Elite Dangerous Announces Major Odyssey Patch | Screen Rant
Frontier Developments, creator of Elite Dangerous, is launching its next significant patch for the game at 4 AM Eastern time on June 3, coping with critical bugs introduced by the Odyssey expansion released on May 19. Servers are expected to stay down for an hour, helping to explain the early morning timing of the update.
Odyssey allows Elite players to step out onto both barren and inhabited planets, engaging in stealth, diplomacy, commerce, and combat. Fighting supports teams, alliances, and coordination between ground and space forces. At launch, however, the expansion was riddled with crashes and performance slowdowns, as well as bugs that broke existing features unrelated to the new expansion. Frontier CEO David Braben was forced to apologize in late May. The upcoming patch will be Odyssey's second hotfix since its disastrous launch.
The download should contain "many fixes and improvements," targeting issues like optimization and the user interface, according to the Elite Dangerous Twitter feed. A complete change list is being withheld until the update goes live, which is relatively standard in the games industry but is already upsetting people wanting to know if their least favorite problems are going to be fixed. Frontier also hasn't specified whether the planned downtime is before or after 4 AM Eastern (9 AM in Frontier's local British time). The question is probably moot for the worst affected gamers, who haven't been able to play for more than minutes at time even when the servers aren't offline.
Prior to launch, Odyssey had already seen a raft of bugfixes upon emerging from open alpha testing, solving trouble with audio, AI, lighting, stability, and more. That was expected, however, since by their nature alphas are both rough and incomplete. Betas are feature-complete and more polished, but in Odyssey's case testing appears to have been exclusively internal - that could explain the expansion's problems, since open betas offer a wider sample of hardware and software configurations. In fact, in his apology, Braben explained that Frontier has been trying to recreate player experiences by using a less powerful PC.
The large following behind Elite Dangerous means that Frontier will probably continue fixing bugs until Odyssey is completely stable. The game has been around since 2014, and has seen numerous content updates over time, even getting VR support and an April 2017 update that mirrored real-world planets discovered in the Trappist-1 system. The core game is available on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, but console ports of Odyssey aren't due until fall 2021 and could conceivably be delayed if work on PC bugs interferes. Those fixes will also have to be replicated to ensure a smoother launch.
Source: Frontier/Twitter