When Frontier Developments opened preorders for Elite Dangerous’ Odyssey expansion last month, most gamers presumed the launch was just around the corner. And it is! It’s just that the corner is a smidge further off than anyone thought, depending on your platform of choice. In other words, Q1 is not happening.
In a dev blog early this morning, Frontier admitted that renewed pandemic lockdowns have forced the team to tweak its development timeline for the expansion: “Our PC plans have only been affected by a small amount, however our plans for the console release will unfortunately see a larger development shift,” the studio says. Ultimately, the PC alpha will see a delay to early spring, with the full PC coming in late spring and the PS4 and Xbox One launches pushing off until autumn of 2021.
“We understand that for many, this additional delay will be frustrating,” Frontier writes. “Once again, we would like to apologise wholeheartedly to our community, especially our console Commanders. However, as mentioned previously, we feel it is vital to ensure that the content being released on consoles meets the highest standards and this will require this additional extension to our roadmap.”
Elite players on Reddit aren’t super upset about the delay, with many suggesting they’d rather all the bugs be worked out first in order to avoid a Cyberpunk 2077 scenario.
Worth noting here is that the game is doing better than ever: Frontier has said the game broke its concurrency records multiple times over 2020, including “just before Christmas.”
“Over its lifetime Elite Dangerous has already generated over £100m in revenues, with over 4 million base game units sold. A successful strategy to seed new players in advance of the launch of Odyssey yielded an additional 8 million base game owners through the launch of Elite Dangerous on the Epic Games Store in November 2020 including a ‘Free Week’.”
