Choose My Adventure: Mission runs cap off a welcoming return to Elite Dangerous

What a difference a month makes. When I first started these series of Elite Dangerous posts for Choose My Adventure, I had gone into it with the assumption that I was flying completely on my lonesome, with nobody else to fly along in a wing or a squadron; I was still going to represent Porg Squadron as I flew, but for all intents and purposes that support was no more. But now it looks as if the overhaul to engineering coming later this week is enough for my best friend and mentor to come back and fly alongside me once more.

But even as I’m pleased to see that my friend is excited for what’s next all over again, what also makes me happy is that her own return to Elite was marked by the simple realizations about the things that made the sandbox fun for her to begin with, which has also mirrored my own experience these past few weeks.

First, though, I should report in on what the mission running ended up being like because that’s what was voted on in the polls. I elected to focus pretty much on the Odyssey missions that involved my going on-foot in order to get things done, with plans to slowly try and ramp things up in terms of intensity to see just where the line would be.

I began with something pretty basic: land at a crashed ship, retrieve an item from the wreckage, and get back to safety. The first time I did this, I had forgotten about the fact that I could be attacked by enemies who landed on the planet surface, so that was a bit of a surprise. Luckily my combat abilities were enough to see me at least take a couple of these raiders out before I decided to book it and fly away with my goods.

It was a little bit harrowing but not too stressful, and it also re-introduced me to maneuvers that I had forgotten about, such as how to best approach a planetary POI. I did this a few more times and slowly got better at it each time. A perfect onramp, in my opinion.

Next up was something a bit more intense in the form of an assassination target. This one got me to play around with a little bit of Elite’s stealth gameplay, though it’s not really that much more involved than crouch-walking everywhere and generally avoiding the big cone of sight of patrols. There was also the opportunity to use the scan tool to yoink security clearance off of an unsuspecting guard.

This one saw a moment where I managed to fail upward: I was trying to isolate my assassination target, but he was inside of a building that I didn’t have access to unless I cut open or overloaded the access panel. So I was cycling through my buttons to try to find which one would let me change “fire modes” for my tools, but in the process of doing that, I accidentally threw a grenade. Instead of drawing nearby guards to me, it actually caused the person I was meant to assassinate to come out of the building and investigate the noise! It was an easy single kill, and I got out of the base before any other guards noticed.

A couple more of these missions kind of cast a harsh light on the general stupidity of the enemy AI that I was encountering in the FPS portion of the game, but ultimately I was having a good time and was able to continue my upward slope in terms of difficulty and intensity, so overall it was a win.

When I decided to do a raid mission, I found the envelope. These missions, on the face of them, appear to be pretty basic, as they’re effectively a kill 10 rats-style objective, only I had to find the settlements that my targeted faction members resided. Once again this helped me to re-learn how to use my navigation and maps, so there was certainly some teaching value there. Where I ran into trouble, however, was in the sheer numbers of enemies.

Now granted, the several times I attempted to complete this raid mission could have been handled a little better. I attempted the guns blazing approach, the stealth approach, and even a mixture of the two, but each time I was ending up being overwhelmed, causing me to die over and over again.

Now I should point out that the penalty for failing this mission didn’t seem to matter, as I was not being dinged as a criminal, was not being thrown into jail, and didn’t even have any rebuy costs (since I was on foot). What’s more, the kills that I did score on each successive attempt counted to the final tally that the mission demanded.

However, my patience was still wearing pretty thin on account of the fact that I had to fly back to the settlement that I was targeting over and over and over again. So I wasn’t losing out in terms of materials or money, but I was wasting a lot of time in travel. Eventually I just gave up about halfway through the required kill amount and abandoned the mission; these kind of things definitely required me to be with a team. But hey, at least I learned that lesson, and it didn’t dampen my overall enjoyment, even if the mission rewards were hilariously meager.

It’s here that I come to that final realization about ED that I alluded to in last week’s column. It is extremely easy to focus on the advice, the guides, the solved problems, and the farm spots and grind spots that the playerbase of this game has found. And I don’t fault that for being the presumed only way to play this game since a lot of the unlock grind is arduous at the best of times. But in focusing on that, I had forgotten about the fun things that I liked to do.

Arguably, doing little missions or trucking or core mining isn’t going to make any big waves in the wide sandbox of Elite. Hell, none of the things I was doing was probably the “right” way. But even if these were simple and even possibly stupid, I was absolutely delighting in it all. When I pushed aside all of the well-meaning but ultimately overbearing advice on how to push forward and focused on the activities that made me smile, relax, or hyper-focus on things like flying and landing, I was easily at my happiest. And I was reminded why this game can be fun.

And that’s incidentally what my best friend was feeling as she came back too.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m not excited for the absolute cliff of engineering progression being smoothed down. It will be honestly wonderful to feel as if I can engage with a system that I never bothered to touch before, to say nothing of the fact that I’ll get to do it with my best friend. But even so, it was good that this series of columns reminded me of the simple and serene pleasures that Elite Dangerous is capable of.

But that exploration of this major update to the game will no longer be our focus here (though you can expect some impressions from me about it later in another column). What we’re concerned with now is our move into Pax Dei, which won out in the polls by a margin of one single vote. Now I’ll admit, I still hold some major reservations about how this one will play out, but I also reserve the right to change my mind if things are too frustrating – even if that change means I instead move to Fractured instead.

Still, let’s try to get this started on the right step, and that involves determining how to begin, which involves either starting from scratch or picking up with the one character I’ve made that only has the barest few things unlocked:

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Polling ends at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday, August 9th. In the meantime, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be hopping into my spaceship cockpit and doing more things. Especially since I have someone to do them with now.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.