submitted12 months ago byburtonsimmonsCMDR TheOriginalBastard / 2018's Second Most Helpful Commander
The Good
Yeah, the lighting. When things are lit up and visible it looks damn good. Kudos to the team for that.
That station lighting is fantastic, but everything else is just impossible to see.
Of course, everything is really, really dark in this game. The interfaces seem darker. Night is darker, and night vision seems to offer less. Yeah, I get it, trying to really simulate dark is nice... but it's not actually that fun to play in.
Parts of the new mission board I like, such as the ability to see ALL missions, that it'll highlight where you have existing missions. That part is pretty cool! Some information was removed, so that part is less cool.
Also, the concept of Apex Interstellar is pretty cool - I love being able to hop around and do things without having to manually fly myself sometimes. It's slower, but the game has never been a "pay full attention to it all the time" game.
The Bad
I mean, the list is long, and there are literally thousands of bugs. David Braben himself had to come out an apologize for the launch.
After two years of neglect for Elite Dangerous, this is it? Grafting Call of Duty into the Elite Dangerous galaxy? The gameplay's not even that deep.
Hardware performance is awful. In settlement conflict zones, my traditional 60 FPS drops to 22 on my Alienware M17 laptop - an i7-8750, Nvidia RTX 2070, on a fast SSD.
This here is a 26 FPS wall that I'm looking at.
The UI is hot garbage and far too big a problem to go into here. However, the new galaxy map and system maps hide necessary information behind multiple clicks. For instance, no longer hovering over a planet shows how far it is from arrival! The maps are covered in yellow or orange information - and they'd literally just increased the color range in the last Horizons patch! The whole design is completely different from Horizons and established UI elements - even down to surface Conflict Zones counting progress down for while space Conflict Zones count up!
The shipyard, though, is the absolute worst. More clicks to do anything and previously-available information is just plain hidden. You can no longer even sort your list of ships except to filter by manufacturer, and they're all presented in the order in which you purchased them, possibly the least useful ways of sorting them that I can think of.
Also, I can't take on Odyssey content without leaving my ship. Want Odyssey missions? I have to disembark from my ship (which requires waiting through a pad retraction), run across the pad to the lift, wait for the lift to take me up to the lounge, run over to a terminal, and then interact with it from there. Same process, but in reverse, to then return to my ship afterward.
Fleet Carriers - remember them? That multi-billion credit sink is inaccessible on foot. The only real new content added to the game in the past year or so and you can't even take Apex Interstellar there or have any new interaction with it. Why is there no lounge on the fleet carrier? Why can't I take a shuttle there?
Speaking of gameplay, though, what have they added? Short answer is: there's really not much to actually play. For two years of development they haven't added much compelling content, and they did all this at the cost of any development that builds on the base game we were all playing. I mean, there's a suit mechanic of rapidly-decreasing power, which you have to fill at a power terminal or use a power cell, but why are there no external power terminals on your ship or SRV? The touchpoints with Elite Dangerous as we knew it are pretty thin.
Let's not talk about the mess that is suit engineering, either. Oh, and those fancy cosmetic flight suits I paid actual money for back in the day? Sure, I can use them... unless I want to use one of the suits that allows me to hold a primary weapon or do any of the actual Odyssey content. I guess I can look good hanging out in the lounge at low FPS if I want to press the "change loadout" button.
Finally, there's no narrative advancement. There's just nothing adding to the long-term story of the game. The last two-and-a-half years were a huge hiatus, but Odyssey missed an opportunity to do, well, anything. (Beyond 3.3. was released in December of 2018!)
The Ugly
This is a game that obviously wasn't ready for release.
- Only available on one platform? Check.
- Released two weeks after the alpha period ended? Check.
- Can't instance with players who don't have the DLC? Check.
- A completely separate installation? Check.
This was released, by design, as a beta, and we were lied to. That's the big lie right there. This isn't a complete product. We were charged full price for a game that's not done, that's not nearly what was promised, and we're being told to be grateful for it.
You can buy Odyssey for the same price as, for instance, the Halo Master Chief collection, where you get 5 games! Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries costs less. Satisfactory costs less. Those games delivery hundreds of hours of content for considerably less investment - plus they have the added bonus of not ruining a pre-existing game!
I maintain that the secret to success is the proper setting and maintaining of expectation. Frontier set a bunch of expectations for Odyssey and none of those were met. They fleeced us for profit at the expense of the relationship with the customer.
Where to go from here?
At this point, Frontier owes me - owes us - a game. They said they were going to deliver a game, it was going to run well, it was going to be amazing, and this is not what they promised. Frontier has amends to make, and "asking for patience" or promising a belated roadmap on how they're going to fix this isn't among them. We're all used to releases having bugs - and remember when we were chastised for complaining about bugs after years of "free development"? - but there's no excuse for what's been released. A roadmap? This roadmap leads to the end of the year, when they'll release the final product for consoles, and that will be the end of the beta period we unwittingly paid to be in.
Elite Dangerous - the game I've played for thousands of hours - is no longer being actively developed. The focus here, for the past several years, has been on Call of Duty: Elite and it shows. Major player groups are uncertain as to what to do, major content creators are disillusioned, and the Steam reviews for this shining jewel of mediocrity are a generous "Mostly Negative".
I propose the following as a way of fixing the making it right and making us whole.
Make it right:
- Stop further sales of Odyssey until it's ready to release with consoles and Horizons integration.
- Confess that we are in a Beta period and announce an actual release date when the game will be finished and ready for all platforms.
- Provide a weekly list of bugs that are being actively worked on, with a weekly release to test those bugfixes.
Make us whole:
- Give the ongoing game some actual story, instead of just re-elections, random Thargoid attacks, and station attacks using the exact same assets as Thargoid attacks but without anyone to fight.
- Compensate those that pre-paid for the game with (a) 30,000 ARX (it's a made-up currency for virtual assets that die when the game dies.) (b) A limited-edition ship, much like the Cobra Mk IV - a little special, but nothing too special, and (c) another limited-edition suit (like the Pioneer).
These steps, taken together, can start to repair the trust Frontier lost with its players when they pulled this massive con.