I have played it, but I'm one of the lucky ones who's had no real issues. I'm just disheartened by the fact that people have to post their immediate reaction as reviews of the game, less than two or three days after release. Yes, it was botched, but does that justify posting a very permanent and very negative review online? How many of these dumbasses are going to update their reviews when Odyssey does improve? Probably only a single figure percentage I'd guess. How does that help the game and the player community?
I think the response was completely justified. FDEV had a relatively short alpha release kicked off with a trailer showing some remarkable planetary tech with blue skies, amazing terrain, ice planets, etc. They released a video with some less than stellar FPS gameplay and they repeatedly said that what we were seeing was from an old build and they were much further along than the video suggested. During the alpha, numerous issues were raised and FDEV, gain, said these issues either had already been fixed or were in the process of being fixed.
When the alpha ended, without a beta, they released the game that was supposedly much further along, and not only was it not further along, but it didn't address many of the issues highlighted in alpha AND they released it as a finished title and charged people the price of a full game for, essentially, DLC. What we got was a buggy mess with a beyond abysmally bad UI, weird lighting effects, clunky AI, FPS drops that make the game unplayable which they are still making a big show as being, "all a bit puzzling" despite the fact that we already KNOW the reason for the poor performance is that they aren't culling their pipeline and are spending inordinate amounts of time rendering objects that don't need to be rendered.
Now all these things can be addressed, and probably will be, but the more concerning issue is the hyped-up, amazing planetary tech which has turned out to be a MASSIVE step backward - gone are the realistic looking cliffs and outcroppings in favour of an early 2000's-style bump-mapped terrain that is bland, colourless, featureless and has lost all the interesting features and realism found in HORIZONS. Planets have been redrawn and are no longer recognisable - look at Dav's Hope, always so notable for that massive mountain, now a featureless, flat-as-a-pancake, bland, grey surface with barely even a rock visible. It's a bait and switch, an outright lie - they advertised one thing and when the alpha revealed that lie, they doubled down and lied AGAIN by saying that the actual release was much more advanced when it wasn't.
