After nearly three years of development and multiple delays thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, Frontier Developments finally released Elite Dangerous Odyssey on May 19. Aiming to expand Elite Dangerous with new weapons, settlements, and certain No Man’s Sky-like elements like discovering new planets and the ability to travel those planets on foot, Odyssey was a major milestone and hotly anticipated by Elite Dangerous fans.
Unfortunately, Odyssey launched with bug, stability, and performance issues so horrendous that the expansion currently has a 31% “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam as of the time of this writing.
Frontier has acknowledged Odyssey’s issues and sent its first hotfix out on Friday to address the Orange Sidewinder error messages, but many problems persist. Today, Frontier CEO and founder David Braben posted his own apology for Odyssey’s dismal launch and promised fixes are coming.
“First and foremost, I would like to apologize wholeheartedly to those who have been suffering from these problems,” wrote Braben. “I would like to reassure you that we take these issues very seriously and that they are our top priority and focus.”
A “second hotfix will be released very soon” to address more bugs and stability issues. Braben wrote that the team is also looking into poor performance on modern PC hardware. He didn’t mention whether he’s personally been affected by performance issues, but he did say he’s been playing Elite Dangerous on an ancient home machine as well as a current development PC.
As for connectivity issues, Braben wrote that Frontier Developments is “focusing fully on improving this for those affected and communicating with you openly and regularly about how these issues are being addressed.”
According to the Elite Dangerous Twitter account, “Blue Cobra” connection errors “are now stabilized,” but players should report any further problems in the Issue Tracker.
