Greetings Commanders.
With the release of Update 5 on 1st July plus a few smaller server updates since, and Update 6 currently in development, I wanted to take a moment of your time to talk about the next steps for Elite Dangerous.
We are aware and fully accept the frustration that many of our players have had with their experience of Elite Dangerous Odyssey. The community have spoken, we have heard the feedback clearly and we will act on that feedback.
As you may remember in our recent development article, the significant amount of updates and development effort that has been done to fix and improve issues since the launch of Odyssey has meant work on our console release has not progressed as quickly as we had hoped. What’s more, we can see that the strides we have made through the last five major updates are positive, but we must continue on with this progress to give the experience that you and we expect on PC.
With those things in mind, we have spent a lot of time discussing and re-evaluating our previous plans and we have made the decision to prioritise the core PC experience for Elite Dangerous. Ultimately, we believe it is right to focus our efforts on the core Elite Dangerous Odyssey experience for the platforms that we have released on, before opening up to more. We know that the work that we do to improve players’ experiences of Elite Dangerous Odyssey on PC will benefit other platforms in the future, but the dates and details of the console platforms are going to change. We do not want to rush into confirming any dates or changes this has on our console release, as we must remain fully focused on the core Elite experience. Only when we feel that the foundation of the PC release is solid, will we be able to re-lay our console roadmap on top.
Elite Dangerous Odyssey is an important step on a complicated journey, and we must get this right, before we can consider moving on to these new platforms.
So what does this actually mean for Elite Dangerous and Elite Dangerous Odyssey?
It means that we will see more game updates over the coming months. We will continue to work through Issue Tracker, fix bugs and improve performance, but we will also be able to explore and add additional features, content and improvements into the game.
We will continue to give open monthly development updates where we discuss WIP content, challenges, the issue tracker and more. We know that the previous levels of detail for the roadmap and developer update have not met expectations, but we are grateful for your patience while we shift and adjust plans, in the face of such clear feedback.
Please remember that our team here at Frontier are working hard to support the game and our community. Behind every bug fix, design decision and community post is a person who cares a lot about giving our players best possible experience. I would ask that everyone remains calm and respectful when sharing their thoughts and feedback.
We all have the same goal and we will get there, together. Please bear with us.
o7 Commanders.
Ive about had enough with Fdev, we have been saying for years that you guys need to focus on Core Game Play, Instancing #1 making a Multiplayer game Smooth and accesible for players, communities and large groups to enjoy a single cooperative experience.
Yet time and time again you move away from what the Community wants, asks for and out right begs of you to do! You have this mentalitiy of its your Game and Not Ours as a whole not just the players but everyones which is utterly dumbfounding as you dont even play the game neither do any of your employees that much is painfully clear in any live stream. All the while you continue to move away from the direction of Fun and move into this ever increasing Grind Heavy experience that new players see as momumental and even older players see as daunting at best. You have end game content "Thargoids" locked behind not only a Time Gated wall but also a resource and money. Yet you continue to remove methods and ways players find and you have put in to increase profit making!? For What? If your trying to kill this game please by all means keep it up; I for one think you all have forgot your core mission statement here and Im at my end having stuck by you and supported you for the last 6+ Years.
You want to fix Elite? Then start listening to players like my self that have been around the longest, that have played the game, that know the insides and outs of it because honestly you dont. I was going to finish this and mail this letter to you personally but im basically done with Elite you have nerfed everything I found fun into the dirt! you even removed the ability to ReLog inside an outpost to reloot your just loosing touch with the community folks.
How do you fix Elite Dangerous:
#1: Fix instancing, Elite is a multiplayer game. You should be able to play with your friends Easily without issues, disconnects, Drops, Rubber Banding or Dsync.
#2: Fix Teams or Wings or What Ever you want to call it. ED Is A MultiPlayer Game. Fix Wings so when One Player Leaves or Drops from Wing it Doesn't Drop Everyone Else!!!
#3: Fix MultiCrew!!! ELITE DANGEROUS IS A MULITPLAYER GAME!!! Why can't We MultiCrew While In A Wing/Team!?
You fix the first three things on this list I can Gaurentee You and bet you 100,000$ USD the community will rally behind you!
#4: Fix This Horrible UI, Everything about the UI is broken. Go to ShipYard, In that Menu Alone is a side panel to the Right that should Allow You Right There to select Your Ship or Call it to your Location. Then Goto Manage This is where You should be able to see IN DEPTH DETAILS about your Ship, Its Loadout, Equipment, Engineering and Experimentals. Currently This Space Is Wasted by only giving you info about its base stats the kind of information you only really care about when your first buying the ship.
#5: The LoadOut UI, Storage UI and OutFitting UI. Is Borked! If you currently goto ShipLoadout You are unable to select and Equip stored modules Yet it shows you how many you have! Now if you goto Stored Modules, you can go through this 8 Click Loop Plus an Additional 3 Clicks because after you Equip a "Stored Module" it puts you Into the "Ship Loadout UI" and doesn't Default Back to the "Stored Module UI" This adds more Clicks and Only serves to confuse and frustrate players.
#5a: Remove "Stored Module UI" and Add the Stored Modules to the "Ship Loadout UI" Selection Screen. This will make the whole UI Flow Considerably better.
#5b: Or Make the "Stored Module UI" Default back to its self, Removing those Extra 3 Clicks, preventing someone from having to Back out of Loadout just to Go Back Into Stored. Literally just go play the game and try to equip multiple Stored Items If you are Confused on this in the Slightest.
#6: Fix Culling, Graphical Improvements, Render Times. Most players FOV is 90ish degrees. A cone infront of them. You can Cull things not in the Immediate Line of Sight and out of 180degrees. This frees up processing time as long as the textured surfaces are rendered (WireFramed) and the bumpmap is present you can then apply a low res Bitmap (Texture) to the surface within a SlideBar Distance Value. Currently you have LOD set higher further out and its costing process time. This shows most notably when approaching a lift tube at a station and the bitmap isn't loaded inside the tube. But the entire dock Space even that which is not viewable by camera is fully rendered.
#7: Stop injecting Needless Grind. Grind is not what makes players keep playing. Fun, Indepth, Story Driven, Narrative focused and Engaging Content is What makes players keep playing. Give your VFX Guy and Artist Something to do. They hands down did a great job on the Guardian Machines (The Orb and the Fighter Monolith) but at no point is there anything else that is that spectacular in the entire game!
#8: Balance Ground Weapon Damage vs Ship's and SRV's. I dont know if someone doesn't know how Rock Paper Scissors works or someone just didn't put any thought into this. Ground Weapons should not posses the Power required to drop a 40MW (40,000,000-Watts), 80MJ (80,000,000-Joules) Shield let alone anything stronger. It shouldn't even be a threat. Ground weapons shouldn't be on the same metric as Ship Based Weapons at all. They shouldn't even be on the Same Metric as SRV based weapons.
#: The NPC AI shouldn't be walking into your Shield Bubble Grenade Field. I dont know how to possibly stress this enough. A Shield Grenade is like your get out of jail free card. Its your oh s***t button. Your shields are off your health is almost gone and you have 3-8+ Guys trying to kill you they shouldn't be walking into Melee Range.
#: Ive lost interest trying to dissect this hot mess any further, I dont know how you as a company or you as programmers or even players could be happy with how this is going.
My Advice to you is to play your game, et enfinatium then ask your self "How could this be made better". good day I hope you get your heads out of your collective *** or dont w/e its your choice.
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