I don't know, but I am under the impression, Odyssey was abandoned by players first (for understandable reasons I guess). As a developer you can't put money and work into something, that is not used much. I get why Frontier is focusing on other parts of the game, to be honest, and I also like it.
Oddyssey Abandoned In Favor of Colonisation
- Thread starter ozrix84
- Start date
Riiight. That's why they rebooted Powerplay.
Riiight. That's why they rebooted Powerplay.
Next up, CQC!
An easy fix would be to make on foot mission money rewards A LOT higher. Right now if you spend a couple of hours doing random space missions, not specific grinding but just enjoying the game, you make a few millions. If you do the same with on foot missions, you make hundreds of thousands, about 10 times less than space stuff.
For most players, on foot materials only matter until they engineer the gear they want. If they stay in one region of the bubble they max reputation very fast, so rep rewards are not important. Same if they move around a lot.
So your only reason left to do Odyssey missions is if you enjoy them. Which gets repetitive fast, is nowhere close to the depth of the space game, and - here is the fail part - is not really connected to the space game.
Providing more integration between the two game modes, space and on foot, is what's needed for Odyssey. And I think it could be achieved by just meddling with numbers, menus and options, so it could be doable.
For most players, on foot materials only matter until they engineer the gear they want. If they stay in one region of the bubble they max reputation very fast, so rep rewards are not important. Same if they move around a lot.
So your only reason left to do Odyssey missions is if you enjoy them. Which gets repetitive fast, is nowhere close to the depth of the space game, and - here is the fail part - is not really connected to the space game.
Providing more integration between the two game modes, space and on foot, is what's needed for Odyssey. And I think it could be achieved by just meddling with numbers, menus and options, so it could be doable.
True, they still would have complained. But it likely would have been complaints after a successful launch which completely changes the narrative dynamic.
It certainly wouldn't have done worse than the initial Odyssey launch and probably would have been a more stable implementation as well.
My 2p on Colonisation...
It appears that it will be a case of "pick a faction that is selling space then build", meaning that, if the piece of space one is interested in doesn't have a suitable faction to buy from, "go elsewhere, mate, sorry..." and, when the system is created, it is intended to integrate into BGS / PP, so other factions can be expanded into the system, kiss goodbye to another anarchy...
So, a lot of work establishing a system as "Architect", just so that it can become part of the PP empires? No thanks, I'll pass. (and being limited to the bubble initially, even less reason to bother)
I suspect the VR playerbase is considerably smaller than the VR players imagine.
Despite the efforts of Meta (Oculus) in making HMDs that are cheap and of reasonable quality (my Q3 is surprisingly good for ED) to play PC games in VR does require a reasonably powerful PC, and there are still folk here complaining that EDO is poorly optimised - yet I can now play it on an AMD 8700G integrated graphics (in 1080 with most settings tweaked) which is a big difference to a 2080 Super running at 9 fps on surfaces! - so unlikely they would have the power to run VR satisfactorily...
Legacy ED in VR is pretty undemanding on hardware, Live / Odyssey does need more wellie to run well...
Yes, I play EDO in VR and can live with the flat screen view on foot, and yes, my PC is reasonable... but, as mentioned, I think I am part of a tiny minority of ED/O players. It would be interesting to know the numbers though, probably...
What makes me so cynical and mildly irritated about it is that it won't make any difference, because almost 4 years on these little adjustments not only aren't in the game already because they are part of Frontier's vision for the game, but even suggesting them here with the required detail has no effect. Which is why I think the Suggestions forum is surplus to requirements really.
So from that angle I can understand and have sympathies for the OP because I know exactly what they mean. Alas, here we are shouting into the void.
The community is a credit to the game but Frontier relies on it way too much. I sometimes wonder if things would be different if the community wouldn't develop free solutions so Frontier can keep their feet up.
This is the exact point I was making about the difference between the "will buy anything" loyal community, and the much larger number of "people who play Elite Dangerous a bit" - and it's that much larger group who put in most of the game's ongoing revenue.
The "will buy anything" community did indeed get really hyped up on the original announcement. Most PC players active enough to post on the forum will own it, and probably make some use of it, and likely enjoy it too. The lesson here is that the "loyal community" isn't large enough, on its own, to make a major expansion a financial success.
Certainly it released before it was ready.
The question then is: how long should they have held it back for?
- it was already running about six months behind the original plan when it did release (it was supposed to be a Christmas 2020 release)
- the most severe performance and functional bugs weren't fixed until the end of 2021
- the less severe performance issues were never fixed and some were probably unfixable, so it would never have released on consoles regardless
- even after those issues were fixed, it struggled to get much more than a "maybe" when people asked "should I buy it?"
It took them three years to get it to its release state. That cost a substantial amount of money (they've never said exactly how much, but combining information from various financial releases suggests around £15 million). So if they'd spent another year after that getting it right, it would have cost about £20 million.
Would another year of work on Odyssey (so it released on PC in roughly the state it did after Update 12) have tripled its sales so it could then break even? (Remember, even in this hypothetical, David Braben still has to personally apologise to the console players)
Would the hype around it have continued despite another year with no release, the general boost to computer games from the pandemic unwinding as people were able to leave the house again, and it then having been two years since the last significant ED expansion?
The "big mistake" was unfortunately made back in about 2018, when they decided that "space legs plus tenuous atmospheres" was a reasonable scope for an expansion that they could develop in ~2.5 years and sell at full price to the majority of semi-active players. They were wrong then on timescale, on price point, on market size, on ability to sell to consoles at all. After that - with the benefit of hindsight - all they could do is choose exactly which mode of disaster they wanted it to be.
(Did they pick the optimal one? Probably not. Did it really matter by early 2021 exactly which they picked? Probably not.)
You can derive a fair bit from things like squadron and powerplay leaderboards, station traffic reports, third-party tool use, and so on. There's a lot of information directly or indirectly shown in-game about player activity levels. It's pretty easy to tell from those that "spaceship content" gets much bigger and more sustained spikes in player activity than "foot content" does.
But I think the main evidence is more about what Frontier has done recently to make Odyssey a more attractive purchase to the people who didn't already have it:
- cut the base price to £10 from £30
- made it the way to get four new spaceships
- introduced one novel piece of on-foot content in the last two years (Thargoid Spires)
- had exactly one CG which required Odyssey (they used to have Horizons-exclusive CGs quite regularly, with the first one just a couple of weeks after it released)
Is that the sort of thing that Frontier would do if - post-fixes - Odyssey was selling well as an expansion and their internal metrics showed lots of players were spending lots of time on-foot?
I quite like a lot of the on-foot content; I think it fits nicely into the Powerplay rewrite, exobio is a good addition to exploration to bring a lot of formerly boring ice balls and rocky moons to being more interesting, the ground CZs make a nice "quick action" break from the more thinky bits of the game, the NPC responses to player actions are a bit more coherent, it isn't embarrassed to have implemented illegal actions. I still don't spend that much time doing any of it, compared with the spaceship-flying content.
I think this is simply the wrong demographic for making FPS a major part of the gameplay. People who love dogfights with WW2 biplanes or 33rd century spaceships don't necessarily want personal combat on foot. And we have more traders and explorers here than (space) dog fighters.
FD just misread their market. Badly.
Odyssey is just as much about new worlds to explore and things to find as it was about on-foot content. And while I find it frustrating not being able to have adventures in stations and planetary ports, I get why Frontier chose to introduce settlements: it provides the most bang for their development buck.
Settlements provide the perfect testbed for general onfoot gameplay, are a less complex environment game mechanics wise, and are easier environment to implement than either ship interiors or station interiors.
And you can be assured that many many people would complain just as loudly about not being allowed to disembark on worlds they discovered as they do about not having ship interiors. While I may complain about station docking bays as not being a gateway to adventure in stations and planetary ports, what I find most frustrating is that Horizons assets aren’t brought up to Odyssey’s standards, and there is no new onfoot Guardian-related gameplay, nor is there any exclusively stuff for Thargoid, beyond invaded settlements. I had an exploration journey planned expecting just that.
Hopefully, that kind of thing is still in the future. Until then, I have PowerPlay 2.0 to keep me occupied.
I am indifferent to Colonization, though.
Yeah, the other thing is how much of the original announcement resembles the hype wagon, take colonisation now, the hype has been....almost hyperbolic, there are still people insisting colonisation is in fact base building even though there has not even been a hint of that in anything so far announced. As far as Odyssey was concerned, simply being bale to walk on atmospheric planets would have been enough to get me in to buy it, but then I am easily pleased!
They introduced new, and in my opinion good, gameplay in providing on-foot content. Yeah, sad that 'explorers' didn't get something splendid from it, or traders were not smart enough to see the opportunities that settlements present for lucrative, but small quantity, trading... Instead, many folk looked at it as being a 'FPS' addition and walked away...
'Explorers' will never have their desires for new and exciting content sated as, no matter what FD introduce, it isn't what they wanted, just the same as 'elite feet', while clamoured for over the years wasn't Odyssey content...
As for Traders, goodness knows, from the forum they don't like the risk of being blown up by NPCs or players as they fly their shieldless and unarmoured ships, squeezing every last ton of cargo space out from them, and sit watching big numbers get even bigger...
Nothing FD can do to this game will be generally well received by at least one 'profession' because the game doesn't get tailored for each individual.
But, as ever, gamers will be gamers, and whatever is added to any game over the years will be not enough, or wrong, or exactly the wrong shade of greenish-pink...
And, as always, gamers will complain about game features they are not interested in, or even an entire game, just because they can.
There are plenty of things in EDO to interest me, and some features I have zero intererest in (PP in any incarnation, BGS, being an "Explorer" (I'm a vagrant that has travelled well over a million LY, but never been arrogant enough to give me the title...) or Legal trading..., I'm not even vaguely interested in the upcoming Colonisation feature (PP & BGS in a pretty wrapper), but there is still sufficient content in EDO to make my playinng entertaining. When the entertainment stops, so will my play, something some players find difficult to deduce for themselves... (not a snipe at you, @Tifu !)
Exploration with combat would have been nice, but we don't even have plants that try and eat you let alone mobile hostiles, that would have been a big win for the exploration crowd, a big fail that in my opinion, maybe next time!
Yeah that bit is very true, and why should we be satisfied with anything less than dinosaur hunting in hothouse jungles, but I think explorers understand more how difficult that is on a planetary scale, at least this one does.
I doubt that. What caused Odyssey to fail wasn’t the content. It was Frontier’s management, who still treat player testing as a marketing scheme, as opposed to the valuable step in the development process it is. A decent player testing program would’ve identified those game-breaking issues long before the general public got ahold of it. A company’s QA department simply can’t compete with the sheer madness of player’s machines out in the wild.
<<< Still remembers how well Odyssey ran on launch, thanks to my computer being nearly identical to David “Odyssey ran fine on my computer!” Braben’s.
In the politest possible language, you have always appeared to have a lot of common sense regarding the game, something I wish was more common...
ED is the strangest game, I know I've never played a single game for so many years, and thousands of hours!
Yeah it's curious isn't it, I am still playing LOTRO after ten years and ED after ten years, but I have no desire to play other games anywhere near that length of time. Tried BDO for a while as a replacement for LOTRO, it was nice, very pretty with much more advanced tech than LOTRO, but didn't scratch that itch. Some games do, ED has a community of players who have been here since the Beta days, that's saying something about the game, not sure what but it does!
It wasn't very good on my PC, which, at the time, was much more powerful than DB's...
I recently built a Mini ITX PC around an AMD 8700G, it does run EDO in 1080 on the integrated graphics, at 30 FPS and with many features turned down, something that would have been very unlikely at launch!