Elite Dangerous: Odyssey‘s launch was an absolute shocker. Not only did they fail to deliver, but they also broke the entire game.
The CEO of Frontier Development, David Braben has publically apologised after the launch of Elite Dangerous: Odyssey. The game is the second paid expansion for the franchise and was designed to offer players a whole new way to experience virtual space travel. Heralded by Frontier as “The biggest update yet”, how did it go so terribly wrong?
Before I outline the variety of shortcomings of Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, let’s look at what was promised. For the unaware, Elite Dangerous is a massively multiplayer online space exploration simulator. Players are encouraged to probe every crevice of outer space in search of new materials to upgrade their spaceship.
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey allows players to land on those planets and explore them on foot, a state of the game the devs call ‘foot-fall’. With this simple addition came a ton of new features to beef it out. Players would be given access to a brand new array of handheld weapons, suit types, ammo types, grenades, new tools and consumables specifically designed for when players enter the foot-fall state.
Players would not only be able to land on these planets but also explore, settlements new and old, as well as crash-landing sights in hopes of some shiny new loot. ‘Concourses’ had also been added to the game. Think of these as social hubs in the form of futuristic space cities, that can be explored in the foot-fall state. Within this space, players would able to trade, chat, and take on new missions.
On top of all this Frontier Development also promised a major graphical update as well as a performance optimisation. As you can see fans of the franchise would be eager to explore all these exciting new features after it finally released, after multiple delays, on May 19.
On release day, reports started rolling in — of not only false promises — but a whole plethora of new bugs. Reddit user u/techercizer compiled a list of some of the worst issues affecting players:
People were reporting frame rate losses of 50 per cent or more. A hilarious, yet devasting bug that is affecting players that utilise the ‘Space Taxi’, are unable to exit the vehicle. Trapping their character forever and forcing players to start fresh and having to wipe their progress.
The community also stated that the graphical upgrade made everything look worse, as well as an overall downgrade in UI and UX usability. Another frustrating bug has been reported, where if you accepted a mission that rewarded engineering materials, all other materials of that category in your inventory would be destroyed. For example, if you accepted a quest that rewarded two high-grade data materials, and you had 50 of that material in your inventory. Upon completion that 50 would be destroyed completely and you would have a grand total of two.
These are just a few of the bugs, but the game has been rendered virtually unplayable for many. To help you visualise how bad this blunder is take a look at some in-game footage players have shared on Reddit.
I was really looking forward to the snow planets. I went to the one in one of early photos. :( from EliteDangerous
I’m confused by everyone’s bugs, runs just fine on my N64 from EliteDangerous
This is very much not the sleek and modern sci-fi FPS that Frontier’s marketing team promised. Naturally, the CEO rushed to the forums to issue a formal apology. Promising fans of the Elite Dangerous franchise that their complaints were being taken “very seriously” and that additional hotfixes were on the way.
Of course, their complaints weren’t taken seriously enough to pull the game from sale, offer financial compensation, or at the least fix these problems before launch after they were flagged during the first beta test earlier this year. No, Elite Dangerous decided they would keep your cash, push out a barely functional product and then half-heartedly fix it throughout the rest of the year — a worryingly normalized trend in the gaming industry as of late.
Fans took their outrage to the internet and begun review bombing the game across all platforms. As of right now Elite Dangerous: Odyssey holds a mostly negative review on steam. Only 30 per cent of players have given the game a positive review.
