Well then. Cripes. And jolly bad show and all that. But it was all so predictable.
Let's just get this out of the way first, by no means should we rage at the individual devs who worked on this; having worked on an MMO myself, it's usually not their fault, and besides which personalising the complaints helps no one. But after putting out unfinished, buggy content for years, then making us wait nearly 3 years for THIS, there desperately needs to be a cultural and managerial change at Frontier, because what we got yesterday was just unacceptable.
Myself, and 2 close friends in the US spent many hours from launch trying to make the best of a bad deal, and here's just the issues that I can remember.
The Odyssey Tutorial:
One out of the 3 of us failed to get past the tutorial as the Cobra MK IV didn't appear. The second hung on the transfer to the main menu for 5 mins or so, probably due to network issues with Frontiers servers. Strangely, I was fine with the actual scripting despite being on the worst system, but we'll come back to that when we get to performance.
The new NPC chatter and mission structure actually showed what hand crafted, and directed content could do for the Elite universe. Enjoy it whilst you can, you'll be back to procedurally generated grind very, very soon.
However there were constant small bugs throughout; navigation waypoints didn't appear, either server issues or graphics lag made moving the arc cutter constantly fail, the enormous bloom contrasted with the extremely low gamma (we'll come back to that too) made reading the visual lay out of the map to find your way around extremely difficult. I found my way into the "Coms" building, the final one, just by trial and error. One other friend did see the writing on the walls which said Coms when they left a building. I think the third actually got the waypoint.
Combat Experience:
Odyssey fizzles right out of the gate. It's blatantly obvious that you're hobbled for energy in order to push you towards the reputation and engineer grind. In theory you can recharge during battle, but all 3 of us had difficulty keeping an eye on recharge locations, especially during chaotic mass NPC brawls. Later on it was easier just to fight until death and respawn with full health etc.
AI is as braindead as seen in the Alpha. Just by being there, and vaguely aiming in their direction with the rocket launcher, I was able to win a battle solo because the AI seems unable to prioritise any of it's objectives and will simply move towards and then shoot at each other. With 2 identical teams of tactical morons, the man with the boom stick is king. Except for the battle my friend was put in instead (we'll come back to party issues later!) where as far as we can tell, either the AI fell off the map, or ran off into the hills never to be seen again because he got stuck on one AI left to kill to end the battle, and the other AI couldn't find it and it wasn't on his radar.
They don't seem to understand height maps either, and with there being copious ladders and ramps, they'll often get onto the roof as a fast way to pathfind to the objectives (rather than trying to thread through the insides; I suspect they have very simple range based movement), not realise they aren't tagging it because they aren't in the circle, and endless rooftop duels then occur with the people downstairs and outside. It's extremely rare to have to fight someone off a point, they'll almost always be outside the door shooting at someone they have line of sight too on the roof.
Grenades seem to have a low, flat arc when thrown that continues on until it explodes, leaving them impossible to aim unless you can find something near the feet of the target to jam it into.
I can't really comment on the feel of the weapons, because performance was so bad...
Performance And Graphics:
It's just so unforgivably bad, folks.
I'm not on the best system (Ryzen 5 2400g, GTX970 4gb, 16gb DDR, running from SSD) but it was enough to run Horizons on Ultra. It can still run space content on Ultra, but performance on foot is appalling, even when reducing the settings down to Low. Space stations appear to be relatively ok, but ground bases are headache inducingly poor, with constant frame rate drops and jerky camera movement. You often have to apply an action (such as charging a door) multiple times as the huge pauses in processing failed to register it. It isn't the presence of moving AI, as you had this even on the Tutorial before they spawned. When they did spawn, I could barely stay on target because the mouse was so crippled by poor performance. One of my friends was in VR, and he took ages to pass that section because he was seeing 20 degree swings in targetting, and ended up resorting to the shotgun-esque pistol to try and pass them.
Combined this with the graphical changes that are just awful. Bloom is set incredibly high, making all the fine detail fuzzy and lost in the clutter; the flames section of the tutorial not only tanked performance further, but the light effects distorted everything to the point it looked like an FPS from the Quake 1 era. At one point during our first attempt at ground battles, I was in my Corvette trying to stop the reinforcement Drop Ships coming in, but the entire base below me just looked like an elongated smear, and if it weren't for the markers on the ships I wouldn't have been able to pick them out of the visual mess.
The same issue occurs in space; we tried a Conflict Zone, and the ridiculous lowering of Gamma meant you couldn't even see gas giants from behind. The rings around the planets are effectively invisible at many angles, leading to quite a few unexpected collisions. And trying to fight the ships meant most of the time you couldn't see them, and when they did get close, you'd only see the parts of them that were in exceptionally light colours, so you'd be fighting a set of jagged, disconnected parts. Ships and planets under strong light in turn often bleed out into pure whites.
And environment bugs everywhere; In my first visit to a station, I found an NPC vendor who was stuck in the floor, and climbed into the counter when contacted, and one floating in the air.
Networking Malarky That Isn't Due To Launch Day Issues:
Everyone piling in on launch day always leads to chaos. We'll have to wait and see if the actual gameplay improves in the future. But Elite has always had shonky netcode, and now Odyssey won't allow Horizons players to play with Odyssey players even in the shared content. That's just unforgivable.
But we 3 were all in Odyssey, and we found it almost impossible to stay together for more than a few minutes. We had the same old issues of getting into a Wing (now renamed to Team) and syncing to the same instance; but at Tombaugh Station, our leader had to take off and land three times before it allowed us all to see each other. The first two times, myself and one friend could see each other on the station but not the Team leader. When all 3 were together, we boarded his ship, and flew to the target; on entering supercruise, the two of us got trapped in the supercruise view and had to quit, whilst he landed on his own. When we tried to join him in the ground instance, he and the other friend were joined but I got put into a solo one (hence the above)...
User Interface Changes That Make No Sense:
It just keeps getting unnessacerily complex and counter-practical.
There's no way as far as I can see now to see how much progress numerically through a rank you are. (I wanted to see this to see if the terrible, TERRIBLE idea of Elite+ was in.)
Elite Feet users can accept a team invite, but can see a message that they have, and yet not accept team mission invites. You need to be able to get back to your ship and use either the left hand or upper left windows to take a team mission.
The system navigation map now has a pulsing orb when a planet is selected... covering up the planet itself. Body information is moved now to the right, and hidden until selected. The target for navigation marker is now on that bar, and not only the planet when selected. Why?
Zooming in on a planetary body now surrounds it with moving lines, as if it was covered in satellite/asteroid orbit paths. But of course they aren't.
All missions of the same overall type (combat etc) seem to have the same icon, thus making it hard to see which subtype it is
Wing missions only have the blue wing icon in the initial selection. You can't tell them apart in the left hand interface as the Wing tagging disappears, nor can you read it and see because until someone joins the wing, only then is there a share option inside it. They become identical to solo until you're in a wing.
Selecting a local faction allows you to filter for missions only for that faction, but a combination of poor UI design, and adding in your reputation with that faction makes it confusing as to which is selected; if you're Allied with everyone, the green bar is more prominant than the faded out icons so it looks like all are selected.
There's no way to see which weapons you have already purchased when looking to buy more, you have to go out and offer to sell them to see duplicates.
You need a specific outfit for flight to be able to see and use your previously purchased flight suits, but nowhere is this obviously explained. I just ended up renaming the default, and leaving it when it worked with my prior black and white flightsuit. Nor are the outfits themselves clearly delineated. Why are some of them given a marker for arm pieces in every option, for instance? I thought it was broken at first.
The tool wheel on the left can be accessed by holding down a button, but the movement commands on it are so poor you might as well just use direct key inputs for what ever you want, because the chance of it still being on what you want when you release the button are so low.
And worst of all; ship outfitting is now a bizarre, broken mess. Got an item in storage? Ok, you can transfer it onto the ship easily. But the options of how to store what it's replacing back again are confusing. And any other way? Click the item itself; you have the option to buy a replacement from the Store. Inside there, you can see yellow items which with some thought are the options at the local station you have stored. But you can't apparently get at the items you have stored elsewhere? Ok, select an item that you think you want to replace it with. This lead to me storing the original item, but not getting the replacement. Eh? The swap icon, the one with the -><- design appears to be moving about items on the ship itself. The whole process confused all 3 of us, and we couldn't make any sense out of what it was trying to replace the old system with.
Nor should it have. Someone at FDev is addicted to UI changes and needs to have their keyboard taken away from them. It was workable (not fine) as it was, stop making it worse!
There's probably a tonne more, but those are the ones I can recall just this morning. Of course, the bloom wasn't helping with ship born UI text either. So blurry. So hard on the eyes.
And The Bugs - So. Many. BUGS:
Let's see, in a few hours I came across;
The planet terrain radar on the ship console showing the underlying grid
If a planetary glide fails (too steep, too fast) any attempt to restart it (by moving back to supercruise up, nosing down and slow speed again) causes a "Too close/too fast" warning, an instant drop out of glide and hull damage. I ended up just flying the full distance down.
Auto-land getting stuck in a small piece of blue terrain in a permanent cycle of aligning over it, losing alignment, and then shuffling around over it until found again. Maneuvre thrusters aren't strong enough to pick up speed and break the auto-land either, so you have to use main engines.
My friend being unable to launch Odyssey at all until he bodged it, as Occulus Home insisted on only launching Horizons.
Getting a persistent bug that crashed me to the menu with a Black Adder warning if I tried to disembark, or launch an NPC controlled fighter. It only vanished with a full shut down and restart.
You can't now share a mission if someone joins the team after it's been shared. It seems to be a one-shot-and-accepted-and-done thing? We had to disolve the team before the option to share reappeared.
Navigation targets being changed to something else as you approached them; I saw this especially trying to get into Conflict Zones, it would shift target to a named station elsewhere.
Conflict Zones just suddenly stopping, with no new NPCs coming in. Targets being destroyed but not counted for Conflict Zone objectives. These are old bugs I think, but still present here.
Being unable to pick sides in the ground zones. Happened to most of the team multiple times, usually it would flash up, but vanish before it could be accepted and then never return.
You can't jump on foot in stations; this is probably deliberate, but weird.
The aforementioned stuck in the floor and floating in the air npcs.
Constantly hitting planetary rings because they were invisible.
Not a bug as such, but the sub settings for sound over-ride the global ones; I was getting voice chatter in Conflict Zones despite the 3 main options being Muted. Had to go into the subsettings and mute all of those too.
Distinct lack of cow themed cowstumes in the Arx store. This is obviously an oversight.
Moving to Supercruise automatically refilled ammunition counts.
As wise man once said; Fix it! Fix it fix it fix it!
Please. Except the automatic ammunition counts. Don't fix that.
Let's just get this out of the way first, by no means should we rage at the individual devs who worked on this; having worked on an MMO myself, it's usually not their fault, and besides which personalising the complaints helps no one. But after putting out unfinished, buggy content for years, then making us wait nearly 3 years for THIS, there desperately needs to be a cultural and managerial change at Frontier, because what we got yesterday was just unacceptable.
Myself, and 2 close friends in the US spent many hours from launch trying to make the best of a bad deal, and here's just the issues that I can remember.
The Odyssey Tutorial:
One out of the 3 of us failed to get past the tutorial as the Cobra MK IV didn't appear. The second hung on the transfer to the main menu for 5 mins or so, probably due to network issues with Frontiers servers. Strangely, I was fine with the actual scripting despite being on the worst system, but we'll come back to that when we get to performance.
The new NPC chatter and mission structure actually showed what hand crafted, and directed content could do for the Elite universe. Enjoy it whilst you can, you'll be back to procedurally generated grind very, very soon.
However there were constant small bugs throughout; navigation waypoints didn't appear, either server issues or graphics lag made moving the arc cutter constantly fail, the enormous bloom contrasted with the extremely low gamma (we'll come back to that too) made reading the visual lay out of the map to find your way around extremely difficult. I found my way into the "Coms" building, the final one, just by trial and error. One other friend did see the writing on the walls which said Coms when they left a building. I think the third actually got the waypoint.
Combat Experience:
Odyssey fizzles right out of the gate. It's blatantly obvious that you're hobbled for energy in order to push you towards the reputation and engineer grind. In theory you can recharge during battle, but all 3 of us had difficulty keeping an eye on recharge locations, especially during chaotic mass NPC brawls. Later on it was easier just to fight until death and respawn with full health etc.
AI is as braindead as seen in the Alpha. Just by being there, and vaguely aiming in their direction with the rocket launcher, I was able to win a battle solo because the AI seems unable to prioritise any of it's objectives and will simply move towards and then shoot at each other. With 2 identical teams of tactical morons, the man with the boom stick is king. Except for the battle my friend was put in instead (we'll come back to party issues later!) where as far as we can tell, either the AI fell off the map, or ran off into the hills never to be seen again because he got stuck on one AI left to kill to end the battle, and the other AI couldn't find it and it wasn't on his radar.
They don't seem to understand height maps either, and with there being copious ladders and ramps, they'll often get onto the roof as a fast way to pathfind to the objectives (rather than trying to thread through the insides; I suspect they have very simple range based movement), not realise they aren't tagging it because they aren't in the circle, and endless rooftop duels then occur with the people downstairs and outside. It's extremely rare to have to fight someone off a point, they'll almost always be outside the door shooting at someone they have line of sight too on the roof.
Grenades seem to have a low, flat arc when thrown that continues on until it explodes, leaving them impossible to aim unless you can find something near the feet of the target to jam it into.
I can't really comment on the feel of the weapons, because performance was so bad...
Performance And Graphics:
It's just so unforgivably bad, folks.
I'm not on the best system (Ryzen 5 2400g, GTX970 4gb, 16gb DDR, running from SSD) but it was enough to run Horizons on Ultra. It can still run space content on Ultra, but performance on foot is appalling, even when reducing the settings down to Low. Space stations appear to be relatively ok, but ground bases are headache inducingly poor, with constant frame rate drops and jerky camera movement. You often have to apply an action (such as charging a door) multiple times as the huge pauses in processing failed to register it. It isn't the presence of moving AI, as you had this even on the Tutorial before they spawned. When they did spawn, I could barely stay on target because the mouse was so crippled by poor performance. One of my friends was in VR, and he took ages to pass that section because he was seeing 20 degree swings in targetting, and ended up resorting to the shotgun-esque pistol to try and pass them.
Combined this with the graphical changes that are just awful. Bloom is set incredibly high, making all the fine detail fuzzy and lost in the clutter; the flames section of the tutorial not only tanked performance further, but the light effects distorted everything to the point it looked like an FPS from the Quake 1 era. At one point during our first attempt at ground battles, I was in my Corvette trying to stop the reinforcement Drop Ships coming in, but the entire base below me just looked like an elongated smear, and if it weren't for the markers on the ships I wouldn't have been able to pick them out of the visual mess.
The same issue occurs in space; we tried a Conflict Zone, and the ridiculous lowering of Gamma meant you couldn't even see gas giants from behind. The rings around the planets are effectively invisible at many angles, leading to quite a few unexpected collisions. And trying to fight the ships meant most of the time you couldn't see them, and when they did get close, you'd only see the parts of them that were in exceptionally light colours, so you'd be fighting a set of jagged, disconnected parts. Ships and planets under strong light in turn often bleed out into pure whites.
And environment bugs everywhere; In my first visit to a station, I found an NPC vendor who was stuck in the floor, and climbed into the counter when contacted, and one floating in the air.
Networking Malarky That Isn't Due To Launch Day Issues:
Everyone piling in on launch day always leads to chaos. We'll have to wait and see if the actual gameplay improves in the future. But Elite has always had shonky netcode, and now Odyssey won't allow Horizons players to play with Odyssey players even in the shared content. That's just unforgivable.
But we 3 were all in Odyssey, and we found it almost impossible to stay together for more than a few minutes. We had the same old issues of getting into a Wing (now renamed to Team) and syncing to the same instance; but at Tombaugh Station, our leader had to take off and land three times before it allowed us all to see each other. The first two times, myself and one friend could see each other on the station but not the Team leader. When all 3 were together, we boarded his ship, and flew to the target; on entering supercruise, the two of us got trapped in the supercruise view and had to quit, whilst he landed on his own. When we tried to join him in the ground instance, he and the other friend were joined but I got put into a solo one (hence the above)...
User Interface Changes That Make No Sense:
It just keeps getting unnessacerily complex and counter-practical.
There's no way as far as I can see now to see how much progress numerically through a rank you are. (I wanted to see this to see if the terrible, TERRIBLE idea of Elite+ was in.)
Elite Feet users can accept a team invite, but can see a message that they have, and yet not accept team mission invites. You need to be able to get back to your ship and use either the left hand or upper left windows to take a team mission.
The system navigation map now has a pulsing orb when a planet is selected... covering up the planet itself. Body information is moved now to the right, and hidden until selected. The target for navigation marker is now on that bar, and not only the planet when selected. Why?
Zooming in on a planetary body now surrounds it with moving lines, as if it was covered in satellite/asteroid orbit paths. But of course they aren't.
All missions of the same overall type (combat etc) seem to have the same icon, thus making it hard to see which subtype it is
Wing missions only have the blue wing icon in the initial selection. You can't tell them apart in the left hand interface as the Wing tagging disappears, nor can you read it and see because until someone joins the wing, only then is there a share option inside it. They become identical to solo until you're in a wing.
Selecting a local faction allows you to filter for missions only for that faction, but a combination of poor UI design, and adding in your reputation with that faction makes it confusing as to which is selected; if you're Allied with everyone, the green bar is more prominant than the faded out icons so it looks like all are selected.
There's no way to see which weapons you have already purchased when looking to buy more, you have to go out and offer to sell them to see duplicates.
You need a specific outfit for flight to be able to see and use your previously purchased flight suits, but nowhere is this obviously explained. I just ended up renaming the default, and leaving it when it worked with my prior black and white flightsuit. Nor are the outfits themselves clearly delineated. Why are some of them given a marker for arm pieces in every option, for instance? I thought it was broken at first.
The tool wheel on the left can be accessed by holding down a button, but the movement commands on it are so poor you might as well just use direct key inputs for what ever you want, because the chance of it still being on what you want when you release the button are so low.
And worst of all; ship outfitting is now a bizarre, broken mess. Got an item in storage? Ok, you can transfer it onto the ship easily. But the options of how to store what it's replacing back again are confusing. And any other way? Click the item itself; you have the option to buy a replacement from the Store. Inside there, you can see yellow items which with some thought are the options at the local station you have stored. But you can't apparently get at the items you have stored elsewhere? Ok, select an item that you think you want to replace it with. This lead to me storing the original item, but not getting the replacement. Eh? The swap icon, the one with the -><- design appears to be moving about items on the ship itself. The whole process confused all 3 of us, and we couldn't make any sense out of what it was trying to replace the old system with.
Nor should it have. Someone at FDev is addicted to UI changes and needs to have their keyboard taken away from them. It was workable (not fine) as it was, stop making it worse!
There's probably a tonne more, but those are the ones I can recall just this morning. Of course, the bloom wasn't helping with ship born UI text either. So blurry. So hard on the eyes.
And The Bugs - So. Many. BUGS:
Let's see, in a few hours I came across;
The planet terrain radar on the ship console showing the underlying grid
If a planetary glide fails (too steep, too fast) any attempt to restart it (by moving back to supercruise up, nosing down and slow speed again) causes a "Too close/too fast" warning, an instant drop out of glide and hull damage. I ended up just flying the full distance down.
Auto-land getting stuck in a small piece of blue terrain in a permanent cycle of aligning over it, losing alignment, and then shuffling around over it until found again. Maneuvre thrusters aren't strong enough to pick up speed and break the auto-land either, so you have to use main engines.
My friend being unable to launch Odyssey at all until he bodged it, as Occulus Home insisted on only launching Horizons.
Getting a persistent bug that crashed me to the menu with a Black Adder warning if I tried to disembark, or launch an NPC controlled fighter. It only vanished with a full shut down and restart.
You can't now share a mission if someone joins the team after it's been shared. It seems to be a one-shot-and-accepted-and-done thing? We had to disolve the team before the option to share reappeared.
Navigation targets being changed to something else as you approached them; I saw this especially trying to get into Conflict Zones, it would shift target to a named station elsewhere.
Conflict Zones just suddenly stopping, with no new NPCs coming in. Targets being destroyed but not counted for Conflict Zone objectives. These are old bugs I think, but still present here.
Being unable to pick sides in the ground zones. Happened to most of the team multiple times, usually it would flash up, but vanish before it could be accepted and then never return.
You can't jump on foot in stations; this is probably deliberate, but weird.
The aforementioned stuck in the floor and floating in the air npcs.
Constantly hitting planetary rings because they were invisible.
Not a bug as such, but the sub settings for sound over-ride the global ones; I was getting voice chatter in Conflict Zones despite the 3 main options being Muted. Had to go into the subsettings and mute all of those too.
Distinct lack of cow themed cowstumes in the Arx store. This is obviously an oversight.
Moving to Supercruise automatically refilled ammunition counts.
As wise man once said; Fix it! Fix it fix it fix it!
Please. Except the automatic ammunition counts. Don't fix that.
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