On the 1st of January I took a lift on the carrier D2EA Northstar (LNK-25Z) to the new outpost at the ‘top’ of the galaxy ‘Rackham’s Peak’ in the HIP 58832 system some 5,500 ly directly up from the bubble. It’s only accessible by carriers and gives an amazing view of the Milky Way.
Came back to bubble and made my way to the Thargoid infested Wellington system, some 884ly from Sol, to take part in some of the newly implemented anti xeno CZs. Deployed my Krait MNK2 off the carrier Draco’s Revenge (VNY-36V). I had to take off the 2 Guardian Shard Cannons and replace them with the AX multi-canons to help deal with the scouts and make the Krate a better all rounder. The AX CXz spawn a mixture of scouts and various flavours of interceptors. With wing missions stacked from different providers and the recent buff in combat, this proved very profitable work.
No big surprise that on the 13th of January. Frontier announce a delay in the much anticipated Odyssey launch. Guessing now that it will be no earlier that April. Such a shame but I guess rather late and working than early and unplayable.
Late in January I went to explore the Imperial Black site/Penal ‘Serene Harbour‘ on planet 3 b of R CrA Sector AF-A d42. This was a mystery that Frontier set up and Canon found in under two hours. They brute forced a search for some 4,000 systems. Pretty impressive.
On the 27th February on my freebie alt account ‘Stella’ I landed on the World of Death in Spoihaae XE-X d2-9. Lost two Krait Phantoms and 64 units of Jaques Stills rares. Was worth it though. Pretty amazing to be on the planet when it flew through the neutron stars cone.
As if that was not dangerous enough the very next day I landed on the 11g planet in the Kyloall CL-Y g1518 D 1 system. Was nowhere near as difficult as I was expecting it to be. Just remember to let the flight assist off gently lower you to the ground.
On the 5th of March I winged up with Rawrsome and liberated some SAP 8 Cores and Antimatter Containment Units from some ‘Military Couriers’ in the Vish system, which was in a Civil War at the time. The SAP 8 cores have long been thought to be a key to finding Raxxla. Now have one on my carrier.
Spent the 15th of March rescuing people from the burning Lave station. Doing my part for humanity.
On the 2nd of April I got my first real time playing the Odyssey alpha. Did play it, very briefly, the day after it came out (Monday 29th March) for an hour after work, but did not really get beyond the key bind stage.
I did have to run the game on a lower resolution of 1080P at medium quality, even then my NVIDEA 1060 graphics card was struggling to get above 20FPS in the spawn station. It did look good, but can’t wait to see it in UHD Ultra. I was very dissapointed and a bit angry with Frontier that had led us to believe that if you can play Horizons then you will be able to play Odyssey no problems. Having said that it is an alpha so should only get better.
I wonder what 1984 me would make of my complains of not being able to play on a 55inch monitor in 3,840×2,1600 rez with millions of colours and 90FPS game play of photo realistic content compared to the, at the time stunning wire frame 8FPS at 320×246 in 8 colours on a 12inch fuzzy RF input telly. Wow! Today that size would be more appropriate for an icon, not a game. We have indeed come a long way.
Thankfully around the same time my new gaming PC build was confirmed as ready to build, so I should get that soon. The new machine from Overclockers, called Gallium, is an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 32 Gig RAM & Nvidia 3080 GFX card, which will have much, much more horsepower to push all those lovely polygons around. Alphas are always a bit crappy for frame rate anyway, once it’s all nailed down the optimisation of graphics can be looked at and I’m sure the frame rates will go way up.
I bumped into Korrban who had been playing the alpha a fair bit and knew the fastest and easiest way to make credits. So on his advice I took on a few source and return missions which were easily accomplished after figuring out the trick of setting the location of the container via a console at the site.
Game play was great fun and the outposts were fantastically realised. It’s going to be lots of fun with first person shooter game play at these locations. Add into the mix SRVs and ships overhead and it could be superb. I believe the underlying game play will be a hold two or three different locations at the base to win, which is the same game play from an old Star Wars game and it worked very well there.
Amazingly, especially for Frontier, there were very few bugs I came across. There was one really annoying one that would not let me exit the Apex taxi system map. I had to exit to menu, go back in, then I was out of the menu, but could not move, then had to exit to menu again, back in then all good. The only other issue was some ground texture not being rendered properly on a planet. I was expecting much more issues, especially from an alpha.
9 April. My new water cooled gaming PC arrived. Specs are:
- Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite V2 (AMD AM4) B550 ATX Motherboard
- Gigabyte P850GM 850W PSU
- AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor (3593MHz) x8
- Kingston HyperX Fury 32Gig (2×16) DDR 4 PC4-28800C18 3600MHz Dual Channel Kit
- Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 27.21.14.6589 (4095MB) x1
- Corsair Force MP600 series 500GB NVMe PCIe Gen4 M.2 SSD
- TeamGroup 1TB Vulcan G SSD SATA 6Gbps 3D NAND SSD
On Horizons my frame rates for 4k Ultra settings are… In space 250-380 FPS, Inside Station 160 FPS, Planetside 60+ FPS, Main Menu 160 FPS. Basically it’s about 4 to 5 times faster than my last games PC. On the 11th of April I got my new gaming PC running with Elite, both the main game and Odyssey Alpha. Frame rate on Odyssey pretty poor, but it is an alpha.
After reading Galnet article I found the Space Dredger in asteroid cluster 1 of Perseus Dark Region KC-V C2-2 B. First one to be put in the game. Were part of the beta back in 2012 I think, but never seen again till now.
Odyssey launched on the 19th of May. There was no beta, just straight from Alpha to launch. I cold not get it to download, Install button greyed out. Did not get it to work till early the next day. Very frustrating. A few days later after a hot fix I had to totally uninstall and re-install Odyssey, this happened a couple of times, massive waste of time. Not a good roll out for this much awaited update.
CMDRs fought back by tagging the game as ‘Early Access’ in steam. For the first time ever the game has a ‘Mostly Negative’ reviews.
On the 9th of June I found out that Obi was so upset with the direction that the game had taken he quit the game and cleared his account. Such a shame as he was great fun to wing up with and shoot the shit. He had amassed around 100 billion credits and had done everything in the game and was not interested in the new ground based gameplay so felt there was nothing new for him to do and probably would not be for a very long time. I can understand that.
Found out about Red Thursday. Shops get replenished with suits and weapons if grade 2+
By late June I had unlocked all the new ground based engineers except for Yarden Bond who needs 8 Smear Campaign Plans, and nobody has found a single one ever in the game so far. Looks like Frontier have fucked up, but they deny it and say they are in the game.
In September I made Gunslinger in the mercenary rank. Certainly easier to win conflicts with upgraded suits and weapons.
Went exploring in a Southernly direction to the Kepler’s Crest sector visiting the Crab Nebula and ‘Station X’ on the way. Then went West and scanned the Zurara, a megaship in the Syreadiae JX-F C0 system that was involved in Project Dynasty. All part of the Fortamine Rift mystery from years ago. Finally got to put a pin in that quest.
In late September I was out exploring in my DBX ‘USS Botany Bay’ and raced back to Visteanis to sell Carto data at the community goal. Doing so made me Elite 1 in Exploration. That’s my first Elite 1 rank.
9 Oct. Made Elite 1 in trade.
On the 9th of December patch 9 was released. The Game now finally feels like it’s out of Beta. Had the game been released in this condition back in May then I’m sure the feedback and acceptance of Odyssey would have been much, much warmer. Hopefully players who were pissed off at launch will come back and give it another go now.
On the 22nd of December I made Elite in Mercenary, which is essentially a ground combat rank. So now Quad Elite. All eyes on getting Elite in Xenobiology. Then I guess will have to have another crack at CQC.
Having burned out on ground combat and a new goal to get that final elite in the main game of Xenobiology, I set out to the Western edge of the Milky Way for some exploration. Never really been out in that direction before. Again used the DBX ‘USS Botany Bay’ which is a good little ship for quick scouting around planetary bodies. Plan to skim the outer western edge of the Milky Way and get up to the DSSA ‘Nowhere’ then head East towards Colonia to sell all the data.
I will be able to sell my cartographic data to the carriers on the way, but will have to keep the Xeno data safe till I get to Colonia, as I can’t yet sell the data to carriers. Looks like carrier interiors may be a thing in early 2022 and assuming you will be able to have a Vista Genomics on board.
A very mixed bag this year. Personally I like the Odyssey expanse, however being lied to from Frontier about ‘If you can run Horizons, you can run Odysey’ was bullshit. The game released in May was not finished, it was a beta, however Frontier would not acknowledge this. The console release is stull unknown, I’m guessing they are having massive issues getting it to work on these platforms.
I have played alsoms exclusively Odyssey gameplay since launch in May, so it must be interesting, at least to me. I’m interested in what future gameplay will come and still optimistic about the games future.
Please do not let me down Frontier.
