The next Elite Dangerous DLC will finally put boots on the moon

Elite Dangerous, a game about internet spaceships, is about to become a game about internet space boots, too. Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is arriving early 2021, and it will let you leave your first-person cockpit to enter a first-person shooter point of view. Walk around! Go on foot! As Steve Carell repeats over and over in Space Force, "Boots on the Moon!"

Elite Dangerous, however, has a few more planetary bodies to land on than just the Moon. An entire Milky Way's worth of procedurally generated planetary bodies, in fact. That may not seem like a big deal, especially when there are other space games out there that let you both fly ships and walk around on planets. No Man's Sky certainly comes to mind. But most sci-fi games typically do one or the other, not both. And most certainly don't let you do it in a sandbox the size of our actual galaxy.

Now, walking around wouldn't look so good in Elite Dangerous, except these up-close looks will be "powered by stunning new tech." Which will be great to see, because currently, even flying over the surface at hundreds of miles per hour, there isn't a lot to see down on the majoritively rocky, barren, icy planets. Even this trailer indicates you'll still be seeing a whole lot of lifeless desert. 

Mission structure is going to get shooty in first-person, too. You see our pilots dressed in stuff that looks more armor-plated than a typical flight suit, and both are packing rifles. So, expect combat to be part and parcel with the new mission variety. The tactical landscape will have commanders, surface rovers, and spaceships converging. If Odyssey can pull this off, it'll do what the developers of EVE Online and DUST 514 had hoped to pull off: Create a game where air superiority and boots on the ground come together.

I've got a soft spot for Elite Dangerous. It single-handedly brought me back to PC gaming after a console-generation-long hiatus. Frontier Developers make questionable decisions, especially when it comes to balancing grind vs. reward in a game where you're just flying around space, grinding for space bucks in order to buy spaceships. But again, cruising through the only full-bodied model of our entire galaxy (that I've seen, anyway) was enough to earn it a spot on my 10 Favorite Games of the Decade.