Tennocon was this past weekend they announced two upcoming updates, the second open world update entitled Fortuna and an upcoming team-based tactical spaceship and space pirating updating called Railbreak.
Fortuna is instantly a marked improvement over the first open world. The town has an actual visual and thematic character (that theme is quite lovely) while the open world has the eye-catching sci-fi landscape you expect from this kind of game. The Plains of Eidolon were generic, open rolling hills as far as the eye could see. There were no landmarks, no sights to see, nothing to identify one part of the map from the other. All of the enemy encounters felt the same because it was just a bunch of hills and it looked and felt the same on both ends of the map. But just the opening area of Venus (apparently it’s called The Orb Vallis?) lets you choose between following a winding, linear vehicle path, jump across small islands in a large lake, or what looks like a more mountainous path. Each path already has some distinguishing identity so I’m interested to see how much DE has learned since their first attempt at this whole open world thing.
The Railbreak space combat stuff is wild and I have no idea how that’s going to fit into the loop based nature of the game. It’s a long ways off but these updates one again showcase just how ambitious this game can get. It’s really impressive just how many ideas DE feel comfortable playing with and grafting onto this Frankenstein of a game.
