 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 1st of October 2021, I'm CMDR Buur In Elite Dangerous News this week, Elite Dangerous Horizons on consoles is patched, Frontier hosts a developer live stream, there's pre-engineered ship weapons up for grabs in this week's CG and we have some thoughts on the current state of Elite Dangerous on PC and consoles. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and if you would like to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. As was promised by Frontier last week, the start of this week saw the latest patch update reach the console versions of Elite Dangerous Horizons. The delay is essentially down to the certification process software has to go through to get into the console's respective walled gardens, a similar patch for PCs being deployed at the end of last week. The primary reason for the patch was to remove the accidental uber damage that had been added to engineered weapons that essentially meant just about anything in the game could in essence be one-shotted, including everybody's favourite pliades party poop as the Thargoids. But there's also a small number of other tweaks and fixes that also made it into the patch those are listed in the patch notes which I've linked in the video description. Frontier hosted a developer livestream in their regular Thursday night slot this week that saw CM's Arthur and Bruce sitting down to chat with two members of Elite's UI team Geronimo and Gotie who are lead UI designer and lead UI programmer respectively. Both have over 20 years experience in the area of user interface have worked on Elite Dangerous since its earliest iterations and have clocked up significant hours in the game itself as players. The UI in Elite Dangerous no matter what of the current versions of the game you are playing is a necessarily complex beast and particularly in recent times the changes to it haven't always been met with universal approval from the player base. The chat provided a fascinating insight into the reasons for some of the decisions that the team make and the challenges of working with a complex UI that has to be replicated on multiple platforms to span control schemes as disparate as keyboard and mouse, hotas and console controller. They also talk through some of the more technical aspects of design such as for example what the team refer to as friction in a UI where the user may be slowed down from achieving their goal and sometimes how this tactic can be used deliberately in certain situations where it's deemed important to do so. The Odyssey UI and the changes it brought haven't always made the life in Elite Dangerous as easy as it could have been the team even admitting that it was buggy at launch as was much of the rest of Odyssey obviously more on that in a moment but it is good to see that the UI experience is constantly under review and importantly changes to its flow do get made as a result of player reactions and feedback. The chat is worth catching up with if you didn't hear it live, if you've been occasionally frustrated by the UI or perhaps struggled to understand why it's designed the way it is then it will definitely provide some useful and helpful insight. As always it's linked in the video description. There's a new community goal active in the game this week that is offering specialised pre-engineered weapons to its participants. Powerplay leader and erstwhile Federation Admiral Yuri Grom, reviled by the leadership of the Federation he once served was involved in a political conference with his former bunk mates that did, initially at least, appear to be building some bridges. Those primordial bridges were sadly sent crashing into the valley below this week when it was revealed that the whole conference was, it appears, a ruse to capture and detain the bearded renegade by the president of the feds, king of corruption and dodgy dealings and all round federal surveillance fanboy Zachary Hudson. The T-1000 of powerplay, even having this to say after Grom had escaped the attempt to move against him, quote, Yuri Grom is a traitor and a dangerous threat to federal security, we cannot ignore any opportunity to eliminate this ruthless tyrant, unquote. Never one to remain happy as a silent warflower, as you'd expect, Grom has responded by saying quote, the Federation has declared war unquote and promising to quote respond in kind, unquote. The end result of this is the community goal that is now raging in the Delta Pervona system. Both sides are asking for combat bonds to be handed in and if the feds win then the top 75% will have two fixed mount class 2 rapid fire multi cannons with increased damage and phasing sequence at the cost of increased spread and reduced range handed to them. If Grom is victorious then the top 75 commanders will have two fixed mount class 2 seeker missile racks with double engineered high capacity, increased fire rate and drag munitions at the expense of increased power draw and mass gifted to them. As usual, the CG will run until Thursday so to be in with a chance of saving the galactic bearded wonder or alternatively aiding Senor surveillance you'll need to pile in your combat bonds before then. The full details for the CG and associated Galnet story you'll find in the video description. It's now nearly 5 months since the Elite Dangerous Odyssey expansion launched onto the PC. The largest expansion that the game has ever had, it's a well documented fact now that what should have been one of the games brightest moments actually turned out in the initial post launch period at least to be one of its darkest days. After the initial excitement and spectacle of a generally well received alpha period it rapidly became apparent that the released product had been rushed to market and was as a result extremely unoptimized buggy and missing a fair few expected key features. All of this arrived off the back of delays to both the console launch and the expected terrain upgrades to Horizons. With all of this combined the resultant anger and frustration from Odyssey, Horizons, PC and console players alike left the community fractured and more than a little bit wounded. In the post launch nuclear wasteland that followed alongside various complaints about bugs and unoptimized code the one unified cry that seemed to come through was around communication from Fdev themselves and in the days following the Odyssey launch there was an acknowledgement from the CM team and indeed David Braben himself promising that they would look at how they communicate with the community. Shortly thereafter things did indeed change. As of right now we have regular news drops at least every other week, the forum activity from the CMs is persistent and consistent, the top voted issues on the issue tracker are reported back to the community on a regularly updated permanently visible basis and we get monthly development updates in the form of a forum post that details where we've been, where we're at and some small hints at where we're going and what to expect next. All of this is sprinkled with regular live streams from the team that, as we've seen this week, feature chats with developers, conversations with community content creators as well as gameplay across Odyssey and Horizons. The community management team have since reached out to the community to gather their thoughts on how the game might be improved in a number of key areas, most notably speaking to the anti-Xeno initiative recently and taking some very constructive and well structured feedback from them. This kind of direct outreach is not something we've seen before and it's very encouraging to see. As far as the various versions of Elite across PC and consoles are concerned, here's where we're at. Elite Dangerous Odyssey has now had 7 major patches to it with numerous much smaller patches sprinkled in between. The vast majority of those have attempted to address frame rate issues and optimisation, lighting issues and planetary rendering as well as numerous bugs and glitches but there have also been gameplay tweaks and UI changes mixed in. Whilst it's still far from a perfect landscape for everybody playing, Odyssey is in a far far better state now than it was at launch. Again, I'd reiterate it's not perfect but it is way more stable, playable and overall it looks much more like a complete game. Had the game launched in the state it's in now it would have been a very different story indeed. There are still some significant frame rate drops around surface settlements but it does feel at least that these are related to the NPCs and the optimisation of their associated nav mesh, it's particularly evident when you arrive at a settlement and things are still loading in. The team at Fdev have said these issues are to be addressed in the upcoming patch 8 specifically. It even seems now that the long persistent invincible Thargoid heart bug has finally been squashed. Alongside the regular patches dropping into the game we are now starting to see new features and announcements of upcoming features. Frontier have stopped short of saying exactly what players can come to expect from Odyssey as an ongoing live service game but with the arrival of the new surface conflict zone features and the announcements around megaship and fleet carrier interiors as well as a new combat oriented multi-crew capable SRV we are starting to see hints of what we think is likely the way of the future that being incremental additions and new features dropped into the game on a semi regular cycle rather than the benchmark season based content drops that we'd seen before. This is a guess however as Frontier aren't stating anything specifically at the moment. With all that said then where does this leave the console commanders? In particular on our own comment section this week we've seen a more significant than usual number of console commanders asking what the state of play with the console edition of Elite Dangerous Odyssey is. In case you're not a regular to the company's live streams or their other social media feeds then the question of quote what is happening with Odyssey on consoles unquote comes up unsurprisingly every single day and the official response from Frontier is always very much the same quote console is on hold as we focus on improving the PC experience for Odyssey when we are able to share more on console development we will let everyone know unquote. There is speculation all the time that the console edition will be cancelled or that the console player base has somehow been forgotten as best we can tell the bottom line to that understandable anxiety coupled with F devs responses on the issue is this Frontier definitely won't have forgotten about consoles corporations are driven by money and Odyssey on the consoles equates to sales in terms of copies sold and money spent purchasing cosmetics for the game as best we can determine the console market makes up about a third of the total player base that's not an insignificant amount of money to Frontier bottom line in lieu of any other evidence to the contrary here at the burp it we absolutely believe hands down there will be a console version of Elite Dangerous Odyssey the next big question is when will we hear more about it and when will it be released any answers I give you now on those questions are of course pure speculation the two interesting things here are however the current version of Odyssey on PCs is in a much better state than it was at launch if the company can nail the current stuttering issues associated with arriving at a settlement and introduce a few other optimizations into the mix then it is starting to feel like the period of triage for the PC is coming to an end and that in fact we are very much now on an upward turn couple that knowledge with the fact that they are now starting to talk about new content and what is to be introduced into the game then we wouldn't be at all surprised if we started hearing more on the console editions and how those are expected to progress most definitely sooner rather than later it's been an undoubtedly long road for all concerned no less so for our console commanders if indeed we are close to the end of all this then as soon as we hear anything will let you know on this very channel are you planning on fighting for Yuri Grom or perhaps siding with the feds against him let us know in the comments below that's it for now thanks very much for watching we'll be back later this week with more videos until then 07 commanders follow the greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack we very much look forward to seeing you next time