 Elite Dangerous Odyssey managed to finish last year on somewhat of a high with the community seeing better communication from Frontier, the crescendo of the azimuth saga, the start of a genuine all out war with the Thargoids in-game and players returning to the galaxy after a definite upturning community sentiment. As the game strides forward into a fresh shiny new 3309, in this video I take a look at what features we know are in our future, others which are likely coming this year and what I'd really like to see. If you enjoy our videos as always please do mashify that thumbs up, subscribe and ding that bell to see all our future content. You can also directly support our work through our Patreon page, links to that and everything else are below. With the list of subjects I'm about to run through here I've tried to be pragmatic and set myself some realistic expectations based on the model of how Frontier have preceded in the past. To that end you'll not hear any comments from me about new ships, panther clippers, commentary landings, earth like worlds, dinosaurs, safaris or ship interiors, I just don't see them being a practical expectation for the coming year ahead at the very least. So having covered off the not going to happen stuff, what do I hope for instead? Let's start on a big one first, and by big what I mean is a huge slavering multi-limbed compound eye mandible faced chittering horror story from beyond the stars. I want this year to deliver Thargoids on foot to a community that has been anxiously expecting it since before Odyssey launched. We are now very much in the age of Odyssey as far as Frontier are concerned and Odyssey means feet. The Thargoids are clearly the big bad for the coming year at the very least and over the last few years there's been a couple of leaks from Frontier that did very heavily point to on foot Thargoids being conceptualised at the very least so it does feel like a moderately safe bet as well as being the fairly obvious route for Fdev to go to. Whilst I'm as sure as I can be that we're going to be fighting Thargoids on foot, what form those conflicts take and where precisely we'll encounter them I really can't be sure of. I do think perhaps the centre of the maelstrom clouds will likely have a role in it all. Also if you've ever been in a damaged and disabled Odyssey settlement then you'll no doubt have noted the strong alien franchise vibes from that content. I'd love to think that one day we'll go toe to claw with something in those environments. I do think the maelstroms have a Thargoid hive vessel or titan as they're also known at their centre I think it's likely we'll be travelling to the centre of the maelstroms and infiltrating those hive vessels on foot in order to shut down the guardian module disabling Proteus fields that appear to be emanating from them. If we do see hive vessel infiltration and Odyssey settlement encounters the question is in what order will we see them. I'm inclined to believe that that would be random settlement encounters first eventually followed by hive infiltration as an elite version of a crescendo dungeon raid moment. Off the back of the whole on foot Thargoid subject having developed that gameplay it makes sense to me that Frontier are not going to then give us the opportunity to remove the Thargoid threat from the bubble completely and thereby negate the content they've spent lots of money developing. When they spoke about the top level roadmap last year Fdev did include on it a key feature overhaul that would be introduced in early 2023. We are now in early 2023. The nature of that key feature has been open to a lot of speculation but if we assume that the Thargoids at our door are here to stay then it's my feeling that a way would need to be found to incorporate them into the topography of the bubble as a permanent feature and legitimize their presence there over and above just allowing a permanent state of open warfare such as we're seeing at the moment. I've speculated on this channel before about the possibility of Thargoids being incorporated into a system like powerplay. The former captive and experimenter of Azimuth Seo Jin-A the artist formerly known as D2 has already proven that a side effect of her alteration by Caleb Wichely's goons at Azimuth is that she can interpret and on some level understand Thargoid communications. She is somehow still connected to them. I don't think it too unreasonable to imagine a future scenario with some version of peaceful coexistence where the Thargoid onslaught is at least guided or kept at bay by communing with them through some sort of mutually beneficial communication channel. That channel being Seo Jin-A or someone like her who's been similarly altered. We do know that D2 wasn't Azimuth's only long term house guest. That individual could become a kind of Thargoid powerplay leader leaving players free to oppose or support that power as they see fit. Part of the Thargoids or at least peaceful non-aggression alternatives being something certain portions of the community have been asking for for some time. Elsewhere then Frontier did promise last year that they'd be revisiting ship engineering and the gathering of materials that facilitates it. I'm hopeful as are many in our comments section that this review is in our immediate future. Whilst an argument could be made for simply adding more materials to a players inventory when they do scoop something up, this has happened before, I'm not personally convinced this is the road that Fdev might necessarily choose to take again. Since the initial implementation of engineering Frontier have for example added the material traders system allowing players to trade mats which in theory at least alleviates the need to grind for one last particular material. I'm wondering if perhaps their tactic for revisiting material gathering might in fact be to make the gathering of certain limited materials very easy just through easily repeatable open to all gameplay loops and thereby encouraging players to engage with that content and then make better use of the trading system to gather what they need. The current Thargoid war for example contains some very easily repeatable mission loops across a couple of accessible to all in-game disciplines that all feature limited material rewards as well as cash. Rather than make the rewards from grinding better this method could potentially eliminate the need some players feel to grind mats in the first place. The next one might seem unlikely but hear me out for a second. Elite is a game often times driven by player developed emergent gameplay that was never part of the original designers plan that's very much the nature of sandbox games and you'd be hard pressed to find many games as sandboxy as elite. Racing and its many forms has over the years become a solid staple of that emergent gameplay ecosystem. There are whole sub communities around the game that deal solely in racing that host multiple well attended events every single year in Elite that all revolve around different forms of racing and yet it still remains completely unsupported in the game in any official capacity. There are no systems or gameplay mechanics whatsoever that support racing in any form not one. Over the Christmas holiday period Tom Coole one of the regular developers who appears on frontiers live streams tweeted that his personal resolution but not a promise for 2023 was to get racing into Elite. It's important to stress here that this is coming from a personal twitter account of an fdev employee this is not a press release or a forum post and it's not coming from an official frontier account this is just what Tom personally would like to see but you'd be hard pressed to find someone in the elite racing community that didn't agree with the sentiment and personally I'd love to see a long term embedded elite dangerous pastime supported in some official capacity. While we're on the subject of the flow of information and communication when it comes to elite dangerous frontier have historically struggled with striking the right balance between communicating their plans with the behemoth evolving sandbox maintaining excitement and anticipation without spoiling what's to come. Last year we continued to see improvements in how fdev communicates with its ED audience broadly speaking from around April onwards the community were treated to a regular cycle of informative and entertaining live streams on a comfortable regular bi-weekly cycle. The live streams were backed up by a continuous stream of posts on the forums and all across frontiers social media presence from twitter to instagram and facebook and not only from the official accounts but also from the community management teams and even developers personal accounts all of which really helped to compliment and highlight any issues or underline hype where appropriate. In particular the build up to the crescendo moments of the azimuth saga in game and the commencement of the resultant conflict with the Thargoids was beautifully handled helping to build and sustain hype for those events which themselves did not disappoint when they finally arrived. All of this was accented by a top level almost executive summary style roadmap. That whilst light on details frontier being ever cautious not to spoil the content they were planning to deliver nonetheless still managed to set an appropriate level of expectation and all important reassurance within the community that there was yet more to come. Whatever the policy change was within frontier last year that was at the root of this positive feedback loop between the company and community it 100% needs to continue. It's always going to be a tough line to dance on to find the right balance but when the dust settled on 3308 it was blindingly obvious that fdev had finally found that balance. Arthur even casually mentioned on a live stream at the tail end of last year that updates 15 and 16 are scheduled for this year again reassuring the community that the game isn't dead continues to expand and progress and has a future. Away from communication there is one significant place where fdev is in my honest opinion apparently still struggling to find the right balance and honestly this one is possibly more puzzling than the communication issue. I'm speaking here of the issue around the arc store and purchasable cosmetic additions to the game. Elite Dangerous is a live service game as a vessel of commerce it survives on its ability to drive profit into the parent company that runs it once again there is a balance here to be struck between giving your player base new cosmetics to freshen or accent their personal gaming experience and flooding your product with meaningless fluff that cheapens and sullies the base product. Currently Elite Dangerous despite having a regularly updated in-game store appears to be doing neither and is again falling down on the side of being too cautious with their flagship life in space simulator. But right now there's only so many paint jobs be they on weapons or ships that folks can get excited about hosing arcs onto. With the exception of a couple of highlights last year that's largely all there is to choose from right now. Here's some prime examples of where I would love to see the game monetized right now just to set the tone of what I'm referring to. Fleet carrier exterior appearances there are three and they can't be mixed and match in the same way that ship kits can and it's been like this since Fleet carriers launched in June of 2020. Fleet carrier interior spaces have three color schemes that arrived free with the Fleet carrier interior feature. There are currently no more color options for players to purchase. The captain's ready room on a fleet carrier is perfect for things like trophy cabinets, desk toys, bobble heads, rugs, potted plants, pets, wall coverings or any other myriad of personalization options. The rest of the fleet carrier interior is ripe for layout changes, decor options, bridge layouts, Christmas, Halloween and other seasonal decor. How about a crew uniform that is customized to your crew members by you? Even different ambient crew members with differing behavior patterns from the current cookie cutter crew. Right now large portions of the community are engaged with rescue and humanitarian work running evacuations and emergency supplies to and from attacked star ports. I know myself and others would love the option to run my evacuation ships with emergency service themed paint jobs and emergency service styled flashing lights and even possibly sirens like those seen on the enforcement ships that deliver troops to the settlement defence missions that were a new addition last year. Character remotes beyond the default set currently available we'd always assumed would be an option in the arc store right from day one and we do feel in the burp it at least that they would be a valuable and popular addition. We do appreciate completely that these things all require development work on the back end and an interface to facilitate them before they can be added and that obviously costs both development time and money however it's hard to imagine a scenario where it wouldn't eventually pay for itself. This is indeed one of the standing tenets of the live service business model. We've run a couple of on the spot straw polls within our own community and there certainly appeared to be almost overwhelming support for most if not everything I've mentioned above with a lot of those asked wishing for more arcs store options to support their favourite game. I don't doubt that the arc store is at least on fdevs radar and I'm hopeful this will be the year when they get a bit bolder with it. Before its puzzling switch off a few years ago the in-game newsfeed Galnet had provided little more than background texture and fluff to the often previously overly clinical tidy and static elite dangerous universe but last year we really saw what Galnet was capable of and frankly good at as it spun webs around the rise rise and fall of azimuth. Encompassing within it the stories of Caleb the witch witchily subject D2 and her re-emergence as seojin a and her now intertwining with ramtarr palin and whatever they're now up to. We also saw player actions finally being properly reflected in multiple ongoing news stories and hints at future community goals that tied directly into the larger plot beyond X faction wants Y commodity in huge quantities because reasons and then had those CG's deliver tangible in-game assets tools and plot points as a result. All that is something that had been lacking from elite dangerous having found its feet finally it all needs to stay. I never thought I'd value Galnet or plot in elite dangerous until elite dangerous and galnet delivered value through its plot and now I find it wouldn't be elite dangerous for me without it. Would you like to see more on the arc store or does the shadow of fortnight loom too large for you to risk it? Do you believe the Thargoids are now going to arrive on freshly minted feet to claw and unsuspecting commanders newly acquired space legs and if racing was to be supported in the game how would you like to see that support implemented? 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.