Elite Dangerous: Odyssey - Dev Diary: Forging Your Path | PS4.

So what's really unique about Odyssey in the Elite  Dangerous universe is that for the very first time   we're going to allow people to set foot on the planets and in Space Port and explore the world in this new perspective. We've tried to maintain  what we felt was a core part of Elite, which is freedom of choice.

And we really embrace that with Odyssey and have transposed all of those careers back down onto an on-foot experience. So when you're picking your base suit in Odyssey, you're really picking it based on the  career and activities that you want to undertake.

Each of the suits has its own strengths and and weaknesses. So for instance, there'll be a suit that skews towards exploration, a suit that skews towards combat, and also a suit which you might want to wear if you were to go scavenging, hunting through wrecks to find bits of equipment that might be useful to you.

Odyssey will provide players with a clear choice. They're free to take missions either from mission boards or mission givers, or players can go out and explore. So we allow the player to disembark at outposts, planet ports, space ports, so all of these are great places to find work and undertake missions.

But also now you can go to our new settlements which are kind of more dust bowl, wild west towns that you'd found on the edges of civilization. When you find these settlements, I think you'll want to travel  into them and see what the lay of the land is, see what options and opportunities they offer, and decide which way you're going to play.

With Odyssey, for the first time we'll have fully modelled and  fully animated characters appearing in game, and they will feel part of the universe and extend the narrative that's there. They will be moving through these spaces. You'll be able to interact with them.

Some of them will speak to you, so we've had to work on getting those performances right. It's a whole new way of exploring the game. You'll hear the settlements, how alive it is. You'll hear announcers. You go into buildings and the soundscape changes.

It's the very first time that you're experiencing the sounds of Elite Dangerous not inside a ship or inside a little vehicle, but inside a body. Meeting people who you can relate to in places is the way you can feel grounded in this quite fantastical universe.

And there's going to be a lot of players transferring from the main game who have never experienced this before but will understand how it feels to be in that universe. All of the NPCs that you encounter in Odyssey are all generated as part of the background sim.

So if i go to a port or a settlement, the NPCs that I'm going to find there will be affiliated with the faction that owns that settlement. So we're driving some personality into our NPCs via the background sim connection, and I think that's an amazing addition.

One of our new features and new characters  works for a corporation called Apex Interstellar. Players will be able to book journeys to and from ports within jump range. This gives a way for those players to actually move aroundthe galaxy for a relatively cheap fee and experience gameplay away from the ports themselves.

So within the on-foot gameplay the primary way of earning credits is to actually undertake missions and obviously complete them successfully. But you can also do some slightly more nefarious acts. Maybe you'll go to settlements and steal items and sell them onto the black market, or you could become an explorer and collect samples from our new organic life.

With Odyssey we've worked really hard to maintain player agency. We want players to have the choice about how they play Elite. If players want to continue in their ship gameplay, absolutely. If they want to engage in on-foot gameplay, perfect. If they want to do both, even better.