hello it's ricardo and welcome back to elite dangerous odyssey elite dangerous
odyssey's alpha is now coming to a close and i thought it might be a good idea
to go through my experiences my thoughts and look at my expectations of what i've got for
the main game when it drops around may the 19th of course it'll be a little bit later on our consoles
and our hearts and minds go out to our console commanders in regards to this so my thoughts
then this can be me chatting the best part of eight minutes so strap in and get a biscuit
one of the first things we noticed when the alpha hit was graphics optimization everyone
wanted the best graphics i was fortunate enough to have upgraded my pc just as the alpha started
and was looking forward to having some 4k gaming with an rtx 3080 supreme from msi i was a little
bit surprised that graphical optimization at the start of the alpha was a little bit lacking the
amount of heat and sound coming from the graphics card i thought was actually going to take off
this however has got decidedly better as the alpha phases have progressed whereas now in
alpha 4 i'm getting very few problems at all whatsoever given that i'm still betting in
this new machine one of the most anticipated aspects of elite dangerous odyssey was having
to be able to run around as your commander with a pair of legs and to facilitate this
frontier have put in a first person shooter aspect where you can get your pew pew pew on
the land settlement and bases provide good arena aspects and maps for this format of game
now the npcs they do range in difficulty but when i say difficulty the ai seems to remain the same
it's just the toughness of your opponent i've seen some npcs take two grenade hits and still bounce
back with half shields i've also seen them take two rocket hits and not die so the balancing of
mpcs in combat in regards to this patching of the game still needs a bit of work so i'm waiting with
a lot of anticipation when the final game comes out to see if additional tweaking has been done
a lot of people have said this is the best first person shooter
they've ever seen if they went back in time five or six years and i think that's probably right but
it's not all about the first person shooter aspect of things yeah the mechanics might seem a little
bit dated and the gameplay might seem a little bit dated in compared to what we're seeing with first
person shooters these days but that's their only job elite dangerous odyssey is doing many jobs
is it a jack of all trades though that's the question we have to ask ourselves and one that
may or may not be affirmed when the game drops if they tweak it any further personally however
i think it's an okay game average if i was going to buy this as just a first person shooter i
wouldn't have bought it if it was on steam i would have got a refund but as a part of something else
something that is a sum of many parts i'm quite happy with it for the sake of our economy
it's like a lot of things though just probably needs a little
bit of additional love and we know frontier will be constantly tweaking
now how many people have got on top of their ship and started dancing with the external
camera on and i bet you it's more than what you think we've all done it and if you haven't done
it then why haven't you done it why haven't you been out there and marveled at the sure scale
of your commander in comparison to your favorite ship one of the first things i did i rushed down
to the cargo bay and got right in front of that federal corvette to see its scale
and even with the type 10 that's a really big old unit the sense of scale between you and your
commander is immense and i think it's aspect of the game really works well now there's been a few
comments as well about the ground clearance on some of the ships and how on earth that srv can
get under there where sometimes in some models you can barely get under there without crouching so
a little bit of tweaking but overall yeah i think it works really well and it does give
a good perspective to the ships to your commander within the game and something
i think we've had alluded to with the srvs but now you're on foot it's even better
next up the old dss scanner yes folks look at that the detailed surface scanner that had a
little bit of a remake going on as well give you the ability to detect on planet biological
entities like these plants okay um had a bit of a spotty we'll say spotty start to this where
they have to adjust for the different colors but you could using this detailed surface scanner
which we've had in game for a while find all these lovely plants and fauna that frontier were talking
about way before the alpha this also then spawned the fact that you get in there with the sampler
with the artemis suit yes folks whereas the asthma suit gave you access to the sampling
tool the dominator gave you more weapon slots and the maverick suit the old stealthy suit gave you
access to a cutter and some other items too but all these are embellishments on your original
flight suit so the sampler also had its own problems in regards to a mini game whereas this
mini game proved to be a little bit of an ache and when i say an ache insert body part here the
community complained and frontier listened taking away the minigame making it a point and click
to sample but we really have to see that when the main game hits what exactly we're gonna get in
its place and will it be a worthwhile replacement or just more lip service to what is obviously you
know seemed a good idea at the time but turned out not to be a very good one at all whatsoever
another point worthy of comment is going to be the planet generation and planet tech in the alphas i
say alphas alphas one to four frontier have also told us that we haven't seen the final planetary
generation system yet which is surprising because the planets look pretty good already
also let's think about the ship v people aspect or mpc's the balance for this completely wrong here i
am in the cobra shooting an npc on the floor seems to be guarding some sort of point of interest
all that's all well and good the balance was out another good point was the point of
interest the crashed srvs and other aspects yes there's been a few problems with these cowboys
look at those cowboy hats shame they're floating containers that have been buried so you can't
get all the swag contained therein not without its problems i dare say even when the game is released
that won't be without its problems as well i had several point of interest missions which i
couldn't complete because the panels wouldn't come off therefore they wouldn't reveal the
items and bounties therein couldn't complete the mission in alpha 4 those panels weren't working
along with the panels as well in some of the settlements to turn off lasers or vent atmosphere
so we'll have to wait and see and hopefully these will all be working within the game but
even though despite all of this being able to salvage items from these downed and partially
destroyed srvs is a nice little touch we've also had satellites probes all these things that will
reveal additional items which you can salvage and use them hopefully to upgrade your suit
and your weapons a great dynamic just a shame in some cases in the alpha it didn't quite work
so that in most respects have been my bug bears and comments and thoughts
on the elite dangerous odyssey alpha experience in short i think a good
alpha a really good alpha because it's what it is an early representation of the game
graphics i think have been spectacular though not without their problems but these have soon been
fixed by frontier i think frontier done a really good job presenting this alpha to the community
and to those people who qualified to play it i think an awful lot of people
won't be able to wait until may the 19th when it comes available to the pc population
you