Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is incomplete. It’s incomplete, partly, for the same reason Elite Dangerous as a whole is incomplete. There will always be more. Players will always want more. Developers will always want to do more. Just beyond our reach but before the distant horizon, there will be something else to strive for; or to long for. Every step forward reveals something new, just a little farther down the road.
When the foundation upon which you build your game is of the galactic sized magnitude of Elite Dangerous‘ 1:1 scale simulation of the Milky Way; no one can say you lack ambition. 400 Billion star systems, squintillions of planets and other stellar bodies and countless opportunities for interest. There is nothing else quite like Elite Dangerous, nothing that comes close to comparing when it comes to the scale and the detail of its hard sci-fi galaxy.
Ambition will sometimes lead you astray. It will take you down a few wrong turns, lead you to overextend, to reach too far. Before you know it, you might find yourself trapped next to a brown dwarf star with no fuel and less than 15 minutes of air. It happens. For me, it happens in-game when I bite off more than I can chew.
For Frontier Developments, for the people that devote themselves to making Elite, it must feel like that every day. They started by dreaming big and kept on dreaming. Everything they do, they do on a Milky Way sized scale. That is no mean feat. They live on that razor’s edge, the one at the limit of what is possible.
So, yes, Odyssey is incomplete. It has issues that need to be addressed. Frontier have work to do on their communication, there is much to be done. A few deep breaths need to be taken. The journey did not end. There are bugs to be squashed, mechanics to tighten, visuals to sharpen, simulations to fine tune and lessons to be learned. Those steps will be taken.
Elite Dangerous Odyssey is neither the end nor the beginning. It is just one more step along the way towards something greater.
There will always be more.
I hope I get to see it.
Thank you for reading. I’d like to extend a special thank you to the Tanked Up crew, of Ben, Lucy & Aadil, for helping me craft this article by allowing me to talk through the game on the podcast. You can find that episode, episode 267, here.
