Frontier have released a recap of a recent Mission Q&A for the upcoming Odyssey expansion of Elite Dangerous. The Q&A piggy-backs on some pre-alpha footage as the dev team showed off last week, explaining in more detail what players can expect in the upcoming Elite Dangerous: Odyssey pre-alpha coming later this month.
The recap is a good way to quickly get some information on the upcoming missions, but it's worth watching the 8-minute long video to see the alpha in action. In the Q&A, developer Gareth Hughes confirmed quite a few interesting tidbits of of note, such as the fact that there are 27 different settlement types to explore out of your ship, including agriculture, industrial, tourism and military to name a few.
Hughes also touched on NPCs and the different types players will encounter in these settlements, such as the guards you can fight against and the civilians themselves. Thankfully, though, if you decide to take the role of the criminal, there are windows of opportunity before the whole station is turned to your illicit activities.
If you go in shooting, that's going to upset even the most friendly NPCs! As soon as you're killing NPCs without reason, you're given a bounty straight away, and you're pretty much fair game! The settlement doesn't have a hive mind in terms of what you're doing. If you're detected doing something that's going to elicit a hostile response from the AI, before the whole settlement is aware of that, the message has to be radioed out - you're given a window of opportunity to interject before they can send that message out.
NPCs will also scan you, much like they will currently in space, and you can scan NPCs themselves as well in order to gain access to parts of settlements. If an NPC scans you, you aren't going to get scanned a ton by other NPCs right afterwards, but if they pick up one suspicious behavior they might request a new scan.
Missions can be approached from a multitude of ways as well, from a guns blazing approach to the full stealth gameplay. How you approach the settlement will be up to you, and some gameplay styles will have bonus rewards, like not being detected or refraining from killing during the mission.
Players can also take on specific roles based on the suits they wear, according to Hughes. Choosing the right suit and understanding how suit management will work, such as the in-suit life support, shield and more is crucial to successfully completeing your mission.
You can check out the full Q&A on the Elite Dangerous forums. Odyssey's Pre-Alpha is coming to PC on March 29th. Recently the Elite Dangerous: Odyssey team also talked about the different weapons players will be using in on-foot situations, detailing pistols, rocket launchers and more.
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