 We're four 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 little 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 settlement based missions and raids experience, far and away one of the central tenets of the Elite Dangerous Odyssey on foot experience. There are around 16 settlement types that range in function, defensive capability and size and the expansion has deployed over 400,000 of these individual settlements into the game, all of them being placed procedurally according to a rule set that determines the likely requirements of a settlement defined by its function and governing economy etc. Missions can be obtained from a starport that will send you to a settlement to retrieve a thing, kill a specific NPC or indeed all NPCs, shut down the settlement's power grid, restore the power grid or mess with their manufacturing ability in some way. It's not always the case but generally speaking the AI won't be keen on you completing your mission and if you're discovered doing or stealing the thing they will react accordingly, mostly by trying to shoot you in the face with an interesting array of weaponry. As well as AI guards and workers each settlement contains a large number of lockers, cupboards, storage boxes and data terminals. Each one of these containers contain a number of the game's new collectible materials and these materials can be gathered to facilitate the upgrading and engineering of Odyssey's new spacesuits and weapons. Note I said upgrading and engineering, they are not the same thing, each suit or weapon that you buy can be upgraded through 5 levels inside on foot social spaces in the game's starports using collected materials. The upgrades will add a standard bonus to damage or armor etc. The equipment can also be further engineered with yet more material gathering by unlocking a new subset of specialized engineers. These engineering modifications are more specialized and will add features like silencers, extra sprint duration, faster weapon switching or automatic reloading of a weapon when it's not in use etc. Any mods placed on weapons or suits are locked to that weapon or suit and cannot be transferred to another weapon or suit. So for example in the case of a silencer or improved sights you're not engineering a bolt on bit of equipment to the gun, you're actually engineering the gun itself. If you want that silencer on another weapon you'll need to upgrade that weapon and re-engineer a whole new silencer add-on. Not only does that feature not make sense in the real world, it's obviously a hard coded gaming trope at this point. A set of sights for a given weapon are generally speaking interchangeable between similar weapons for example and not hard welded onto a gun. And it's this environment of hard blocked equipment and add-ons that has led to at least some of the anger directed at Odyssey's first person shooter component. Honestly, I'm not unsympathetic to that either, it's an odd design choice at best and forces the player down the path of material gathering and engineering just to change the weapon they're using. It makes sense to me with a starship to have multiple engines or shield engineered, with a handheld weapon it doesn't. It's not a showstopper but I can't say I'm a fan of it and with so much of the general criticism of Elite's vanilla game centered around quote the engineering grind unquote rather than choosing to address that design choice with Odyssey Frontier seems to instead have doubled down on it. While we're in the general area of materials let's talk about those for a moment. It's a long established trope or bugbear depending on where you stand of Elite Dangerous that there's a lot of material gathering needed to enjoy the game to its fullest. It's something the player base have complained about since the introduction of the engineers system with the launch of horizons and it had been complained about right up until the launch of Odyssey. I would suggest that the problem is not so much the act of gathering and using materials but rather the availability and accessibility of those materials that is the root of the problem. With the launch of Odyssey Frontier have on one level attempted to deal with that issue and on another level compounded the problem tenfold. In summary the sheer volume and variety of materials in Odyssey is mind boggling and only some of the materials are useful for anything others are as best we can determine at the moment at least useless. Material storage in the early days of horizons was rejigged to allow each material to have its own finite storage space. You can gather 50 space apples and they'll go into the space apple storage and not infringe on the available space for interstellar oranges. Frontier changed to that system post horizons launch having learnt some valuable lessons from the community reaction to the original storage space where you could gather a thousand space apples taking all your available storage and leaving no room for interstellar oranges. Having learned that valuable lesson all those years ago Frontier have chosen to unlearn it with Odyssey and we're essentially back to a big unpartitioned sack where you can fill it to the brim with useless stuff again leaving no room for the possibly valuable. I assume in an effort to counter this change in functionality the game provides a trading system via NPC bartenders that allows some simple exchange of goods but also importantly unlike with space bound materials players can now drop materials from their inventory onto the ground allowing them to be picked up by another player. That ability to exchange and trade with other players is welcome and it can help with material gathering if the burden is shared, indeed I have used the functionality myself but it really doesn't make up for the weird backward step with material storage. Weapons and suits are available to buy pre-upgraded to a max level of 3, at least we've never seen any higher than that and whilst the spawns of the pre-upgraded and modified gear are rare the elitosphere is huge and with many eyes and there has been a nice effort by the community to crowdsource pre-upgraded gear intelligence mostly via a constantly updated forum post. As a result with a degree of dedication it's fairly easy to get a completely level 3 inventory sorted for yourself. These pre-upgrades do make a difference and they are definitely worth seeking out. However all this cannot get away from the fact that you are left with that most elite-esque of gameplay loops, extensive material gathering with restricted availability and accessibility. Generally the material gathering loop will either sit okay with you or you'll be in a huge rush to get to the end and find the whole thing very frustrating and unsatisfying. Personally I'm somewhere in the middle, I really like the settlement raids with some reservations more on that in a moment, there's opportunity for stealth and guile or straight out pew pew whatever works for you and generally I enjoy the types of missions available to me. What I do find hugely frustrating is the spawn rate of mats in the settlements. After clearing a settlement I'll often get utterly useless materials from it even the locked harder to open boxes mostly contain trash mats and this has been an annoyingly common occurrence. The limited availability of materials feels to me at least somewhat artificial at the moment almost like Frontier are attempting to deliberately delay players reaching a perceived end point maybe. Whatever the reason with somewhat limited playtime available to me the significant engineering of a weapon let alone multiple weapons and suits is currently still a very very distant target. I mentioned the first person gameplay and in that regard I'm going to specifically speak about the first person shooter gameplay and to be even more specific remember I'm talking here about the settlement mission and raid first person shooter gameplay not the conflict zone gameplay they're two very different experiences and the conflict zones discussion is for another video. On the subject of the settlement raids then there's two parts to this section of the review to discuss what is there and then to discuss what isn't there. With regards to what is there as I mentioned I generally really enjoy it and I've spent many a happy hour now creeping around on rooftops and plapping NPC bad guys from a distance I'm assuming they were bad guys I honestly didn't stop to ask. As I've also mentioned you can go full on pew pew as well both work equally well and present very different challenges so far so good. What does frustrate me about the settlement based FPS in Elite is not so much what's included but rather what isn't. The pace of the shooter portion is for my money about right it sits nicely just the right side of the slower tactically paced shooters and it feels suitably realistic. In some of the more extreme comments since Odyssey was launched in May I've seen the words Fortnite in space bandied around a fair bit with Wild Abandon. I'm pleased to report that that is frankly just plain nonsense and isn't representative of the experience at all. However in choosing to be tactically paced the designers have similarly chosen to exclude most of the tactical shooter tropes from that particular sub-genre of the FPS. For example you have no ability to go prone with your character. To remain stealthy on a rooftop you have only to crouch in fact in most circumstances if you crouch you're practically invisible even when nicely outlined against the morning sky on a rooftop. Use of cover is encouraged particularly when indulging in the stealthier shooty parts and there is a nice interior close quarters combat element to the settlement incursions but the lack of a lean function to peer out from behind cover in these situations again makes the FPS feel very basic. I freely admit however that a lack of leaning in a shooter is a pet peeve of mine so make of that what you will. I'm acutely aware that this is a personal play style thing so your results may vary but for me I've found its exclusion detracts from the immersion of the overall experience. Similarly it would have been nice to have had a non-lethal option for dealing with the settlements inhabitants. I was kind of expecting the power transfer tool that comes with every suit to be a nice convenient stun gun option but sadly it just administers a simple lethal voltage and therefore the game is again lacking an extra layer of subtlety that would have granted more options and depth. Equally it would have been nice to have seen some hostage rescue missions or arrest and detainment missions varieties over and above the just kill people missions. For the most part the weapons feel and sound meaty enough but the addition of personal shields for players and most NPCs has meant that realistically again for me at least as much as I might enjoy for example the laser and kinetic submachine gun variants especially for the interior spaces it's just more practical to deploy plasma in most circumstances. For the most part I'm defaulting to a level 3 pre-upgraded sniper rifle for distance and close quarter kills. One round loses the shields, the second round kills the target and there currently seems no reason to use anything else. Your results may of course vary but I can't help feeling a degree of balance and subtlety is lacking there to give the other weapon types a reason to exist. As I mentioned the game allows you to utilize stealth and guile fairly extensively but stops short of giving you any cool toys to facilitate the guile part. The base settlement gameplay is good but with the addition of things like remotely triggerable pipe bombs or wall mounted tripmines, a nice hackable network of CCTV cameras, flashbang grenades, shotgun aids or the ability to shoot out lights or deploy smoke well you get the idea it could have been great gameplay and it's an absolute crying shame that that stuff hasn't been explored more. Pre-launch much noise was made about the sphere of combat in Elite Dangerous Odyssey and at the risk of sounding like a stuck record on the subject certainly as far as settlement raids are concerned it's almost completely absent. It would have been utterly glorious to see modules added to the existing pantheon of ships that facilitated air to surface support either in the form of optics for spotting, spying or some targeting coupled with guided munitions for magnificent cooperative moments. In my honest opinion the settlements are ripe for this level of tactical gameplay and the fact that it hasn't been exploited is such a huge wasted opportunity. The Elite Dangerous player base is in my experience fairly mature, experienced and resilient to slightly more complex gaming ideas and the settlement first person shooter experience whilst undoubtedly fun is definitely not what it should have been or what this fairly sophisticated player base is more than capable of absorbing. I find myself playing and enjoying the settlement content but only because it's part of the greater Elite Dangerous experience and not because it stands particularly well on its own If the game wanted to attract new players by using the FPS side as a gateway drug to the larger space based game and I've no idea if that was the intention or not then there are far more sophisticated and refined FPS experiences that will do it far better than what Elite is currently offering. Ultimately the settlement raiding in Elite Dangerous Odyssey is fun but I do find myself constantly lamenting what it could have been and importantly what it deserves to be. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on all things settlement based in the 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