Landing on planets hasn’t gone well for Odyssey, the latest expansion for the gargantuan space sim Elite Dangerous. In fact, things have been so turbulent that the developer’s CEO and founder has posted a formal apology.
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey has already received multiple hotfixes over the past week, but it hasn’t stemmed the tide of furious complaints. The expansion is still sitting at a 30% user rating from over 3,500 reviews, with posts all over forums and social media complaining about poor optimisation, crashes, launcher problems, bizarre planets, graphical quirks, and more.
It’s gotten to the point where users have started breaking down problems with Odyssey‘s luminance and oversaturation issues in the kind of clinical detail you’d expect from the Elite community. Unsurprisingly, the volume of complaints has been heard loud and clear, spawning a direct apology from Frontier Developments founder David Braben.
“First and foremost, I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to those who have been suffering from these problems,” Braben wrote. “I would like to reassure you that we take these issues very seriously and that they are our top priority and focus. ”
“Our second hotfix will be released very soon, which we hope will address more of the reported bugs and bring further stability improvements into the game. We will continue to work on updates which will resolve more bugs and improve stability further.”
Braben added that he has been testing Odyssey on a 2014 Intel machine with a GTX 980, a rig that arguably would have no issues running the latest expansion. Most of the optimisation complaints have come from users with entry to mid-range GTX 10-series cards, so it’ll be interesting to see what the discrepancy in performance is.
All of this isn’t to say that Odyssey doesn’t have its fans. But right now, you’re probably better off sticking to Horizons until Odyssey‘s launch issues are resolved. That said, people are discovering that even the older Horizons expansion is suffering from performance problems now, although Frontier is issuing a hotfix tomorrow to hopefully correct that.
Space is rough, people.
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