Frontier Developments CEO Apologises Over Elite Dangerous: Odyssey's Poor Performance

We had some positive impressions when we previewed Elite Dangerous's latest expansion, Odyssey. Implementing first-person shooter styled gameplay, new fauna, ground exploration and more, Odyssey showed promise but unfortunately, it's launch has been anything but smooth.

Receiving a "Mostly Negative" user rating on Steam after 3,316 reviews at the time of writing, it's faced wide criticism for poor performance on PC, affecting everyone from minimum specs to even those with high-end hardware. As a result, Frontier Developments CEO David Braben has now issued an apology.

Read More: Elite Dangerous Odyssey: Release Date, Alpha, Trailer, Price, Gameplay and Everything We Know

Frontier Developments CEO Apologises Over Elite Dangerous: Odyssey's Poor Performance

Speaking on Frontier's forum, he released this statement:

With our first hotfix now released and another one arriving very shortly, I wanted to take a moment to address the wider community feedback and reports regarding performance issues, server outages, and bug reports within Elite Dangerous Odyssey.

First and foremost, I would like to apologise wholeheartedly to those who have been suffering from these problems. I would like to reassure you that we take these issues very seriously and that they are our top priority and focus.

Our second hotfix will be released very soon, which we hope will address more of the reported bugs and bring further stability improvements into the game. We will continue to work on updates which will resolve more bugs and improve stability further.

Some of our players are reporting poor performance on machines where we would expect the performance to be good, and others are saying it is fine. We are trying to get to the bottom of this. I have been playing on my old home machine from 2014, which has an Intel i7 Extreme CPU and a GTX 980 GPU, 16 Gb RAM, playing at 1080p full screen at Ultra. I was doing this so I could have a good feel for how the game was playing on older hardware, and I used this same machine during Alpha. I have also been playing on a high spec 2021 dev machine.

I would like to thank you all for your patience and support. The Elite Dangerous community has always been at the heart of the game. We understand that there are a number of players who have had problems accessing and playing the game and I can assure you that we are focusing fully on improving this for those affected and communicating with you openly and regularly about how these issues are being addressed.

While it's lovely seeing such Braben offer such direct community engagement, it remains disappointing that Odyssey even launched in this state. As stated above, a hotfix has already been released and a second one is on the way. As such, we're hopeful this will bring Odyssey to a more playable form.