I’ve been following the development of Elite: Dangerous for quite some time now and what a ride it’s been. I have always been infatuated with the idea of what Elite: Dangerous wanted to do. The potential was astounding. The promise was unbelievable. The vision was palpable and glorious and everything that a true sci-fi nerd wanted out of a space sim game. A fully simulated 1:1 scale model of the Milky Way Galaxy? Holy crap. Every star system explorable? Yes please. A complex, simulated background economy? What? Factions that ebb and flow through expansion, negotiations, war, and politics that can be directly influenced by the players’ actions? You’re kidding. But it’s true. It’s all true, to a certain extent.
And then there were the rumors. Wild, crazy rumors that eventually, you’d be able to walk around! You wouldn’t just be locked into the cockpit of your ship, or your SRV (the deployable ground vehicle to explore planet surfaces that was released with the Horizons expansion). No, there was promise that your Commander would be under your direct control with the ability to walk around inside space stations, interact directly with other NPC’s and players alike, and even explore planets and settlements on foot! It seemed almost too good to be true.
And for years it was. But there were still the rumors that eventually, it would come to be a reality. That day did finally come, with the release of the Odyssey expansion to the base game. And holy crap do people hate it. Something happened. I don’t know what. Maybe it wasn’t just one thing. Maybe COVID had something to do with it. Maybe pushing something incomplete out the door to please investors had something to do with it. Maybe crunch had something to do with it. Maybe Frontier doesn’t care about making a great game anymore and is focusing their attention elsewhere. I have no idea.
What I do know is that the Odyssey expansion seems to have created more problems than it solved. Yes, you can get out of your ship and walk around stations and certain planets (only ones with no or limited atmospheres, but none yet that are heavily populated or that have lush atmospheres). But what you do on foot seems to be fairly limited to either infiltrating, attacking, or rescuing various settlements on these barren rocks, or exploring to try and find rare xenobiological samples of strange alien flora.
I’m not going to go into great detail about the fact that you can’t walk around inside your own ship, which to me seems to be a huge missed opportunity for all sorts of interesting gameplay like hands-on repairs, EVA missions to other ships, more immersive multiplayer opportunities, etc. But, as of right now, it seems that Frontier’s intentions are not to work on ship interiors in the foreseeable future.
Gone also is the option of playing this new expansion in VR, which, for many, was a huge draw for playing the game in the first place. On top of that, the look and feel of the game has seemingly changed at an almost core level. The lighting is different. Stations emit a strange and unnatural looking glow. Lights are emissive in a hazy, over-saturated kind of way. Planets took a hit, too with drastic shifts to the way that planets look both from a distance and up close.
A game that once created a sensation of flying through a simulacrum of our own galaxy has become a caricature of itself. It feels artificial and weird and broken in fundamental ways. Even under the hood, there are reports that the expansion has broken the BGS (background simulation, running all the economy, factions, politics, etc.) and that much of this is due to the fact that they’ve basically divided the game into two instances that have to remain synced until the Odyssey expansion is released to consoles as well.
But the developers assure us that they’re working on it. They understand that people aren’t happy and they’re trying to figure out what happened. Currently, as of the writing of this review, the game’s expansion sits at a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam, which is shameful for a franchise that has been such a stalwart name in the genre for so very, very long.
I can’t help but be reminded of how I felt when the game first released. I recall being sold by the fancy words and promises of amazing things to come during the crowdfunding campaign. I believed that all of these shiny amazing things were right around the corner. That the “mile wide and an inch deep” gameplay would soon gain depth. But, I feel like I’ve been had. I feel like I was sold a lie. That the ocean keeps getting wider, but no less shallow. There is more to do in the game now than there was at the time it was originally released, but with this new expansion, it almost serves as a rude reminder of all of the things we were promised that we still have never gotten. Like, with the ability to walk would come the ability to go on a safari on a strange world and hunt alien big game, just as an example.
I know that making games is not easy. And I know that it takes time to put all of these moving pieces together and make them play nicely with each other. But I also know that with each iteration of expansions, I keep feeling like I’m just being given a fraction of what was promised, hoping that I’ll forget what it was supposed to be.
I want to love Elite Dangerous: Odyssey. As it stands right now, I don’t love it, but I still hold out hope that it will improve. I hold out hope that it was pushed out the door early and that they are still behind the scenes diligently working on adding more and improved content to deepen the pool and not just widen it more. I hold out hope that someday I’ll be able to walk around on a proper planet with vegetation, animals, and the like a la No Man’s Sky and fly around in the actual atmosphere and then land and explore. I even hold out hope that someday I’ll be able to visit a planet with cities, like Earth. But I know that those hopes are as tiny and distant as the stars in the sky.
In the end, I will say that Elite will always hold a special place in my heart. It captures some mystical aspect of space exploration and adventure that no other game of its kind has ever done before or since. It is a hopeful, amazing, grandiose attempt at creating an amazing game. It has just fallen short of the mark so many times that I wonder if it will ever make it.
Here’s to hope. Here’s to Odyssey becoming the expansion that it was meant to be. Maybe by the time it is ready to be released to consoles as well, there will be a reckoning of the code bases and things will improve. Who knows. Time will tell. But how much time? And will there be anyone there at the end?
