The world of Elite has taken its next big leap. No longer are you tied into the seat of your spaceship or your Scarab planet exploring vehicle. The new Odyssey DLC finally grants you the possibility to set your feet on the ground. For the first time, you can enter the common facilities of the space stations and walk in and out of the buildings on the planet bases. Do espionage, where you have to break and enter a building, steal stuff, enter in FPS combat. All in all, you can do a lot of new stuff, equipped with your new suits, tools and weapons.
Sadly enough, the launch of this new DLC has not been the smoothest possible. While it is quite brilliant when it works, the whole performance of Elite has taken quite a steep hit thanks to the buggy new rendering technology presented for the planets. There's a new light system as well, but these technologies have brought a plethora of rendering issues and have at worst stumbled even the better rigs out there.
Luckily enough, you can still play Elite: Horizon as it was. Originally, Frontier considered bringing the new rendering and planetary tech to Horizon as well at the time of the launch of the DLC, but I guess someone noticed, that while the DLC was officially released, it is still far from being ready. Also, if you didn't know, Horizon was merged into the base game, so now everyone with Elite Dangerous can have the planet landings as well.
All I'm saying is, that the current state of Odyssey, while showing some great promise, feels more like a beta rather than a final release, which is a shame, as releasing unfinished products has been quite an issue in the games business in recent years. I can't escape the feeling, that PC players are used as a beta bed for the upcoming console release later this year and Frontier is hoping to use the data gathered to greatly improve the console performance in order to avoid the CD Project Red situation they had with the ill-famed pancake of a console release with Cyberpunk 2077. That launch ended with Sony removing the game from their store and might have harmed the reputation of the developer and the game for good.
If you were wondering about the performance difference, here's an example. On a computer I play Elite, I can play Horizon in Ultra graphical setting sin 1920x1080 resolution and get steady 60fps no matter if I am flying in space, landing on planets or docking on space stations or docking on planet bases. Driving around on planets gives me the same nice 60fps. But switching to Odyssey, on the same machine, the only steady 60fps I get is when I fly in space. Landing on planets causes the frames to drop in less than 30 fps, at worst near 20 fps. Turning settings lower helps some, but doesn't solve the issue.
I'm not gonna bother doing a full review of Elite Dangerous: Odyssey as of now. For more proper gameplay, I do think it's prudent to wait for a couple of patches to emerge before I give it a more serious spin. For those, who were thinking of sinking their teeth on Elite now, I'd recommend holding back from buying Odyssey as of now. It would be smarter to get the base game, considering it now has the Horizon DLC included and can be often bought with less than 10 bucks. Just wait for Frontier to fix what is broken and spend some time playing Elite that is actually properly functional.
That said, I'm going to play Odyssey myself, as I do like what it brings to the table. It just is a shame, it's not functioning more properly as of yet.
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