The next expansion of Elite Dangerous is Odyssey, which adds first-person shootybangs to Frontier’s space sims with a galaxy size. We already knew this, but now Frontier has announced that the expansion of the alpha will begin on March 29, and there is an extremely tight play through of this.
I have a soft spot for these marketing videos that work like LARPs for gamers, in which developers play the most serious and engaging players they can think of. The video above is filled with chats of poetry as three players break into a compound, sneak past a couple of guards, break into a building and approach a reactor before fleeing back to their ship for a getaway.
It’s completely different from how the vast majority of players will talk while doing these missions themselves, but hey, it’s trying to sell the taste of the thing, whatever. It’s more of a problem that it serves here to highlight a lot of the discomfort in the unfinished version they play. They ‘sneak’, for example, at guards who look completely dull and unconscious. When a fight breaks out, they make a big deal out of the fact that they seem to be overwhelmed, while enemies mostly wander around in front of them, in public, and do not shoot.
These are alpha recordings released before an alpha release, and they are obviously incomplete. Its basics remain impressive. Elite Dangerous long ago transformed from a game that stuck you in a cabin into a game that made you move on ships, and could walk and roam on planets. That it is now also a game where you can fight on foot and that a fight can communicate on foot with the world around the spaceship is remarkable. This is what EVE Online dreamed about years ago, and Star Citizen still dreams of it.
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey hits alpha for those buying it on March 29, and aims to give a final release later this spring.