4Game

Elite Dangerous was a game where you could immerse yourself as a spaceship pilot to mine, trade, map, pirate, and fight. Then when the on foot expansion came out it allowed our space legs to do only a few limited and isolated versions of these original experiences–making the DLC feel disconnected from the original game.

So I was wondering what would the "good" version of Odyssey actually look like? How would we give each of these gameplay loops from the original ship experience a proper tie in/ analogue to the legs? Here's my thoughts on each one and lmk what yall can add

Mining: I really think they dropped the ball on this one considering there is literally zero Odyssey-related gameplay for mining. The only time you go mining is inside your ships cockpit parked in an asteroid belt/ring and that's it. Yet I can imagine so many cool gameplay experiences with Odyssey like what about planetary caverns full of resources only accessible to on foot CMDRS equipped with special hand mining tools? Or what about player owned mining outposts that drill into planets to farm you materials? What about a new mining SRV to compliment this too?

Trading: The trading in Odyssey on foot is purely for grinding materials. You go to the bartender, and you trade settlement loot for upgrade loot. There's no difference between bartenders and everything sells for a flat rate. A Power regulator here is gonna cost the same as over there across the galaxy. Meanwhile for ship based trading you have economies that affect this and you build routes to take advantage of supply and demand. For example download data seems so cool at first in oddysey–when I look at a data port and steal manufacturing instructions from somewhere it makes me feel like I got something valuable in the right hands. But really it is just as mediocre no matter who you sell it to and nobody seems to care about what it actually is and what it is worth to them. (unless it's mission specific)

Mapping: You can scan plants with the Artemis suit in Odyssey and it is one of the better implementations imo–but ultimately it still pails in comparison to the ships scanning/mapping gameplay. I mean in a ship you can enter a whole FSS mode with all kinds of frequencies to discover, you can shoot probes to map the planet, etc… meanwhile on foot the most you can do is point at a plant three times until you get a genetic sample. This may sound a little off the wall but what if we had a microscope or something to resemble the ships FSS? You could find an alien virus or very small creature hiding in the soil and it would sell more to a station (hell maybe it could even be engineered into your weapons to make canopy breaching bio gas bombs to infect your enemy lol). Also just give us more stuff to see on foot like the caves mentioned earlier

Pirating: You can raid settlements, sure, but what if there were roads connecting settlements–trade routes with NPC trucks that you could intercept and steal from? That would be more akin to the ship pirating experience we know from the original version of the game. They could also give us a better way to transfer cargo from ground to ship by maybe implementing "surface collector limpets" that drop from orbit and pick up the loot you dislodged from trucks or settlements etc. (maybe it could even pick you up so that you don't need to wait for your ship to land lol)

Fighting: This is where most of the focus went for frontier but I think we all know it could be a lot better. Like reworking stealth by allowing us to incapacitate NPCs instead of being forced to kill them. Give us on foot thargoids. Have NPC ships and SRVs attacking us in conflict zones (instead of just me being the only guy with a tank during a war). Make it so that maybe a bounty I'm chasing will try to escape by landing on a planet and running away inside of a base (then I'd have to go on foot to chase and capture or kill). Make it possible to have combat happening inside space stations. If they added ship interiors they could also do some really cool docking combat where you run inside the enemies ship on foot to eliminate the people in there