 The Odyssey expansion to Elite Dangerous is being heralded by Frontier as the biggest update the game has ever had. The opportunity to finally unbuckle from your seat harness and walk around outside the ship is without a doubt hugely exciting and enticing. One of the criticisms however that I see leveled at Frontier time and again whenever Odyssey is mentioned is fix the game first and let's be honest Elite has its fair share of foibles and bugs. Even if you're a semi-regular player of Elite then I'm sure you'll have your own favourite bug or oddity in the game that continually gnaws away at your enjoyment as they're fairly hard to avoid. For me the big ones are the instability and overall general implementation of multi-crew and how it works or more to the point doesn't with wings or SRVs. Player instancing whilst better right now than it has ever been at any point in the past is still sometimes a frustrating lucky dip. Core mining right now is also just plain broken. You can sort of core mine but the scanner doesn't work as advertised and even though FDF have stated they are aware of this issue there's currently no sign of it being fixed. And the squadrons feature is just screaming for extra functionality and integration into the game. Like a lot of features in Elite it kind of feels like it was rolled out to the player base at version 1 and then just left. So what might be going on here is Elite just being left high and dry? Or is it something else? Frontier developments are consistent in remaining tight lipped about most things Elite with an almost zealot like dedication so it's nigh on impossible to really know what's honestly happening. I can however offer you what I think might be going on or at least what I hope is going on. Elite was announced to the public in November 2012 and then released in December 2014 a full 2 years later. It's quite an old game at this point and it has of course been iterated on and added to in the years since then. I'm no developer but those I've spoken to that know of this dark and mystical art form have often spoken to me in hushed whispers of a thing they call technical debt. The internet defines technical debt as quote a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer unquote. My understanding is that essentially the code has been patched and iterated on so much that it's now basically a big bag of spaghetti and trying to weave more spaghetti into the existing bag of spaghetti is just too complex and will invariably end up breaking something else. So with such a project as Elite you invariably reach a point where in order to move forward you have to unscramble all your spaghetti and lay it out straight again before you can add more spaghetti to it. And that's a lot of spaghetti. We believe from comments David Braben made at a Frontier shareholder meeting earlier this year that Elite is due a code refresh and that that code refresh is being delivered via a paid update. That being the case and if my assumptions about technical debt are correct then it's entirely possible that Frontier is in a somewhat awkward position with Elite Dangerous. If Odyssey is indeed the public face of that code refresh then it is possible that some if not all of the quirks and bugs may already be gone in the forthcoming brave new version of Elite's code. For Frontier it makes no sense to repair the issue twice and therefore risk upsetting the spaghetti bag still further so the inevitable result is that the player is left with bugs and wonky features that persist version after version until the mythical code refresh arrives like a bag of unicorn scratchings at a weekend boot sale. Frontier's big problem as I see it is communicating this to the player base and I'm not unsympathetic to that. If you fess up and say that's fixed but it's in the new version next year then you will undoubtedly harvest a firestorm of ire and salt the like of which the world has never seen except for that time when Blizzard first nerfed Druids into oblivion Mankind will surely never recover from that. Equally for players not being told anything at all about what they can look forward to is just as frustrating. If the bugs that we're currently wrestling aren't solved with Odyssey's release then the game could be a tough sell for Frontier going forward. It may be the case that we're not actually officially told about the code refresh at all it's simply something that happens in the background and becomes the next version of Elite Dangerous. If Odyssey is indeed the fabled code refresh that was etched into stone tablets and brought down from the mountain and the game is not just being added to but repaired, revamped and almost rebuilt then it makes early 2021 an even more interesting proposition than it already was. What are your feelings on all this do you think bug fixes are realistically now a next year thing would you feel better if Evdev were more transparent about their plans and what are you hoping to see fixed first sound off 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 oh seven 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.