When I first heard of Elite: Dangerous it was interviews talking about resurrecting one of the oldest space games out there, David Braben telling fantastical stories about flying down on to jungle planets, getting out of your ship to go big game hunting for alien dinosaurs. Interviews with demo tech showing off flying through the upper atmosphere's of gas giants. All sorts of ambitious promises and talk of how it would basically be First Person EVE: Online but much more realistic and with much more support for solo players and even a single player mode for those that just wanted to enjoy things on their own terms.
I also at the same time was hearing a lot about [REDACTED], which made similar lofty promises, but at that point only Elite had an actual playable game, so I got roped in and to be honest I loved it. The sheer amount of complexity and the broad horizons set out in front of me got me hooked immediately. It was shallow, and grindy as hell without much to really do, but hey at least there was promises of constantly adding more, and indeed the announcement of Horizons that year solidified my belief in Elite: Dangerous as a project. I pre-ordered Horizons immediately and landing on a planet for the first time when [REDACTED] barely had a single space station to fly around and I laughed and made fun of [REDACTED] for thinking it ever had a chance at comparing to Elite.
Horizons, however, was my first eye-opener in to how much you really care about this game. But I ignored it because I was invested and wanted it to be my dream game. Bugs galore, horrible performance issues, multicrew preventing a huge portion of players from being able to connect with eachother, terrible lag, but hey. Elite was cool. Elite was ambitious. The Engineers being disgustingly grindy to a degree that can only be described as comical? Surely that will get balanced over time. Frontier cares about this game right?
That was my first introduction to PvP groups who, more than any other community in Elite, are effected the most by the huge amount of balance issues. And I wrote it off, because I didn't do PvP that much. But then I decided I wanted to test myself and see how good of a combat pilot I could be so I joined some discords, watched some streams, and was introduced a much deeper level of ineptitude. The first big reveal was what Smiling Dog Crew called "Operation Spicy Boys" where they showed that literally nothing could stand up to heat beams even after balance passes and bug fixes were claimed to have been made on them. They were an unacceptably over-powered weapon, and Frontier didn't care. So SDC and other PvP groups went on one of the biggest murder sprees the game had scene with these weapons, and only after mass backlash did Frontier finally reel them in. Watching people play competitively and try to connect with eachother also opened by eyes to just how bad the net code is for this alleged MMO. The sheer amount of rubber banding, de-sync, and complete inability for friends to connect and play together was so constant and opressive, but hey. I ignored it. Frontier care about this game right? It will be fixed right? That's what I told myself. And I continued to get invested in Elite. Sure it's buggy, unbalanced, the multiplayer barely functions, and the features are constantly being released in near-unusable states...but hey Frontier cares! Frontier will fix this with time!
And then came more promises and interviews and live streams and all this and that and then nothing. Nothing. No talk of content. No talk of what's to come. Radio silence. Then an announcement comes. Then a feature is dropped after being hyped up. The feature launches and it barely functions. Bugs from Horizons still exist in the game. Nothings fixed. More nothing. Same cycle. Content gets dropped that does next to nothing to improve the game, old bugs are ignored, the fact that some of my friends STILL after Multicrew had been in the game for years could not connect to me, getting support tickets say nothing is wrong and multicrew works just fine it's all on their end somehow, content drops, it's broken, backlash happens, basic fixes, repeat for months and months and months BUT OH WAIT THIS UPDATE the one that made mining more interesting, the one that added more depth to exploration, the one that added more variety to beige planets that had gone un-touched since Horizons launched those updates got me back and made me think Frontier does care, only for more issues to arise, more bugs from years before still being present, more radio silence. Meanwhile [REDACTED] kicked its development in to gear and went full-speed ahead releasing quarterly updates that are substantial and push the game farther and farther along and I finally decided I would give it an honest try, and yeah while it's buggy and has performance issues, they at least don't try to act like their updates are final products. Elite is a finished game. It releases updates that are advertised as being finished and they never, EVER are.
So I drop from Elite and play [REDACTED] a bit and I have a good time and I decide that honestly, I'd like to see both games succeed, I was convinced both games WOULD succeed. Elite for being a much more free-form space sim with a focus on the galaxy rather than the player, and [REDACTED] being a more "SecondLife/ARMA but in Space" approach.
The came the Odyssey announcement. The single most anticipated and wanted set of updates ever. My DREAM update for Elite and so, so many others. Atmospheres, space-legs, FPS combat, the first steps towards that vision Braben had so many years ago, I was HYPED. Everybody I knew was hyped.
Then came the reality check. "No ship interiors, no VR support at launch, super basic atmospheres, a big grind, almost completely separate from the rest of the game." Okay. Well. That's disappointing. But okay one step at a time. The "alpha" is announced and that immediately set off my red-flag-o-meter. Why are you calling it an "alpha", why are we talking about Odyssey launching in a short time span when you claim its still in "alpha"? I preodered on steam to try it out and it barely functioned at all. It was a struggle to log in, the performance was horrendous even on my high end rig, crashes, and all for what amounted to some of the stiffest and most boring FPS combat I had ever experienced. I took a breath and just said "alright that's fine, they claimed this is a much older build and the actual game is much farther along and this is just to get some feedback and a bit of field data." I took advantage of the Steam refund system and intended to buy it after it launched just to make sure. And boy did I not regret that decision.
It launches. And virtually NOTHING from the so-called "alpha" had changed. Sub 30% positive on Steam reviews where everybody is describing the exact same issues: Odyssey was launched in the exact same state it was in, worse for many people, as in the "alpha". People that I've seen defend Elite to death and rail on [REDACTED] as a scam were calling Odyssey "The best Advertisement for [REDACTED] that could possibly exist". And they aren't wrong. [REDACTED] has a funding graph that shows how much they make on a day-to-day basis and they were pretty stagnant up until Odyssey launched on the 19th, where their funding skyrocketed and they made nearly $4 Million dollars over just 3 days off the back of Odyssey's launch as vast numbers of Elite players bail, taking Elite's Steamchart records from the single most people online at any time the day of Odyssey's launch to not even a month later and it's the lowest it's been in over a year and continues to drop.
Everybody is sitting here waiting for answers and what do we get? A corporate non-apology. A roadmap that amounts to "We're going to fix some bugs, make the UI slightly less abhorrent to use, and fix some more bugs." And that's when it hit me. On-foot mechanics? Atmospheres? "Alpha?" Roadmap? Frontier you're just straight up trying to ape [REDACTED] without even the slightest bit of idea of what makes that game palatable despite the "scam" meme and rocky development cycle.
Let me give you a simple example:
Roadmap for Elite: Dangerous Odyssey for this quarter:
While Frontier have been wiping their backsides with Elite for years now, focusing only on what investors seem to care about and big-budget movie license projects, [REDACTED]'s devs have been hard at work pumping out beefy content updates that are the size of Odyssey itself in terms of additional content on a quarterly-basis for years now, they make no pretense about the fact that the game is still in alpha and you shouldnt buy the game if you want a fully polished product any time soon, they communicate with and use actual testing phases for their updates, and they do it all with a slow-but-steady process that ensures all the mechanics are being added in seamlessly rather than Elite with which Frontier have taken to just bolting on content at this point. Seriously, Odyssey may as well not even exist if you don't own it, and Elite: Dangerous may not exist if you're playing Odyssey. Frontier, you looked at [REDACTED], saw how much praise it's currently getting, and decide to fast-track what you should have spent years more developing and introducing properly, and then bolted it on in a way that treats it like a completely different game.
And now you tell us that there will be no further VR development?
And then you tell us you have absolutely no intentions for ship interiors?
Frontier I respected you and rooted for you for years and pumped thousands of hours in to Elite and I have never felt more insulted by a dev studio than I do at this point. Your marketing team put more effort in to making people think Odyssey was going to revolutionize the game than you development team put in to the actual game.
And I want to be clear here: I do not blame the individual devs. You guys are doing your jobs, trying to get paid, trying to make a living and create something for people to enjoy. I respect you guys even more for having to put up with pushing out this content. I blame your management. I blame your executives. I blame every higher up involved with the decisions that lead to the lies, the , the bugs, the rushed and unfinished nature of every aspect of Odyssey EXCEPT THE PREMIUM SHOP THAT MAKES YOU MONEY of course that works just fine doesn't it?
Sure, [REDACTED] won't have a live release until I'm a head in a jar flying in my own FTL capable space ship, but hey, right now at least I can get more than 30FPS on a $2000 gaming PC and at least my friends can connect to and play with me. Elite can only dream of being able to claim that at this point.
Frontier you should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves, you should issue every person that bought Odyssey a refund without removing it from their account, and I hope that whatever you choose to do from now on isn't a clown show of ineptitude and embarrassing screw ups that I can only describe as making No Man's Sky look like it launched smoothly.
But I'm done. With Elite, with you. Maybe if expansive changes are made and we get video footage of Frontier's executives on their hands and knees begging for the forgiveness of their customers and Odyssey becomes a fully-functioning update that were were promised I might consider coming back.
Goodbye Frontier,
I'd say "fly safe" but you'd have to play your own game to do that.
07
I also at the same time was hearing a lot about [REDACTED], which made similar lofty promises, but at that point only Elite had an actual playable game, so I got roped in and to be honest I loved it. The sheer amount of complexity and the broad horizons set out in front of me got me hooked immediately. It was shallow, and grindy as hell without much to really do, but hey at least there was promises of constantly adding more, and indeed the announcement of Horizons that year solidified my belief in Elite: Dangerous as a project. I pre-ordered Horizons immediately and landing on a planet for the first time when [REDACTED] barely had a single space station to fly around and I laughed and made fun of [REDACTED] for thinking it ever had a chance at comparing to Elite.
Horizons, however, was my first eye-opener in to how much you really care about this game. But I ignored it because I was invested and wanted it to be my dream game. Bugs galore, horrible performance issues, multicrew preventing a huge portion of players from being able to connect with eachother, terrible lag, but hey. Elite was cool. Elite was ambitious. The Engineers being disgustingly grindy to a degree that can only be described as comical? Surely that will get balanced over time. Frontier cares about this game right?
That was my first introduction to PvP groups who, more than any other community in Elite, are effected the most by the huge amount of balance issues. And I wrote it off, because I didn't do PvP that much. But then I decided I wanted to test myself and see how good of a combat pilot I could be so I joined some discords, watched some streams, and was introduced a much deeper level of ineptitude. The first big reveal was what Smiling Dog Crew called "Operation Spicy Boys" where they showed that literally nothing could stand up to heat beams even after balance passes and bug fixes were claimed to have been made on them. They were an unacceptably over-powered weapon, and Frontier didn't care. So SDC and other PvP groups went on one of the biggest murder sprees the game had scene with these weapons, and only after mass backlash did Frontier finally reel them in. Watching people play competitively and try to connect with eachother also opened by eyes to just how bad the net code is for this alleged MMO. The sheer amount of rubber banding, de-sync, and complete inability for friends to connect and play together was so constant and opressive, but hey. I ignored it. Frontier care about this game right? It will be fixed right? That's what I told myself. And I continued to get invested in Elite. Sure it's buggy, unbalanced, the multiplayer barely functions, and the features are constantly being released in near-unusable states...but hey Frontier cares! Frontier will fix this with time!
And then came more promises and interviews and live streams and all this and that and then nothing. Nothing. No talk of content. No talk of what's to come. Radio silence. Then an announcement comes. Then a feature is dropped after being hyped up. The feature launches and it barely functions. Bugs from Horizons still exist in the game. Nothings fixed. More nothing. Same cycle. Content gets dropped that does next to nothing to improve the game, old bugs are ignored, the fact that some of my friends STILL after Multicrew had been in the game for years could not connect to me, getting support tickets say nothing is wrong and multicrew works just fine it's all on their end somehow, content drops, it's broken, backlash happens, basic fixes, repeat for months and months and months BUT OH WAIT THIS UPDATE the one that made mining more interesting, the one that added more depth to exploration, the one that added more variety to beige planets that had gone un-touched since Horizons launched those updates got me back and made me think Frontier does care, only for more issues to arise, more bugs from years before still being present, more radio silence. Meanwhile [REDACTED] kicked its development in to gear and went full-speed ahead releasing quarterly updates that are substantial and push the game farther and farther along and I finally decided I would give it an honest try, and yeah while it's buggy and has performance issues, they at least don't try to act like their updates are final products. Elite is a finished game. It releases updates that are advertised as being finished and they never, EVER are.
So I drop from Elite and play [REDACTED] a bit and I have a good time and I decide that honestly, I'd like to see both games succeed, I was convinced both games WOULD succeed. Elite for being a much more free-form space sim with a focus on the galaxy rather than the player, and [REDACTED] being a more "SecondLife/ARMA but in Space" approach.
The came the Odyssey announcement. The single most anticipated and wanted set of updates ever. My DREAM update for Elite and so, so many others. Atmospheres, space-legs, FPS combat, the first steps towards that vision Braben had so many years ago, I was HYPED. Everybody I knew was hyped.
Then came the reality check. "No ship interiors, no VR support at launch, super basic atmospheres, a big grind, almost completely separate from the rest of the game." Okay. Well. That's disappointing. But okay one step at a time. The "alpha" is announced and that immediately set off my red-flag-o-meter. Why are you calling it an "alpha", why are we talking about Odyssey launching in a short time span when you claim its still in "alpha"? I preodered on steam to try it out and it barely functioned at all. It was a struggle to log in, the performance was horrendous even on my high end rig, crashes, and all for what amounted to some of the stiffest and most boring FPS combat I had ever experienced. I took a breath and just said "alright that's fine, they claimed this is a much older build and the actual game is much farther along and this is just to get some feedback and a bit of field data." I took advantage of the Steam refund system and intended to buy it after it launched just to make sure. And boy did I not regret that decision.
It launches. And virtually NOTHING from the so-called "alpha" had changed. Sub 30% positive on Steam reviews where everybody is describing the exact same issues: Odyssey was launched in the exact same state it was in, worse for many people, as in the "alpha". People that I've seen defend Elite to death and rail on [REDACTED] as a scam were calling Odyssey "The best Advertisement for [REDACTED] that could possibly exist". And they aren't wrong. [REDACTED] has a funding graph that shows how much they make on a day-to-day basis and they were pretty stagnant up until Odyssey launched on the 19th, where their funding skyrocketed and they made nearly $4 Million dollars over just 3 days off the back of Odyssey's launch as vast numbers of Elite players bail, taking Elite's Steamchart records from the single most people online at any time the day of Odyssey's launch to not even a month later and it's the lowest it's been in over a year and continues to drop.
Everybody is sitting here waiting for answers and what do we get? A corporate non-apology. A roadmap that amounts to "We're going to fix some bugs, make the UI slightly less abhorrent to use, and fix some more bugs." And that's when it hit me. On-foot mechanics? Atmospheres? "Alpha?" Roadmap? Frontier you're just straight up trying to ape [REDACTED] without even the slightest bit of idea of what makes that game palatable despite the "scam" meme and rocky development cycle.
Let me give you a simple example:
Roadmap for Elite: Dangerous Odyssey for this quarter:
- Update 3 – Thursday 10th June
- Many improvements and fixes, including
- Loadout UI flow changes
- Adding earned ARX for on-foot gameplay
- Update 4 – Thursday 17th June
- Many improvements and fixes, including
- Suit Livery UI flow changes
- Codex CMDR stats
- Update 5 – Thursday 24th June
- Many improvements and fixes, including
- Shared missions
- Galaxy & system map UI updates
- Outfitting UI update
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
- [REDACTED]
While Frontier have been wiping their backsides with Elite for years now, focusing only on what investors seem to care about and big-budget movie license projects, [REDACTED]'s devs have been hard at work pumping out beefy content updates that are the size of Odyssey itself in terms of additional content on a quarterly-basis for years now, they make no pretense about the fact that the game is still in alpha and you shouldnt buy the game if you want a fully polished product any time soon, they communicate with and use actual testing phases for their updates, and they do it all with a slow-but-steady process that ensures all the mechanics are being added in seamlessly rather than Elite with which Frontier have taken to just bolting on content at this point. Seriously, Odyssey may as well not even exist if you don't own it, and Elite: Dangerous may not exist if you're playing Odyssey. Frontier, you looked at [REDACTED], saw how much praise it's currently getting, and decide to fast-track what you should have spent years more developing and introducing properly, and then bolted it on in a way that treats it like a completely different game.
And now you tell us that there will be no further VR development?
And then you tell us you have absolutely no intentions for ship interiors?
Frontier I respected you and rooted for you for years and pumped thousands of hours in to Elite and I have never felt more insulted by a dev studio than I do at this point. Your marketing team put more effort in to making people think Odyssey was going to revolutionize the game than you development team put in to the actual game.
And I want to be clear here: I do not blame the individual devs. You guys are doing your jobs, trying to get paid, trying to make a living and create something for people to enjoy. I respect you guys even more for having to put up with pushing out this content. I blame your management. I blame your executives. I blame every higher up involved with the decisions that lead to the lies, the , the bugs, the rushed and unfinished nature of every aspect of Odyssey EXCEPT THE PREMIUM SHOP THAT MAKES YOU MONEY of course that works just fine doesn't it?
Sure, [REDACTED] won't have a live release until I'm a head in a jar flying in my own FTL capable space ship, but hey, right now at least I can get more than 30FPS on a $2000 gaming PC and at least my friends can connect to and play with me. Elite can only dream of being able to claim that at this point.
Frontier you should be absolutely ashamed of yourselves, you should issue every person that bought Odyssey a refund without removing it from their account, and I hope that whatever you choose to do from now on isn't a clown show of ineptitude and embarrassing screw ups that I can only describe as making No Man's Sky look like it launched smoothly.
But I'm done. With Elite, with you. Maybe if expansive changes are made and we get video footage of Frontier's executives on their hands and knees begging for the forgiveness of their customers and Odyssey becomes a fully-functioning update that were were promised I might consider coming back.
Goodbye Frontier,
I'd say "fly safe" but you'd have to play your own game to do that.
07
Wonder why?
