It’s been a while since I played Elite Dangerous, but with The Citizen’s Patch 3.24 taking about as long as the game has been in development all together (or so it feels), I needed some kind of space sim to tide me over. Unfortunately, Elite Dangerous only lets players have one character, and since I had been on and off with that game so often I felt that I needed a fresh start so I deleted my character — for the second time, mind you — and started over. Color me surprised, then, when the game about flying around in space actually started me off on foot, on the ground, trying to recover some data, compliments of the Odyssey expansion. I found this not just interesting, but also engaging on account of the fact that Elite has baked in a few very nice features in the foot-traffic gameplay that has me hoping that Star Citizen will expand on their on-foot gameplay.

There are four tools displayed above, three of which I got to use in the tutorial (aside from having to shoot enemies using weapons). The first, the “energy-link” tool (upper left) allows players to power up small systems like defunct door panels. Using the overload feature, it can short-circuit electronics in similar situations. The second tool is the “profile analyzer” (upper right). This is used to scan people and their inventory, or to clone their profile. The cloning mode is considered “illegal”, but in the tutorial I had to do it to impersonate a dead NPC with a high clearance level. The last tool I got to use was the “arc cutter” (lower right) which has just one mode and allows for the cutting of metal panels in order to access the electronics inside.

Star Citizen has a cutter, but it’s rarely if ever used in the game so far. I like the implications of the energy-link and profile analyzer tools, though. Being able to hook into a dormant system to give it a bit of juice, or to pump so much energy into something that it explodes, seems like the kind of gameplay that Star Citizen would benefit from, considering how their expanding compliment of on-foot gameplay is designed to offer alternate methods of access and traversal. The profiler, on the other hand, seems a lot more specialized; there are a few places in SC where players need to obtain codes from NPCs, but being able to remotely scan and “impersonate” those NPCs could be a non-violent way to achieve the same purpose, and moves the needle a bit away from the “combat as solution” culture that Star Citizen seems to be cultivating. It also seems criminal for the last tool, the genetic sampler, to be omitted from Star Citizen because “exploration” is a feature that the devs say they want to include, although right now it seems like the major focus of that path will be finding resources, derelict ships, and unmapped signals in space.

I do hope that Star Citizen widens its tool kit as Elite has. Being able to run around outside of ships is cool, but there has to be reasons for it — I’m having trouble finding these reasons in Elite, but Star Citizen is already leaning heavily into such gameplay although it’s limited to carrying items around and, of course, shooting things.