Console Update

[Sunyavadin]

Those Jaguar cores are the killer for getting a lot of stuff running on the 8th gen machines. They basically rule out porting anything CPU-limited to them.

And frankly given the install base, I cannot imagine it being in any developer's interest even if they were allowed to make an 8.5 gen exclusive version of a game. The cost probably outweighs the limited sales potential on a console with only 20% as many units sold as the base versions.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

indeed....... that was the garnish of my main point tho. i do think the current gen would be capable of running any game which can run on the min specs that ED:O can run on.

It just depends how important the elite franchise is to FD imo (because they do still support the console with their other games)

 

[tanner1ie]

indeed but the current min spec for ED:O that the game runs ok on is below the power of the PS5, where as the PS4 / Xbox 1 vanilla machines were pretty weak sauce even back in 2013

i wouldnt be surprised if FD could have played ED:O on a PS4 pro or Xb1X from last gen (just guessing, maybe the cpu would have given issues but the gpu in them is much improved)....... but both Sony and Microsoft have strict rules that they were not allowed to release games only for the pro consoles.

I've seen plenty of other developers do wonderful things with the "underpowered" base PS4 and Xbox 1, I and many others people are still very happy with them*...

However let's say, just to avoid arguments, even if it isn't due to developer incompetence and there is some part of Odyssey's code that makes it impossible to run at an acceptable frame rate on the base systems - they NEVER made any announcement or seemingly any effort to release the game on the "next gen" consoles...

Even now, they just seem to say, "that's too hard, just release Odyssey as a PC exclusive and cancel console development!"

I and many others wouldn't even mind if Odyssey was a PC, PS5 and Series X exclusive, but the fact that Frontier don't seem interested in the "next gen" consoles at all is shocking and very disappointing! .

*Indeed CD Project Red took about a year to get Cyberpunk 2077 running well on the base consoles, but they stuck with it and did it.

I own and regularly play on a base PS4 and also on a Pro and I don't notice much difference between the two, if any.

About the only game I've seen struggle on the base PS4 is Stellaris in the late game, otherwise newer games make the base PS4's fan get a little loud at times, but that's it.

The PS4 and Xbox One are still very capable, while it shouldn't take that much effort to release "next gen" versions of existing PS4 and Xbox One games - but here we are!

 

[angusmadmac1]

I think many of console players would have accepted ( like myself) that EDO wouldnt run on last gen ( I mean pc have a minimum build so why not consoles ??) And had bought a series X for EDO . But I think they went for the easy option and lay some of the blame of the slow progression of EDO at Consoles and poor connectivity . Now PC players are now expecting it to be faster and may be disappointed to find it was something else.

 

[Sunyavadin]

indeed....... that was the garnish of my main point tho. i do think the current gen would be capable of running any game which can run on the min specs that ED:O can run on.

It just depends how important the elite franchise is to FD imo (because they do still support the console with their other games)

There's also the question of its current performance on AMD hardware, which the current gen consoles are also based on. Pretty sure Odyssey wouldn't go down too well with Series X/PS5 owners if they crashed constantly when approaching planets or entering rings and asteroid fields.

 

[aRJay]

indeed but the current min spec for ED:O that the game runs ok on is below the power of the PS5, where as the PS4 / Xbox 1 vanilla machines were pretty weak sauce even back in 2013

i wouldnt be surprised if FD could have played ED:O on a PS4 pro or Xb1X from last gen (just guessing, maybe the cpu would have given issues but the gpu in them is much improved)....... but both Sony and Microsoft have strict rules that they were not allowed to release games only for the pro consoles.

Which makes if it was possible or not irrelevant.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Which makes if it was possible or not irrelevant.

for PS4 generation absolutely.
but not ps5. (only mentioning ps5 because the Xbox naming is bonkers but the point stands for that too)

 

[Deltus Infinium]

I think many of console players would have accepted ( like myself) that EDO wouldnt run on last gen ( I mean pc have a minimum build so why not consoles ??) And had bought a series X for EDO . But I think they went for the easy option and lay some of the blame of the slow progression of EDO at Consoles and poor connectivity . Now PC players are now expecting it to be faster and may be disappointed to find it was something else.

My rtx 3080 and 3700x can't even break 60fps in a large ground conflict zone at 1080p. Literally gives me worse performance than playing Control with RTX on at native 4k with no DLSS. It's not that consoles can't run the game, it's that Fdev can't make code that runs well on even modern hardware. People with 5800x3D cpus are now finally able to do ground conflict zones above 60fps, because of the increased cache size. This indicates Fdev doesn't actually know how to make their code work within all the constraints of modern hardware, and the game absolutely hammers the CPU with memory requests at an unreasonable rate, which is why all their lighting and rendering optimizations over the past near dozen updates, have only made marginal improvements in very specific scenarios. Fdev only seems to look at half the specs of modern hardware when trying to diagnose where the issue is in Odyssey's performance. Between this and then struggling to implement any kind of actually decent anti aliasing into the game outside of just lazily supersampling everything, it's obvious they have a major lack of actually experienced devs who know what they are doing. Fanboys can blame the console specs all they want, but the specs of an Xbox or PlayStation aren't responsible for sub 60fps at 1080 on an rtx 3080, with only 40% gpu usage with a cpu above recommend specs...

 

[Deltus Infinium]

indeed but the current min spec for ED:O that the game runs ok on is below the power of the PS5, where as the PS4 / Xbox 1 vanilla machines were pretty weak sauce even back in 2013

i wouldnt be surprised if FD could have played ED:O on a PS4 pro or Xb1X from last gen (just guessing, maybe the cpu would have given issues but the gpu in them is much improved)....... but both Sony and Microsoft have strict rules that they were not allowed to release games only for the pro consoles.

Actually that is purely with Sony and Fdev, not Microsoft. Microsoft goes so far as to even let developers lock specific features to specific console versions, as well as maintain different builds of the game for each Xbox console (the console automatically downloads the version that works best for it). They could literally make Odyssey exclusive to the Xbox Series S/X build of the game, upload said build, and peoples Xbox would automatically download either that version, or the old build Horizon, depending on what console the user is on. Microsoft literally has stuff in place (look up Xbox Smart Delivery) so Fdev could do stuff like make a next gen exclusive version, without even having to sell it as a different game. Any blame is on Fdev, not Microsoft. Even funnier in all this, is that Elite Dangerous is on Gamepass, and if Fdev gave the greenlight for Microsoft to stream it on Xcloud, Xbox users could stream Odyssey from an Xbox Series X on Microsoft servers, to their phone, tv, pc, whatever has the Xcloud app. Console availability would not impact console users from being able to play a next gen console Odyssey, same as PC players keep telling them to just use Geforce Now and play the PC version from their xbox browser... There are near unlimited solutions, but Fdev is very unimaginative.

 

[Sunyavadin]

Actually that is purely with Sony and Fdev, not Microsoft. Microsoft goes so far as to even let developers lock specific features to specific console versions, as well as maintain different builds of the game for each Xbox console (the console automatically downloads the version that works best for it). They could literally make Odyssey exclusive to the Xbox Series S/X build of the game, upload said build, and peoples Xbox would automatically download either that version, or the old build Horizon, depending on what console the user is on. Microsoft literally has stuff in place (look up Xbox Smart Delivery) so Fdev could do stuff like make a next gen exclusive version, without even having to sell it as a different game. Any blame is on Fdev, not Microsoft. Even funnier in all this, is that Elite Dangerous is on Gamepass, and if Fdev gave the greenlight for Microsoft to stream it on Xcloud, Xbox users could stream Odyssey from an Xbox Series X on Microsoft servers, to their phone, tv, pc, whatever has the Xcloud app. Console availability would not impact console users from being able to play a next gen console Odyssey, same as PC players keep telling them to just use Geforce Now and play the PC version from their xbox browser... There are near unlimited solutions, but Fdev is very unimaginative.

Smart Delivery works for differentiating Durango (One and One X) builds vs Scarlett (Series X/S) builds.

One and One X however use the same build of the game with different features enabled. If it detects a One X, it enables them.
Odyssey is a separate build of the game to Horizons so they would need to make a version of it for XBox One for that to then be able to detect a One X and enable any additional features like higher resolution or FPS cap. Plenty games have significant quantities of features disabled on One X which are present on Series S because of this fact, as even though many such features could technically work on One X, their presence would necessitate features that the XBox One version of the Durango build could not support.

Cloud streaming would definitely work, as with games like MS Flight Sim.

 

[denispage]

People… move on.
I know, it was a sad announcement but now it‘s time do move on.
Get a PC, play on GFORCE NOW (runs well), play horizons or play another game.

PS: Don’t shoot the messenger.

 

[CCStonewall]

People… move on.
I know, it was a sad announcement but now it‘s time do move on.
Get a PC, play on GFORCE NOW (runs well), play horizons or play another game.

PS: Don’t shoot the messenger.

I play with a lot of older players who can't just run out and but a new computer.

 

[CCStonewall]

All the systems that I have explored and friends that I have made will be destroyed in this update.

 

[Akhenaten241]

Greetings Commanders,

Elite Dangerous is a game close to my heart.

It’s no secret that Odyssey’s launch was less than ideal, including the need to split the PC/console player base to focus on a PC-only launch. Since Odyssey’s release in May 2021, we have worked tirelessly to improve the Odyssey experience on PC, and whilst we have made great progress there is still more to be done. We have been supporting the pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey codebases since.

Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward, and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development. We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this we need to focus on a single codebase. Elite Dangerous will continue on console as it is now together with critical updates, but we will focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase.

We appreciate this news is not what our console community were hoping for. This was not an easy decision to make, but it was made with the long-term future of Elite Dangerous in mind.

Look here F-dev I know your playerbase on console don't mean much, but take a page from Hello games, They work around the clock for their players across all platforms and push out updates for everyone daily and they don't even have a quarter of the developers you do, I understand its alot of work for a hyper realistic space game that I both on playstation and PC, but abandoning half of your playerbase that have been waiting so long? yeah I understand that they are basically two different games, but at least delay development, don't abandon it, because that makes you look very bad, and i'm guessing you have lost alot of income which is not good, especially for your devs, please, at least listen to your players more, show that you care. Thank you for your time.

 

[Rat Catcher]

All the systems that I have explored and friends that I have made will be destroyed in this update.

The systems will still be there, and if your name was on them it still will be.
It is up to your friends what they do.

 

[angusmadmac1]

The systems will still be there, and if your name was on them it still will be.
It is up to your friends what they do.

It looks as if some systems have been over written when first foot is given to players in EDO . But the game is still there for now at least

 

[Rat Catcher]

It looks as if some systems have been over written when first foot is given to players in EDO . But the game is still there for now at least

Odd, but then, there are a few bugs in ED.
I've seen quite a lot of systems where discovery, mapped and 1st footfall have been 3 different names, but this is ED so what you say isn't in the least unbelieveable!

 

[GraphiteGB]

Whats taking September so long to get here, Want to nuke the free Epic games account and clone My console to PC then double the money I got...
Using the potato CPU and GeForce now... So much for time flying by.. humbug... boo..

 

[tanner1ie]

I'm still hopeful that once the devs sort out Odyssey, they change their minds about console development and the general direction the game is going...

Whether the core team comes back to console development, they hire and train a secondary team to focus on consoles or even if they take a leaf out of Kerbal Space Program and Stellaris' books and hire third party companies to port Elite to consoles from now on, if we get the new content, we don't mind THAT much about having to wait for it...

Of course we want the entire game, including Odyssey with full dev support on the "next gen" consoles, with whatever they can get to work on the older consoles (and PC version 3.8 for that matter)...

In terms of the direction the game is going, I'm sure most of us want more ship and space based content, say a minimum of six new ships, though hopefully twelve plus, across all ship classes and sizes, new weapons and modules etc...

In particular more to do "out in the black" and more interesting and diverse things to find out there and in the game in general...

Lastly cross play would be a big bonus, say between PS5, Series X and PC 4.0, with PS4, Xbox One and PC 3.8 playing together separately, if not letting us all play together, if they can optimise Odyssey enough to make the entire game run well on "last gen".

All in, I want the game to be as good as it could be and let everybody play the best version of it on their systems of choice .

 

[stormyuk]

We all hope for the best @tanner1ie but, I seriously don't see a U-turn on the horizon unfortunately.