Frontier hasn’t had the best year when it comes to Elite Dangerous. After a line of patches that were plagued with many issues, notable community members banded together to craft a list of grievances and format a petition to induce Frontier to provide proper patch notes, put patches into open beta for two weeks, and grant test server access to lifetime subbers. Now it seems the planned December update has been delayed too. The update, announced this past summer complete with teaser trailer, was meant to drop massive fleet carriers for the game.
In its letter to players, Frontier says it took to heart players’ feedback after the September update and is now converting the rest of 2019 and part of 2020 to cleaning up “recent and longstanding issues,” with updates coming every three to four months – including the public beta players asked for. The first one’s coming in December.
“As a result of our updated plans, we have made the difficult decision to defer the release of Fleet Carriers. We are now planning for Fleet Carriers to be released in an update in the second quarter of 2020, rather than in December 2019 as previously stated. This will grant us additional time to refine the feature as well as focusing time on addressing existing reported issues. It will also ensure the state of the game is in a better position to introduce Fleet Carriers, that will provide Commanders even more opportunities to interact with the Milky Way. We understand that this delay will be disappointing for some players, but do know that this decision is one that we do not take lightly, and is made with the best interests of the community and game at heart. Ultimately, we are confident that this will improve the Elite Dangerous experience for all our players.”
So where does that leave the paid 2020 update that the studio teased earlier in 2019? The update the majority of the live team was supposed to be working on? Still on track, as it turns out. “They’re making fantastic progress and on schedule for release by the end of next year,” the devs say. “However, we can only announce the content when it’s at the right stage of development, we estimate this will be ready to talk about at some time in summer 2020, after the Fleet Carriers update.”
