game in a Team with.
6) ¯\(ツ)/¯ crashes happen sometimes. I'm a developer myself and of course these things happen - I submitted a crash report. Hopefully someone will look at it and whatever caused it will be fixed.
7) This just seems like a bug around the Ship vendor that needs fixing.
8) See #7 & #2 really
9) In my worldview, this is a simple one. The Team leader picks the missions. All Team Members get the same missions. Rewards can be shared or instanced to each individual (the latter would be fairer imo), but I don't understand why this far into the life of ED this in-game system is still so bad. Frankly I actually don't want to play the game on my own. I really want to play the game with one or more friends. But if my friend(s) and I can't team up to do missions together then really what's the point in playing in a group?