 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 16th of July 2021, I'm CMDR Buur. In this weeks news, the community team points loudly at the Azimuth-Saga storyline and Frontier doubles down on PC development. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, click the little bell icon and remember to select all notifications and to further help support the work of this channel, you'll also find us on Patreon, links to everything you need are in the description below. Something interesting happened on the forums on Tuesday. Community manager Bruce Guerrido posted a very lengthy thread called the Azimuth-Saga the story so far. For the uninitiated the Azimuth-Saga is what Frontier is calling the storyline currently playing out in-game, surrounding long missing mega ships, shady corporations, dodgy dealings, alien technology and self-proclaimed messianic type figures promising a desire to save us from the bogeyman under the bed. Frontier's community managers have stated on a number of occasions that the multi-part story will have consequences and that our actions in the game are branching those consequences and driving the direction the narrative moves in. The story has been playing out for some time now since October 2020 in fact and with its many intertwined threads and multi-faceted community goals it can be difficult for the less active, less tin foil-hatted players in the game to keep tabs on. This thread then serves a useful purpose, it's a nice refresher on where we started, where we've been and where we are but I can't help wondering if this thread having suddenly arrived doesn't serve another purpose. Are Frontier's Dungeon Masters just offering up a friendly summary for those that might have missed the narrative in the flurry of their everyday lives or are they trying to underline and point loudly at something in the game to ensure that we either understand the consequences of our decision or that perhaps we're missing something that's in plain sight? The latest story on Galnet implies that the dredger ships that were taking apart the long lost Megaship the Hesperus have left to pull apart something more valuable and we still have a not so long lost Aegis Megaship that went missing just a few weeks ago. Whatever the reason, if you've not been keeping track of the ongoing story in the game or you perhaps need a refresher or you want to go over the finer details with a magnifying glass then it's now perfectly documented for you, there's a link in the description below this video. As we reported earlier this week Frontier's CEO David Braben took to the forums to announce that the company had made the decision to refocus its development efforts on fixing the PC build of Elite Dangerous Odyssey before launching the product on other platforms and the unwanted cost of that refocus was that the console release of Odyssey is now indefinitely delayed. Gamers are generally speaking fickle creatures and understandably the continued problems and delays to Odyssey will undoubtedly be causing some players to leave or look elsewhere for their gaming if not space gaming fix. When analysing a situation like this with let's be honest little to no solid facts whatsoever to work off of it's important to attempt to remove the emotion from the analysis. That in and of itself is quite hard to do, video games are by their very nature emotion inducing constructs indeed in casual conversation if you were to ask Rene or I what we thought of Elite Dangerous we'd tell you that overall we love it. Here's what we think is going on here and what we're likely to see as a result. I would think Frontier has projections for how many people are engaging with the game at this point in it's life cycle. Those projections will make assumptions about how many people log in, how long they stay logged in, what activity they engage in whilst logged in and how long they engage with that activity. And I'm completely guessing here they will likely be holding those projections up against the actual level of player engagement in the game seeing an undesirable drop off and therefore analysing why that drop off is happening and acting accordingly in an attempt to limit the drop off. Likewise they will be looking at how many arcs they are selling on a weekly basis, how many transactions on the store those arcs translate into and once again seeing a drop off. That drop off in engagement and therefore arcs etc will hit their bottom line, how much revenue they're making and that's the point when the board of directors not just David Braben will get really involved. That's just how companies work whilst engagement with the game from a player level is driven by emotion it isn't at the corporate level. The almighty revenue will be shouting at Frontier and demanding that they bring their results much more in line with their projections. So how to do that? Obviously fixing bugs is part of the story, people can't engage with your game if they can't play it or the experience they have whilst playing it is negative. That is obviously going to be a priority number one for Frontier no two ways about it and we do know now that patch six is in the works at Frontier. In his forum post David also made mention of additional features and content. As a product I believe but I don't honestly know that Frontier was likely destined to ship with a few extra features than it has right now but the pandemic landed slap bang in the middle of that development cycle and inevitably things got delayed. Not big features I don't think shipping terriers were ever in the plan for odyssey but there do seem to be some odd design decisions in the product that we have at the moment that almost feel like loose ends that were meant to be tied off. Wings or teams are still limited to four people but even the largest ship in the game can only carry three people. Station interiors are all very generic and look almost exactly the same no matter where you are in the galaxy and no matter who owns the station. A federal starport looks basically the same on the inside as an imperial or an alliance starport. In the build up to odyssey's launch CQC was mentioned as having an on foot component it never arrived and it's never been mentioned since but the ability to queue for CQC has been added to the ship's cockpit meaning Frontier are presumably keen for you to engage with it still. Despite the much lauded sphere of combat feature that Frontier heralded pre-launch where ships SRVs and on foot players would engage in the same battle at a ground installation PVE combat at least is limited almost exclusively to on foot gameplay you can bring a ship or an SRV sure but the AI never will as a feature in PVE at least it's essentially non-existent. Listing all the odd or missing features in odyssey is a video in and of itself but the problem with trying to analyse this stuff from the outside is that honestly Frontier as an entity tends to make some odd design decisions anyway we have a saying in this house that things are sometimes a bit frontier when they don't quite make sense or add up to what you were anticipating we expect but Frontier has never explicitly stated either way that new features and stuff would be added to odyssey as the product ages anyway this would largely mirror what we saw with elite and horizons in their early days at least we think it's likely that when David says additional features and content he's talking about stuff that has always been in development and maybe got pushed back from launch because of time rather than cut entirely with the intention being at least that odyssey version 1.0 would be the minimum viable product at launch and then be iterated on and expanded to help maintain player engagement. Ultimately what we think we can expect is this an extended period of repairs to what we have now some limited feature additions and improvements that will help drive interest support existing player engagement and bring a few people back that have wandered away with odyssey stabilized and a few small extra features dropped in console development will press forward. So have you been following the azimuth storyline in-game what do you think is salvation's true motivation 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