Elite Dangerous 2022

I played for a good while, stepped away for a while, and have come back to see how Odyssey is after a fair amount of time to work some kinks out, as I've been reading.

To be clear, I am an explorer. All my comments should be recognized in that context, that's all I do. Still very much love what this game has to offer.

That said…

1) as far as I can tell (?) being several weeks distance out of the bubble, am I screwed from getting a bioscanner or do I truly have to lug my ass back through the heavily-discovered spaces to get one now? If I don't do that, basically I can't enjoy the Odyssey content other than footfalling some worlds?

2) I've been away long enough that the muscle-memory for the controls, commands, and actions have all gone and I have to admit: the Elite Dangerous UI is pretty terrible.

I get it, I get it, it was designed for VR and to be accessible for consoles …but (lemons into lemonade) now that FDev has brutally abandoned both, can we finally advance the UI recognizing that we have keyboards, mice, and joysticks available? Dump the jankey linear-progression-through-the-menus, adopt basically-universal paradigms like 'ESC always backs you out a menu layer', and make the mouse at least optionally work across all UI elements. Apply the same consistent UI principles to all screens, scanners, and interfaces.

Now that we don't have to be beholden to the few keys of controllers, we can get actual menus and drop downs, text boxes, queries, and maybe make route-planning feel more like actual navigation and less like driving a PlaySkool toy with mittens on. Maybe implement stored builds for easy switching between modes? There are essentially no end to ways that, now we are no longer bound operationally to service game clients with limited HID capabilities, the game could be made vastly more user-friendly.

Or hell, don't even let FDev do it; offer the API publicly and I'd estimate that in 6 months you'd have truly novel, informative, useful, and clever UIs available.

3) More than one character per account? I'm WEEKS of flight away; if I want to run back, do something, and come back to what I was doing, that 2x that many weeks. I'd love to occasionally try to participate in some of the interesting story stuff back in the bubble, maybe even play some pvp (most likely I'll simply be easy kills for some folks…) but without the ability to have a couple of characters per account, it's simply not worth the opportunity cost of 8 IRL weeks' travel (with little income, as things have been scanned) for me to try what might be very interesting elements of the game.

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Anyway, glad to be back.