 We're 5 months down the road since the Elite Dangerous Odyssey expansion arrived on the PC. Now that the dust has settled somewhat from the launch period, in this video series I'm going through all of Odyssey's current features and telling you what I think of them and the expansion as a whole. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, remember to click the bell icon and select all notifications and to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. For this video we're going to be talking about and focusing on the surface conflict zones experience, the Elite Dangerous Odyssey on foot version of the vanilla games space based BGS combat. As I mentioned in our review of settlement raids there are around 16 different settlement types and layouts and the expansion has added over 400,000 of these individual settlements into the game. The settlements are owned by any one of the gajillion NPC or player minor factions in the game and when an armed conflict starts in a system due to ambient BGS conditions being just right they become the focus of the surface equivalent of the vanilla games space based conflict zones. The gameplay within the zones on a very basic level equates to a fairly simple capture point based first person shooter set entirely within the confines of a given settlement. Each team has 12 total combatants either NPCs or players and a pool of respawn points they can draw from. As combatants are killed that pool is drawn from until no more respawns are left. Additionally the zone also features physical capture points essentially a futuristic version of a flagpole. Players and NPCs can stand within the capture radius of the point and if they're there long enough the point will be deemed to have been captured and the opposing team will lose 50 of their respawn points. Once a team's pool of respawn points is reduced to zero they are deemed to have lost the conflict and victory is declared. Being in a conflict zone can be handled a couple of ways they are not a compartmentalised instance so you can just walk, fly or drive to a settlement that is under dispute and witness or participate in the conflict. Respawns are handled by frontline solutions vulture dropships that are sent from nearby starports and signing up to a conflict zone at the starport and getting a dropship all the way to the CZ in real time is also an option. The settlements are littered with ammo boxes, medkits and power recharge stands to keep players life support and life denying abilities functional. As of patch 7 to the game the settlements under dispute now feature deployed frontline solutions owned, surface to air turrets and also faction specific NPC ships fighting overhead. In a nutshell that's basically it. The combat flows at a fairly frenetic pace and the relative small size of the settlements coupled with the constant supply of dropships means you're never far away from your next engagement. As the conflicts take place in real time inside the larger elite dangerous galactic simulation it means that unlike some other more dedicated first person shooters you're not playing a night map or a day map but rather all the games are played out in whatever the ambient conditions are at the time. As an isolated first person shooter experience it's somewhat simplistic but actually very playable and were it part of some sort of CQC element similar to the vanilla game space arenas it would actually sit quite well within that and it is generally quite good fun to play but it's here that the problems with surface conflict zones start to appear. Whilst they are fun when taken with an isolated arena CQC frame of mind that isn't where they sit in the larger game they're part of a galaxy spanning simulation. They are for want of a better descriptive very gamey heavily relying on gamified systems like respawn point pulls, arbitrary pole in the dirt, capture points, settlements littered with ammo boxes and health packs and respawns that do their level best to get you back into the fight as quickly as possible as a result they sit utterly and completely at odds with the rest of Elite Dangerous as a whole as well as with much of the rest of Odyssey. The atmosphere they engender is somewhat akin to dropping Mario Kart into the middle of a hardcore formula 1 sim or a game like Ace Combat into the middle of a DCS simulation no matter how fun it might be in isolation as part of the wider Elite Dangerous experience it just doesn't really fit. Further problems arrive when you introduce kit upgrades and engineering into the mix. As a stark example what you'll see playing under the sound of my voice now is conflict zone gameplay from the perspective of the irrepressible commander Yagashura there's a link to the full video in the description below if you want to see it every bit of kit Yaga is using here is grade 5 and has also had engineering applied to it. Once the gameplay skills of Yagashura are by no means under question he is a very proficient gamer what you're forced to endure when even a modicum of upgrading and engineering is applied to a loadout is gameplay that far from being a tactical thoughtful simulation based FPS experience starts to feel eerily close to my memories of early Unreal tournament. You're never going to please every demographic with a video game especially one like Elite Dangerous and my experience is of course completely subjective but the surface conflict zone experience feels to me pitched completely wrong and utterly at odds with every other aspect of the game as I've mentioned aside from CQC. What I would have liked to have seen personally is something much more akin to a somewhat simplified mill sim something like a watered down armour and make the conflict zone more of a choose your own adventure defend and attack capture and hold type of experience instead of the bottled capture point driven experience that we have today. There are wider discussions around the bullet sponge nature of surface combatants the wisdom of the current implementation of shields on foot the speed of weapons outgoing rounds don't get me started on that plasma sniper rifle the current lack of a reason to engage with the sphere of combat idea you can bring a ship or SRV but there's currently no reason to why capture points are a pole in the ground and not a room or piece of equipment of strategic significance in a settlement full of rooms and equipment of strategic significance why the drop ships drop you right into the middle of the conflict zone rather than a temporary forward operating base away from the immediate area of danger regardless of the side you're fighting for why the conflicts are set against a planetary scale backdrop but played out in an area the size of a postage stamp I could go on but these are subjects I think better suited to a forum thread than they are to a subjective video review. In summary whilst conflict zones are a bit of kick about fun they don't gel well with the rest of the elite experience they're not bad per se but if you're looking for a capture point based more gamified first person experience then there are far better examples available elsewhere there is a lot to admire about the current implementation of surface conflict zones the fact that this has all been achieved as part of a wider galactic scale simulation as a way of settling matters arising from the BGS and you can just casually walk in from that simulation is not something that should be ignored and swept under the carpet just because the included gameplay doesn't push my FPS button specifically there are clearly some people playing and enjoying the surface CZ experience we've conducted a couple of completely unscientific straw poles within our wider community and the results there would seem to imply that around 30% of the respondents were enjoying them when you collate all these points together however taken in the wider context of BGS conflict resolution the current implementation feels like solving a territorial conflict by means of a football match rather than using the opportunity to grant players the chance to resolve the conflict using their own tactics strategy and guile we know there is a new multi-crew combat centric SRV on the way it's difficult to see that being of use currently the SRV we have right now doesn't have enough open ground inside a CZ to operate on anything near an effective level again this seems like an odd design choice at odds with the requirements of the current conflict zones if the conflict zones are left in their current iteration and not expanded upon it continued to feel like a huge wasted opportunity and that would be an awful shame so does F dev have gameplay plans over and above what we have right now only time will tell I'm interested to hear your thoughts on all things conflict zone based in Elite Dangerous Odyssey are you enjoying the first person additions what else would you like to see let us know in the comments below that's it for now thanks very much for watching if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel and maybe take a look at one of our other videos linked on screen right now