 As we record this video it's been approximately 4 days 18 hours and 21 minutes since the Odyssey expansion landed on the PC. To say the launch of the expansion hasn't been as smooth as everyone would have liked is an understatement of mountainous proportions. In this video we're going to take a look at where we are now, how we may have got here, where it leaves us and how we're feeling about Odyssey. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, click the 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. With any major content expansion to an MMO or live service game problems and bugs are to be expected. There's a reason the phrase I don't play on patch day is such a parroted cliche however the issues with the release of Odyssey go way beyond day 1 glitches or bugs. For a large portion of the player base the problems that landed with Odyssey have arrived with all the welcome of an asteroid landing on a city. Frames per second is by far the biggest showstopper with some players having unacceptably low performance. This doesn't however appear to be consistent across levels of hardware. Some commanders with much lower end hardware are seen perfectly acceptable frame rates in most areas of the game with only some minor slowdowns in busier areas and some players with top-of-the-line hardware are experiencing very low frames per second indeed. That's obviously a situation that sits somewhat at odds with logic and whilst I'm no game developer I was actually quite relieved when we started hearing these reports from the higher end PC graphics card users as well as those at the lower end of the required system specs Frontier issued a few days before the release as this does seem to imply that the problems are almost certainly not related to the power of the hardware and that's a good thing. To further add weight to that hypothesis there was a fascinating post on reddit by a graphics engineer that dives into the nuts and bolts of Odyssey's rendering which gives some fascinating behind the curtain screenshots from someone more eminently qualified than I am and the greatly simplified assessment from that individual concludes that the game isn't culling unwanted polygons as much as it should. There's more to their explanation but that seems to be the general thrust. The good news from that reddit post is that in the original post as considered professional opinion the problems should be eminently fixable. I've linked to the post below if you'd like to read it. Undoubtedly one of the issues that must have been causing further headaches for Frontier are the sheer volume of commanders trying to play the game at any given time. This was indeed mentioned by DAVSTOT on a Frontier livestream as servers were being spun up to cope with the traffic burst from Odyssey it then put an extra unexpected load on the existing servers which then led to some problems appearing. We don't have any solid stats for how many people are trying to play Odyssey at the moment but the Steam statistics page which has always been a good indicator of traffic volume trends for Elite has once again seen previous records for player numbers smashed. We've also seen a resurgence of more instancing problems than we've become used to in recent times but it'll be difficult to make a solid assessment of those until the system stabilizes overall somewhat. So no, this is definitely not what anyone would have wanted for the launch of Odyssey, least of all Frontier. Frontier's community and development teams have reacted to the crisis in the game with admirable gusto and there's been a raft of patches hitting the game almost daily since launch. There are some more general but less immediately obvious and pressing problems with Odyssey that I want to make mention of. Here at the pit we're fairly convinced that the terrain generation engine and the new lighting system are not currently working as intended. Whilst some beautiful vistas are indeed present in the game and there are some genuinely oh wow things to see, overall the new terrain is generally very flat. It almost looks like the galaxy has been ironed. Greenie and I have yet to see a significant mountain or valley like feature and we're prepared to be wrong there but it just doesn't feel right at the moment. Likewise a huge amount of the colour appears to have been flushed out of the planetary bodies while they were being ironed. There's a huge amount of grey and everywhere feels a bit dull to say the least. Whether this is intentional or not I really can't say. If it's an attempt to give the game a more realistic colour palette I'm not convinced of its value personally. In the Alpha it was widely agreed that everywhere was too dark overall and whilst it has been brightened in some places allow me to just show you a stark example as a couple of pictures can speak a thousand words. Here's the beautiful Taygetta system in horizons and then in Odyssey side by side. The difference is evident. I can't believe that's working as intended right now but none of these issues will stop you playing the game and as I'm sure the dev teams are aware it's the showstoppers that must be addressed first and that is happening. I will come back to give some more final thoughts on the Odyssey launch problems but I want to just make a quick mention of how we may have got to this point. I don't work for Frontier and I won't claim to know their inner workings but it strikes me that risk management with huge budgets, shareholder expectations, end of year reports to the stock market and boardroom decisions have more to do with deciding game release schedules than do conversations with development teams at most companies of any significant size in the games industry these days. I'd imagine the developers voice and that of the project management team working with them are heard in the boardroom for sure but ultimately the share price and end of year financial reports have to be shouting quite loudly. When you throw in the exceptional circumstances of a worldwide pandemic then things get really complicated and schedules and deadlines undoubtedly start to tumble. I am positive that no developer or community manager, producer or project manager at Frontier would have liked Odyssey to release on the schedule that it did with the problems that it has. There is an uncommon amount of passion at Frontier and Elite as a franchise is a large part of that and that passion starts right at the top of the company. It always felt odd that Odyssey went from an alpha to a release with no beta in between. It's an angry gamer cliche and I don't like saying it but I genuinely think we're probably playing what would in any other circumstance be a beta. Indeed had it been sold as a beta instead of a full price game the feedback from a lot of players would probably be of a very different texture indeed. Whilst I don't know whether or not Frontier knew for certain that the game would have serious problems on launch I do think it's interesting that apparently quite last minute Horizons was left as an available option. I don't know of a game that has ever done something like that before, installed a massive update and then left the old version of the unupdated game there for you should you need it. I do suspect that Horizons was left unupgraded as an anticipated fallback for players should they need it. If that's the case then honestly given the circumstances the dev team found themselves in they should be applauded for that decision. I think that whilst Frontier anticipated some bugs and perhaps a heavier than necessary launch the frames per second issues particularly do appear to have caught them off guard they genuinely seemed surprised when the problem started appearing. So where does this leave us? As we record this it's not yet been a week since Odyssey launched and since the game dropped the developers have clearly been hammering away at problems and we've had a fair few patches already with those patches arriving at some unusual times. They are obviously working tirelessly to get issues resolved. With regard to the frames per second bug in particular given the nature of what we're seeing and specifically the insight from the Reddit post I've mentioned I am absolutely confident that this situation will get fixed but the game is going to demand a lot more patience than usual from its player base before that happens. The problems this week whilst very frustrating haven't personally dampened our enthusiasm for Odyssey and we don't believe that we've yet seen everything Odyssey has to offer as an expansion. As I've said before on this very channel I do believe Odyssey is a platform for Frontier to build on but I don't think they'll want to be putting anything on that platform until it's proven more stable. Once we've had a chance to poke around Odyssey in a bit more of a meaningful way we will be producing a video giving our thoughts on the gameplay and what Odyssey might mean for the future so make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss that. What's your experience of Odyssey been up till now? Have you been able to access the game and what are your frame rates like? 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.