What makes me optimistic about Odyssey and the future of Elite

LOL.

ED had more than a years worth of a head start than No Man's Sky AND was established in name decades prior. Looking at his list of patches/updates, you're telling me that Fdev has outdone HG's in terms of the content they had provided for NMS?


IMHO, Fdev address more bugs than providing more content. Period. Fixing bugs shouldn't be counted when it seems that the bugs that are fixed create more bugs that need to be fixed, and then it cascades. This is a symptom of serious testing deficiencies you don't see in projects with dedicated, inhouse testers. Imagine what kind of content we could have if the majority of the time wasn't spent on bugs and rushing new development out the door to satisfy a bottom dollar.

Who cares about "established in name"? Like what absurd argument are you trying to make. NMS is a planet simulator with a very weak space game sort of attached. Its galaxy is pathetic, what 6 planets pet star, every single time? That's what I saw.

By contrast Elite has widely varied, full scale star systems, full scale planets, a solid ship flight model...

Now they have added a robust ground game, admittedly less plants and no animals, but I'll remain hopeful and keep having fun.

Its true I can't build a base, yet, but I have a base that jumps wherever I want it with my fleet of ships.

NMS is a nice casual game from what I hear, but none of the people I know who own it play it much. I've never bought in because they keep charging $60 and I don't think it does anything I'd want from it better than Subnautica.

The point I made is Oddesy is new, it is, anyone claiming otherwise is demonstrably wrong. It released last month.

Hello Gamea went silent after a very misleading release where they presented a product that they claimed was actual game play but was actually a carefully hand crafted lie. They claimed to be multiplayer and had none.

By contrast Elite claimed and delivered multiplayer content with combined arms and cool stuff on the ground to do, that is admittedly buggy.

They have communicated that there are problems, apologized, patched 4 times already with another patch every week this month and more after wirh consol optimization.

To hold up Hello Games as any kind of comparison is disengenious. Frontier has the better product and better dev record in my book and I'll keep my money here.
 
If you take a look to the terrain in vr it's flat and smooth like glass. It's like a glass floor with stone effect wallpaper glued on.

I could be mistaking what I see, but there also seems to be quite a bit of fairly large scale ground features that are done with normal maps, when one is on ground, which causes this shading that appears like fine-looking depressions in the terrain on a still image, but the second you move, even without VR, that shading turns into black smudges of soot on the smoothly undulating slick blanket that is the ground.

Somebody started a thread about wanting tesselation heightmapped with the ground textures, on top of the progressive mesh subdivision that refines the topography as one get closer to ground, but was shouted down by the: "Shut up! Everything is perfect!" crowd... I might quite possibly have settled for parallax mapping myself... :7
 
LOL.

In about 6 years, No Man's Sky has put out 17 (FREE) named updates to their game in addition to a slew of patches/fixes between these updates. The additional content it provided was countless. This is from a team of like 30 people!!



Lol all you want but No man’s sky’s team only has a single project while frontier has several.

Not to diminish anything they did, I mean the way they turned around No man’s sky is astounding. Still I don’t get the impression that Elite has a huge dev team behind it.
 
You get it. People who whine about Odyssey being nothing have no clue that the platform that FDev has laid with Odyssey is truly worthy of the 'New Era' moniker.

I do understand the immediate frustration but Odyssey is a major achievement and really sets the stage for vast future expansion possibilities and iterations. It's part of the reason why I tend to think some of it comes across more as frightened SC users who also get it and can't handle the idea that Elite might be leapfrogging SC while that whole thing continues to trundle along the way it has..

It's like this; for all the craziness and aggro of these past couple of weeks for Elite & Odyssey.. that's basically been Star Citizen from day one of the end of the Kickstarter until now. Literally. And the Start Citizen 'players' have lapped it up with rationalization after rationalization.

Having said that, I don't wish for bad things for Star Citizen, I hope to see a great game come out of it, but conversely, some of what I've seen here looks like quite a lot of people who seem to only want bad things for Elite with all the dooming, FUD & concern trolling.

I just hope that FDev finally learns this lesson that the stakes are pretty high and giving the naysayers a field day needs to definitely be on the 'not to do' list.
Your optimism just baffles me - russian roulette with a round in every chamber would not scare you as well, because rounds can fail, isn't it like this?-

You really believe Star Citizen will ever be released?- These guys make the most money by not releasing the game - because in the moment they would, they would be judged for it, but as long as they stay in development, people like you will always be optimistic about it regardless of how incomplete the game is. And those developing it will always find details you really really want, and that take time of course and they don't have to release it "until then" - this "until then" can be postponed by another new detail to do first of course. And this can go on endlessly, because people like you believe them.

Now with EDO - there is pretty much nothing to render compared to a rich atmospheric world - and they have trouble doing this at an acceptable frame rate. There is like nothing on it, it is just height map terrain, some clutter and just a few rather simple buildings on it and a few NPCs - ah, and some lifeforms which pop in and out of existence due to too low drawing distance. This is as well compared to a rich atmospheric world pretty much nothing to render - complex atmospheric worlds are much harder to render, but it can be done fluently on lesser hardware than EDOs minimum requirements at pretty stable 45 fps in 1920x1080 - less than that is unacceptable, and where is EDO?
 
Your optimism just baffles me - russian roulette with a round in every chamber would not scare you as well, because rounds can fail, isn't it like this?-

You really believe Star Citizen will ever be released?- These guys make the most money by not releasing the game - because in the moment they would, they would be judged for it, but as long as they stay in development, people like you will always be optimistic about it regardless of how incomplete the game is. And those developing it will always find details you really really want, and that take time of course and they don't have to release it "until then" - this "until then" can be postponed by another new detail to do first of course. And this can go on endlessly, because people like you believe them.

Now with EDO - there is pretty much nothing to render compared to a rich atmospheric world - and they have trouble doing this at an acceptable frame rate. There is like nothing on it, it is just height map terrain, some clutter and just a few rather simple buildings on it and a few NPCs - ah, and some lifeforms which pop in and out of existence due to too low drawing distance. This is as well compared to a rich atmospheric world pretty much nothing to render - complex atmospheric worlds are much harder to render, but it can be done fluently on lesser hardware than EDOs minimum requirements at pretty stable 45 fps in 1920x1080 - less than that is unacceptable, and where is EDO?
Yeah that's what really puzzled me about the performance. Even in a wide open plain with barely any rocks or fauna, performance was still awful for me regardless of settings. The game is barely having to render anything besides textures and some depth buffers, and yet the framerate is tanked.

Meanwhile I could boot up NMS, go to a verdant planet with trees, rocks, grass, all sorts of flora and fauna, with weather effects and volumetric clouds and everything, and can easily stay above 60fps no problem.

Something is just fundamentally wrong with the rendering engine right now.
 
Yeah that's what really puzzled me about the performance. Even in a wide open plain with barely any rocks or fauna, performance was still awful for me regardless of settings. The game is barely having to render anything besides textures and some depth buffers, and yet the framerate is tanked.

Meanwhile I could boot up NMS, go to a verdant planet with trees, rocks, grass, all sorts of flora and fauna, with weather effects and volumetric clouds and everything, and can easily stay above 60fps no problem.

Something is just fundamentally wrong with the rendering engine right now.
The issue may be in the topology of new 3D terrain shapes, perhaps?

:D S
 
I am also optimistic about the game. I really think that they've held quite a bit back for a time when the game is in better shape to ship it. But if I see "Panther Clipper" DLC 8.99, yeah that's gonna be it.
 
You vastly underestimate the development monstrosity that a galaxy of ELWs represents.

Well, i'm not saying ELWs will be easy, however i still think they'll be less amount of overall development effort than what's gone into Odyssey (and will go to make it work properly). In addition i think future expansions will be more a focused effort, while Odyssey has been quite broad.

Someone drank WAY too much of the koolaid...
I cannot confirm nor deny it :p
I fear that english may not be your first language.

I think I get the point you're trying to make, but suggesting everything is going downhill is an unfortunate turn of phrase.
LOL, yeah, you got me :p
 
This early into NMS launch people were justifiably livid, now are praising it, so the issue seems to be time and patience not dev behavior.
Lol, are you serious? Do you claim NMS hasn't changed at all since release and time was the only factor? 😆

People's opinion of NMS changed, because the game changed. Massively.

I think Frontier will be able to fix bugs and performance problems until December. The problem in my opinion is that the content feels quite light too and that probably won't change.

Elite's progress has been treading water for years now - Odyssey didn't quite offer enough in my opinion to justify that/make up for it.

I am now fully convinced that we'll never get the game Frontier talked about during Kickstarter and I'm quite sure all the placeholders and abandoned features won't get meaningful makeovers either.
 
Lol all you want but No man’s sky’s team only has a single project while frontier has several.

Not to diminish anything they did, I mean the way they turned around No man’s sky is astounding. Still I don’t get the impression that Elite has a huge dev team behind it.
Frontier has several projects indeed, but they employ hundreds of people. Elite Odyssey had over 100 working on it. No Man Sky being torn into a bit by some comments here, yet if you crisply play the game, it's at least more fun than Elite in many respects. Sending fleets off, making bases and generally exploring planets that have caves etc is far more enjoyable for me than scraping dregs from the Elite Missions board or "exploring" barren rocks that have nothing in the form of caves and overhangs etc.

Frontier really need to step up their quality of work with Elite because the core content was achieved years ago. Improving upon it is where they are lagging and Odyssey is outright shambolic and released in such a state from pure arrogance. Unlike with NMS, you also have to pay for the update!
 
I meant the planetary engine revamp (despite its results being still contested) to set new grounds and all the footwork (pun intended)
A couple of handcrafted assets won't do it for fauna and flora. NMS uses procedural system for body parts and species still look familiar (but there is species on every planet). Making some rocks new and rearranging them isn't even half of the work. If you think flora and fauna will just appear from nothing you are seriously underestimating the work required. Then there is settlements. The cost of performance for all the additional detail. The additional agents to make the stuff move about believably. And that cost of performance as well. Flight modelling for atmo. Etc., etc.
 
Hot take: I don't think we'll ever see ELWs. There are tons of "simpler" planet types missing already, and seeing how the engine struggles with "simple" airless worlds with a single outpost, I can't imagine what it'd be like with clouds/weather, dense vegetation and cities. Add to that that it needs to run on old-gen consoles, and that they'll have to soothe loud community sections who want ship interiors, VR or a focus on non-planetary activities, and it's pretty unlikely ELWs will ever be a justifiable effort.
 
Only thing that makes me optimistic is the fact that 100ish people that worked on odyssey can now work on fixing things. I just hope they’ll fix things in odyssey AND Horizons (make issue tracker useful) and not do something random like downgrading UIs.
 
Only thing that makes me optimistic is the fact that 100ish people that worked on odyssey can now work on fixing things. I just hope they’ll fix things in odyssey AND Horizons (make issue tracker useful) and not do something random like downgrading UIs.
Tone that down to 6 people, since the only ones that can fix bugs are programers, the other part of the team have other priorities, like continue 3d modeling and sound and story creation.
 
F-Dev isn't going to do much. Certainly not with game play. NMS / HG is not F-dev. They dropped the ball with the "Horizons Season Pass", and they even stated they would be committed to adding meaningful contend. Surprise! They didn't. In fact that season fell off a cliff with minor and broken game play.

Take F-Dev for what they have done. Not what other companies or devs have / are doing.
 
F-Dev isn't going to do much. Certainly not with game play. NMS / HG is not F-dev. They dropped the ball with the "Horizons Season Pass", and they even stated they would be committed to adding meaningful contend. Surprise! They didn't. In fact that season fell off a cliff with minor and broken game play.

Take F-Dev for what they have done. Not what other companies or devs have / are doing.
The question I ask myself is, why did they create EDO at all, if there is no intend to make something bigger out of it?- At least when they started with the project (3 years ago?) there was most likely still the intend to do atmospheric worlds in ED - especially because they had Jurassic World Evolution released at that time and eventually some of the technology used there could be used in ED as well. i don't know much about that game though, this is just a wild guess.

something might have changed since then - maybe they discovered that it's not so easy to do and had a "what else can we do with it?" moment. That jurassic game had bad reviews as well at launch and even a year later reviewers call it a forgettable experience, too repetitive and inflexible - sounds familiar?- Could well be that they have given up on thier original vision and came up with the "next best" idea - an FPS - an "oh let's attract some youngsters to ED" kind of idea, which of course falls flat on it's belly, if they don't create an environment, where the FPS crowd wants to play in - it's certainly not EDO though. So is that really made for this crowd?- yeah .. nah, don't think so, not really.

This looks to me like total confusion about in which direction the game should be heading in future - i hope, when they will have figured that out, they'll let us know. Meanwhile i'm more likely to try out some of the other space games until FDev will have a captain at the helm of the ship again, who gives it a consistent direction.Or maybe I'm just wrong about it in regards to EDO, and it is a consistent decision -to get a last injection of money before phasing the whole thing out .... within a couple of years.
 
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This looks to me like total confusion about in which direction the game should be heading in future - i hope, when they will have figured that out, they'll let us know. Meanwhile i'm more likely to try out some of the other space games until FDev will have a captain at the helm of the ship again, who gives it a consistent direction.
FDev's very narrow saving grace is that there is no other game on the market right now that scratches the "semi-realistic space flight sim" itch. Things might be different in the future (Starfield, for example) but right now, nothing else matters.
 
Frontier has several projects indeed, but they employ hundreds of people. Elite Odyssey had over 100 working on it. No Man Sky being torn into a bit by some comments here, yet if you crisply play the game, it's at least more fun than Elite in many respects. Sending fleets off, making bases and generally exploring planets that have caves etc is far more enjoyable for me than scraping dregs from the Elite Missions board or "exploring" barren rocks that have nothing in the form of caves and overhangs etc.

Frontier really need to step up their quality of work with Elite because the core content was achieved years ago. Improving upon it is where they are lagging and Odyssey is outright shambolic and released in such a state from pure arrogance. Unlike with NMS, you also have to pay for the update!

Yeah, nms is more about fun than Elite that’s for sure.
 
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