The main areas of Pain™ for me are:
Wildly (and I mean wild) fps inconsistencies. I can start in a station and have 45 fps with low settings, go to my ship where the fps dips to 25 fps, go back up to the foyer and fps dips to 25fps (loading assets I assume).
Space is about 10 -20 fps lower than Horizons (but stable).
The biggest issue is FPS foot combat, or any surface base FP because then the fps dives to 10fps and is unplayable.
Horizons is really well optimised- I can @2560 x 1080p @0.75 scaling get 45 fps minimum (stations drop to 30fps on entry and pop back) at medium / low.
FD have a lot of work, and if I'm being honest I can't see this being 'fixed' soon to Horizons levels. My guess is base consoles won't see anything until well into next year, if at all...and that FD will hold a crunch meeting at around late October / November to see if the progress outweighs the expense continuing on.
Same for me (albeit on a higher level in terms of raw fps numbers), even though I'm well above the recommended specs. Given that fiddling with the graphics settings beyond resolution and FSR (yuck) doesn't really make much of a difference at all (given it's unoptimised still no surprises there) I'm leaving those on Ultra, but instead locked my framerate to 45 to get a more consistent feel to the game.
Not only does this make the game more 'choppy' for me due to me using TrackIR (which runs at 120hz iirc so only 60fps would really be smooth... but I'm willing to make
some sacrifices),
the game can't even hit that 25% reduced limit either, be that at settlements, concourses or even flying through the mailslot/any transition between SC and normal space.
But that's not all unfortunately. Odyssey is riddled with visual glitches, lighting issues and texture problems in so many areas it's honestly difficult to play the game for 5 minutes and not come across at least a couple during that time, and I'm not even talking about Odyssey gameplay but Horizons stuff.
For example, I'm currently building up credits so for that Odyssey content is useless (terrible payouts, will they be addressed at some stage? God knows). Instead, I do some hauling runs and mining i.e. while I play Odyssey I solely engage in Horizons activities only -- which in itself is a rather peculiar situation given it's supposed to be the new and shiny content that's supposed to keep me entertained, a mere 3 months post-release.
The jankiness when dropping into a station instance, the glitchy LoD transitions of lights and station interior, the frame drops (even at 45 locked!), the out-of-whack dynamic lighting in cockpit and outside (sometimes the screen goes darker/brighter depending on where I point the ship, even though I'm not moving it by more than 10 degrees), the flickering of the volumetric fog in the asteroid belt, the jaggies everywhere - much worse than in Horizons - textures not loading until a minute or so of booting up the game every single time, the weird flashing of red/blue at random moments in the cockpit, the game still being too dark in some places, and too bright in others, shadows developing a life of their own (noticed this really badly while mining yesterday, it looks like we're back in Alpha), holding a button will still trigger the toggle option (for example, hold Y and dpad up activates the on-foot vanity cam for me, but Y is also assigned to draw weapon - so when I want to take a selfie in a settlement I get into trouble with security as the game draws my gun as well; the same happens with the SRV with double assigned buttons - when I deploy the cargo scoop it now also pulls the handbrake).
I could go on but it'll be much more of a rambling wall of text than it already is. In short, the game isn't exactly a pleasure to look at, unlike Horizons,
and all that while it performs worse than that.
TL;DR - yes, there is a
lot of work to do indeed, and it's not just performance but visual fidelity, and bugs of course - I can't see them sorting all these out in the next year never mind by end of this one; megaship looting got fixed after almost two years only, and that was a simple collision detection/hitbox issue.
