Odyssey Progress

[Screamapillar]

Greetings Commanders,


With our first hotfix now released and another one arriving very shortly, I wanted to take a moment to address the wider community feedback and reports regarding performance issues, server outages, and bug reports within Elite Dangerous Odyssey.  
 
First and foremost, I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to those who have been suffering from these problems. I would like to reassure you that we take these issues very seriously and that they are our top priority and focus.  
 
Our second hotfix will be released very soon, which we hope will address more of the reported bugs and bring further stability improvements into the game.  We will continue to work on updates which will resolve more bugs and improve stability further.
 
Some of our players are reporting poor performance on machines where we would expect the performance to be good, and others are saying it is fine. We are trying to get to the bottom of this. I have been playing on my old home machine from 2014, which has an Intel i7 Extreme CPU and a GTX 980 GPU, 16 Gb RAM, playing at 1080p full screen at Ultra. I was doing this so I could have a good feel for how the game was playing on older hardware, and I used this same machine during Alpha. I have also been playing on a high spec 2021 dev machine.

I would like to thank you all for your patience and support. The Elite Dangerous community has always been at the heart of the game. We understand that there are a number of players who have had problems accessing and playing the game and I can assure you that we are focusing fully on improving this for those affected and communicating with you openly and regularly about how these issues are being addressed.  
 
Thank you all, 



David

Some? No a majority of us have poor performance, no matter the build. The UI radial design made for consoles is complete trash. You can make changes to the UI, but not at the cost of what made the previous UI so good. Piece of advice, symbols only UI for sorting in the Galaxy map, aweful idea. New loadout outfitting screen completely unnecessary. Why are there extra clicks for everything? Because new, so there for good? No.

Does Fdev actually do QA? The extra grind isn't fun, the UI isn't fun, the performance isn't fun. Don't tell me this is all down to immersion or need it to be as close to simulated as possible. The peer to peer networking isn't fun. Frontier obviously has enough cash in the bin. Invest in a server farm for galaxy instancing. This is basic stuff. Be honest with your players. Your Steam rating is at negative, and won't go back up. There won't be a No Man's Sky moment for your company, because you don't care. It is only about making the money. Elite is the vehicle to make money, rather than make a game for people to enjoy. The money comes after.

Look at your competitor Digital Extremes in how honest they are with their player base. They admit mistakes, and roll back changes or fix issues. They frequently reward players with ways of earning currency.

Instead for Frontier it is always onto the next sparse update, with zero fixes. Obsidian Ant has laid his own bug list in a video. Perhaps give it a watch. While you are watching, then watch all the other videos on grind, and how much it isn't fun for a ton of us. Especially working full time, with maybe several hours a week to play. You are pushing away your core audience with these botched releases. The Pilot stopped creating content altogether because he was sick of it. He's out playing No Man's Sky as an alternative. Yamiks meanwhile continues to show this game needed more time in the oven every stream.

Alpha was not an alpha. It was alpha in marketing name only only to keep your stock higher, if not that a poor business decision over all. Horizon's had better and a lot more fun of a launch than this. What happened to the design decisions from that era?

To the actual devs. I wish leadership gave you more time and this game got delayed.

 

[Para Handy]

Interesting that a mod has edited my earlier post to remove mention of QA - I was not referring to a department, but the whole quality assurance of ensuring a product is fit for purpose, that is not a single department's responsibility, it is everyone's. So, sorry if people thought I was singling out a department, my criticism was much more general.

 

[Screamapillar]

Thanks for the info. Best of luck to you and the team with resolving the current issues. Hope you can get the problems sorted out quickly.

If I might make a general suggestion, if feasible it would be worth considering a different release approach for critical releases.

A couple of options to consider:

• A quick one day / half day closed Beta as close to release as possible to get player assessments of the state and suitability for release.
  
  
• Have a longer period of downtime for the release, do the server update, and then do a brief closed release of the update to a pilot group of players to assess the status before commencing to the full release to the entire playerbase. (You'd need a good spread of players to cover various RL locations, system specs, and locations and activities in the game. Ideally you'd have them feeding back live to the FD team reporting how it goes.)

There's cons to both of these obviously, and I won't suggest they'd be a panacea for all ills. I also obviously don't even know if they would work in practicality for how things operate at FD, and am just setting them out in general principle for consideration.

On the performance not directly correlating to system spec, this has always been the case in general as far as I can recall. What I can say for me personally, always playing on the same machine is that performance has never been a constant and has directly related to things at, for want of a better term, the server side. For example performance has always dropped when there's been a Beta going on, and I've been playing the main game. (Having rubbish onboard graphics sometimes makes certain things stand out more.)

I'm sure it'd be possible to find players who'd be more than willing to participate in some co-ordinated, focussed testing to try and get to the bottom of things like that.

o7

You would think a dev with this many years in, would have taken these steps already. Proper testing is done in closed and invite only pilot states as much as possible before any release to the public. Paid or otherwise.

 

[Flippimonkey]

THE SLEEPER HAS AWOKEN!!!

Hopefully this means he is on the warpath to get things straightened out. Also, +40K free Arx for everyone.
Seriously
Free Arx for everyone in Odyssey.

 

[Sluggy71]

It's also important to point out that the blame lies solely with management (perhaps with marketing too) for this fiasco. The actual developers (i.e. those writing the code) were just doing their jobs and I can guarantee you there will have been many dissenting (and now quite demoralised) voices in both that team and the QA folks as to the reception to all their hard work.

The CMs will also have to take the flak for this decision (though I guess they are paid to do so), which won't be much fun either.

Cheers,

Drew.

Well said. If there are any FDEV coders reading this, we're not angry at youse guys and gals!

 

[Screamapillar]

Oh whatever. Ant posted a video two hours after the release critiquing it like he even had time to make the video and play the game. I’ll add it’s the game and community that made him. No faith with no hands on time shows just how much of an expert he is. This is the instant gratification that my nieces and nephews cry for and they get punished for. We don’t apologize to them. Name a game without issues on release. I’ll wait.

Every Insomniac, Tell Tale, Naughty Dog, Deep Silver, and Valve game. Do you want more developers who are more space based? How bout the Eve and Warframe devs or the X devs? While not pitch perfect, and have required some hot fixes, nothing where it feels as though half the game isn't done or features are missing.

 

[Screamapillar]

Come on, kiddies. No frigging manners, no patience, no clue of how huge an undertaking the game is, and far too much time on your hands. Give it a rest, come back in a few days and see if hotfixes have rectified the main problems. You do have other things to do in your life, right?

The first kid to give a smartass or hurt reply to this gets a lollipop.

Thanks for the updates FDev, looking forward to more.

Do you work IT? Do you work in Dev Ops? Do you have any idea how an actual alpha, beta and gold release is supposed to work in other games or software? This is a paid beta. Anyone with half a brain can see this game needed more time in the oven.

 

[Screamapillar]

Well I was gutted to find on my first visit to Dav's Hope in Odyssey the mountain to the right of the settlement is now no longer there, so some places have been smoothed.

I wanted to a do a space walk. and hop off that thing. Dang, thanks for the report.

 

[Mogen Teras]

I wanted to a do a space walk. and hop off that thing. Dang, thanks for the report.

It also doesn't help that Dav's Hope is also no longer anywhere near its original location.

 

[Werewolf13]

Yamiks can be dismissed by many as a crank. Obsidian Ant - less so.

Minor thread Hi-Jack...

Sorry, just couldn't resist.

Yamiks is correct on just about everything he says IMO. His presentation (patter) is unique, humorous and enjoyable.

Obsidian Ant? Both his voice and accent are so very annoying to me that I find it incredible that his popularity is so high. In addition his presentation lacks energy and comes across as that of a corporate shill (I'm pretty sure he is not - a shill - that is - that's just the way he come's across to me).

That said: I now return y'all to your normally scheduled programming.

 

[Bruce Patton]

Not sure if this was reported befor or whether this is the correct place to mention this:
Routes planned in galaxy map are not persisitng when entering SC after leaving a station or planet. This neccessitates to re-enter the galaxy map and select recalculate route before you can see in the cockpit the dot for the frist waypoint.
Made a bug report but it does not show-up in the bug tracker.
Hologram for stations when in SC still sow entry slot in incorrect position and so that hologram cannot be used to adjust the flight path to a station because on exit from SC the ship is in a totally different position.

 

[MrHatMan]

THE SLEEPER HAS AWOKEN!!!

Hopefully this means he is on the warpath to get things straightened out. Also, +40K free Arx for everyone.
Seriously
Free Arx for everyone in Odyssey.

Don't care about ARX. But a free exploration suit for anyone outside the bubble would have been nice. Being on the opposite side of the core doing exploration without the ability to actually do xenobiolgy is a bit of a let down

 

[Flippimonkey]

Don't care about ARX. But a free exploration suit for anyone outside the bubble would have been nice. Being on the opposite side of the core doing exploration without the ability to actually do xenobiolgy is a bit of a let down

I feel you. I spent the week before heading back to the Bubble. If you're stuck so far out you should just be sent all the suits. Scavenging out in the distance is worth it too.

 

[Sublime]

Some of our players are reporting poor performance on machines where we would expect the performance to be good, and others are saying it is fine. We are trying to get to the bottom of this. I have been playing on my old home machine from 2014, which has an Intel i7 Extreme CPU and a GTX 980 GPU, 16 Gb RAM, playing at 1080p full screen at Ultra. I was doing this so I could have a good feel for how the game was playing on older hardware, and I used this same machine during Alpha. I have also been playing on a high spec 2021 dev machine.

Thank you.

Regarding performance, one of the issues seems to be that the performance does not seem to scale well with better hardware at higher resolutions.

For example older video cards (and newer ones) might be able to play well at 1080p, but much newer video cards are not getting the performance expected at higher resolutions like 4K. In some cases only 1/3 of the frames they had in Horizons.

In certain scenes even top of the line cards like an RTX3090 can barely get to 60 frames at 4K resolutions.

Thank you for the ongoing support with these issues.

 

[DarthVain]

All I can say is that I want the Space Loach back. Who would have thought that.

It's not just technical problems, it's a downhill journey in design all over the place. As an example, please compare outfitting in Odyssey to the original version as in Horizons. It's completely overloaded, confusing and leads to user errors like erroneously selling engineered modules that did cost dozens of hours to make them. The new UX is way worse than the old one which was clear, concise and task-oriented. Whatever the concept behind the new "Carrier" UI may be, it's inferior and annoying and I'm starting to hate it.

Saying this hurts me, because I love the game and Odyssey too and put more than 4k hours (25 weeks in 24x7 terms) of my precious leisure time into playing it. Odyssey has many great ideas and many aspects work quite well and are cool and exciting and really fun, and I do share the overall vision. But other, and vital, parts just suck, and VR among them in particular. For that part is completely unplayable as it stands, and not just because of performance issues. Don't let your flagship game go down in flames like this.

O7,

Yes, a huge trap when it comes to outfitting. One has to store the modules first before buying.
Where did the storing option choice disappeared to also what happened to the buy back option?

 

[The REAL cmdr jjameson]

Greetings Commanders,


With our first hotfix now released and another one arriving very shortly, I wanted to take a moment to address the wider community feedback and reports regarding performance issues, server outages, and bug reports within Elite Dangerous Odyssey.  
 
First and foremost, I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to those who have been suffering from these problems. I would like to reassure you that we take these issues very seriously and that they are our top priority and focus.  
 
Our second hotfix will be released very soon, which we hope will address more of the reported bugs and bring further stability improvements into the game.  We will continue to work on updates which will resolve more bugs and improve stability further.
 
Some of our players are reporting poor performance on machines where we would expect the performance to be good, and others are saying it is fine. We are trying to get to the bottom of this. I have been playing on my old home machine from 2014, which has an Intel i7 Extreme CPU and a GTX 980 GPU, 16 Gb RAM, playing at 1080p full screen at Ultra. I was doing this so I could have a good feel for how the game was playing on older hardware, and I used this same machine during Alpha. I have also been playing on a high spec 2021 dev machine.

I would like to thank you all for your patience and support. The Elite Dangerous community has always been at the heart of the game. We understand that there are a number of players who have had problems accessing and playing the game and I can assure you that we are focusing fully on improving this for those affected and communicating with you openly and regularly about how these issues are being addressed.  
 
Thank you all, 



David

@David Braben CEO of Frontier
it's nice when you personally post and comment here.
Most of us sympathise and understand
The challenges and difficulty's you all have at hand
What with Covid, scalpers, community pressure
To us Frontier , you and your staff are a treasure
To you all we truly take of our hats
but JUST ONE REQUST though to mention last
What the hell in Odyssey happened to all my Thargoid mission reward manu mats???????

 

[Captain Squareyez]

Thank you David. FD are doin a great job. o7

 

[Juniper]

Minor thread Hi-Jack...

Sorry, just couldn't resist.

Yamiks is correct on just about everything he says IMO. His presentation (patter) is unique, humorous and enjoyable.

Obsidian Ant? Both his voice and accent are so very annoying to me that I find it incredible that his popularity is so high. In addition his presentation lacks energy and comes across as that of a corporate shill (I'm pretty sure he is not - a shill - that is - that's just the way he come's across to me).

That said: I now return y'all to your normally scheduled programming.

Yeah, I really enjoy & appreciate Yamiks' videos too. I also enjoy OA's videos, but for different reasons.

Put bluntly: if I want honest & accurate "no-holds-barred" opinions on E: D, Yamiks is the go to. Like you say, his videos are frequently humorous and entertaining, and on the whole very accurate with no stone left unturned. If I want relaxing, well edited & pretteh videos which go out of their way to show the best of E: D, with a calm voiceover that 'feels' like a corporate shill that I don't have to take too literally, OA is the man.

I'm actually kind of glad that Yamiks didn't get a Bribe Box™. It would have felt wrong, somehow. I hope he keeps on being honest.

 

[CMDR GLENDAROB]

THIS GAME IS AMAZING.

 

[V-4-Vendetta]

The Yamiks not receiving a 'Bribe Box' has elevated his status to 'King'... Long live The Yamiks!