Elite Dangerous Odyssey Season 2: How I think Ship Interiors should be implemented

Ship interiors offer excellent gameplay opportunities for the game but I worry that without enough discussion of these FDev will not prioritise interiors, or if they do, will implement them purely as a cosmetic feature.

I see ship interior discussion frequently revolving around two broad positions:

1. Ship interiors won’t offer meaningful gameplay and will become tedious to navigate.

2. It doesn’t matter that Ship interiors won’t have good gameplay, they should be prioritised to enhance immersion.

I wanted to explore in a fairly long post, some ideas for how to implement ship interiors with meaningful gameplay, and why I think it would make for an excellent second phase of the Odyssey expansion.

Ship Interiors as Level Design: integrating Odyssey with the base game

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• The biggest opportunity that ship interiors offer is the chance not just to move around your own ship, but around OTHER ships.
• FDev has already done some great groundwork in Odyssey finally creating Space legs with an FPS system (let’s ignore bugs, and criticism of that system for the time being), scavenging gameplay, and other rudimentary mission types centred around settlements.
• Ship interiors brings all of that gameplay into space to be enjoyed alongside existing gameplay loops like bounty hunting, rather than completely separately on planetside.

1. Boarding Action

• Ship Interiors should be designed first and foremost as levels which existing FPS gameplay can be brought into and enjoyed with the addition of new exciting elements like zero G.
• Boarding action should be the first new feature that will allow us to fight against pirates through the corridors of an enemy Python, or against dozens of marines with our friends in an enormous federal corvette.
• AI ships will now always carry a complement of security guards or combat forces depending on the ship’s size, affiliation and rank. Players might have the option of hiring muscle to protect their own ship or storm enemy ships.
• Bringing existing Odyssey FPS gameplay is a great and obvious first step, with e.g. control points, arc cutters for doors in the ship, stealing identity. There is scope for new elements to add strategic depth too – e.g. in the Expanse, boarders have to simultaneously attack the bridge and engine room because the defending commander has their finger on the self-destruct button.
• Boarding could be implemented in a number of ways that are rewarding for different playstyles:
  • Bountyhunting: For a simple implementation, boarding might only be possible once you have disabled a ship’s drives, thus enabling a second phase of combat where you (and hired crewmembers/muscle) storm the vessel.
    • Once all enemies are defeated, the ship could be tagged for authority vessels to impound giving a weighty bonus to your normal bounty voucher.
    • By the same token, enemy ships might now try to shoot out your own drives and you will have to defend your ship pirates.
    • Boarding could also be possible through use of hatch breaker limpets/breaching pods, forcing you to split your crew to defend against boarders while still fighting other ships. While this would be pretty cool, I also think implementing ship interiors that can only be used while the ship is stationary would actually be fine, if the alternative is particularly hard to manage with the current engine.
  • Conflict Zones: Conflict zones can enable boarding in a similar way, with the likelihood that in any given conflict zone there will likely be a disabled large ship with a (e.g. 12v12) conflict that the players can join, much like surface conflict zones.
    • Some limited interiors for Capitol Ships would be a great centrepiece.
    • Just as conflict zones have occasional objectives ‘kill the special ops ship’ – objectives involving boarding can be added – ‘capture the general on the flagship’, ‘disable the power regulator’ etc
    • I can’t imagine given everything else FDev has managed, that procedurally generated corridors and layouts for Installations wouldn’t be impossible, which would make great environments to fight in too, with the randomness lending some variety.
  • Piracy: The sky’s the limit here, but there a couple of different options depending on how ambitious FDev wants to be.
    • Easy and ok: Boarding a ship will enable access to a wider range of cargo or valuable items (all of the settlement goods, components and data can be moved straight into ships). Captured ships could be tagged for scrappers and salvagers to take, with the reward of a black market voucher.
    • Hard but awesome: Captured ships literally become yours to fly but with some big downsides, e.g.:
    • the ship will have a very large bounty that can’t be removed,
    • you will lose the ship permanently if it is ever destroyed or if you move into a different stolen ship,
    • the ship might not be able to be outfitted,
    • could only be sold in Anarchy systems for a black market voucher similar to a bounty.

2. Scavenging

• Odyssey makes a start in introducing a gameplay loop that has been pretty basic prior to Odyssey (arguably still pretty basic).
• Ship interiors could help flesh this out to a career in its own right.
• Ship interiors don’t have to be only attached to functioning ships, but also allows a whole range of derelict hulks that can be explored by EVA – Anaconda corridors with flickering lights, gaping holes, broken in half etc
• All of this could be explored with use of the arc cutter to scavenge materials, data and cargo just as we can currently do in settlements.

3. Missions

• Ship interiors allows for a whole new layer to existing missions. Odyssey missions are currently structured like:
  • Base Game Missions (in Ships or SRVs)
  • Odyssey Missions (on foot)
• This was an issue in Horizons as well – missions were either traditional Ship missions, or they were SRV missions, and they rarely integrated them. Megaships and installations made somewhat of an effort to move some surface gameplay to space, but most SRV missions remain SRV missions – the ship is just the vehicle to transport you to the location.
• Instead let’s imagine an integrated model for these missions:
  • Assassination missions with a bonus if you kill the pilot but leave the ship intact.
  • Massacre missions which can be filled with ships or soldiers on those ships
  • Theft and recovery missions which contain items that can only be reached by boarding ships or derelict hulks
  • Liberation missions where you actually rescue a real person on the ship rather than an escape pod
  • Frontline Solutions missions involving combat both in space and on the ground.
  • Missions involving disabling or re-enabling power regulators on targeted ships
• Characters who you meet in these missions should be mission givers as well:
  • If you rescue someone from a pirate, maybe they have a family member caught by a pirate from the same clan.
  • If you try to assassinate someone – maybe they will pay you better for a different job if you let them live.
  • This would be a much more meaningful implementation of the current random missions that sometimes pop up in your inbox, and Odyssey has done some groundwork in Concourses that could integrate these two things.

Reasons to walk around: Gameplay options for you AND your crew to stand up

• While enormous numbers of Elite Dangerous will pay for the immersive qualities of interiors, good gameplay in the longrun means giving a good reason to leave the cockpit.
• Ship interiors offer opportunities to replicate existing gameplay elements in different ways, and to improve on others. Some ideas:
  • EVA and repair work: This gives players an alternative to AFMUs and hull repair limpets, and also brings some of the firefighting in settlements to your ship.
    • While AFMUs and hull repair limpets are automated and fast, hand repairs by EVA outside the ship, or by walking around your ship to the module, would be less effective or slower. It might already be balanced due to the fact that you can only do it outside of combat or if you have extra crew members (more things for multicrew members to do!!)
    • I would suggest using a minigame – use the arc cutter? Or maybe this is a better use of the maligned sampling tool minigame.
  • Engineering: Again, an alternative to visiting engineers or using pinned blueprints, by walking around your ship and doing it yourself, perhaps you could do a less effective, or temporary engineering effect yourself.
    • A really simple implementation would be to take a much lower materials cost, and allow players to randomly apply a less effective, or temporary experimental effect to modules and weapons.
  • Passenger Cabins: Allow interaction with passengers – build on the existing way in which Passengers give random annoying requests, and instead let us go down and barter like in the concourse. This would help give passengers personality, and make the requests maybe less ridiculous with some more control over rewards.
  • Comms Centre: A place in the ship where an extra crewmember can perform some of the functions normally filled by the multitude of scanners and limpet controllers that you can equip at a lower degree of efficiency or higher difficulty.
  • Exploration and Lab work: I think it is widely acknowledged that for a career with its completely own elite rank, exobiology is only half implemented at best.
    • Just as the exploration changes to the discovery and surface scanner made a massive difference to the exploration pathway, there is scope here to overhaul exobiology.
    • A new gameplay loop allowing more detailed analysis of samples back at the ship would be a great start.
    • I’d also love to see something like the Scanner Room from Subnautica that allows you to bring up a topographical map of the surrounding area to help look for POIs.
  • Medical Bay/Kitchen: Provision of medkits, food provides a temporary health bonus.
  • Habitation quarters/Bed: As a real time MMO, a bed cannot be used to skip time, but it could be used to RELOG.
    • For better or for worse, relogging is used a lot in Elite Dangerous whether to produce different enemies, respawn data and materials etc.
    • I think it’s time for FDev just to embrace it, and let us ‘sleep’ giving the illusion of time passing as we wake up to new NPCs, data and materials – an immersive alternative to switching between Open and Solo.
• Finally, on the issue of whether it would get tedious to go through all the corridors all the time to get from the stairs to the cockpit: think about this like the Gutamaya or Core Dynamics manufacturer would.
  • If we’re too lazy to direct our avatars to walk up and down a corridor, you can bet that our commanders will have complained to the ship manufacturers. A couple of possible solutions:
    • A second set of stairs/ladder that comes directly from the cockpit.
    • A turbolift from the cockpit to the top of the stairs.
  • Sure this means you won’t get to see the beautifully crafted interior every time you get out of the ship, but that SHOULDN’T be a problem – because you’ll be visiting your ship interior to actually do things of your own accord, rather than being forced to walk through it every time you dock at a station.

These are just my ideas, and I’ve contained myself to things which I think tie in well with existing gameplay mechanics and systems. Integrating expansions with the base game is absolutely core in my view. I’ve also stuck to gameplay loops that I’m more familiar with. I should also note that I have watched endless Odyssey videos but I have not purchased it yet, as I’m keen to enjoy the finished product, which it currently is not.

TL;DR: Ship interiors offers a chance to actually integrate Odyssey with the game through boarding, scavenging of derelict ships, and integrated missions, and I think there is lots of realistic interesting gameplay you can create to give people a reason to walk around their interiors.