Are you ready for some hopefully less braindead on-foot enemies in Elite: Dangerous? Then it’s time to test your FPS mettle in any number of combat zones or settlements today because the newest update to the sandbox has brought on some updated behaviors for Odyssey enemies. Ideally, anyway; time and player trials will tell whether these updates have made FPS combat a bit more dynamic. Assuming you have the Odyssey expansion, anyway.
On paper, the changes to AI behavior do sound good: NPCs will now prioritize cover when shields are down or when doing things like reloading, certain enemy types will do their best to charge player positions as well as use grenades to flush players out of hiding, and enemies will also do their best to react to threats faster and stand out in the open less frequently when under attack.
Tangentially, there have been updates to enemy suit armor and shields that reduce the disparity between kinetic and plasma damage (but only for NPCs and not for players), increased projectile speeds for several plasma weapons, faster reload speed for the Karma L-6 rocket launcher, a smaller clip size for the Karma C-44 SMG, and faster stow and draw times for all FPS weapons.
The other major piece of this patch is the cash shop release of the Caspian Explorer spaceship, which features several unique fittings that allow it to get some impressive jump range when powering up on certain stars and let it enter planetary orbit at more extreme angles. Finally, other updates in the patch include UI and mechanical updates for powerplay systems that are ripe for undermining and a sizable list of bug fixes.
