 The Elite Dangerous Odyssey Info Drop from Frontier that was expected this week has arrived earlier than originally anticipated and in a different form, but it is here. In this video we're breaking down what Frontier have said and what we now know. 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. Frontier kicked off this week in Elite with a 90 minute Super Cruise News livestream on Tuesday that primarily focused on answering questions from the chat and previewing the upcoming UI changes to the ship outfitting system which are scheduled to arrive in the game on patch 5 on Thursday morning. The team stated that the flow of the UI has been brought in line with something more akin to that seen in Horizons and the danger of accidentally selling engineered modules has been significantly reduced with the UI defaulting to storing rather than selling modules and even then when selling is still selected it will apparently still flash up warnings which was all quite frankly a relief to hear. Recently here at the pit visits to the outfitting screen have been a multi-person affair with management sign off being granted before anything is clicked on. The CMs also mentioned a new web based community calendar that is in development currently at pains to point out that it is being developed by the web team and his development doesn't distract from the development on the main game. The calendar will apparently allow the community to post their own events such as expeditions, races or PVP matches etc and attach an image associated with the event after being reviewed by a moderator the event will be searchable and filterable by commanders looking to participate in the plethora of community content that the game generates. There was even mention of the calendar one day perhaps appearing in the game but that's not definite and certainly not in the immediate future. So far so promising we look forward to seeing this stuff in the game and it seemed to be generally well received by the stream chat as well. So what of the release today? Before we talk about the content of the drop let's clear some things up. Frontier initially promised a much hyped monthly developer live stream and the information dropped today was to be one of those live streams. Somewhere along the way that plan changed however and it was mentioned on stream this week that this info drop was not only arriving a day earlier than planned but that it wasn't a stream anymore and would be a forum post instead. In the initial paragraphs of the post today it also seems to imply that the developer updates going forward are monthly news articles and without explicitly stating it it appears as though the development updates may have morphed into forum posts also. I can feel your palpable sense of disappointment from here but hear me out for a second. What the community is craving right now is solid information and a stripping away of the nonsense PR fluff from Frontier. With a somewhat divided community what's needed right now is some reassurance and something solid we can all cling to. Developer guest live streams whilst entertaining are particularly in the current climate in danger of falling into the trap of being a pointless bit of theatre to appease the baying mob and that's not what is healthy for Elite right now what's needed are black and white facts and importantly clarity in any message being delivered. At least with a forum post the message can be concise, clear and referenced easily further down the line. It also goes out to the community as a whole rather than just those who watch streams which seems a much better way to divulge information in a timely manner as well. As to what was actually delivered in this particular message well definitely not what we were expecting for sure. The post starts by laying the foundation for future dev posts and what we can expect. It also makes a point of stating that future dev posts will be warts and all likely showing off work in progress screenshots and other content taken from in development builds. It then goes on to detail where the company has been over the last few weeks since the Odyssey launch on PC and summarises the areas where improvements and fixes have focused thus far covering off lighting, character and outfitting UI changes, galaxy map navigation changes, found organic data tracking and overall performance with the caveat added that they are aware that there is still more to do there. The post then goes on to talk about what is next detailing the changes and improvements coming in update 5 which is due to arrive tomorrow Thursday 1st July as we record this. The changes include shared ground missions, overhauls to the cockpit lighting, visual improvements to neutron stars and as we mentioned earlier a redesign of the ship outfitting interface and a rebalance of drop rates for rare items. It's worth noting here one small detail the screenshots in the post show the shield strength rings in the cockpit now have a percentage number associated with them something I was personally really pleased to see. The post then goes on to talk about the top 5 issues as voted on the company's issue tracker and offers some commentary on those issues. The issues listed are lighting, degraded terrain textures when compared to horizons, repeating planetary terrain features, anarchy factions and their struggles with the BGS and overall frames per second performance. Of those 5 things, 3 of them have been mentioned by Frontier before specifically on live streams etc and have generally been addressed in patches and updates already. The 2 mentions of planetary tech failings however are the first time that Frontier has admitted that the planet tech is not working as expected. In the case of degraded terrain textures what Frontier describe as quote pathways to improvement have been identified and the team is actively working on that now which is good to hear. The repeating terrain pattern issue however doesn't pay quite such a rosy image. Whilst not a showstopper of a problem for most players the post does say and I'm quoting here that it's proving to be a very significant technical challenge. At the current time we do not have a workable solution but investigations will continue and we will keep you updated unquote. This sentence in particular would be part of the warts and all approach that Fdev said at the start of the post that they're taking with these updates. Fdev Evolved wouldn't have even acknowledged the problems let alone the fact that a solution was proving problematic. Take your positives where you can. The 5 things listed FPS performance is perhaps the most troubling to read about that really is a showstopper for a lot of people currently and the language used in the post today would seem to imply that it's an issue Fdev are still wrestling with and that we may not yet see significant improvements in patch 5. The final section of the post is entitled future progress the longer roadmap. In essence it lays out that the problems Odyssey has suffered at launch have unsurprisingly knocked Fdev's previously held plans and timelines into touch and those timelines are now being reassessed. This of course could possibly be hinting that the console release of Odyssey is going to be delayed and honestly it wouldn't really be a surprise I don't think to anyone to see some knock on effects of the extra 6 weeks and counting of intense extra development time the PC build has seen. Sadly we may not know what lies in store for the console release for some time yet. It is clear at this point that Odyssey simply wasn't ready for public consumption and needed a good few weeks in the oven to cure still before being released into the wild until Odyssey as a product is in a much better state and with a console launch still bearing down on them as much as we might want it Frontier clearly don't think it appropriate to talk about anything else content wise being added to Odyssey just yet. Whilst we'd love to know just what we've bought into with Odyssey we'd love to know whether there are seasons or further expansions or who knows what coming the plain and simple truth is that in the grand scheme of things the bugs and problems need fixing first and content can and hopefully will be coming after that as Fdev have promised. Fdev and Elite are clearly not out of the weeds yet on the eve of patch number 5 the last in their current patch roadmap it's very clear that more work is yet still to do. The positive we can take from all this however is that they are communicating the post today was about as open and transparent as I've ever seen Fdev be particularly with regard to problems they might be wrestling with and whatever you might think of Odyssey and its launch that fact is to be applauded. Whilst there's clearly been a shifting of policy when it comes to how the dev updates are to be delivered I'm personally pleased that they are taking a much more cautious fact driven and dare I say it less PR driven crowd pleaser approach with their messaging on these important issues. At least we now know more about the format these monthly development updates are going to be taking and we look forward to seeing Fdev continuing to improve the management of expectations within the community going forward. So I'm almost afraid to ask this but now that you've seen the first development update how are you feeling about it are you like us glad that it's a more fact driven forum post or would you rather see a developer explaining problems live on a stream let us know in the comments below. That's it for now thanks very much for watching if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel and maybe take a look at one of our other videos linked on screen right now