Don't think the game is dying as such, but it's on a downhill slope. It is dying for me personally though, and looking at my friend list (which is about 3 pages long so not huge but it's still an indicator nonetheless) I actually seem to be one of the 1/4 of players of that particular sample size who still play at all. Many haven't logged in in weeks if not months, and not sure if they'll come back or not.
EDO had a bit of a resurgence over the past week and a half or so for me, with patch 6 which improved the worst performance issues for me, but when I step back a little the biggest reason for that is because I reset my CMDR and started from scratch.
But after playing for the past week or so, the following problem areas are becoming proper stumbling blocks for me to continue to enjoy and play the game (I'm leaving performance out as I found a sort of compromise that works well enough - as disappointing as it is to have to lock a 7 year old game to 45fps on a year old mid-range PC):
General look of the game compared to Horizons - the lighting is still highly inconsistent, and there's a LOT of visual glitches that don't occur in Horizons
Lack of game-play options in Odyssey - basic looter/shooter with a self contained engineering loop, and scanning plants is all we got essentially
Bugs - relentless, I hoped the fabled code base refresh would nip many of these in the bud but instead we got plenty of new bugs and lots of regression issues from past years. I always played around them but it's hard to ignore them now... for ex. 3 Horizons engineers (Martuuk, McQuinn, Ishmaak), unlocked for me just like that without having met the prerequisites. Sure I'll take it but it's still incredibly lame that this happened.
Considering that about 70-80% of the aforementioned fun I had over the past few days was Horizons gameplay related, the second point is a bit of a problem because I've played Horizons for well over half a decade already, and hoped for sufficient new content to keep me going. This hasn't materialised with EDO unfortunately, and I very much doubt there's much more in the pipeline anytime soon, as Frontier are too busy fixing the mess they themselves created.
The second wind I got from my CMDR wipe is almost gone now. The above two issues combined with a further disintegration of internal logic and consistency (I traded 192t of Fruit & Vegetables with a settlement that happened to be powered down and had not a single NPC present was the latest example) make me wonder why I still play this game, certainly not for immersion these days.
And since I can't see the issues I mentioned in this post being addressed anytime soon.... for this individual CMDR the future ain't bright unfortunately, not something I expected to say a mere 3 months after the biggest DLC update released for my favourite game ever.
PS - one thing I wouldn't underestimate is the current Steam rating. Whenever I browse Steam for a new game I'll check those out first, even before checking YT/written reviews, and a game that doesn't at least scores "Mostly Positive" simply gets ignored in my book - too many other games out there competing for one's time.
To what extent this will impact console sales I have no idea (most consolieros probably don't look at Steam reviews I'd say!) but Odyssey's reputation is already in tatters, the game's on last gen hardware so if I was Frontier I'd think long and hard about going ahead and hold on to the console versions. I have a feeling their sales will completely bomb if and when they release.
![[VR] James Constantine](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/275/275309.jpg?1622437385){kind=avatar}
