Aaaah yes, it is good to be back in this saddle again.
Now any of you fine readers who also watch my streams on OPTV (thanks for that by the way) know that I’m already pretty familiar with Elite: Dangerous and have even gotten pretty competent in a bunch of its activities! You also may be familiar with my best friend and mentor in the game, Britarnya. So naturally, I was going to make sure to leverage that help as I started off this month’s Choose My Adventure run in the sandbox.
So as the title suggests, this week was a pretty quick bit of co-op for the most part. Brit’s schedule kind of demands that we had to cut our run mostly short, but it still ended up being an effective bit of time together, particularly since we’re starting to get back into the on-foot mission swing of things.
See, Brit found out some of the best ways to get on-foot engineering materials – those are the mats needed to upgrade your FPS weapons and spacesuits – and has been running a bunch of these missions pretty recently. What’s more, she’s figured out a lot of the stealth stuff along the way as well. Both of these things have been previously tough nuts to crack for me on a personal level; the former being because every mission I used to run almost always didn’t give me what I wanted, and the latter being because I suck. Still, I think it’s still really cool that my friend can still learn new things even as a 10-year veteran of the game.
So it was that our time together would be spent knocking down a couple of settlements. Or more specifically, powering them back up.
The thing that would make these otherwise routine-sounding missions difficult is an apparent bug. The security forces for the minor faction that is asking us to get these facilities back up and running apparently sees us as hostile for some reason. Basically, we had to skulk around a base protected by the people who hired us to turn it on because otherwise they would open fire on us. And we’d be the criminals as a result.
It’s insipid, frankly. But it’s also FDev still out here FDev’ing, as we’re both wont to say.
Even with that uncomfortable wrinkle, we were pretty easily able to power things up without firing a shot or getting a bounty placed on our heads. Most of this was down to our general ability to leap across rooftips and stay in the dark. Now, I’ve done both of these things in my own personal stealth attempts prior, but for some reason I was always getting caught. Probably because I presumed that the NPC guards stumbling around had a cone of vision rather than what I can only assume is a half dome of vision, meaning that even though their heads don’t crane upwards, they’re still able to sense things above them. At least, things in front of them, anyway. The moment their backs are turned, all perception is gone.
Using this to our advantage, we moved along from building to building, rummaging around for materials along the way. A lot of this still continues to feel like a crap shoot in terms of getting wanted things, but then I’ve also since come to appreciate how best to trade unwanted goodies at the bartender of a space station for wanted mats. This is immensely helped by a third-party tool known as the Odyssey Materials Helper, which lets me track the things I want to upgrade and records how many mats I have against how many I need. It also chirps at me in annoyance when I pick up something that’s useless, which is so fun, let me tell you.
Even though I mostly felt a bit like I was being led along by Brit, following her lead and trying to not screw things up along the way, I still got the sensation that Odyssey’s missions are more and more the solved problem I had always expected them to become. I recall when this expansion first launched how curiosity and eagerness melted into disappointment and dismay as the sheer cliff face of grind and horrible winds of bad RNG would never see us get the upgrades we wanted.
In just a couple of runs, I was able to upgrade my shotgun from grade two to grade four. So clearly things have improved since then, if not because of improved drop rates than thanks to a deeper knowledge of where to find this crap. Yes, it should not have taken FDev literal years to get this right, but better late than never, I suppose. And we’re having fun besides. And as I said, it’s nice to be back in familiar environs.
Now this isn’t to suggest that we’re going to keep on our merry way doing this all the time. Obviously the two of us are going to follow the Will of the Polls in terms of our next primary task; we’ll just likely do this on-foot stuff a couple of times more or in-between the main poll choice. So then, what’s that main poll choice going to be, friends?
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Polling will close up at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday the 13th (mwa ha ha ha). Until then, I daresay the two of us are going to maybe see about turning on the lights in a few other stations as we wait for the poll results to come together. Ideally without having rent-a-cops opening fire on us.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
