Elite Dangerous is on Life Support and the Plug Is Loose

What does the future hold for the divisive title?

Back in May 2021 I wrote about the disastrous launch of the Odyssey update for Elite Dangerous. It was very much their ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ moment. The game performed horribly even on the most powerful PC hardware, it was riddled with bugs and what followed was an immediate delay of any further development and a multi-month roadmap of major patch updates rectifying this launch.

At the time I wrote with a hopeful tone, Frontier Developments had a solid track record and I had every reason to trust them.

However, we are coming up on a year since this launch and the current state of things has me worried.

Still taking on water

A year later we are still getting updates focused mostly on fixing the bugs and raising the experience up to what was advertised.

Update 9 launched in early December and whilst it did bring with it the first new piece of functionality all year it also contained a heap of bug fixes for game-breaking bugs and crashes. Update 10 came out this week and while performance and quality are slowly improving, plenty of issues still remain on the cutting room floor, and players are left holding out hope for each and every patch.

All of this work is in service of the PC version of the game only. Console players have been left out in the lurch all year, the Odyssey update on indefinite pause until the PC version is up to snuff. Now a year behind on all the new content, the game’s developers refuse to communicate anything about when console players can expect any news, leaving many speculating that the update simply cannot run on consoles.

That would leave me to hypothesize that concurrent player counts on the consoles are dwindling, given they have been without an update to their live service game for over a year. I lack the evidence to back that hypothesis up, but I do have evidence that the PC population is dwindling.

In the year leading up to the Odyssey update, the monthly concurrent player base peaked at twenty-seven thousand and the average was regularly around eight and nine thousand. After Odyssey, it’s a cliff drop, an average of ten thousand in the launch month, seven thousand the next month, and around three and four thousand players for the rest of the year. Conservatively three thousand core players stopped playing the game altogether after that update and have not yet returned.

Still losing trust

I talked earlier about having every reason to trust Frontier Developments. Since 2014 the game had constantly been improved upon, received regular new content, and the developers had a transparent and open rapport with its community. Prior to Odyssey, I felt that the community and the game's developers were all swimming in the same direction.

As you can imagine the update burned a lot of trust, but unfortunately that’s not where the trust-burning started, and it certainly isn’t where it ended.

Prior to launch, the developers launched a multi-phase ‘Alpha’ program where players were invited to try out the upcoming release and help the devs catch bugs. This entire process was marred with red flags. For one, you had to pay for the privilege to bug test their Alpha for them, something that was only possible through pre-ordering a specific version of the Odyssey release. This resulted in a lot of confusion in the community as people had already pre-ordered other versions of the game — I had to get my pre-order version refunded, and it wasn’t something Frontier had charged for previously.

As players got access to the Alpha they started to see just how broken the game was. Concern started to grow in the community and people began questioning why an ‘Alpha’ was being used to test a game set to be launched in one month’s time. By the time the dust settled, it became clear to me that this Alpha was nothing more than a marketing stunt to drive up pre-order numbers.

With the disastrous launch came the standard ‘we screwed up’ template. A heartfelt apology from the CEO, a roadmap of patch updates, and an increased level of hand-on-heart engagement from their community teams. As negative as I am being, a big shout-out goes to those in the community-engagement positions at Frontier Developments. As we can see from the Steam numbers this update put a lot of people off, but unfortunately more bad news was still to come.

For those not familiar, Odyssey was supposed to be a pinnacle update for the game. The reason why people play Elite Dangerous is that it's a realistic space sim, but you do everything from within the cockpit of your ship. There was no character that you control that allows you to walk around and explore the inside of your ship, a space station, or a planet surface.

Referred to as ‘Space Legs’ the community dreamed of the ability to be a person and walk around the game and after six years the developers finally announced that Space Legs were coming as part of the Odyssey update.

Unfortunately, this is where the community and the developers started swimming in different directions. Odyssey did indeed bring the ability to walk on planets and in space stations, but what it did not bring was the ability to walk around your personal ship. For some players, myself included, that's the feature we wanted the most. Frontier got in front of this messaging prior to launch saying it wouldn't be part of the Odyssey update.

This led players like me to believe that it was coming later, but sadly that is not the case. Frontier then went on to announce that there were no plans whatsoever for that feature. For me this is where I lost whatever trust I had left for them. Prior to launch they led me to believe that ship interiors where coming just not straight away, and then after launch, after they had my money they said it was never coming. It's hard not to see that being a decision made by a money-hungry group of individuals.

Around the same time we got this news, we also got the news that development for Virtual Reality Headset was being stopped. Prior to Odyssey the game had full VR support, but because Odyssey implemented walking around on planets and in space stations that brought with it a series of complications. The developers communicated ahead of launch that VR would have some issues at launch. Upon launch a hacky-workaround was provided which effectively took the flat image and spread it across the headset and their communications led the community to believe that this would be fixed in time.

Sadly this was another bait and switch and Frontier Developments announced after launch that VR development would go no further. Elite Dangerous has traditionally attracted the sorts of players willing to invest a lot of money into VR headsets and other peripherals in order to fully immerse themselves in simulation. To entirely stop VR development, is to say a big ‘fuck you’ to those loyal players and it doesn’t surprise me that the concurrent player numbers on Steam are so low.

Nearly a year on and the trust continues to slowly fall away. Major game-breaking bugs are still present and the studio still isn’t organized enough to stick to promised timelines. Some new functionality (carrier interiors) and bug fixes had been delayed from the end of 2021 to sometime in Q1 2022.

Anything but a live service game

My biggest worry is that the sense of activity that was present a few years ago seems to have vanished. Prior to the release of Odyssey, I penned an article highlighting some of the best moments in Elite. I had written it as a way to memorialize the era that was clearly coming to an end, as the promise of Odyssey really had me believing that it would take the game in some wild new directions. In hindsight it seems more like I was writing the game’s swan song.

When Elite is firing on all cylinders, it’s more than the developers giving us new ships. The background simulation sparks interest and even novels, the mysteries drive the community wild trying to solve them, the discoveries trend on Reddit, and the story impacts thousands of players. In return the game takes on a life outside the game, Youtubers pump out content, third party tools get set up and the antics in the game by the community often make it to the front pages of major video game publications.

All of that has gone. Sure the developers are focusing their efforts on fixing game, and they even found time to give the community some new functionality, but the content didn’t just start to dry up last May. Unfortunately the new stuff for this game started drying up years prior to launch, presumably because development was taking so many resources.

We haven't had a new ship since December 2018 and the Thargoid War that started with a hiss and roar has fizzled out. The mysteries and the discoveries have slowed down, and the background simulation is running on autopilot. The game is growing stale, which means the community is also growing stale.

No longer does Elite make the front page of PC Gamer and the major Elite Dangerous YouTubers have moved on to other games. The only videos they produce about the game either break down what's new in the latest bug fix, or navel-gaze about the game's future.

It’s depressing because it means if Frontier does turn this around, the community will have to be rebuilt from scratch, and that's a whole other big task for them to get right.

CMDR, signing off.

It’s been a heartbreaking year for Elite and I really feel for the players and the developers who have been burned through this process. Video games are hard, something we seem to be reminded of more and more these days, but I genuinely fear that this game has run its course.

It feels like they over-committed in the wrong direction which means so much extra time and energy needs to go into getting back in line with the community and I don’t think the player base will stick around long enough for them to do it.

I hope to be wrong. I leave the game installed on my PC in hopes that one day I can return but for now, I’m going months between log-ins. We can only wait and watch, hoping for the best.