Elite Dangerous News

Discovery Scanner [Weekly Update] - 14/03/22

Greetings Commanders!

It feels like it's been a while since I wrote one of these weekly updates for you, and it's good to be back. We've got multiple things for you to look forward to this week. You may also see that we're trying out a new name for these posts, as they've evolved to be more than just a schedule post.

So without further ado, let's dive in.

[h2]Odyssey Update 11[/h2]

After we detected some issues in the final round of checks, we moved Update 11 into this week. We're currently on schedule to roll out the update early this week as we're just undertaking those final, final, checks again!

Living under a space rock and not sure what Update 11 brings? The major attraction is definitely the Fleet Carrier Interiors. The dev team have pulled out all the stops with these beautiful interiors for your very own megaships. I'm as excited as you are to take a seat, relax, and enjoy that Frame Shift jump. Talking about sitting... don't own a fleet carrier? No problem! The galaxy is full of chairs ready for you to...err... sit down on.

Apart from Fleet Carrier interiors, you'll also be getting a new mission type, alongside another wave of fixes - so make sure to jump into game this week and try it out!

[h2]READ THE FULL DISCOVERY SCANNER HERE[/h2]

- Zac

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey cancels console development to focus on PC

Space sim Elite Dangerous has gone to the dogs since its latest expansion, Odyssey. It launched in May 2021 in a sorry state and, while developers Frontier have been fixing it up, it's still a mess now. This week Frontier announced that to help focus their efforts on fixing Odyssey, they're cancelling the yet-unreleased console version. Good news for us on PC, I suppose, but oof! "This was not an easy decision to make, but it was made with the long-term future of Elite Dangerous in mind," Frontier frontman David Braben said.

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey was meant to be a big step forward for Frontier's sprawling sci-fi sim: The ability to exit ships and walk around on planetary surfaces "feels like one of the biggest leaps for the game in terms of scope and things to do," we said just ahead of its release in May 2021. Alas, it was in a dreadful state when it rolled out, and while multiple patches have been released since, it still holds a "mostly negative" rating on Steam...
Read more.

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey Hotfix 10.03 | 14/02/2022

Greetings Commanders,

Today at 15:30 UTC, we'll be releasing a small hotfix to Elite Dangerous: Odyssey in order to address some stability issues within the game.

There's no expected downtime associated with the hotfix.

o7

Elite Dangerous: Odyssey gets another round of performance improvements

One of the main issues that's plagued Elite Dangerous' ambitious first-person Odyssey expansion has been performance - it's tough to keep the space game running at a nice framerate while you're roaming the space game's planets on foot. Frontier Developments has released a new patch for Odyssey and Horizons today that improves optimisation and squashes some pesky bugs.

In Odyssey, the developers have improved optimisation for several features, including cockpit and other transparent glass surfaces, galaxy and star maps, avatar decals, forward-lit visual effects, fine textures on planets, shadows, and emissive rescaling. The upshot of all this is that these things shouldn't hit your framerate quite as hard now, hopefully producing a smoother gameplay experience.

Frontier says it's also fixed a few bugs, notably an issue that popped up while running with cutting tools. This is generally a bad idea for other reasons, but the game shouldn't throw a fit when you try it from now on. The team also says it's addressed a "quantum physics issue" that apparently would happen when multiple players attempted to grab the same item - the devs don't say what exactly was happening, but we're just going to assume it's a timeline split that'll have to be resolved in act three.

Read the rest of the story...