Today is a big ol’ bit of updatin’ for the space sandbox of Elite: Dangerous. Not only does today mark the launch of Update 8 for the Odyssey expansion, but it also marks a number of fixes to the Horizons version of the game on both PC and consoles.
For Odyssey, there are a number of features arriving that Frontier Developments had already noted, such as an emote wheel, some new Engineers in Colonia, four-player multicrew for several ships, the ability to walk the interiors of certain megaship types, and several new missions involving smuggling, deliveries, and meeting and interacting with NPCs. Certain missions can also see hunter and assassin ships involved as well.
Update 8 also applies a variety of fixes and adjustments to AI behaviors, audio, and performance optimizations among other things. On the subject of optimization, the devs note that this update brought “significant performance improvements to the on-foot experience during internal tests” and appear to indicate that further performance boosts may not be coming. That said, the devs will continue to investigate whether more optimization can be made, and will be taking in case-by-case player feedback.
If you’re still the sort of Commander who would rather play Horizons instead, your game is getting an update too. Most of this patch primarily has maintenance work for the game, but it also adds fixes to a rare softlock issue, several different clipping problems, and store item previews.
Release timing for these patches is a bit different from the original timeline FDev shared, but in any event the updates available for download by the time you’re reading this.
