You've got to be kidding me with this trailer. Elite Dangerous: Odyssey gameplay reveal with a David Bowie soundtrack? My armchair astronomer just died and went to heaven.
The upcoming Odyssey expansion takes the sci-fi spaceship-'em-up to the next level—by giving the game its most down-to-earth gameplay yet. You'll get to walk around on planetary surfaces! Walking on planets! I know!
It's weird how saying that will make a space-sim lover (like me) get all excited. I mean, walking on planets? Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, isn't that what every first-person shooter in the world does? Sure. But not every first-person shooter in the world has a 1:1 recreation of the Milky Way Galaxy to roam around in at will. There's the rub, my friend.
Well okay, you say, backup argument fully in tow: Didn't No Man's Sky let you go seamlessly from boots on the ground to your butt in the cockpit and back again? And hasn't No Man's Sky let you do that since it launched back in 2016, back when the game was reportedly unfinished?
Touché.
But I also think there's room enough in this universe for both Elite Dangerous and No Man's Sky to exist. And while their audiences might overlap, I don't think they cannibalize one another. I gladly hop into either one of those games to get my sci-fi fix. One is just more NASA-like in its harder-science fiction, and the other is more pulp-novel cover art in its execution. Both games do their respective thing rather well.
Suffice it to say, having the opportunity to turn Elite Dangerous into a walking sim of sorts is more than enough to make me hit the reinstall button. Now if I could just get my hands on another HOTAS that isn't being scalped at 2020 Star Wars: Squadrons just-came-out prices.
Elite Dangerous just rolled its Horizons content into the base game for free, which will all be required for Odyssey to work. And while the game is on Steam, Epic, Xbox One, and PS4, developer Frontier is only taking pre-orders on PC for now. It'll be a solid $40 to add that one to your cart. Which will be an easy buy for me. I mean, the baseline game handily made my Top 10 Games of Decade. You should probably know that about me.
