ANNOUNCEMENT Elite Dangerous | Odyssey: Roadmap

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Ian Phillips

Volunteer Moderator
Ian Phillips

Development Update 1 - June

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...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

CMDR Davanix

CMDR Davanix
Now hers something to think about, we have seen that all their future updates revolve around issues with their new dlc and they have no future plans around that as of yet, now let me ask if Odyssey went smoothly would that mean that nothing was coming after it until a much later date?

It would be either two options.

1. They knew Odyssey was going to release in a mess and are using it as a way to take longer with future content, thus releasing full price finished dlc at Beta lvl production standards.

On this point their "Great plans going forward after it releases" was nothing more than updates and fixes to prolong the life of so far content and playability (What we have now until console release) with no future being shown just yet (After telling the community a road map of content was coming)

2. They didn't know Odyssey was going to be such a mess (Their claim) yet if this is the case then had no plans for future content/updates thus also bad as they where lying about "Great plans going forward after it releases"

On the point of number two, if they had no idea about the release going to be so bad then why are they then saying no further update on the future as if it went well they would have had stuff they could be showing us now only with an extended release period that they wouldn't need to date, Adleast we would see what's coming when everything in the mess is fixed. (No road map at all about what could have happened after release and is now postponned)

Only these two options are relevant while showing either way Fdev have lied or are being deceitful to their player base regarding future content or have no idea what they are doing but avoid telling us that with vague answers.

Also please note I exempt CM's in this as they do a fine job but are just left in the dark nearly as much as us.
 

StuartGT

StuartGT

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey Update 5

Greetings Commanders! As of approximately 07:00 UTC / 08:00 BST this morning, we have deployed 'Update 5' for Elite Dangerous: Odyssey to address a number of issues and implement some quality of life improvements to the Galaxy. The update will be available once the servers are back online for...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

Funker Voigt

F
Cmdr_Flintlocke said:
Blue cobra, Blue cobra, Taupe cobra - then all my missions are gone and a 500k credit fine for dropping the delivery. Sigh.
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As I still find a lot of adders in the stations, preventing me from further alpha-/beta-testing: Did they fix the problem, that you can't pay the fines in the systems of the specific factions?
 

Hydrino

Hydrino
VR StarLightPL said:
I kinda want them to so I can show them a big fat middle finger and ridicule this idea all over social media. No to that! No to axing features and paying for getting them back (build from the ground up for VR, yeah right)!

They are a publicly traded company, not some indie Hello Games who needed to cling to their IP for dear life, and they sure as hell don't need another round of funding. Their financials are open, they are very successful in the field of publishing. You would like that some of that juice trickled down to the game that actually made them and got Braben his OBE? "LOL NO" is their answer. I don't see EA needing to beg and crowdsource to release new IP, neither does a 600-man strong FDev. If they want to make a product that I should buy, they have to invest their own money. It's called investment precisely because of that.

One more thing. The wallets of the space nerds are huge. When I hear some people here spent four figures / an equivalent of a VR headset on cosmetics it frankly terrifies me (I would consider it extreme waste of money myself). That said, if they really delivered and wanted 111€ for the DLC - I would pay. Same as I said that if Scam Citizen ever releases (alongside earth-likes in Elite Dangerous haha :>) then I will buy it for 111€ too. I would even consider a subscription if the game Braben pitched at kickstarter would come to life. And look how many years scam citizen was able to parasite off its users selling pretend-spaceships in a demo level of an universe. This shows that there is huge earning potential, and the "niche spacefans" group is not so niche, or it's highly underestimated.

Frontier doesn't need money. They need leadership who shares the kickstarter's vision. I don't think they have that anymore after 2017.
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I think we are broadly in agreement.

I didn't mean by a new Kickstarter or plea for money. If FD did things more like in the Kickstarter and laid out in broad strokes where they are headed in certain time-blocks, and had focused feedback threads on major new mechanics and re-writes, I think players would fund it tremendously by purchasing Arx and paid DLC as well, etc. [edit for clarity] as in how EA and every other company gets cash to fund continuing operations. Yes FD have money in the bank and they use it to fund growth and also development of existing franchises. I have no problem with cosmetics being a cash-shop item because they have zero effect on the game. The alternative is that FD has to gamble doing things the way they did the last 2.5 years. Not communicating a vision could mean all future sales and Arx purchases decrease dramatically. And if there is still a grander vision for the game then that isn't something I want to see happen (massive drop in sales). **Whether the broader market of casual gamers cares or not is another question altogether. < and that is something certainly not lost on business executives who don't see value in reading every word of 5,000 salty posts from disgruntled customers.

Arthur is trying to help by giving black-and-white solid answers, but the time-horizon dealt with so far is very short term. Arthur confirmed on the stream today they are still working on sharing a longer-term view (how long and visionary no-one but FD knows), as he previously said they would. I can understand FDev want to get the next communication right, as Arthur has said. But I also think it's silly that some more broadly re-assuring statements can NOT be made in under 6 weeks. Indeed it is surprising that FDev never got the hint that they needed to drop them every 6 months or so if they cared about the core fanbase fanning the sales and hype flames.

If FD does not have a longer-term vision than the Odyssey season, no R&D teams on procedural life and Earthlikes, Gas giants, zero-g EVA and the like, then it has been incredibly mis-managed and dishonestly portrayed in the past. Indeed, we could be looking at a "current season/DLC features only" roadmap concept, with no mentions of anything past that due to FD reasons. If so, that would shed a bit more light on how Horizons was run and how Odyssey seems to have come about. But it would also be massively disappointing. See comment above on whether less devoted gamer market would care even one iota and thus it might not really worry management.

In any event, I'm intrigued to see the "longer term-ish" update to come, and ongoing increased communication, and a nice break from work in a few weeks for summer holiday. Cheers and o7.
 

Hydrino

Hydrino
Ian Doncaster said:
I think slightly later in that video is actually a good example of the problems with believing their early design conversations before they knew anything about MMO writing - and why I'd actually be happier if they just owned up and said "yes, with hindsight that was never going to work, sorry"



And sure, let's think about where that all ends. We want to be able to sneak onto other player's ships while they're loading cargo (and then, according to elsewhere in the video, steal the ship)

So that means that cargo loading has to take a non-trivial amount of time, so that another player has time to notice you doing it, head over to your bay (you must now enter the hangar to load/unload cargo), stealth around, wait for the right moment, and sneak in. A painfully slow transfer rate for a T-9 pilot of 1t/second - over 10 minutes for a full turnaround, even if loading and unloading are simultaneous - would still make it near impossible to do this on anything much smaller than a cargo-fit Python. (Not that it would have to be the same rate for each ship, of course, but still, even three minutes sat on the pad for each cargo transfer would be painful! Especially at outposts...)

And it probably needs to be something you can't avoid happening to you by just logging into Odyssey or you end up with a situation where people wanting to sneak on board ships play the Elite Dangerous Espionage client and people who don't want their ships sneaked onboard play Odyssey, so no-one actually gets to board anyone else's ship.

And then once you've got on board, then what? Do you arc-cut your way onto the bridge, blast the CMDR with your rifle before they manage to switch to "walking" mode and get their shields up, and steal the ship. Brilliant way of buying and selling engineered modules from other players, I guess. Where does the other CMDR respawn? Does it count as a ship rebuy for them? What if the other CMDR suspects you're on board and logs off a couple of minutes after launch while you're still sneaking through the air vents?

These aren't unanswerable questions ... but the answers would involve a lot of rewriting of existing long-standing gameplay decisions (cargo loading is instant, insurance rebuys exist, your ship doesn't persist if you log out with another player around) ... and most current players are probably quite happy with those decisions being as they are, and wouldn't like them changed for an expansion they aren't even buying.
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Things change and have to be detailed. But there are a lot of assumptions here that don't necessarily need to exist and are used to assert a bias as fact instead of taking 10 seconds to think about how things could be implemented.

Like "sneak onto other player's ships while they're loading cargo" causing issues for implementation. If we could potentially board a ship at any time or any time when docked, then maybe cargo loading would still be basically instant or always take the same time no matter how much cargo is loaded. The assertion that it would take 10 minutes and increase timer watching is not inevitable. Or maybe "while loading cargo" means while the player is fiddling around buying goods on the UI and so while the ship is parked and nothing more.

There are many issues and concerns once you leave dream-crafting and start doing design docs and even more when the coding starts. It doesn't mean every idea is untenable or unachievable in some form. Nor does it mean FD doesn't still target some or all of the big-ticket items DB took time to specifically mention. The question for me is more, will FD update us on that or not?
 
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