State of the Game

Darth Ender

D
console users do have one main point. this open endedness with consoles is dubious and suspect at best. That might be something a tiny outfit gets away with "it's done when it's done" but not a decent sized studio. Schedules are made in advanced and timetables have to be followed to a certain degree. Either it's got a planned date or it's off the roadmap. The console people can't take this non-answer answer any other way (if they care at all) than fdev is stringing them along to continue to milk money from console players while knowing full well that they are not further developing it. I'd be extremely surprised if fdev still hasn't identified what's making odyssey slow and consequently what kind of work needs to be done to correct it. it's been like half a year - and that's assuming nobody played the game while they were developing it before release.

i suppose if consoles makes up a tiny fraction of the playerbase and income and you're hoping to avoid any kind of legal issues with releasing a broken game that can't play on the stated specs then I guess you gotta start with PC. Otherwise, focusing on PC would only really make sense if they were doing rapid releases to test changes and fixes .. and they're not. and if you were intent on releasing on the consoles, it would make more sense to target them for the initial optimization runs because they're the weakest systems and what makes them run faster will almost certainly cross over to PC performance (and there is less noise in the test feedback because the systems are all the same), where as the other direction is not guaranteed at all.
 

ubermick

ubermick
My guess is that its a combination of "its off the roadmap" (Braben's already said as much, basically inferring that console work is a non-starter until PC is where it needs to be, which everyone agrees that it isn't), focus on getting F1 ready, and - tinfoil hat - a realization that Odyssey isn't going to get there in its current state and a new Elite game will be announced in the summer, maaaaybe in time for next Xmas.
 

nemolomen

nemolomen
ubermick said:
My guess is that its a combination of "its off the roadmap" (Braben's already said as much, basically inferring that console work is a non-starter until PC is where it needs to be, which everyone agrees that it isn't), focus on getting F1 ready, and - tinfoil hat - a realization that Odyssey isn't going to get there in its current state and a new Elite game will be announced in the summer, maaaaybe in time for next Xmas.
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You might want to take your temperature and have a lie down. There is no way there will be a new elite game inside of 3 years from now and probably much longer. I mean, unless they use another engine, which seems highly unlikely.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
ubermick said:
a new Elite game will be announced in the summer, maaaaybe in time for next Xmas.
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Anyone expecting a new Elite any time soon is dreaming as much as the consolistas. At the very least they would leave it a few years to drive demand up.

... and the idea that all the explorers really want to start from zero, and the PMFs all want to start from a single system, and everyone wants to go back to a core set of ships and wait for the good ones to be rewritten - nah.
 

PRORABBIT67

PRORABBIT67
R.jpg
 

ubermick

ubermick
nemolomen said:
You might want to take your temperature and have a lie down. There is no way there will be a new elite game inside of 3 years from now and probably much longer. I mean, unless they use another engine, which seems highly unlikely.
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Yep, I know. That is unless at some point during the Odyssey development they realized that, and started working on one. Couldn't get it ready in time, so released a half baked version, but are still bunkered down trying to get it done. Elite: Deadly coming soon to PC, PS5, and XBSX.*





*Powerplay not included.
 

nemolomen

nemolomen
ubermick said:
Yep, I know. That is unless at some point during the Odyssey development they realized that, and started working on one. Couldn't get it ready in time, so released a half baked version, but are still bunkered down trying to get it done. Elite: Deadly coming soon to PC, PS5, and XBSX.*





*Powerplay not included.
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Yeah, you might want to schedule a visit with you primary care physician...just sayin'...

OTOH nice dig there...
 

LeoBartlet

LeoBartlet
ubermick said:
My guess is that its a combination of "its off the roadmap" (Braben's already said as much, basically inferring that console work is a non-starter until PC is where it needs to be, which everyone agrees that it isn't), focus on getting F1 ready, and - tinfoil hat - a realization that Odyssey isn't going to get there in its current state and a new Elite game will be announced in the summer, maaaaybe in time for next Xmas.
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My guess is Frontier will cut its losses and consider Ody the last of the expansions the game will receive. I said this shortly after the launch and nothing has changed since then to make me think different.
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
ubermick said:
My guess is that its a combination of "its off the roadmap" (Braben's already said as much, basically inferring that console work is a non-starter until PC is where it needs to be, which everyone agrees that it isn't), focus on getting F1 ready, and - tinfoil hat - a realization that Odyssey isn't going to get there in its current state and a new Elite game will be announced in the summer, maaaaybe in time for next Xmas.
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I'm still tempted to believe that EDO will never see the storage of a console, I would be very surprised it it could run acceptably on my PS4, seeing as Horizons is not exactly detailed yet still challenges it a little.

I also don't believe that another Elite will be released, but am open to being proven wrong there!
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
LeoBartlet said:
My guess is Frontier will cut its losses and consider Ody the last of the expansions the game will receive. I said this shortly after the launch and nothing has changed since then to make me think different.
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Depends if it is still making money - I could see an actual-space-legs DLC with EVAs / wrecks etc. Maybe DLCs with more ships / SRVs as they are low effort.

I really don't think they'll do ELW as they would be so much effort. And people would just point at other games and complain. Though that hasn't stopped fdev before, so what do I know :)
 

Darth Ender

D
Factabulous said:
Anyone expecting a new Elite any time soon is dreaming as much as the consolistas. At the very least they would leave it a few years to drive demand up.

... and the idea that all the explorers really want to start from zero, and the PMFs all want to start from a single system, and everyone wants to go back to a core set of ships and wait for the good ones to be rewritten - nah.
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why would explorers care about restarting from zero? what has any explorers found that matters to their game or any aspect of the game? The few things Fdev has hidden and placed around the bubble can easily be replaced with new mysteries and things to find.

And it's unlikely we would be re-starting feature-wise from the way things did with ED. coming out of a kickstarter vs normal game development are different plans... and a sequal would have the benefit of all of the previous to go off of. Not just what works and what doesn't... but even 3d assets could be re-used without starting from scratch.

one wouldn't even need to necessarily reset the bgs state...since that can likely be carried over without losing much if anything and still build a new game around it. But i would hope they would. The current game carries too much baggage from how the bgs was laid out that would keep many improvements in a sequel from being implemented properly.

Instead, have the game take place 200 years in the future. The Bubble is decimated by the thargoid war. humanity is spread out across the galaxy in bits and pieces here and there. Technology has changed...some hasn't. New mysteries await...new things to discover - old wars to finish. Elite: Fatal Encounters, Rated: M
 

Rat Catcher

Rat Catcher
LeoBartlet said:
My guess is Frontier will cut its losses and consider Ody the last of the expansions the game will receive. I said this shortly after the launch and nothing has changed since then to make me think different.
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Makes sense. They appear to have read their market wrong with EDO, as well as alienated themselves from gamers with such an abysmal launch (and an, as yet, unending series of updates that have yet to be particularly effective in solving issues), the product would have to be magnificent when 'finished' to draw confidence back, and it is unlikey to be so.
 

Darth Ender

D
and their secrecy in upcoming features is to blame for not reading the market. if they came at the playerbase a year+ ago with the idea that space legs would take the form of a first person shooter added to planetary surfaces ...the playerbase could have asked them to stop coming up with ideas while drunk and given them a better picture about what the playerbase wants from space legs. Or maybe they'd have said, ok we dont mind a first person shooter...but it should behave this way... and not how odyssey ended up being done.

There's literally no reason why the gameplay of odyssey needed to be secret until it was far too late to do anything about it. Entirely an unecessary miss. Like most surprise features fdev puts into elite cough*cqc*cough. lessons never learned.
 

nemolomen

nemolomen
Darth Ender said:
and their secrecy in upcoming features is to blame for not reading the market. if they came at the playerbase a year+ ago with the idea that space legs would take the form of a first person shooter added to planetary surfaces ...the playerbase could have asked them to stop coming up with ideas while drunk and given them a better picture about what the playerbase wants from space legs. Or maybe they'd have said, ok we dont mind a first person shooter...but it should behave this way... and not how odyssey ended up being done.

There's literally no reason why the gameplay of odyssey needed to be secret until it was far too late to do anything about it. Entirely an unecessary miss. Like most surprise features fdev puts into elite cough*cqc*cough. lessons never learned.
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Its not that bad from my perspective and Odyssey has added a lot for me in terms of how I can approach the game.

For reference...

Post in thread 'What are you up to?' https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/what-are-you-up-to.442368/post-9638107

However, as I've said before, it appears Odyssey hasn't added much for end gamers.
 

[Diplomacy] Carnegie

[Diplomacy] Carnegie
LeoBartlet said:
My guess is Frontier will cut its losses and consider Ody the last of the expansions the game will receive. I said this shortly after the launch and nothing has changed since then to make me think different.
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Dooooom!

Seriously though, I think you're wrong because, ironically, of the Steamcharts. They showed that a LOT of people really want to play ED, but aren't currently doing so - peak player count up by a factor of 4-5x. There's definitely a market for ED expansions and if FDev can do a better job of tapping into that (and not release a steaming pile of garbage next time) then there's still money to be made. The fact that they're still adding content to ED and EDO shows they haven't given up hope yet of turning things around. If EDO was to be the last expansion, they'd already have binned the console release - otherwise it's just a waste of effort.
 
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