Elite Dangerous: because when you aren't alone, they want to kill you.

[wonko the sane?]

But it's not personal, it's just business.

So yes, another space game. Been around about 10 years now, recently got a DLC which added first person content that the devs are rather half heartedly attempting to "no man's sky". Kinda working too, recent opinions are on the uptick.

Anywho: I'm literally just here to share a charlie foxtrot that actually wound up making me money.

I was flying an adder, kitted out for cargo. I managed to pick up a bunch of data courier missions, one black box recovery (legal.) and one "personal effects" recovery. I've only recently started doing the recovery missions, because I'm only now starting to get comfortable with combat. So I courier the data, and notice in the end point that there's a bunch of delivery missions all going back to where I started... which is where I need to bring the personal effects cargo anyway. Awesome! The total to move the new cargo is like 150K, so I load up, and roam out in search of of the personal stuff.

This is where the Full spectrum scanner comes in. I... either was completely ignorant of it, or it did not exist in previous plays, but it made finding the material SO much easier and faster, you have no idea. So I rather quickly find the hot spot, and cruise in. I was literally about 100 meters off getting the container into the cargo bay when I get attacked. Crazy douchnugget, spouting something about "if I can't get paid, I can get revenge!" but I never met him, so... yeah. Anyway, he and his wingman blow me up, cause I was a sitting duck with my cargo scoop open.

Respawn, and I still have the mission to get the container. I guess they didn't steal it? So, launch and cruise back out. Find the container again. I was in combat mode, I had the right fire group engaged, I was ready to rip this guy and his wingman a new exhaust port... but sector police had already mostly done it. Wingman was dead, but at least I got the kill shot (and the bounty.) for mr.revenge.

So, I start tracking debris and try to find the mission objective. OOoohhh, fruit and veg crate. Alright, a little extra cash wouldn't hurt either, so I scoop it up. Turns out it was illegal salvage, and the cops were RIGHT THERE, so... fined. Okay, I didn't want it that badly: jettison the cargo. Oops! That's also a crime and the cops are still RIGHT THERE. So fined again.

Right, kinda pissed off, but whatever, still have a job to do. My find the debris from my last life, slowly collect (god, I need limpets if I'mma keep doing this jive.) the materials out there... jive, the OTHER mission cargo is gone. So is the black box I hauled up. Those were irreplaceable. That's literally 150K down the shitter. Fine. Abandon those specific missions, and get going on the very last one.

I as I transitioned into the destination system: I get an urgent mission update. Turns out SOMEONE doesn't want me to bring this box in, and I'm being hunted. I didn't even get to finish reading the email when I was interdicted, and under fire. So NOW I'm in a dog fight in the corona of the system star. But my cargo scoop wasn't open, and I didn't get lost on the controls. I was able to very handily win this fight. Scored a nice 40K bonus for the kill even.

And it was rather uneventful after that. Made it to destination unmolested, and handed in the mission. So almost 120K for that. Then I went to pay off the fines, and noticed I had bounty vouchers? I don't bounty hunt so that was weird. Oh, it was the jerks I killed: turns out that they were both wanted men, and between them they were worth nearly 170K... So...

Long story short: I failed a bunch of missions, and walked away richer for it.

The game is holding my attention much longer this time than the last two, and not just because I got a shiny new throttle and stick. I'm playing different, not just in that I'm actually trying new things, but also that how I play is different. I'm not trying to grind out 3 or four hours sessions, I do two or three missions in a row, then I log, get up, do stuff, and come back later. It really makes a difference.

 

[Ungnome]

The FSS system wasn't in the game originally. They added it during a rather major exploration revamp during the second half of the Horizons period(AKA a couple of years before the Odyssey updates started). The previous system just had you jump in, HONK the system with your discovery scanner and move on. Resource discovery simply relied on your ships sensors being in-range to auto-detect, which meant you had no idea what resource nodes were in the system unless you were close enough to them. The FSS system made the scanning part a lot more interesting.

 

[wonko the sane?]

It really does. I like it, now that I understand how to make it work (both in conjuction to game mechanics and actually controlling it with the hotas.).

 

[wonko the sane?]

Hehehe.

 

[Ungnome]

Actual station or someone's fleet carrier?

 

[wonko the sane?]

Coriolis station.

 

[Ungnome]

Neat. I know a lot of the stations are named after people associated with sci-fi, but didn't know Lucas was in that list.

 

[wonko the sane?]

There's also a kirk station somewhere. I might dig up a list of famously named station and take a sight seeing tour one day.

 

[Ungnome]

I know of Leonard Nimoy station.
Most of the stations on the bubble to Colonia run are named after explorers.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Okay, so, 4.0 for PC just dropped. It brings a lot of the GUI, graphical updates and special effects to horizons that odyssey has.

If you find it hard to read the fonts in your cockpit, turn off bloom and FSR to "normal" or "off". Mostly fixes it. Not as sharp as before, but goes from painfully blurry to legible and understandable.

Also: new witchspace? Soooooo pretty.

 

[Ungnome]

I'll have to check it out, though I found late Horizons planet gen to look better than early Odyssey planet gen for the most part.

 

[wonko the sane?]

Okay, so I also sprung for odyssey given it was half off.

Here's my initial impressions:

You get what appears to be a movie and quickly transitions into FPS gameplay when you first load. This is meant to introduce you to the new content. Despite being on keyboard and mouse (and operating AROUND my x52.) The only really janky part was staircases. It was smooth enough for even fairly hectic combat (it wasn't bullet hell levels of stuff.), and the set pieces looked GOOD. No pop in textures that I saw, no jaggies, animations were fairly basic all told, but worked well. The weapons respond well, but there isn't much feedback cause it was lasers... which is actually immersive. Lasers don't kick. There's plenty of things to interact with in the settlements, lockers, computers, boxes, even vehicles. Plenty of stuff to pick up for later, and different ways to interact with different things. Hack them, cut them open, or find someones (corpse or alive, you know whatever.) security clearance and copy it. Once you finish, you board a ship and sit in the passenger seat and fly to the destination where you get dumped on the concourse. I don't know if because it was a set instance for training, but it worked well. It was smooth and functional. I haven't done any other on foot missions yet, so no point of comparison... yet.

It was also at this point I was worried that it might force you to start a new game, cause I have 3 ships and 11 million credits and I'll admit, panicked for a second there. But NO! It just loads the old save game with new options depending on where you are. The other thing is that now not all services are available through the station interface anymore. You actually have to go and WALK into the ship vendors spot to browse the wares. There's also plenty of folks kicking around that are mission givers, so if the stuff in the mission board doesn't float your goat: take a walk. You'll either find something, or kill enough time for the missions to refresh. Or go shopping, weapons and armor await in the outfitters. I'm not a huge fan of the new menu layouts, it's kind of less streamlined than it used to be, but it's not deal breaking. The... quasi conversation thing when dealing with people is weak, but also not deal breaking.

Now, I'm going to say what most of the optimistic people are saying about this: it's got potential. It (seems to.) works fine, now it just needs content and diversity to exploit.

Here's what I will say they did absolutely, positively RIGHT though. You no longer have to define the controls on a single list. You can use the definition files, and consequently, different input devices, for every stage of movement. Want to use a hotas for the ship? Yup. AND use a control pad for the SRV? Absolutely. AND rig up a treadmill (now we're getting ridiculous.) for the FPS parts? DO IT. The game lets you set control inputs independant of each other now. So instead of the single lost list which eventually went through all required settings, you define them seperately. It's lovely, they should have done it this way for horizon. I'm actually going to do SRV missions now, it's not a pain in the ass to get it to work with my gamepad!

So yeah, only took ANOTHER dlc to get me to play horizons.

 

[wonko the sane?]

ADVENTURES IN ODESSEY!

OR!

Dying like a goon, on foot, cold and alone.

So: With everything properly configured to play, I decided: what the hell, let's go for it. I bought a half million in combat equipment, picked up a mission, and off I went.

As my keelback is diving into the gravity well of the target planet, four jumps from my mission giver... I wonder if I remembered to buy AMMO for that nice semi-auto assault rifle I purchased. Also... what did the outfitter mean by "save your loadout"?

Meh.

So I land a klick away from the settlement I'm meant to murder, and start walking in. I get all the way there, whip out my... pistol? Where's the semi auto? Okay, no big deal, there's only twelve of them spread out over the entire complex, I'm an experienced FPS player, I can do this with a pistol. And in my defence, I did kill two of them before the shotgunner rapped me.

Thankfully, because I died the elite dangerous equivalent of "buck fuddle naked", and they never once attacked my ship: it literally cost me nothing to get rescued, and even move my ship to orbit.

Turns out what the outfitter meant by "save your load out" was literally that. You have to create an equipment load on the personal screen in your ship (the one you see when you look down at the controls.) and from there you can equip what you need for the job at hand. Hacking, stealing, murdering, rescue work, whatever. So At least I didn't damage any of that half a million in equipment I bought, because apparently I never put it on. I rectified that, and am looking for another assault mission, because I know I can do better.

Might just swing in with the ship next time, I got big assed lasers on it.

 

[wonko the sane?]

DO NOT SWING IN WITH THE SHIP. At least not a keelback kitted for cargo. I got shot down. Thankfully, 14 million plus banked, so the 1/4 million buy back was fine, but still a harsh loss.

But... 14 million, and combat is calling. So I wandered out in search of a good, actually entry level combat ship; cause an eagle with armor, even against NPC's? Hard pass.

Did eventually find a vulture. bought it, then spent it's price again in components and weapons... and took up a threat level 2 "kill pirates" contract. And... I didn't even scratch the paint. Three kills, no damage to me. Well, alright then. Return to quest giver, pick up another kill quest worth about twice as much as the first. And... they barely hurt my shields.

Return to quest giver, spend some of that dosh to put some amenities into the vulture: cargo racks, collector limpet controller, fuel scoop. then I went out to a local resource extraction site, and started killing pirates. I don't know how many I killed, but it was worth 880+ thousand, plus almost 100K in escape pods. I wound up taking some damage this time, structure dropped to 77%, but largely because someone phoned, and I was splitting my attention between dodging fire and catching up the person on what happened to my father.

Still, I was out for like a half hour, and made almost a million... so... definitely doing that again. Fun as hell, and worth a good value in arx too. Plus, almost out of harmless in combat.

 

[Ungnome]

Yea, I'd imagine a cargo kitted ship would be horrible in a dogfight. I had some decent luck with a Krait kitted out with a fighter bay and a hired NPC pilot, though.(Actually, I just LOVE the design of the Krait. I've got two of them. One standard kitted for bounties and one phantom variant kitted for exploration.

 

[wonko the sane?]

The new UI lets me keep looking at the krait, but I've yet to find a place to buy it. Cause the shipyards now show all the vessels in the game, including all the ones NOT for sale at that location.

Because I wanted a canadian shopping simulator baked into my ******* space life sim.

Also, I was given the concept (last night when I was watching a let's play.) that apparently the missions you can take from your ship, and the missions from a console in the same station are different? Going to confirm at some point today.

 

[Ungnome]

I got mine at Jameson Memorial (it has every ship available), but Shinrata Dezhra, where it's located, is permit locked. You have to hit Elite in at least one of the three play styles to get access.

 

[wonko the sane?]

That'll either happen or it won't. It's not like it's make or break for me, cause I've already passed through (and thankfully, bookmarked.) a couple of stations that sell stuff like mambas and chieftains.

Edit: CONFIRMED! The missions from station services in your ship and the missions from station services on the concourse are completely different! Thankfully, you can hand them in from the landing pad.

Also, I apparently suck at the combat, the only salvage run I succeed at was the one where I was able to shoot the bad guys with my ship weapons and the thing I needed to collect was actually in the only openable box on the sight. I did notice that the ships had some compartments I could cut open: but too late to be useful.

 

[wonko the sane?]

So, the groundside missions that aren't explicitly combat don't pay very well: but I am having fun doing them... except when the mission doesn't actually spawn the required item. Cause that's apparently still a thing.

I was thinking of basing out of the current station, bringing my eagle in, and equipping it to do these groundside missions. Cause a missile launcher makes clearing groundside baddies (granted, that are unsupported by heavier weapon emplacements.) much easier... and fun. No, seriously: just ******* missile them. You might be able to make do with a laser array, but the ship won't let you target individuals, and even the straight firing weapons need a minimum distance to actually hit that target point your hud is showing you. But SPLASH damage... oh, so fun. Plus the groundside instance stuff is all completely immutable. So no worries about it.

So I could refit my vulture for pirate hunting, and use the eagle to for groundside... sounds like fun to me.

 

[wonko the sane?]

So, there's a rather persistant rumour that hutton orbital in alpha centauri will give you an anaconda if you show up. Given how REMOTE hutton is (despite being so close to sol.) it's kind of understandable.

Well, I've currently had my fill of killing pirates, so I figured "ROAD TRIP!" and then covered the 138 light years from erdi, THEN the fifth of a light year in supercruise (which took about an hour.)... only to find that I had been punked.

Think I'll backtrack to bernards, and kill more pirates... after I visit the mug.