Development Update 1 - June

[Pigletslastand]

So no console development outline or release date

Honestly mate you don't want it right now.. it's nowhere even near out of Alpha yet, be glad it's not getting released so far.

 

[[VR] Goooost]

I think you guys need to make an offer and buy hellogames. Your art style on their procedural terrain would make this game much more interesting.

 

[beatwaster]

I love disastrous films, but being a member of one of them, in a sense, sucks. But I paid for a ticket to this Titanic. So you have to drink champagne and enjoy the icebergs overboard.

 

[Jikesaijo]

Thank you for the update. Now we need:
1) on foot more game play
2) leg in space. entering a station from space, leaving planetary outpost by foot ... boarding other ship
3) ship interior to extend legs game play
4) player base construction
5) improved trade system. Please add available resources and not only the price for commodity market when scanning other station
6) earthlike planets
7) make more activity in settlements: NPC in SRV, train between outpost ... make it alive

but overall good job!! and please dont make me start playing SC

 

[Ashton Crowfield]

Thanks for the update guys. I love this game and I want to see it flourish. Best of luck to everyone involved. I believe in you.

 

[Flyinspaghetti]

Future Progress: The Longer Roadmap

As mentioned in our previous post, our aim was to focus on the initial set of updates and then turn our attention back onto console. There’s no doubt that the additional development work on these updates and community requests pose a challenge on our previous plans and timelines. We are actively investigating, reviewing, and remeasuring the further roadmap but these things will take a little time. We understand that this may not be as much information as people may have wished for, but we hope that the open and transparent nature of this update means that you’ll bear with us while we pull those together. What we can say, is that through these monthly updates, we will be able to share and keep you informed every step of the way.

Most game companies whether publicly announced or internal have roadmaps that cover the direction of their games for at least a few years, the fact there's not even the tiniest hint about what the future for Elite Dangerous is after this initial Odyssey launch suggests there is no plan.. and using language such as "investigating, reviewing, and remeasuring" when talking about the future of the game speaks volumes.

What I'm getting from this is the game is now in wind down mode.

It's like you're really saying "thanks for the £30 but we're focusing on Lemnis Gate and other projects now".

 

[PRORABBIT67]

 

[Red Anders]

what!! That some leap

His rich (and possibly intolerant) fantasy life prompted him to suggest that a member of the dev team deciding to participate in a stream for pride after work hours today was somehow the reason for the proposed stream about the game which was originally planned for tomorrow having been cancelled. He went as far as to make a thread about it and to argue the toss about it, despite basically being told to have the sense to shut his trap for once.

 

[VR StarLightPL]

"The amount of "Thanks Arf" frankly makes me barf", a poet once said.

 

[CMDR Crustatious Cornelius Pig]

It is very disheartening to come to this forum and read anything these days, and I have been a frequent participant since 2013 not that that really matters. I do remember better times and civil conversations. Not so much these days.

 

[Tikanderoga]

Future Progress: The Longer Roadmap
As mentioned in our previous post, our aim was to focus on the initial set of updates and then turn our attention back onto console. There’s no doubt that the additional development work on these updates and community requests pose a challenge on our previous plans and timelines. We are actively investigating, reviewing, and remeasuring the further roadmap but these things will take a little time. We understand that this may not be as much information as people may have wished for, but we hope that the open and transparent nature of this update means that you’ll bear with us while we pull those together. What we can say, is that through these monthly updates, we will be able to share and keep you informed every step of the way.

So the June "roadmap" was it?
We are back to square 1?
No more future plans to share? No more "this is what we are working on" or "this is what is coming in the next updates"? Still no "This is what you asked for and this will be implemented"?

If you look at the steam player base, you lost over 60% of your players, from 20+k concurrent to just over 6k. At this rate, by the time you release it for consoles, your player base will be tumbleweeds.

 

[Winterdyne]

'So what are you going to do about the fact my steak was cold, raw and came with no chips?'
'We've spent loads of time cooking you some chips and we've brought you two'.
'And the steak?'
'We'll investigate, review and remeasure our plans for cooking meat.'
'ThAnks, WaItER'.

 

[MASA]

... and so how many studios are about to release epic ED scale games on UE5 in the next year?
If it is so easy, why isn't this happening?

Probably to do with financial viability. Elite is the only game I play for any great amount of time but I'm aware it's quite a niche game and certainly never going to sell in the same sort of volume as a CoD or Battlefield game.

I think the lack of potential sales is a big reason why every game studio doesn't release an Elite clone.

 

[AtomicJuggler]

Here is my reasoning - I am aware that when EDO was rolled out that it engages a bunch of variables in user accounts that would get wiped on a rollback. The problem as I see it is that they have created a development hole that is causing two primary issues - 1. dev is fixing a dog of a product that even as a working end product will still be horribly substandard and 2. The player base hates what is here and are either going elsewhere or complaining bitterly on every platform that will let them. A reset would at the very least gain a little respect for a royally shambolic product release (along with refunds where appropriate). "Sorry guys we did a bad thing, we acknowledge it, and we're going to go away and reflect on how to stay faithful to both the product and the player base". They could conceivably do a Hello Games and pull one out of the hat but HG had the advantage of not really engaging with their playerbase, shutting up and getting on with it. Frontier has MUCH further to fall and this half hearted communication coupled with apparently zero intention of creating the game that their current player base is interested in is a recipe for disaster IMO.

First, I doubt that many players would agree to this rollback (and I certainly won't).
Second, what you are asking require at least client and server codes rollback which could "theoretically" be done somewhat easily (revert?).
For the database though... it may (or may not) be problematic...

Simply restoring a 5 weeks old backup of the database and pushing the previous horizon versions would, of course, do the trick (relatively) quickly but EVERYBODY looses all assets/credits/ranks/reputation gained in these 5 weeks and I don't want that.

(edited for clarity and typos)

 

[Pigletslastand]

Most of it will be to do with the fact they designed and own the COBRA engine so are married to it for all their games as it's cost effective.

 

[SpaceIsHuge]

4) player base construction

Whats the point of this at all in Elite? When you travelling all the time. Makes sense if you could manage stuff in your ship like in Skyrim\Fallout houses. But players bases on planets are useless. So you build it and then what? Grow some alien potato?

 

[Tikanderoga]

Probably to do with financial viability. Elite is the only game I play for any great amount of time but I'm aware it's quite a niche game and certainly never going to sell in the same sort of volume as a CoD or Battlefield game.

I reckon that's the game branch they are/were aiming for.
Implement mindless CZ, spawn, shoot, die, repeat, roll it out to consoles and hope to sell some skins before the whole thing goes belly up.
The entire UI is aimed to be played with a game pad, not M&K or HOTAS.

 

[CMDR Crustatious Cornelius Pig]

... and so how many studios are about to release epic ED scale games on UE5 in the next year?
If it is so easy, why isn't this happening?

I smell the sarcasm RC and I know you know the answer, It is not easy, software development is hard. Getting it right is even harder.

 

[thistle]

They open the barn to us with such topics. In it, we can wrestle with horns, make a hot-tempered noise, and go home. This is a cheap payoff from the angry moods of deceived fans. This is not a lawsuit that casts doubt on the qualifications of the company and "in principle" whether it has the right to sell something to someone. This is throwing beads in front of pigs. I paid dearly for my right to voice my grievances, but this is not a place where it can have any effect.
They just boil us here like toads in a cauldron, sometimes launching a moderator who opens the lid "read deletes too aggressive comments", making sure that the bouillon does not run away. When all this is digested, the aggression will subside and we will become a little more tolerant of this dismissive attitude.
This is a policy of treating plebeians known for thousands of years.

This is a work of art. I don't know what it means, or if it means anything. But I like it.

 

[CMDR HollowPointPC]

Incredibly disappointed with where we are at with this tbh. As has been stated by many, there's simply no way the team didn't know Odyssey was a s***show before releasing it, the very idea that it was a surprise, would be laughable if it weren't such an insult. I was a cheerleader for this rubbish during Alpha, I told people it would be all good by release, FDev will come good, yes there's bugs, yes it's nowhere near perfect, but it'll be fine by release, have faith... you made me look like a total fool, the second you announced the release was going to be 19th May and I knew it, right there and then. The state of the Alpha, meant that even if you were telling the truth about having a much more advanced trunk branch (which, you clearly didn't), I knew right then and there that the release was going to be awful and surprise, surprise, it was worse than awful. I haven't played Odyssey for more than a couple of hours since release, because it's too damned painful. The AI animations are all over the place, the mission system is borked, the UI is horrid and large parts of it unusable, the performance is beyond dismal, the number of bugs and worse yet, regression bugs is despicable...

Let me make this abundantly clear, I have a decent system. An i7 10700k, 64GB RAM and an RTX 2070 which is OC from factory. I've logged in after each update and while sections of the game have improved marginally, I still can't get more than 30FPS stood at the top of the stairs in an orbital station and I can't get more than 20FPS in a surface port, while severely suffering at <15FPS in a settlement, be it a CZ, or a power on/restore mission that I'm there for. If tomorrow morning I log in and I'm still getting those same numbers after update 5, well over a month and a half since release, I want my money back for Odyssey and I think you should be refunding every single Odyssey player, whether they want it or not, until you've actually fixed it. I don't care about Console, at this point you haven't got a hope of it running on an old XBox One or PS4 at any kind of playable Framerate, if you're not going to get it working on high-mid-range PCs before you start focusing on consoles, you can shove it tbh. I originally played on the XBox and contemplated buying Odyssey on the PS4 Pro I've got in the living room originally, but considering you don't even seem interested in making good on the PC build, I don't see why I should even see buying it on the Console as an option at all.

If this is it, if this is the last improvement we will see before Console launch, you're taking the p***, simple as that.