Frontier Developments’ CEO David Braben has once more taken to the forums of Elite: Dangerous to address the community regarding the ongoing problems with the Odyssey expansion.
Braben first opened up with an explanation on what was causing the game’s servers to fail at the beginning of Odyssey’s arrival, pointing to the way Fleet Carriers operate as a source of the problems: Fleet Carriers exist in both Odyssey and Horizons servers, and when they jumped and brought other players in tow, it caused “significant amounts of data” to transfer between servers unnecessarily. As readers will note, Fleet Carriers have since been fixed and Braben notes that server disconnects are “greatly reduced” in spite of record concurrency numbers.
As for the matter of performance, Braben explains that the team is working on the problem but also notes that this is a far larger challenge to tackle and so “may take a little longer to resolve.” Incidentally, performance problems on high-end machines are possibly CPU-related, but Braben promises that the devs will get to the bottom of it all with the help of the community.
Further communication on how FDev will attack Odyssey’s problems will come by way of a roadmap set to arrive on June 4th, which will include some details on specific improvements. In the meantime, Braben once more apologized for the expansion’s issues, asked for patience from the community, and tried to offer some perspective on what Elite is attempting with Odyssey. “This is not a static arena shooter where all the players join at the start, but where players are continually joining, leaving, travelling between servers alone and in groups, and so many other things,” Braben writes. “It is a real shame this incredible achievement is somewhat overshadowed by the issues we have been seeing.”
