Hands on with Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

Elite Dangerous has always been a game, since before it even released, that I wanted to get in and play, not for review or anything else, other than just I wanted to fly spaceships. The reason I never did was that first up, I didn’t have as much free time as I used to, but the second reason is that, as much as flying around in spaceships is, I always wanted to explore on foot and discover the worlds I was seeing from afar. Thankfully, the game, after many years, is now getting the option to step out of the cockpit and explore planets on foot and Frontier were kind enough to provide me access to the alpha, so I could see what I might have been missing and what they were doing going forward.

As with lots of early hands on, this is a work in progress build, so all the bugs and unplanned issues, should likely be ironed out prior to its now announced PC release date. That being said, the alpha did highlight a number of areas where things needed to improve, but as this was the point of it, I am going to leave that alone. Needless to say though, it needs a solid once over on frame rate and this is coming from someone who never really cares about that, games can run at 30 or 60 and I am ok, but this dropped frames often. But given it has been almost a decade of the game being released and this is an entirely new branch of gameplay systems, there was bound to be issues, but with that all said, let’s move on to the actual exploration.

Stepping out of the ship and looking up at it, does have a lot of similarities to No Man’s Sky, there is a sense of scale that even with some of the game I have seen over the years, fails to provide. The catch is that the scale is only apparent when you are near ships, once you are around other human sized folks, doors and such, the scale vanishes and it loses its vastness, for a little more of a familiar nature, just like most other FPS games. Before I picked any missions, my first task was to try and learn this interface, how do I reload, what about swapping weapons or changing suits, there was a lot to try and learn. The game didn’t make it all that easy sadly, this could be due to my not understanding the game as a whole, but what I was trying to work out wasn’t easy. Thankfully, I was able to get the basics after some trial and error and with that sorted, it was time to venture out on foot.

There were a few options for quests, from the usual take out as many things, or obtain a particular item, each was fun enough, but nothing all that special. What did make the quests interesting is how the game gave you a chance to do things at your own pace and let you try to complete objectives how you see fit. For example, taking down a number of enemies can be done by just shooting them, but you can also use the environment to take them down, nothing as elaborate as rigging an entire base to blow, but there are other ways. Those who lean towards playing as stealthy as they can, should really find some fun here, because if you can get into a buildings power room, without being detected, you can cause some real chaos. The fun of the buildings, when you discover them, is that they are all laid out, as if we might actually build them, power, barracks, lavatories and more, you won’t just find a random room, without something nearby for context.

Once you have all of that sorted, everything clicks into place a bit more, the combat is generic at a top level, but there are a few little tweaks to it, that you have to understand, else you will get destroyed. The first is that shields are not always on, at least I couldn’t find anyway to make them that way, so I had to learn when going into combat, to make sure they were enabled, else my combat time was counted in seconds, rather than minutes. With that issue sorted, it let me focus more on the feeling of combat and in my mind, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to other shooters, namely Destiny 2 and the Division 2. This was exacerbated by the fact that most enemies are damage sponges, meaning you have to unload a lot of bullets into each enemy, in order to take them down, that is of course as long as you are using the right weapon. If an enemy has an shield active, then you need to use any energy weapon you can, to disrupt it, otherwise your bullets are just going to bounce off. The combat has a few little things to be aware of, but for the most part, its par for the course, just with the option to jump as high as the surface lets you.

There were a few times that I encountered other players in the world and as PvP is not something I care about, at all, I would leave them alone, though sometimes a player would try to be cute and shoot near me. The game does offer actual places to let loose on other players, but it wasn’t something that I felt like I needed to do, especially in the alpha, due to the smaller number of players. That being said, I can see it being a draw, once the full game is out, to allow for a break in the solo/team missions, but how deep that becomes will depend on the players I suspect.

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is a strange experience, it is a competent shooter and has enough extra layers on it, to challenge the most devout of the FPS genre, but on the other hand, it feels a little disconnected from the main experience. This could all be due to my not having a solid understanding of the base game, but each location I explored on foot felt empty and for a game set in the dark reaches of space, that is saying something. It was hard to play this and not compare it to No Man’s Sky, which I am sure other players will as well, and just like that game, I suspect that Odyssey will take time to get up to snuff. For me personally, I can’t envision any more boots on the ground until there are locations worth exploring, fans of the series might be able to overlook the issues early on, but things will need to evolve fast to keep them there.

Elite Dangerous Odyssey will launch on PC on May 19, with the console release to come later in the year.