Odyssey‘s big appeal (for some users, anyway) is the introduction of “on foot” game play – you can now get out of your ship and walk around, providing the planet’s gravity isn’t too strong.  This of course brought with it a new set of engineers and a whole new collection of materials to gather for those engineers.  And the implementation of “space legs” isn’t … seamless.Given the implementation of SRVs, it should have been obvious that, without really a complete rewrite of the game taking into account the different “modes” of play, space legs was going to be implemented much the same as SRVs.  And so, those of us expecting this weren’t surprised when “Disembark” worked pretty much the same as deploying an SRV.  The complaint then follows that the “space legs” stuff almost feels like a completely different game “added on” to Elite: Dangerous … and it does.

The thing is, without all ship interiors being developed and mapped out (something that would have required an entirely new game/game engine – see “Star Citizen” for a perpetually alpha version of such a game), it was going to have to be.  As critiques go, this is one that anyone with any idea of how software development works would be more than willing to forgive.

Before I go into the new Engineers, let me first give a shout out to the new exploration options – it can be very profitable to head out to mostly unexplored areas and look for biological signals on planets, land, and scan them.  Indeed, you’re looking at close to 80M credits for being the first to scan the right type of “biological thing”.  Even a new bacterium sample should get you 5M.  Worth the time?  For a newer player, sure!  For an experienced one … maybe only if it’s gathered from a planet where there are several other signals available.

Now, as far as the rest of the new Odyssey game play, what’s harder to forgive is the mess that is the new engineering of on foot suits and weapons.  It’s somewhat forgivable (I guess) that there are materials that you can collect that have zero use – at the very least, you can sell those and make some additional money, since (at least for those of us who have been playing the game for a while) the ground missions don’t really pay that much.  What I’m having strong issues with is material rarity.  There is some “trading” available, but there are materials that are incredibly difficult to locate, and no way to trade up to them (outside of the player economy, which, while it does exist, suffers from the same rarity issues – anyone who collects the rare materials is usually trying to get them in the first place for their own usage and not to sell them on their carrier).

Some of the on foot engineers also have some … extremely difficult … prerequisites for unlocking.  One in particular requires six each of two kinds of missions for you to perform.  These missions require you to steal something but do it in such a way that requires you to not set off any alarms – meaning you need to find the alarm console without getting caught, which usually requires you to steal an identity without getting caught, and if you kill someone in the process, you need to make sure that you’re not witnessed.  The closest I’ve gotten to managing (in several attempts) to do this task successfully got me right up to the point I was about to steal the thing … and ended up getting shot in the back by a guard I didn’t know was there, who saw me shock a guy who would have been problematic during the theft.

To summarize the new engineers, they’re like the old engineers but even worse.  Even more of a grind, with even harder to obtain materials.

Am I still playing that?  Well, it’s like having a new game, so … it’s something to do.  I guess my complaints after that are that it’s … easier? to do the planet-side stuff in small ships, and having a fast, tough ship (as occasionally outpost residents like to start shooting at your ship) with potentially some limited jump range, and to also do it in systems that may not necessarily be your home system (because it’s easy to get bounties when doing legally questionable activities.  With all that in mind, it can make it very difficult to also do Fuel Ratting on the side.  Rat ships are best with long jump range, which usually means light shielding.  Basically, a good rat ship is really not a good candidate in my mind for raiding outposts.

As I was originally a Playstation player, I couldn’t play Odyssey without getting a PC to play it on, and I had been a Mac/Linux guy for some time. Elite: Dangerous scratches a particular itch for me, and honestly I could have continued enjoying the game without the space legs.  But, since they dropped support for consoles and there were no other comparable candidates (No Man’s Sky being, in my opinion, a completely different game that I still play from time to time), I managed to find a relatively cheap “gaming laptop” that seems to run the game just fine.

In summary, I understand the complaint that it seems like space legs are a separate game, but if you’re basing that complaint solely on the way you move from ship to ground, that’s really not the thing to focus on.  If you’re basing the complaint more on the fact that the foot engineers are implemented in a way that seems very different than the ship engineers, well, then the complaint bears much more weight.  However, as much as I want to complain about it myself … well, I also want to measure my critique since, well, once you hit an end game, any new “extension” of the game that is separate from what you did before will of course feel more difficult, so … complaining that “It’s harder!” may just be more of a “I hit the end and don’t want to work too hard any more!”