Most of the time when I ask for pollsters to guide me to tasks in Choose My Adventure, it’s just for that purpose: guidance, direction, and a general understanding of what it is I should be doing and writing about. This time around, however, my best friend Britarnya and I took up the chosen task for Elite: Dangerous – to take on missions from the mission board – we saw the opportunity to try mission types that we’ve never tried before.

So, how did this exploration of a brave and new (to me) frontier go? A whole lot better than I expected, honestly. And that’s likely due to several updates made to the game as well as the shattering of presumptions I had been harboring ever since Odyssey had launched.

You see, when that expansion released, things were a whole lot messier, and not just from a bug standpoint. Mechanics for performing missions weren’t really well explained. Difficulty levels felt extremely misrepresented. Tactics were not put together. And through it all, the rewards weren’t plentiful enough to make muddling through those mires worth it. As I’ve written before, it nearly killed the game for me and it took an update that arrived only last September to save the game wholesale for me.

But that was over four years ago. This is the here and now, and I was bringing my best friend and a veteran player of 10 years along for the ride. And over the course of her doing some other missions, she learned a thing or two – as did I.

A few missions we picked up involved going to crash landing sites and retrieving some goodies, which I’ve done before previously. There wasn’t a whole lot new here, but the rewards for doing them were a whole lot better than they’ve ever been. One just a couple of runs I was able to upgrade some of my FPS weapons and my favored on-foot combat suit – things I had never been able to do in literal months of play prior.

But then we decided to start risking a bit more. We took on an assassination mission. Mostly because it was yielding a whole stack of otherwise hard to find materials. It was enough that Brit, who is generally risk-averse, was extremely excited to get going.

Now I do need to preface by saying that Brit has done these kinds of missions before, and I have attempted them a few times myself as well, but they always went poorly. From my own personal recollection, I always screwed up sneaking around and infiltrating, and while I would manage to get the targeted kill, I would often end up alerting the entire settlement and getting cut down by gunfire and turrets as a result. But the solution to these problems was astonishingly obvious.

Once again, we walked on rooftops.

It’s a trope almost as old as stealth games themselves, but it’s one that I never thought was so effective until we went out for that sneaking mission. It also definitely helped that I had a tactically minded and extremely alert friend to guide me along, but I was generally gobsmacked at how inept and unaware guards were. I was introduced to this loophole last time around, but it still gave me pause regardless. We very frequently were able to land, sneak to a control base, turn off alarms, get our target, and then exfiltrate without any issue.

Emboldened, we decided to risk a bit more: We took on illegal flagged missions. This has always been something I never dared to try because I don’t want the burden of bounties on myself or anyone else I’m flying with, but considering these had materials that I was otherwise not really able to get in the quantities I wanted, we pretty much felt like we had no choice.

Yet again, this went by smooth as silk. The illegal operations that we took on involving either more assassination, uploading data, or absconding with an item from a base all were flawlessly executed using a combination of foreknowledge, a bit of planning, and continued use of rooftop skipping. We even had some goofy spy caper moments like being caught by a friendly-flagged cop who just let us walk away or me distracting a guard while Brit sneaked up behind him to take him down.

As a matter of fact, we often went back to one specific settlement known as the Syvolap excavation site over and over and were successful each time. It’s a lucky thing that these guards have no object permanence as well as no ability to crane their heads upwards, otherwise our ship would have been blown apart the second we broke into atmospheric glide. Seriously, we knocked over this location about three times or so times.

Through it all, we were having a great time, learning quite a bit (I certainly was), and finally feeling a sense of reward for doing these otherwise more involved missions. I keep remembering how much time it all took – the flight there, the wandering, the flight back – against how menial the rewards were, but now this stuff is actually worth doing. I’m one step away from maxing out my combat suit. I have maxed out one of my favorite guns. I genuinely never thought I would ever see something hit Grade 5.

Overall I’d say that this new ground was broken very successfully. We both got lots of rewards, I actually made progress in an avenue of the game that I never thought I could before, and we’ve started to increase our knowledge of on-foot activities, which we’re eager to share with others assuming the Vanguards system works the way we hope it will.

So now that we’ve pushed into some new territory, perhaps it’s time to try more new territory? One of the two next poll choices involves engaging more with the Powerplay 2.0 stuff that’s been added somewhat recently, which I only got involved in enough that I would begin earning merits for doing basic things, so that means we would redirect to some more targeted objectives in order to actually improve our chosen faction’s standing. Or failing that, we could just take it easy, head towards some more understood activities, and continue to improve my favorite spaceships through engineering. So what is it going to be?

What's the next primary objective in Elite?

  • Engineering. Do what you have to do to make your ships slap. (43%, 9 Votes)
  • Powerplay. Get out there and make trouble for other factions. (57%, 12 Votes)

Total Voters: 21

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Polling will wrap up at the usual time of 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, June 27th. For now, I daresay that the two of us will poke at the mission board a couple of times more in order to rake in more goodies. It’s rewarding enough at long last, so why stop 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.