Elite Dangerous has spent nearly a year attempting to rebound from the catastrophic launch of its last expansion. Despite recent upgrades, the game has suffered another big setback with the cessation of platform production.
Frontier has announced the cancellation of their most recent expansion for Elite Dangerous' console versions. Consoles will only receive crucial upgrades for the multiplayer space sim in the future, while the PC version will continue to receive updates for current and future expansions.
“Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development,” wrote CEO and franchise co-creator David Braben. “We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this we need to focus on a single codebase. Elite Dangerous will continue on console as it is now together with critical updates, but we will focus on new content updates on PC on the post-Odyssey codebase.”
The Odyssey addition included new gameplay elements to the spacefaring game, such as atmospheric flying and new colony settings that provide dynamic first-person gameplay dependent on player actions. However, it also radically altered planet generation, which means that the game no longer looks the same as it did when it first released in 2014. Add in frame rate and connectivity concerns, as well as other challenges, and Odyssey has had a bumpy path since its introduction in the spring of 2021. Frontier appears to be limiting its losses in order to focus on the PC platform, which has by far the largest player population.
Braben informed series fans in early 2021 that production on Odyssey's console version was still in progress, but hampered by pandemic-related concerns. Nonetheless, he teased a console release (at the time, "fall 2021") by expressing "a concentration on making Odyssey as wonderful as it can possibly be for all our Commanders, regardless of their platform."
Odyssey was plagued with poor performance and glitches when Frontier released it on PC. On Steam, it still has a "Mostly Negative" rating.
Frontier postponed the console versions indefinitely as it delivered fixes for the PC, until finally announcing its decision this week. Odyssey has received ten updates thus far, with the eleventh scheduled to be released on March 11.