My sincere hope is that it won't be crap forever.
One thing that has been bothering me is that as I look at DLC for other games, it seems that Frontier has their pricing model flipped upside-down. Most games I play charge the higher price for the core game and a very modest price for the DLC, unlike Frontier which is charging more for Odyssey than Horizons. Even if Odyssey ends up being fixed 100%, I'm not sure there's $40 worth of new content there. Sure,
there may be $40 of effort put into the game by developers (a LOT of work went into modeling interiors), but from a player's (or at least
this player's) perspective, it feels like maybe $20 of gameplay at most.
You probably have me on ignore as well but I'll respond to this as I thought about this last night when playing the game, and touching upon it with
@Rubbernuke.
There is a LOT of copy/paste in EDO, even more so than the base game. You have 1 layout each for Starport, Outpost and Planetary Port; you see the same pieces of garbage at exactly the same places (I believe this is state/security dependent?). A tube there, a pizza box there. Copy/paste. The mission NPCs (who stand in exactly the same spots, everywhere) give me the same handful of lines each time I pass them -
top 1% anyone?
The shops are the exact same layout and look, the bar looks the same. The only difference is some slight colour variation, maybe a different banner (PP related usually). Weapon choice, while broad enough, isn't as varied as in other games.
The settlements show a certain level of variation but I still think they're all the same layouts i.e. 27 of them (?) in total - but they use the same building blocks so visually they're extremely similar in their appearance. The visual fidelity is alright - not fantastic, or even great. Just alright for a game in 2021. It's good enough from an immersion viewpoint for me, but there's a lot of repetition.
What I'm trying to (long-windedly) say is, I'm not sure how much work it really was to come up with all that - if I compare this with Night City (CP2077) or any Bethesda or Rockstar map (interior and exterior environments), it's rather on the light side of things in terms of variation and detail.
EDIT: one more example I forgot, you know there's the status panel in the hangar, next to the lift that gives you the (UTC) time and days until shift change - that's 26. Everywhere. Every day. How hard could it have been to track that variable at each location? It's a very small thing but when I played the Alpha I thought 'wow, neat little detail'. Nope, hard coded it seems. Copy/paste.
bag and ajoke of an Alpha...in advance. I understand that because of that so many say "well it's playable at least.." you know it's hard for some to admit their own mistakes, but this one was very predictable.
MKAY, keep the tone or this discussion is over. ED and counter strike is basically on the same level regarding players right now, the point is people are playing the game in significant numbers.
no arguments and all insults.