Damn, those early planets shots looked incredibly fun. I wished I had been there.
It’s another thing that was ruined in Odyssey for me: beyond the planet horrible rendering, they deleted the old galaxy and generated a new one, making old familiar spots generic or unknown. Another baffling decision.
They did what now? Why would they do that (I know you’re asking the same question)?! Maybe to allow a bunch of people to be first to discover stars or something?
In that case I’m glad I never went back
The discovery record was kept, but the planets aren’t the same, with different characteristics and contents. It’s a very strange thing they did.
Huh, weird! Well, I’ll add that to the list of inexplicable decisions they’ve made post-release.
Probably they updated their procedural generation algorithms, and they didn’t want to try use the old algorithm only for any place that someone had already seen.
No Man’s Sky has done the same thing a few times too.
Okay, I want to get back into Elite; I never progressed far back in the day, and I’d just like to see if I can get the VR finetuned when I get my new HOTAS and do some explorationsellingwithoccasionalcombat.
Question is… I see that Odyssey has horrible Steam reviews and negative posts here. But if I want to play nowadays, do I need Odyssey? Does it beef up the non-planetary game at all? Or if I just want to stay on my ship and not step outside like some kinda redshirt, should I just stick with the OG game?
I ask because Odyssey’s in the Steam sale, so there’s good reason to update my Elite, now’s the time to do it.
Odyssey doesn’t play nice with VR anyway, so I would skip it if I were you. You probably will want Horizons, but that might be free now?
I haven’t played in ages, but did reinstall recently and chose Odyssey, mainly because I already owned it. I believe it does add some extra planetary stuff that works in VR. I figured I could just not do the non-VR walking stuff, if the way they did VR flatscreen is too awful.
Yeah, I have Horizons. As long as everything still works, I’ll likely just stick to that.
VR flatscreen? That does sound horrible.
Yeah apparently the workaround for the walking stuff is to project it on a screen in VR. Not actually tried it, but I guess it’s good that you can at least do that content without removing the headset.
I’ve played a lot of E:D in VR. Pretty awesome experience, but Odyssey soured me on it quite a bit.
Odyssey is mostly an on-foot FPS expansion. It’s really a separate game within the game with separate gear and separate progression systems. Spaceships are pretty much only used as transport from FPS battle to FPS battle. You don’t even need your own spaceship as you can take a taxi. And VR doesn’t really work - it is projected to a 2D screen inside VR making it pretty pointless.
Odyssey does introduce landing on planets with tenuous atmospheres. That’s still in full VR. But it doesn’t really add a lot to the game - at least for me.
The biggest VR downside with Odyssey was the enormous performance regressions introduced. That made Odyssey a net loss for VR players. However, performance has improved greatly since launch. I stopped playing E:D last fall and it was mostly OK by then. From what I’ve read it has been improved quite a bit further since then. Odyssey is now in the state it should have been at launch…
I would buy Odyssey (at a discount) if you plan on playing E:D. Frontier has made it clear that that’s the version of the game they will continue working on. And since the performance apparently is OK now, it is no longer a net loss expansion for VR users.
Site note: Evochron Legacy has great VR support and is a far better game than Elite. It’s just not as pretty.
Perhaps I should revisit it for more than the 8 minutes I played it in 2021. ;)
(I did play a bit more of Evochron: Mercenary a decade ago…)
Huh.
Near 30 years at the company he founded. That’s quite a career, especially in the gaming industry! How many people can say that?
Ooh, that reminds me, two weeks till F1 Manager comes out.
Anyone played this recently? I never did pick up Odyssey, and I haven’t found much information on what their plans are now.
I’d say don’t waste your time with it. Everyone I know who used to play regularly has become severely delusioned with the thing.
I played a bit over Christmas. The alien invasion of the core bubble is in full swing.