 The Elite Dangerous Odyssey Alpha test is now well into its fourth and final phase with the current expected end of the alpha being just 5 days away now before the expansion has its final release on PC at least on the 19th of May. In this video I'm going to give you my thoughts on what we've seen so far and how I'm now feeling about Odyssey. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, click the little bell icon and remember to select all notifications and to further help support the work of this channel you'll also find us on Patreon, links to everything you need are in the description below. Frontier's Odyssey Alpha test has been running now since the 29th of March, in its four phases we've gone from being restricted to the Apex Shuttle in the Adachan system to gaining access to most of our ships from the main game with a 50 light year bubble of space around the Nervi system. For a game that has spent the last 7 and a half years cocooning us in a ship or SRV cockpit to suddenly find yourself with legs, feet and nothing but the thin veil of a space suit between you and the unforgiving environment one of the newly opened tenuous atmospheric worlds is a heady mix. There's been a lot to contend with in a short time, phase one saw some overly long and let's be honest quite dull shuttle rides in supercruise to get to a planetary settlement only to find that you couldn't complete your mission or there were heavily armed swarms of NPCs intent on making your brand new maverick space suit look like a colander full of awful charming image I know. The cries from the community of if this is Odyssey then I'm out and not entirely unreasonable or unexpected either it doesn't matter how many times you say this is an alpha test a lot of the community aren't thinking their testers they paid for access to this their customers and they're playing to have fun not necessarily to help frontier out for my own part I did find phase one let's say challenging I could see the fun in the power up power down steal the thing etc missions I was being offered getting to that fun was much harder than it should have been but I did keep telling myself this is an alpha and honestly by phase two things had significantly improved on that front. In phase two launched it saw the arrival of the dominator space suit I'm really uncomfortable with that name by the way and the launch of the hotly anticipated planetary combat zones it was expected that this would be the first opportunity to really see the much vaunted sphere of combat in action and whilst the trinity of ship vs SRV vs man is possible in a combat zone let's be honest it rarely happens and the NPCs haven't gotten involved in that triangle beyond the human on the ground shooting another human on the ground outside of open play I can't yet at least see the heralded sphere of combat entering any combat zones and if it does it'll likely be quite one sided. In the alpha at least the combat zones have become a fairly lightweight call of duty style experience as it happens I quite like that for me there's a nice place to the combat and I enjoy seeing the elite weapon tropes play out on a small scale if they remain as they are I will however be disappointed that the AI doesn't take a bigger role in it and I'll struggle to see the point of the rocket launcher in the game that I specifically play at least but this is just the alpha you'll hear me say that a lot and it's important. So phase three then arrived bringing with it the Artemis space suit and exploration one of the biggest tent poles of the larger elite community and the feature that we probably knew the least about the handheld bioscanner slash cabbage can and the thing being the biggest unknown was the vegetable grabber going to spring out and literally rip bits off the defenseless planet side lifeforms or was some other unforeseen mechanism going to kick in that we hadn't anticipated yep it was option two I've gone on about that at length before and the community also felt the same the twitch reaction based spinny dial mini game didn't survive its first weekend it's still in the alpha but frontier were quick to hear the community outcry and to their credit swiftly took action we don't yet know how it will work exactly upon release but it's been alluded to that the broccoli tester will instead be a point and click kind of affair I understand why frontier have gone that route time is short I do however hope that they'll revisit the much maligned celery Sampa mini game and just maybe science it up a bit and lose the twitchy nonsense I wanted an opportunity to fit potato Prada into this piece looks like I won't get my chance now as I'm done talking about it so I'll just say potato Prada and then we'll move on phase four honestly the money shot the thing everyone had seriously been looking forward to of all the myriad of experiences and vistas and new stuffs to fiddle with what so many of us really really wanted was just to get out of our ships turn around look up and stare that simple act of wonder to see the ships that have been your identity the thing that other players used to judge and identify you as an individual in this colossal virtual galaxy for the longest time from a perspective that has never been possible before was just glorious you know the ships even the small ones are big but you cannot appreciate the scale until you're stood on the ground looking up and up and up at them I've heard tell from multiple commanders that on seeing the ship that took them on the distant worlds expeditions or moved countless tons of CG freight or was their personal right hand of justice in a hasres upon seeing that extension of their life in elite dangerous from the first-person perspective for the first time well they shed tears I will never forget seeing those lift doors open and catching my first glimpse of my faithful anaconda the wobbly rocket from the floor of the hangar bay it's not often words fail me I think one of the big problems that the Alpha test had was the branding and by association the setting of expectations frankly calling it an alpha test because honestly it doesn't feel like an alpha test it feels more like a focused test of some very specific features and ideas to see how they roll with the community and how they function in a more realistic environment than frontier can create themselves admittedly that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily as alpha test I think a lot of people expected the Odyssey Alpha to be the complete Odyssey experience with more bugs I don't think that is what we've been playing indeed frontier of actually stated on more than one occasion that what we're seeing is a slice of Odyssey not the full game and that they want to keep stuff back for us to discover for ourselves that's admirable and understandable and I'm honestly glad they're doing that I'm curious to know how complete those slices are are they themselves missing features that are being kept back for full release I'm hoping that frontier is keeping something back and that there's something more to the trinity of combat then you can do it if you want to but you don't need to deal with it if it isn't present in a more meaningful way I will honestly be disappointed with that huge missed opportunity if they've kept it back as a surprise then bravo one thing that is kind of a big deal to me the simple act of exiting your ship is really disappointingly handled it's a fade to black you then pop into existence outside your ship and off you go when you launch an SRV there's a whole deploy unfold install and go animation sequence it's been present for years and serves no viable gameplay purpose other than being cinematic and immersive and I love it likewise the deployment of an SLF the whole catapult and unfolding wings thing is fantastic and immersive one of the greatest moments in elite dangerous gaming turning around and looking up at your ship after leaving the cockpit is heralded by just popping into existence inside a blue circle on the ground if that is genuinely the Neil Armstrong moment that frontiers spoke of when we first heard the name Odyssey spoken out loud all those months ago well here at the pit we play multiplayer a lot all the time in fact as do other members of our community I can't speak for them but when I see a commander pop into existence inside that blue circle it jars me every single time I honestly can't bear it one of the big things absent from the Odyssey conversation so far has been space and what's going on there in our rush to get out in our newly acquired feet no one is really discussing what's happening in the black if indeed anything has changed are things like comets or more accurate renderings of things like black holes or close contact stars now a thing are there any new objects to be found in Lagrange clouds or planetary rings we've no idea and frontier aren't saying we've heard from frontier themselves that new SRVs won't be a thing on day one of Odyssey but we were also told in that regard to watch this space there's a direct implication there more SRVs or something to do with SRVs is on the way post launch you can take two things at least from that implication number one frontier is not done with Odyssey after launch there is more on the way number two there would surely be no point deploying more or different SRVs or SRV options without the gameplay to support it when it comes to engineering suits and weapons one of the components needed a new materials called suit and weapon schematics during our gameplay in the alpha we've also found vehicle and building schematics base building was part of an alleged leak from frontier a few years back before we knew Odyssey existed that leak which covered multiple games has been proven to be largely accurate and is at this point regarded as genuinely having come from inside frontier frontier have since said that this stuff isn't part of Odyssey but if base building or SRV engineering for example are not planned for further down the line at least then what are those schematics for frontier clearly had some sort of roadmap for the initial launch of elite dangerous and then horizons that lasted approximately five years there was then a two-year period where broadly speaking nothing much happened in the game and we had no idea what if anything was ever coming to the game again even whole communities like the anti-zeno guys had their content and onward narrative essentially turned off for reasons that have never really been made clear there's now a whole generation of elite players who have no idea that the Thargoids used to be advancing week on week on week towards the bubble eventually attacking the bubble itself until they suddenly weren't elite dangerous is that most modern of beasts a game as a service it has to have new stuff dropped into it on a constantly evolving cycle I'm hopeful that frontier reviewing Odyssey as a resurgence of their flagship brand and that going forward will see new ships new SRVs new weapons and features etc being dropped into the game on a more regular cycle frontier hasn't traditionally been great at managing expectations in the community some sort of roadmap or idea at least of what to expect going forward would be a nice addition to the Odyssey launch cycle are we seeing quarterly content seasons or annual expansions or anything who knows but it does feel like Odyssey is a platform to jump from rather than a stopping point I guess we'll just have to see overall I love what I've seen of Odyssey so far the on foot stuff has mostly done what I expected it to and you can't get away from the fact that it's doing all this in a galaxy of 400 billion stars which is being driven by some stunning new planetary tech that frontier have shown off but we haven't even yet seen finalized in the alpha if you're coming into Odyssey you'll be boots on the ground on May the 19th we'll be right there with you gazing up in wonder