Development Update 1 - June

[LuckyLuigi]

It's great that you are reaching out to the community.

I have one question. The lighting of Neutron Stars in Odyssey not great. In Horizons there were like point sources (which they should be) but in Odyssey they are massive like stars which makes no sense. Explorers see Neutron Stars all the time. It would greatly enhance the game if this were fixed in Odyssey.
Is this on the timeline ?

 

[Drelthar]

@Arthur Tolmie

I'm glad you put some information out.

However, I suspect you are going to now get a lot of flak for going over things people kind of already knew, and not really giving out any "new" information.
This was a highly anticipated information dump - and the future development part amounts to "we're thinking about it" which is not really what the community at large were hoping for I think.

I hope people still appreciate the info that is in there.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Personally? I was hoping for some info on the future of Elite (not the immediate tomorrow future, the what the designers want to do with the game - new gameplay wise)

So I come away quite disappointed.

Here is why:

• Lighting, brightness and gamma
• Character and Outfitting UI
• Galaxy Map navigation and found organic data tracking
• Performance – We know there is more to do here, but we are pleased to see some players reporting notable improvements for particular configurations

These are just fixes to broken stuff really. I know Frontier will fix things they broke over time, especially big things.

• Shared missions – allowing you to work together with other Commanders on the ground and share mission rewards

We already knew about these, and frankly... it's bizarre they weren't in the initial release.

• Overhauled cockpit lighting

This is a fix for what amounts to a bug

• Visual improvements for neutron stars
• Redesign of ship outfitting interface

More bug fixes

• Rebalanced drop rates for rare items

Something gameplay related again, good however, we already knew about this.

Issue Tracker
Another area we like to keep an eye on is our Issue Tracker.

Yes, you want to fix game issues, cool.

Future Progress: The Longer Roadmap

Finally! the part I care about!!!!

Once I remove the explanations and fluff there is this.

We are actively investigating, reviewing, and remeasuring the further roadmap but these things will take a little time.

This, is very very disappointing. This says absolutely nothing. Though, if I was being cynical, I could say that it says a lot, that being, there are literally no plans for anything beyond Odyssey at all within the design team.

That would be tragic.

So, I hope that elucidates you on the way this communication landed for me on a personal level, and I hope I'm not being too harsh or critical - I'm just being very honest about how this communication sat with me.

 

[LoneTech]

In the interest of openness and transparency, what was the precise "rare" drop rate of smear campaign plans?

Good question, as it would be trivial to answer! My guess is none were generated at all, at an expected rate no higher than 1e-5 per player.

 

[CMDR Kasanna]

Greetings Commanders,

We would like to share with you our first monthly development update since the launch of Elite Dangerous Odyssey. The purpose of these monthly news articles is to give a regular, moment in time, updates on how development within Elite Dangerous is progressing. The aim is to a provide a factual look at community requested features, issues, and a look forward at what the team are working on next.

Please note: the nature of these updates will be ‘warts-and-all’; you will likely see work in progress screenshots and content taken from WIP builds. That means that all information and assets shared are subject to change.

We will be looking to share more information on development challenges as well as talking about progress that has been made in other areas. Making games requires a large number of people working closely and in sync. There will always be a need to prioritise and focus development efforts on specific features and content for the biggest benefit of our wider community. Despite an incredible team, we simply wouldn’t ever have enough time to add all the awesome things that are requested by the community. As such, we hope that by being open about these requests, we can avoid giving the wrong expectations and everyone can be informed and up to date with where development is at that time.

So let’s get started…

June Update

Since this launch we have had to adjust our focus and the development team have been working incredibly hard to review and address as many reports and issues as possible. We have done this through a number of early hotfixes and a subsequent series of five game updates, including the one that will be deployed tomorrow.

Throughout these five updates we have made over a thousand changes, fixes, and additions to Odyssey based on your feedback, including in key areas such as:

• Lighting, brightness and gamma
• Character and Outfitting UI
• Galaxy Map navigation and found organic data tracking
• Performance – We know there is more to do here, but we are pleased to see some players reporting notable improvements for particular configurations

So, what is next for Odyssey?

As previously stated, Update Five will be deployed tomorrow and will deliver on more key areas of focus and feedback that we have received. These include:

• Shared missions – allowing you to work together with other Commanders on the ground and share mission rewards

• Overhauled cockpit lighting

• Visual improvements for neutron stars
• Redesign of ship outfitting interface
• Rebalanced drop rates for rare items

Issue Tracker
Another area we like to keep an eye on is our Issue Tracker. This allows us to see and measure the key issues within the community, as voted for by you. We know that many of you are keen to have an update on the top issues. So we’ve listed out the top five items below and given some direct thoughts and feedback on each one of them.

Current Top Five:

1. Improvements to lighting (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/33174)
   • Many of the lighting issues have been improved across previous updates, the last major set relate to the update of ship cockpits which will be in Update 5. We will continue to monitor your feedback.
2. Degraded terrain textures compared to Horizons (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/32854)
   • Pathways have been identified to improve this and a team is actively working on this area.
3. Planetary features that appear to repeat (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/34834)
   • We understand this is an important topic within the community. As mentioned at the start of the article, we want to share the challenges as well as the positives. Investigations are still ongoing, however, it must be said that this is proving to be a very significant technical challenge. At the current time we do not have a workable solution. BUT, investigations will continue and we will keep you updated.
4. Anarchy factions and the BGS (https://issues.frontierstore.net/issue-detail/35479)
   • After extensive investigation we found that missions against anarchy factions were too impactful and this has been addressed. We are making further tweaks with Update 5 and will continue to monitor this issue closely to see if further action is required.
5. FPS performance in Odyssey
   • Pathways have also been identified with performance and the team are actively working on this area.

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.

Livestream

As you may have seen from the weekly schedule, I will be jumping into Elite Dangerous tomorrow and playing through the most recent update with Bruce. Please come along and join us where we can discuss today’s update.

o7

Just a recap of events from my perspective as a player and a member of the community. During the alpha of Odyssey, it was made quite clear by everyone that the launch date was too soon, as the game had tons of bugs, issues with the UI, the game itself did not seem feature complete, and performance was abysmal. FDev still decided to launch within two weeks of concluding the alpha.

We all know what happened during the launch, mass negative reviews, and public outcry, which prompted the company's CEO to reach out to the community via the forums publicly. We were promised open communication as we advance, as most of the communication from Fdev to the community was misleading or plain false (i.e. Sphere of Combat, Armstrong moments, statements such as "no VR at launch" implies that it's coming later).

Odyssey is a massive update to the world of Elite Dangerous, and David Braben is correct that the team at FDEV should be congratulated towards creating a 1:1 scale of the galaxy that is accurate to the millimeter. It is a feat accomplished by no other game in existence. However, when you add something such as space legs to a game that was already as massive as Elite Dangerous, this accomplishment meets your consumer as a "so what?". Because this was the bare minimum expectation out of space legs, we expected it to function and work in the way that it does.

The content in Odyssey is a bare minimum product; it is a collection of material game loop. The seeming lack of content for a $40 update is why the community demanded, "what is the long term roadmap for Elite Dangerous." The player base has already voiced that the updates they wanted for the game are not what Odyssey delivered, and another gut punch was provided that they weren't even planned at all.

This roadmap was an extremely pivotal point for Fdev to say "Hey, not committing to any dates, but we are looking to do some updates to exobiology, squadrons, fleet Carriers, on foot Thargoids, and Power Play, and these are some of the ideas being thrown around the office, what do you guys think?" Instead, your post is 95% about update 5, which is going to be briefed in detail tomorrow, and we'll all receive the patch. There are great things in update 5, but this was not the post for it.

You must understand the reason that the community is asking for this roadmap is that Odyssey feels feature incomplete from the player's point of view. The long-term roadmap provided is…nothing… "We are actively investigating, reviewing, and remeasuring the further roadmap, but these things take a little time." I've watched and heard you say that great things will be in this dev post in your live streams, but there's no information about what the community asked to see. This post is not what you told the community would be delivered, further eroding the trust in what the community team says is going to be delivered.

On the positive side for the post, the top five issues that the dev team is tracking are good; please keep that coming. Hopefully, whatever update you do to the tracker will allow us to visualize the priority list of bugs the team is going to work on. But again, I can't stress that enough, this list and most of this post is not what the community wanted or needed right now.

 

[Rubbernuke]

@Arthur Tolmie

I'm glad you put some information out.

However, I suspect you are going to now get a lot of flak for going over things people kind of already knew, and not really giving out any "new" information.
This was a highly anticipated information dump - and the future development part amounts to "we're thinking about it" which is not really what the community at large were hoping for I think.

I hope people still appreciate the info that is in there.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Personally? I was hoping for some info on the future of Elite (not the immediate tomorrow future, the what the designers want to do with the game - new gameplay wise)

So I come away quite disappointed.

Here is why:



These are just fixes to broken stuff really. I know Frontier will fix things they broke over time, especially big things.



We already knew about these, and frankly... it's bizarre they weren't in the initial release.



This is a fix for what amounts to a bug



More bug fixes



Something gameplay related again, good however, we already knew about this.



Yes, you want to fix game issues, cool.



Finally! the part I care about!!!!

Once I remove the explanations and fluff there is this.



This, is very very disappointing. This says absolutely nothing. Though, if I was being cynical, I could say that it says a lot, that being, there are literally no plans for anything beyond Odyssey at all within the design team.

That would be tragic.

So, I hope that elucidates you on the way this communication landed for me on a personal level, and I hope I'm not being too harsh or critical - I'm just being very honest about how this communication sat with me.

FD 'remeasured' the roadmap once before, and it resulted in the period of chaos where FD swapped to monolithic updates. And as we know, that worked out 'well'.

 

[William J Smith]

Cockpit lighting fix would be my fav update, but lets see how it pans out.....

Bill

Oh and for the OP.. . please excuse some of the more excitable members of the forum.... they would'nt be happy until the game conformed exactly to their vision... making the rest of us very unhappy

 

[Iron Golem]

I am happy to the extant that all my issues I feel are important have been at least pointed out and acknowledged MINUS wing (Team...) instability especially on planets.

Pointing them out and acknowledging is one thing. Actual improvement is another. Lets keep in mind Odyssey is not being sold as early access / alpha or beta. @David Braben

@Arthur Tolmie It would be nice to see team instability, especially planetary acknowledged and addressed specifically.

Also bring back the CLONK! Of the docking clamp please. Its been replaced with a muted electronic fizzle.

 

[Winterdyne]

Hypothetical question:
If frontier said, we’re running another Kickstarter for ship interiors or weather effects etc insert your dreams here…. Would you fund it to allow them to get more developers onboard and accelerate development.

I know I would. I’d be interested if others would too. I didn’t track the original kick starter so not sure if these things were covered in stretch goals or not.

With Frontier's track record for achievement and commitment to what's promised? Not a chance in hell. As others are saying, nope lesson learned. In the same way as I've spent the money I intend to on Star Citizen.

If they produced ship interiors or Fleet Carrier internal decs and charged ARX for paintjobs / cosmetics / layout alterations for the inside?

I would very likely drop money IF EVERYTHING ELSE WAS WORKING CORRECTLY.

As I just now got ejected out of a concourse and through the station mesh while exiting a mission board/console, this seems a way off to me.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

It's great that you are reaching out to the community.

I have one question. The lighting of Neutron Stars in Odyssey not great. In Horizons there were like point sources (which they should be) but in Odyssey they are massive like stars which makes no sense. Explorers see Neutron Stars all the time. It would greatly enhance the game if this were fixed in Odyssey.
Is this on the timeline ?

The original post has "Visual improvements for neutron stars" which probably means yes, but might just mean that the massive blob is blue rather than white - guess we'll find out tomorrow.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Oh and for the OP.. . please excuse some of the more excitable members of the forum.... they would'nt be happy until the game conformed exactly to their vision... making the rest of us very unhappy

Yes, lets wait for years for Powerplay to be updated, after waiting three years already.

 

[bm01]

This, is very very disappointing. This says absolutely nothing. Though, if I was being cynical, I could say that it says a lot, that being, there are literally no plans for anything beyond Odyssey at all within the design team.

I don't think that's being cynical, to me it's very clear that while they may have ideas for future content, they might not be able to implement them due to a lack of profitability I would guess, and maybe even technical limitations. I mean, why would you need to "investigate, review and remeasure" otherwise?

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

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.

I'm quite lucky I haven't had the performance problems that most have had and I've been enjoying the content provided, however I am worried about the future of the game after the Odyssey Console update. I really think the community needed some reassurance that the game will continue to be developed and evolve after the final ODE release and not be put into maintenance mode like it was before Fleet Carriers or, even worse, sunset.

I'm afraid this update hasn't provided any that reassurance that was needed and has just given a lot of the doomsays on this forum more grist for their mill. I'm all for holding things back like the original thargoid reveal, but I don't think this is the time to do that.

 

[Asharyn]

We were told we would get info on powerplay plans. What happened to that? There's no info in ANY future plans.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

Oh, I know. Its mostly the metallic wraps for ships that seem the most "off" when it comes to the graphics. If it's metallic, it turned weirdly matte or some other weirdo deal. The Azure paintjob is a great example of it, since pretty much everyone got it last year, having gone from a wonderful pearlescent blue-green to... BLUE that sort of looks green on a few edges.

Maybe the changes tomorrow will fix it, but I doubt it. And that means we'll all be having horrible paintjobs to go with all the other issues while we wait for Oddy to get released to Console so FDev might bless the folks currently "Alpha-Testing" Oddy for them.

If you want to have a laugh, go and check out the Fleet Carrier paint jobs and thruster colours. Many of the PJs have changed beyond recognition (one of my red ones is now yellow believe it or not), you don't even need to compare with Horizons just look at the thumbnail image in the livery/shop section. The thruster colours are broken also. And previously matte Midnight Black paints now look like the (significantly cheaper) Tactical Graphite skin.

These all cost a fair bit of money, I don't give a rats arx what other people think is more important, I paid (a lot) for a product and I expect it to be working as advertised.

Exhibit A

 

[Darkmatter]

This, is very very disappointing. This says absolutely nothing. Though, if I was being cynical, I could say that it says a lot, that being, there are literally no plans for anything beyond Odyssey at all within the design team.

Given that FDev is quite busy with other big projects as well, Occam's Razor dictates that this is the most plausible explanation. Well, at least there are no plans they are ready to talk about yet. We will just have to wait. I can wait a little longer.

 

[[Cancelled Consoleer] boppa_]

This new age of communication certainly seems a little light on actual tangible, useful information?

 

[Silver-Wulf]

I seriously have no more to give. Just want to finish getting my Elite combat rank as I never got beyond Deadly in the original. I will then leave this game In the past as it was before this poor excuse for an expansion, DLC or what ever you chose to call it came along. It's pretty clear now that Elite is just a dead end game nothing more. I certainly will never spend a penny again with Frontier Developments a poorly managed and run company. Shame on you for all your misleading comments.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

So what happened to the Powerplay info?

Is it still the office drinks coaster or something?

Face it, they've got way too much on their plate at the moment to even consider PP.

Fixing Odyssey is going to take them months, if not longer.

 

[Supremex3]

That is something that really bothers me. CMDRs can fly on their own ships and meet at site, but it would be so much better just to have a single ship and share the ride.

Funny thing is that Odyssey's first gameplay footage can never be replicated.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrLjC47iwlY


Me and my friends got suckered in to buying the Alpha because of this footage. Never again.

 

[Christopher Roberto]

Could we get a merge of Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Zoo into the ED universe so we'd at least have some developers working on ED?