Elite Dangerous: Odyssey releases new patch fixing tons of bugs
After its rough launch last month
When Elite Dangerous: Odyssey came out on May 19th, it was filled to the brim with bugs. Crashes, performance issues, stability problems - you name it, Odyssey was suffering from it. Developers Frontier issued three hotfix patches in its launch week, but more still needed to be done. Now they've released a sizeable patch that should remove a lot of the jank, addressing issues with the servers, UI, lighting, menus, missions and more.
Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is a new expansion that lets players hop out of their ships and explore on their own two legs for the first time. Unfortunately, it came out in such a buggy state that game director David Braben ended up apologising "wholeheartedly" to players suffering from the launch woes.
Even known-Elite Dangerous fan Brendy couldn't quite get past all the jank. In his Elite Dangerous: Odyssey review, he says the expansion wasn't released in a finished state. Unsurprisingly, it's hard to enjoy a game that's fighting against you with crashes, bouncy characters and UI glitches at every opportunity.
"Hopefully in the future Frontier will finish working on Odyssey's borked features. When that happens, I'm sure this will be the place to jump in for new players," he writes. "But I can't make that recommendation now. Perhaps if you're desperate to step foot on a strange world (lord knows I have been) this fancy-yet-malfunctioning ferry might satisfy you. For everyone else, stick with the spaceship you've got."
It seems Frontier have been working pretty hard to get the game on track, however, squashing a ton of bugs in the Horizons Update this morning. The patch notes are lengthy, so I won't post them all here, but it's worth taking a look in case a specific problem has been plaguing you.
The largest number of tweaks revolved around Odyssey's UI, which include showing players correct stats, fixing UI and HUD alignment issues, generally making sure things pop up when they're supposed to, and loads more. AI behaviour has had a few fixes too, such as making them draw the right weapons at the right times.
As for audio, the devs have softened harsh sounds so as not to hurt your ears with high frequencies, and they've improved landing audio, ambient noise, and more. Lighting and brightness in some areas has been tweaked, missions should now show the useful info you need for them, servers should be a bit more stable now, and crashes "associated to mission object location spawning" have been dealt with too. Judging from player responses in the patch notes thread, these are all very welcome fixes. A few players commenting on the changes on Reddit say they've already seen performance improvements too.
Frontier do note a couple more known issues they're investigating: there's a problem with armour not appearing properly on female avatars, and some environment assets are still a bit broken. They haven't said when the next patch is coming, but for now, at least, it seems Odyssey is on the mend.