“What Elite has leant to Odyssey is a foundation and principles on which to build – core experiences to transpose down onto the surface of planets – the vision of freedom for a player to forge their own way in the galaxy, the wonder of exploration and, of course, the danger.”Īnd this desire for more personal exploration doesn’t just come from the team: “Players have been asking for on-foot gameplay from day one, you can go all the way back to the Kickstarter campaign and find a ton of discussion.” “In terms of its scale, and in large parts its development, Odyssey can definitely be compared to a new game,” says Jackson. So how does creating an expansion on this scale compare to a wholly new project? With a couple of years of development time and a sizable headcount, the team could have completed the development of a substantial standalone game. “It’s something we’ve played around with for a number of years, experimenting with different ideas for gameplay, but Odyssey in its current form started taking shape around the beginning of 2019.Īnd the team to bring this next evolution of the game to its player base? “We’ve averaged around 100 developers working on the project with a peak of around 140,” Jackson reveals. “It would be fair to say that the on-foot experience has been in our minds since the inception of Elite Dangerous,” says game director Piers Jackson.
