 Frontier hosted their Frameshift Live livestream yesterday and as promised they dropped their big announcements on console account transfers and the longer term plan for Elite Dangerous Odyssey. In this video I'll break down exactly what was in those announcements and what it means for the longer term future of the game. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and if you'd like to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. Frontier's weekly livestream Frameshift Live aired yesterday afternoon one day earlier than usual due to a scheduling clash with the release of Frontier's new Warhammer 40k game Chaos Gate Demon Hunters. The livestream presented by CM's Arthur Tomey and Bruce Guerrero had promised last week that it would be detailing the much anticipated plan for console account transfers to the PC platform following Odyssey's cancellation on the consoles earlier in the year and also equally importantly speaking to some of the community concerns about the future of the game as a whole and what Frontier's plans are for this year. I'm going to firstly detail the two separate parts of the announcement that Frontier have made and then I'll give my thoughts on what this all means for the future of the game. Firstly, Arthur and Bruce addressed the future of livestreams themselves. Going forward Frameshift Live will continue on a fortnightly basis instead of having one stream every week. The rationale here was to allow for the streams to have more meaningful content in them and make them more information dense and therefore bring more value to their 2 hour run time. Whilst the regular development and bug fix reports that Frontier were delivering during their triage period for Odyssey have now stopped, their plan from here appears to be to introduce more meaningful content than the streams of late had been delivering. The team made specific mention of introducing more dev interviews and content like behind the scenes footage. I've mentioned on this channel before that since their return earlier in the year the livestreams had become rather uncomfortable and formulaic to watch with them having little to no content within them that was actually being generated by Frontier featuring as they did a predominantly community content driven focus. The community driven content is important and it absolutely has a place but Frontier must bring something to the conversation on the livestreams and this is their opportunity to do just that. On to console account transfers then, Frontier will be offering the opportunity for console commanders to copy one of their console profiles over to the PC platform. Note I said copy not transfer, after the copy the console profile will still be playable and the PC copy of it will be a separate commander with predominantly all the same assets. The copy process will also come with a free copy of Elite Dangerous Horizons on PC. The elements that will be copied over are all ships, hollow me, weapons, SRVs and SLFs, core game progression including inventory, reputation, navy ranks, permits, codex discoveries, engineering progress, guardian tech broker progress and NPC crew progress and cosmetics. The elements that won't be copied over are your commander name, the process will require a new commander name to be chosen if there is a clash. Any remaining ARCs balance, Frontier are recommending that ARCs are spent on cosmetics before the copy is applied so that those cosmetics are copied across instead. Squadron membership as squadrons are not cross-platform, friends list, blocks lists and private groups, again these are not cross-platform, current mission progress so finish any in progress missions first and NPC crew names and appearances. And finally Fleet Carriers, Frontier are recommending that existing Fleet Carriers be decommissioned, wait for the credit refund to be made and then apply for the account copy and repurchase the carrier afterwards. The reality here is that you could have access to two Fleet Carriers as a result, one on your console account and one on the PC side as they are 100% cross-platform. The copy option will be a time limited offer but Fdev reassured that it won't be on a short fuse and there will be plenty of warnings for the start and the end of the process to allow everyone that wants to take part to take advantage of it. Overall short of odyssey miraculously appearing on consoles overnight this is a great solution with just about everything not only being transferred across but actually being copied across with a free copy of Elite Dangerous Horizons bundled in and the original account also being left active. There's a really important point I want to make about the account transfer opportunity and it's tied into what I'm going to talk about next so I'll give my thoughts there after we've talked about that to give it the proper context. Next up then the team addressed the future of the game, their plans for the rest of the year and also forward into 2023. Bear with me while I get through this because there's some important points I want to make. In the forum post and roadmap graphic that accompanied the stream the community team stated that their three main focuses for the rest of the year are our old friends, stability and optimisation and launching what they refer to as the next phase of the narrative. In the live stream they also spoke about the impending crescendo event that will top off the story arc around the azimuth saga and whoever or whatever salvation is. All this will be delivered across three planned updates arriving between now and 2023 the first of which update 12 is arriving this month. Update 13 is currently planned for August 2022 and update 14 is planned for November 2022. The roadmap also makes mention of a key feature of the game being overhauled in early 2023. Frontier aren't yet saying what that feature is but mentioned only that they are doing some work behind the scenes with whatever it is. Update 12 later this month plans to deliver further patches to stability and optimisation as well as a new mission variant. The details of that mission variant we don't yet know about I suspect we'll probably start hearing about that as we get closer to the patch release day maybe on the next planned live stream on the 19th of May. Update 13 in August as well as including further enhancements to stability and optimisation will also include the rather nebulous entry of quote narrative content and update 14 planned for November will bring further stability and in frontiers words the introduction of the next major narrative phase. To distill this then update 12 is predominantly patches and updates and the addition of a new mission variant patches 13 and 14 are where the big hitters are. In relation to the azimuth saga and we think update 13 Frontier have said on multiple occasions including last night and in the accompanying forum post that the conclusion of the saga will have widespread meaningful consequences for the galaxy. The forum post directly states and I quote the azimuth saga will conclude in a grand finale event the consequences of which will mark the beginning of the next stage of the elite story in update 14. Frontier are in the tricky position here of predominantly delivering new content and features as part of the ongoing narrative. This is something that Elite Dangerous has historically always done. The big example of that being the Thargoids, a narrative advancement that spawned a new gameplay loop, multiple community events and community goals and eventually led to new weapons, ships and tactics. If you weren't around in the early days of the game to experience the arrival of the Thargoids then you may not be aware that they haven't always been the presence that they are today. Once we'd seen hints of an alien presence in the galaxy their actual arrival into Elite Dangerous was a sudden narrative event that just happened one day when one lucky unlucky pilot in the Pleiades sector was suddenly hyperdicted and knocked out of hyperspace for the first time by a Thargoid interceptor. No one had ever seen this in the game before, ever. It just suddenly happened and it was one of the coolest gaming moments I have ever seen. If Frontier were to detail exactly what was in the narrative updates they were planning to deliver it would essentially be a spoiler for the narrative itself and any new gameplay that was coming down the pipe so their answers to the question of what's coming will always be by necessity somewhat nebulous. As a stark example of what I'm talking about listen to Arthur's statement in this excerpt from last night. I will tell you something we are working on something that has never been attempted before in Elite Dangerous right that's fact right and I can tell you that because I'm involved in it and I'm not gonna tell you what it is I'm not gonna tell you how but you will all experience it if you're in the narrative and that will come with extra stuff that you'll be able to engage with it's gonna be really really cool I can't spoil it and I can't put stuff on this about what's in it because it will ruin it for you so that's the only downside of us focusing on narrative I actually think it's gonna be a fantastic we'll use them in there seven months we got left I think some of that this is gonna be a really cool seven months I think some of you already tinfoil hat and some stuff and trying to put some stuff together we are still focused on optimization we are still looking to get this game running even even better and faster than other machines and yes there is something we're focused we're looking at for early 2023 which we can't talk about right now but we're doing some violence in his work so to answer everybody out there he's asked this question I keep saying it no Elite Dangerous is not dead frontiers roadmaps for elite have always been and are always going to be light on detail and I'm okay with that otherwise it would be like reading the last page of a novel before you'd looked at the first chapter what they needed to do and what they'd failed to do until last night was offer a rough schedule some timings and some reassurances to the player base that there was indeed a future for the game and the larger ongoing narrative as much as they can without spoiling things I believe they have now done that I said I'd come back to the console transfer issue and it's importance what frontier are planning to offer with their console account copy proposal is hugely complicated and offers a lot of featured granularity for anyone who chooses to avail themselves of it I have no doubt it's expensive for the company to execute and honestly they don't have to do it they have already cancelled Odyssey on consoles and regardless of what we as a community think they should do they could just walk away at that point if they so choose the fact that they are choosing to spend the extra development time and money on initiating the console transfer opportunity speaks I believe volumes about what frontiers plans for elite dangerous are it shows a commitment to the product's future and it demonstrates an intent from the company to carry on supporting the game I believe long into the future did you watch last night's live stream and how are you now feeling about the game's future are you planning on jumping from the consoles and porting your commander data over to the PC game to start playing Odyssey let us know in the comments below that's it for now thanks very much for watching if you found this video useful consider subscribing to the channel and maybe take a look at one of our other videos linked on screen right now