“For example, players could be tasked with stealing important data files from a heavily guarded settlement. “As with Elite over the past four decades, players will be able to forge their own path and take their own approach to the game – whether that’s fighting for factions as a mercenary, stripping wrecks as a scavenger or pursuing discovery in its purest form, exploring planets and their organic life from an entirely new perspective.Īnd that freedom needs to operate at two distinct levels, Hughes explains: “One of our core design principles when designing Odyssey has been to ensure that we offer player choice at the macro level – the type of activity they want to engage with – but also at the micro level – how they want to achieve their chosen goals. Which begs the slightly unfair question of why it’s taken so long? “It’s always been something we wanted to bring to the game but it had to be a meaningful experience and we always had to balance that with our desire to enhance and develop the in-cockpit gameplay,” says Jackson.įREEDOM OF MOVEMENT Gareth Hughes, Frontier DevelopmentsĬoming back to the idea of extending the core experience and values into the on-foot gameplay, Gareth Hughes, lead designer, explains how the existing experience, and the franchise as a whole, has defined Odyssey. “What Elite has leant to Odyssey is a foundation and principles on which to build – core experiences to transpose down onto the surface of planets – the vision of freedom for a player to forge their own way in the galaxy, the wonder of exploration and, of course, the danger.”Īnd this desire for more personal exploration doesn’t just come from the team: “Players have been asking for on-foot gameplay from day one, you can go all the way back to the Kickstarter campaign and find a ton of discussion.”
“In terms of its scale, and in large parts its development, Odyssey can definitely be compared to a new game,” says Jackson. So how does creating an expansion on this scale compare to a wholly new project? With a couple of years of development time and a sizable headcount, the team could have completed the development of a substantial standalone game. “It’s something we’ve played around with for a number of years, experimenting with different ideas for gameplay, but Odyssey in its current form started taking shape around the beginning of 2019.Īnd the team to bring this next evolution of the game to its player base? “We’ve averaged around 100 developers working on the project with a peak of around 140,” Jackson reveals. “It would be fair to say that the on-foot experience has been in our minds since the inception of Elite Dangerous,” says game director Piers Jackson.
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