 We're three 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 to go through all of Odyssey's current features and tell 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 little bell icon and select all notifications and to further help support the work of this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. One quick caveat I need to mention I'm not going to be discussing Odyssey bugs and the patches etc that have been seen from Frontier to fix those bugs. We document that stuff on a regular basis on the channel so I won't be repeating that here. What we are talking about here are the actual headliners of Odyssey feature by feature and what's been delivered for the current asking price of 30 quid. For this video we're going to be talking about and focusing on the exploration experience. Getting out of your ship or SRV and walking about is without a shadow of a doubt the single biggest headline feature of Odyssey and standing underneath your ship and looking up at this thing that has been your entire game since forever especially for longer term players never gets old. Unless you've been living under a particularly fascinating rock you'll also know that Odyssey also arrived with a new handheld genetic sampling tool and if you were there during the alpha test you'll probably remember that it originally shipped with a sort of line up the spinning patterns twitch based mini game that was immediately as unpopular as Bermuda shorts in the Arctic Circle. These days the genetic sampler is a simple point and shoot affair to grab a genetic sample of something growing on a planet's surface frontier having backtracked on the design after receiving an immediate and definite tidal wave of feedback about the scanner. The scanner itself is in appearance somewhere between one of those mini vacuum cleaners that sound like a great idea for sucking up all the dust in your cars upholstery and the claw that grabs the alien squeaky toys in the toy story movies. Plants and geological phenomena are no longer restricted to a number of planet side hotspots but now instead occur in planet wide zones which can be viewed and filtered from the detailed surface scanner in supercruise. This is a fairly fundamental change to the whole surface mapping game loop and I have to say it's most welcome and feels overall much more realistic. Rather than being clearly defined pin point targets the target zones you're interested in now show as varying degrees of blue colourisation in the DSS HUD. Currently the HUD doesn't show a huge amount of differentiation from the not of interest zones that surround the of interest zones which can be problematic particularly for the first time user but once you get used to what it's showing you it does work. After finding a suitable biological candidate area you now fly low over the zone looking for signs of life making the search for life well much more of a search than in horizons. A welcome and much needed change and ultimately much more rewarding than the old style focused and definite hotspot. Having found your life form you then move out to the SRV or on foot portion of the loop. To obtain a complete biological sample you'll need to grab three scans from three sufficiently genetically diverse examples of one particular life form. Once you scan it you can move to another one sufficiently far away usually just the short SRV drive is enough. Scan that rinse and repeat and you'll get your magical three samples. The hand scanner also has an alternate pulse wave mode that works something like a handheld version of the asteroid pulse scanner however in order for it to show up a suitable genetic sample to take you need to be so close to it that you may as well just attempt to take the sample anyway it could have been a useful feature but currently it feels a little under designed and developed. Currently there's nothing intrinsically wrong with surface exploration but the three scans to get bio samples from one life form does feel rather artificial and contrived and in turn lacks an extra layer of much needed depth and while you're in the middle of the three scan sample you can't scan anything else without losing the scans you have. Once you've got your three samples the DNA strand is deemed complete and only then is it banked and bagged and you can then move on to collect a new sample of something else and then when you're ready you can return to a starport where you can turn them all into cold hard cash and rank in the new exobiologist discipline. For me what might have been more satisfying would be a system with an extra layer of player engagement sometimes perhaps you need to only take one scan because you find a great sample in idyllic conditions or sometimes you end up taking five because you found that one space cabbage at the shallow end of the gene pool something more akin to how the current FSS scanner works in that you can choose to uncover just the high value stuff or uncover everything or perhaps some other system that just requires a degree more input and agency from the player. As for the multiple bio sample issue it would have been nice to have the option to engineer it to be more versatile or perhaps to buy a better one or add some more sample pots somehow to upgrade it. When frontier removed the bio scanner minigame scene in the alpha version they did promise to revisit the sampling tool generally speaking at the time there was a call to make it more sciencey so I'll be curious to see what eventually gets added there. So what of the biological entities that you sample? As well as the old favorites like brain trees there are a host of new biological organic entities to be sampled the lifeforms do feature varying levels of maturity so you can often see the various life stages of each structure I'd struggle to call them plants or animals they generally defy categorization in the traditional sense and fall somewhere in between but don't expect to see any of them walking about or moving a great deal they are very much static structures and you won't need to chase them down. As things stand overall there seem to be around 20 major types of biological species you can sample with each species having multiple sub species underneath their top tier heading. This was something of an elite dangerous oddity that was established with horizons hundreds of planets that are tens of thousands of light years apart and bear no intrinsic relation to each other can have exactly the same lifeform on them. I can't believe that the real galaxy works that way and for a game that prides itself on being embedded in real science it seems an odd choice. The alternative however is to have plants generated procedurally and then to populate the galaxy that way but the results as can be seen from a game like No Man's Sky can be problematic and are in danger of ending up looking somewhat cartoonish. A balance has to be found and whilst I'm not an explorer myself explorers I've spoken to before writing this article seemed overall pleased with the resultant solution. Active geological phenomena such as geysers and lava eruptions etc are now much harder to find but there is a definite method to it which does make the process much more rewarding. Commander Exorcist has created an excellent tutorial that covers how the scanner works when looking for active geological phenomena which I've linked in the video description below. It is worth noting that the hand scanner is only obtainable as part of the new Artemis space suit and to get one of those new shiny space suits you need to swing by a starport to buy one. Frontier has added and modified equipment on ships particularly for explorers in the past without the need for them to visit a starport. The ship bound exploration revamp from a few years back that introduced the FSS and DSS scanners being a prime example. Forcing players that have been out in the deep black for up to five years or more back to civilization when they could have just implemented a similar system and gifted everyone a suit of their choice the first time they booted up Odyssey seems to me at least unnecessarily punitive. The other significant addition to Odyssey for explorers is of course the new and much anticipated tenuous atmospheric worlds along with the complete revamp of all planetary terrain right across the game. Whilst the new planet tech was not without its problems at launch as things stand it's now in a much better place and there are some absolutely stunning vistas to be found. As the Odyssey terrain tech is a complete ground-up revamp if you'll excuse the pun the contrast between the two can be a shock for the player switching over. Huge mountains were a feature of Horizons the most famous of which originally extended right up into orbital cruise range and the games twisting crevasse like canyons of horizons had spawned an entire community of flight assist off daredevils who called themselves Hooners and used the game's excellent flight model to gracefully sweep through the surface's many twists and turns in well-practiced moves that defied belief when viewed from the cockpit of the more mortal piloting fraternity. Whether by design or by accident is not entirely clear but the advent of Odyssey's terrain engine saw the signature highs and lows of horizons somewhat homogenised. The extremes have gone to be replaced with a terrain palette that feels overall possibly a bit more realistic an exo geologist is probably a better person to comment on that than I however. Sadly the lack of extreme terrain was the death knell for Hooners and despite a valiant community effort to find suitable Hooning spots in Odyssey it does seem at this point that Hooning as a pastime in Elite Dangerous Odyssey is now all but dead and that is a real shame. There's no denying that the vistas presented by the game now are still stunning. Lighting tweaks and colourisation have continued since launch but it has to be said as of this recording the planetary vistas of the type that was shown off in the trailers pre-launch and tantalisingly are still shown in the splash screen every time you start the game have yet to be found in that kind of fidelity. Here at the pit at least we're not yet convinced that the lighting on planetary atmospheres in particular is still quite working as intended. The expansion does make some odd choices overall in a couple of places as is often the way with Elite. Planetary atmospheric entry being one prime example. No professor of planetary physics and I won't claim to understand the mysterious inner workings of the frameshift drive but planetary atmospheric entry does conjure images of returning space shuttles and Apollo modules and the resultant plasmatic fireworks display that heralds the dissipation of so much energy in so short a time. To add some re-entry heat effects and smoke trails to ships descending from supercruise into an atmosphere would have been a seriously easy win for frontier and would have tickled the jollies of many an amateur space fan playing Elite. To not include anything at all seems an odd choice to me to say the least. Entry into the atmosphere of a planet in Odyssey is exactly the same experience as entry into the gasless gravity well of a horizons era planet. This is certainly not game breaking but I do feel it's just a missed opportunity at some inherently easy drama for the low price of a few particle and sound effects and it's a crying shame that it's missing. Pre-launch much furor was made of the Armstrong moment when getting first footfall on a planetary surface and the reality of that experience has unfortunately turned around and somewhat bitten frontier on the rear tier. See what I did there? The image that is conjured by the phrase Armstrong moment is Neil Armstrong gingerly moving down the ladder of the limb on the surface of a starkly beautiful moon. Rather than handle the many and various ways needed to enter and exit a starship the company instead opted for the now infamous generic blue circle on the ground where your commander pops in and out of existence. For ships specifically I do get why they did that. Designing and then animating all of the different entry and egress methods needed for the 30 odd ships across the game would have been hugely time consuming and very expensive. Star citizen level of expensive and let's be honest kids elite just doesn't have that budget and it never will. The blue circle is a somewhat inelegant immersion breaking but sadly necessary solution. I don't like it but I understand why they did it and I may just have to accept that this is probably never going to change and the blue circle is here to stay. Likewise the SRV uses the same magical spawn method for entry and exit from the vehicle. I'm guessing the problem here is that whilst it's eminently doable to easily animate the one entry and exit from the vehicle and I do speak from direct experience when saying that the sad fact is that the many and varied positions and scenarios that the SRV can find itself in be it upside down tilted on one side or stood on its tail cannot be accounted for with a simple animation solution and would just end up being a nightmare to work with. But for the much vaunted Armstrong moment that blue circle became a poster child and ended up making it all sound like a damp squib. What Frontier was referring to was of course the act of being the first person to stand on an alien world and getting your name stamped on it not the bit right before that where you don't walk down the ladder and as it is the first footfall moment is just fine. You get a subtle audio fanfare and a text pop up on screen and it's of course that achievement that the explorer fraternity collect and crave. Taking a more holistic view of exploration I was personally a little disappointed to see that Odyssey focused almost entirely on placing a layer on top of the original game and didn't also revisit the in-space exploration experience to make additions there. As of my speaking these words there are no new notable stellar phenomena nothing new happening at the guardian ruins no visual or gameplay changes to objects like black holes to better reflect our current understanding of them no additions like comets etc. It doesn't mean those things won't come to the game in the future but it clearly wasn't on the roadmap for Odyssey. On to a conclusion then whilst I do explore in the game I don't consider myself an explorer but just this last weekend I was out on a mini expedition and I indulged in all of the above. I scanned multiple planets descended through atmospheres got first footfall on numerous worlds stopped and looked in awe at some incredible vistas and scanned untold planty animal biological things and then turned in the data back at home and I really enjoyed it. Whilst taken in isolation the components of Odyssey's exploration are in places a little lacking in depth taken collectively they do add up to an overall enjoyable experience in the coming months I'm curious to see what Frontier decides to do with the hand scanner mini game loop that they removed post alpha. It would be nice to see some meaningful gameplay go into that slot that better suits the explorer mentality but overall what's there right now is a good starting point. Elite Dangerous has always been a live service game and as such it needs additions and extra whiz bangs on a semi regular basis to keep the player base engaged and excited. Some simple additions to the explorer loops could take it from being a good start to the great benchmark elite specific experience it deserves to be. I'm interested to hear what your thoughts are on all things exploration in Odyssey do you miss the hand scanner mini game what would you like to see in its place and where do you think Frontier will take exploration in the future 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.