Elite Dangerous: Odyssey

I run a spreadsheet tracking every major Elite Dangerous update since launch, so when Odyssey promised to finally let commanders step out of their cockpits and onto planetary surfaces, I cleared a week in my calendar. What I found was an expansion with a genuinely thrilling concept executed with the kind of rough-edged ambition that Frontier Developments seems constitutionally unable to avoid. The core hook is real: walking across a planet-sized world that you just flew to from another star system is a perspective shift that almost nothing else in gaming can match. Almost. The on-foot layer adds three distinct activity pillars. First, there is ground combat across settlements, outposts, laboratories, and refineries, using a small arsenal of weapons governed by a shield-versus-hull resistance system borrowed directly from ship combat. Lasers shred shields; kinetic weapons chew through suits and hulls. That tactical layer is interesting in theory, but the enemy AI has never reached the standard the game needs, and mission structures repeat fast enough that you will recognise the layout of a "hostile settlement" job well before your tenth hour on foot. Second, there is exobiology: scanning alien fauna on atmospheric worlds, cataloguing species, and cashing discoveries in at Vista Genomics on station concourses. For the explorer-minded commander this is the expansion's genuine highlight, rewarding patience and chart-reading over twitch skill. Third, there are covert-style missions involving hacking terminals, stealing data, and navigating settlement security without triggering alarms, a mode that works better than it sounds but is hamstrung by the fact that on-foot co-op missions are not properly supported. Teams can technically play together, but the game does not share mission objectives across the group, which makes the multiplayer promise feel like a bullet point that was never fully coded. The launch in May 2021 was a cautionary tale. Steam reviews cratered to a mostly negative rating on release weekend, and the criticisms were fair: frame rate drops that hit even high-end rigs, broken tutorial sequences, mission items that refused to spawn, and an AI that would sometimes just watch you commit crimes without reacting. Frontier has shipped waves of patches since, and the stability picture is meaningfully better than it was at year one. Whether it is good enough depends entirely on your hardware. A fast CPU and plenty of RAM make a measurable difference in on-foot zones. Players on older rigs still report inconsistent performance in dense settlements. The console release was cancelled outright, which tells you something about the expansion's technical overhead. VR support also exists only for the ship side of the game; strap on a headset and the moment you disembark the immersion cuts off. Who should actually consider this? Veterans of the base game who have exhausted Horizons and want a reason to dock at stations rather than just refuel and leave. Explorers who will spend hours in deep space cataloguing flora for the exobiology payouts. Anyone who finds Elite's core loop of trading, bounty hunting, and mining in zero-g to be enough, but wants one more texture on top of it. Newcomers to Elite Dangerous should not start here. The base game's flight model, rebuy mechanics, and engineering grind are steep enough without adding suit upgrades, material farming for on-foot engineers, and a second progression tree to untangle. The expansion genuinely rewards commanders who have already built a foundation, not those trying to learn the cockpit controls simultaneously. The honest summary is this: Odyssey is an expansion that expanded the blueprint without finishing the building. The ambition is real, the exobiology loop is underrated, and the sheer visual weight of standing on a barren moon while your ship sits on the pad behind you is something worth experiencing. But the on-foot combat is thin, mission variety is limited, co-op implementation falls short of what was marketed, and the performance ceiling still depends too heavily on your specific hardware configuration. It is a better product than it was at launch, but the Mixed rating on Steam at 43% positive reflects years of accumulated frustration from a community that expected more follow-through.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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