Update 14 and Beyond: Live and Legacy Modes

I actually take Frontier at their word that they did try to get it working on consoles right up to the end.
It fits with their track record of chasing a sunk cost fallacy on things that are fundamentally broken.
My guess is something foundational to Odyssey simply kept breaking the console versions they tried to make work. Just look at the state of it on RX 6000 series graphics cards with delightful stuff like the pretzel planets, for how bad of a mess it can be. But they desperately wanted the money from the console launch, so when the PC version finally launched after its own delays, they kept going at it, because they had already made the initial mistake in 2020 of taking a bunch of time to try and fix odyssey after they discovered its problems, rather than scrapping a bunch of progress on it and starting over, which would have cost them being able to launch it in 2021 at all, but might have salvaged the possibility of console versions and gotten us a better performing 4.0 client.
Well there's a theory that I believe, that the version of Odyssey that they couldn't get working a year ago was for "last gen" consoles only, that they never made any attempt or had any interest in releasing the game on "next gen" consoles which would surely run them perfectly, for some silly reason!

While as said, it would have been nice to be able to judge for ourselves!! πŸ˜―πŸ˜‚ .
 
Well there's a theory that I believe, that the version of Odyssey that they couldn't get working a year ago was for "last gen" consoles only, that they never made any attempt or had any interest in releasing the game on "next gen" consoles which would surely run them perfectly, for some silly reason!

While as said, it would have been nice to be able to judge for ourselves!! πŸ˜―πŸ˜‚ .
When questioned on current generation of consoles I believe Frontier's stock answer was they had no plans for them and that never changed.
 
I am not going to deep into it now, but no to all of that. All you need to know is that none of this is relevant to the discussion of FPS. At all.
It's not relevant to the subjective experience of people who are fine with lower fps gaming due to what and how they play.

It is relevant to the objective metrics of what we can actually see, and therefore potentially experience, if we choose/are able to expose ourselves to it.

Obviously other things can play into that experience, for example the improved experience on CRT displays due to the vastly diminished lag over LCDs. One of the sacrifices the industry made for cheaper and less heavy screens. It's not like the experience of smooth gaming can be reduced to just framerates.

(Anecdotally, pretty much everyone I have ever known who has been "fine" with 30 starts to find it uncomfortable to play at after developing familiarity with the experience of regularly getting greater than 60 on a new PC, a case of "you can't unsee it" where something never stood out until you had it brought to your attention, but once that happens it's impossible to miss, like the dude on his mobile phone in the composite art used for the loading screen of the main city in fantasy RPG Guild Wars 2)
 
Last edited:
Like I said, surely a properly optimised version for "last gen" consoles would surely run at around 40, while a "next gen" version would surely run at at least 60, but as said yes, 30 is enough for me and most other people!! πŸ˜―πŸ˜‚ .
30 was actually alright for me last gen on my XBox One when I had it hooked up via my old HDMI-SCART cable to a CRT TV. Played Elite just fine, though sometimes text could be a bit indistinct.

Still is fine on CRT monitors. Get a decent HDMI-VGA adaptor and they display 30 much smoother, that's why I keep my XBox 360 hooked up to one too, as that system's notorious for bad framerates in many, many games. Also on earlier HD games, the antialiasing is utter trash or wholly absent, while a CRT screen naturally provides a nice soft version.

On LCDs it gets too noticeable for me, there's a perceptible flicker like I am looking at a flickbook, where individual images linger longer than they're supposed to, with a sense of missing information that should be filling in between them. It's part of why on last gen consoles many devs didn't include a motion blur off toggle for games, as by making the edges more indistinct from one frame to the next, you don't spot as easily when something jumps from one position to another with no inbetween frames.
 
Anyway, I do think the Live/Legacy split could be the final nail in the coffin, if stuff like account copying hadn't already been enough, for any hopes being held out for a native 9th gen Odyssey client. 3.8 on consoles is running in their backcompat mode. Introducing a new version would mean having two SKUs on each console's store in order to keep supporting Legacy, this means no Smart Delivery on XBox, and thus essentially marketing one game confusingly as a sequel of sorts, ironically probably how they ought to have gone about Odyssey's mechanics in hindsight, building a game for them from the ground up instead of bolting them on through dodgy knots in spaghetti code.

(I guess TECHNICALLY they could build a launcher similar to how the Rare Replay collection handles its bundled 360 titles, or the Halo MCC's menu option to play Halo 5, which would contain a Legacy option in the menu that would launch the 3.8 client in backcompat mode and suspend the current gen launcher)
 
Last edited:
So generally a malaise then. Consoles gone, mac gone, VR no support or development, cmdr figures going down I would've guessed.
So their response is to invade the bubble with thargoids.
Fab for those who can fight em. Mare for the rest.
Which leaves a small contingent of ax pilots to save the bubble.
Truly I just don't get it!
what are they doing?
 
So generally a malaise then. Consoles gone, mac gone, VR no support or development, cmdr figures going down I would've guessed.
So their response is to invade the bubble with thargoids.
Fab for those who can fight em. Mare for the rest.
Which leaves a small contingent of ax pilots to save the bubble.
Truly I just don't get it!
what are they doing?
To be fair to Frontier Steam Charts suggests it's been a big sucess
steam-charts-december-2022.png
 
steam charts? oh yea


View attachment 337895

seems fine to me
If only 6,000 people are playing the game on Steam and the peak was 10,000, I'm truly shocked!! 😯

I figured that the game has sold a bit over a million copies on PC (mostly because it came out there first about two years before on Xbox and about three years before Playstation) and had sold about 500,000 on Xbox and about a million on PlayStation (since Playstation is the most popular platform, while I'd have expected the PS version to sell around 3 million copies if it was the lead and not last platform released), so I'd expect around 100,000 on average, at least, now playing per platform!

While certainly I saw 30,000-50,000 players taking part in some popular CGs and even only about 10,000 players taking part in less popular CGs, while indeed only a small amount of the community takes part in any given CG, so again that's rather shocking!

Frontier should be doing everything they can to advertise and grow the game on every available platform, not pulling it all back to PC!! 😯 .

Wow! πŸ˜―πŸ˜‚ .
 
If only 6,000 people are playing the game on Steam and the peak was 10,000, I'm truly shocked!!

That's the hourly simultaneous users, not unique users
If you take an average of 4k per hour, and you assume an average session is 2h, that means 48k unique players per day
further on, if you assume that an average player is logging in every other day (very optimistic i'd say), that 96k unique players per month
And this is only on steam, there are a lot more on Frontier and on Epic.
So the real numbers can easily reach 250-350k per month
 
If only 6,000 people are playing the game on Steam and the peak was 10,000, I'm truly shocked!! 😯

(...)

The average player session length has been 2.8h recently. Given the yesterday's average player number as shown by Steam, this translates into around 45k daily players.

This correlates with the number of recently active playes inferred from Inara data. And gives some idea about the total players number.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom