Haha! Actually I think I have fast scan on it now, maybe the build is out of date a bit.

Is my iEagle the fastest ship at SimHQ? 820 boost. It could be faster, but I'm wondering who has a faster boat in mission trim? It's 835 if I drop the HRP, but that's not how I fly it, feeling I am smart to have a little additional integrity.

Once I finish unlocking G5 thruster engineering, imma see how fast I can make stuff. I have been stuck in Sirius for a couple of days now, running missions here and there on foot every once in a while. Last night I wound up in prison for wasting a few guards that got in my way for the "good of Sirius Corporation" because all I needed were the contents of a locker in a power station.

The guards were unreasonable, I swear. I asked them nicely to let me inside so I could retrieve the item, but noooo they would not open the doors for me. They mumbled something about access permits, something. Maybe it was the fact that I shut off the life support systems, and laser drilled into an access panel, or maybe it was because they caught me red handed trying to overload the door circuits, but for whatever reason they stopped asking questions and just started shooting.

What's a man to do!

So I shot back. My trusty SRV's turret barrels glowed white hot as the laser bolts pew pewed, and when the dust settled I saw my break--a clear path to the inside. One overload to the circuit later, I was in, and there stood an engineer who promptly wasted my dumb arse because I forgot to turn my personal shield on.

Idiot.

At least the food in prison was hot, unlike the driver of the Apex shuttle who flew me back to station after my release...

I'd say you win by a long shot! My Courier stopped in the mid 700 range as I remember. Your definitely the mad scientist. Great job!!

yay!

Speed King has a nice ring to it.

That is 1834 MPH by the way.

Zoom Zoom

One of my favorite things to do in Star Citizen is to skim planet surfaces at 400 - 700 m/s. I can't wait to do this in Elite.

There are far more ground obstructions in Star Citizen, though. Hopefully Frontier will beef up the detail on planets even more.

Having just finished two campaigns in Total War Rome 2 which I picked up a month ago, I was on Steam last night looking for my next adventure. While I was there I had a look at Odyssey. And good grief was the expansion getting ripped! I knew there were issues, as I follow it from afar. But I did not know it has been this poorly received. So much so that I reckon this could qualify as a disaster release. Frontier is getting killed in Steam reviews. I picked a good time to take a break, and maybe it will be better when I pick it back up.

Odyssey has never been must-have for me, but I planned to get it anyway. But after what I've read I see no compelling reason to do it anytime soon.

I have played Odyssey a lot since release and I've only had a few very minor issues. The problems folks seem to be having are strange, and most of the complaints seem to be from users of ultra high end equipment. I play Odyssey on my 3770k and 1080 GTX on ultra detail at 1080p and my framerate is 60 fps in space and dips down to 30 - 35 in Odyssey specific new settlements. I have a theory than many of those with issues are those who aren't playing on ultra--but this also could be a driver thing with respect to the newest cards. Odyssey isn't optimized yet, and there's issues here or there, but it is far from the dumpster fire that these reviews are painting the game as.

And this is coming from someone who has spent who knows how many hours playing the Star Citizen alpha, which IS a mess. None of these whiners have likely spent much time with that.

The solace of low expectations

Some players recommend the expansion, and some are accepting of its faults. But in the main I see a majority who are displeased with this release.

But if you are the sort who can ignore Star Citizen's faults, then I reckon Elite is not so bad. I'm sort of the same, throughout my gaming history I have rarely seemed to suffer what others complain about. Maybe I am less discerning than some. But Odyssey is something that I don't care much about, and if it is full of issues I'll wait until that is in the past, as much as is possible.

And while technical issues are part of it, the issues that stand out to me are more gameplay related.

Odyssey really isn't bad at all, DBond. I've been playing the game fine, for the most part.

There are minor annoyances such as the brightness of ships in supercruise, or an occasional graphical color flash, or the odd time I saw the interior of the on foot lobby in the middle of a coriolis station(that happened one time out of hundreds of landings), but these issues are very rare.

Perhaps I have been very fortunate in not having many problems, but I'd be the first to tell you if this is a mess, and it ain't. Star Citizen, however, is. You played through Cyberpunk, right?

Even I have avoided that dumpster fire. Mostly because GTA-style gameplay really isn't interesting to me. I'm more of a roaming exploration kinda guy, and Odyssey has been pretty solid for this.

Yeah I finished Cyberpunk.

I'm not too concerned about it honestly, just posting my thoughts on the matter. If Odyssey was something I had been looking forward to with great anticipation, then I'd probably buy it, bugs and all. But I'm not even playing Elite at the mo, and the fact that my interest in Odyssey is minor means I'm fine with waiting, and may even get it on sale if I wait long enough

Watch out for personal cloaking devices...



Took a mission to eliminate some scum who had seized an outpost tonight. These were the worst of the worst, for they had not only seized the facility, they also mind wiped all the workers and psychologically reprogrammed them to be subservient sycophants.

Sick.

So I swept in, dropped off my SRV, and got down to business. I plugged eleven of the scum before I even set my boots down, then scoured the complex, room by room, plugging the stragglers and picking up security clearances along the way. Down the counter went, 3, two... one.

One left.

One dirty, swarthy, brainwashed punk who had unfortunately fallen for the pirate line, "We'll guarantee you hookers, blow, and mountains of gold to go with."

Yeah, gold plated ammo, maybe. To their heads. One last punk to waste and I could blow this rock in my courier and head back to station for some fine tail at the bar.

Or so I thought. I searched high and low but the punk just couldn't be found. So I hacked into a mainframe terminal and set a tracking beacon on them. This effer didn't want to die. Maybe they had managed to accumulate a pile of gold, sealed away in some locker beneath a bunk. Whatever their exploits, when I showed up where the tracking beacon said they'd be... they weren't. Just a lonely blip on my visor.

And then it moved...

Yes, the blip moved. But there was nobody there! This couldn't be right! But I kept my shields on, just in case. Never know if these slippery punks had left me a surprise of their own in the mainframe and were waiting for my stupid bounty hunter head to cross their sights.

Then I felt them...

Something fleshy, warm, soft and sweaty brushed against my suit. Still, I saw corridor and floor. And I bumped into them again. I didn't know what to think so I did what any veteran would do next...

I pulled out my sidearm and started to spray. Squirts of blood misted the air and there they appeared, flung to the floor, they flopped down dead, materializing out of thin air.

Bastages have cloaking devices. You have been warned.


(And if this was a bug, a pretty nifty one at that. One more check for the bank and some nice reputation to boot. I always get my man.)

Outstanding AAR Blastman! Keep them coming

Ok, so where do I begin?

I'm finally back in the bubble and I was really blown away by being able to disembark from my ship and visit the lobby of a station. I bought my first combat suit and I'll be doing some planetary missions this week.

My only slight drawback so far is that my frame rate performance is not exactly ideal when I'm in first person mode but hopefully that will improve with subsequent updates from Frontier.

One theory I have is folks with the most framerate problems in Odyssey are running at lower detail settings. I know this may sound counter-intuitive, and I have not tested, but try running in ultra settings, minus the anti-aliasing(which you can switch to off or FXAA if you must). I found that setting shadows to medium had the largest impact for me, and I'm on a 3770k + 1080 GTX, so really old hardware, and usually have about a minimum of about 30 FPS in settlements, 60 in space, and around 50+ on stations at 1080p. The premise of my theory is the bulk of their optimization code is centered around all graphics options on, and they may not have ported over all the optimization functions to the lower settings. Whenever I see folks complaining about awful framerates on the Steam forums, I noticed that they are running on low detail settings. I am also offloading maximum work to my GPU.

You need more than a combat suit for planetary missions--many require a maverick suit which has a cutting torch. The artemis suit you won't need unless you're out doing exploration, where the biological scanner could come in handy. Often I'll land on a neat moon or planet and go off wandering on a hike.

The game defaulted me to "ultra" settings but I'll go ahead and set my shadows to "medium" and go from there. High detailed shadows do indeed have a big performance hit in most games. At least the ones that I've played. I really don't want to turn off the anti-aliasing because I can't stand those jaggies!

I have my shadows set to highest now--seems the last few updates have helped this. There's such a remarkable difference on planets with shadow quality, and I spend most of my time outside of settlements anyways. Thirty FPS is good enough--I still remember the days of playing Quake 1 online at 20 - 30 fps at 320x200 resolution.

You must have died a LOT.

I killed a lot of 'em, too. Stacked them virtual bodies up like cordwood.

Has anyone done any infantry combat yet on the planet surface? If yes, what does it "feel" like? Does it handle like a standard first person shooter or is it a bit clunky? I'll be trying it out myself tonight.

The first persona combat feels solid. Don't forget to move and stay fluid, unlike shooters such as Counterstrike which reward you for crouching and stationary shooting. That will get you quickly overwhelmed in Elite. Odyssey is a nice compromise between Quake style combat and Counterstrike.