A mighty big patch landed for Elite Dangerous: Odyssey today, bringing fixes for a bunch of audio and visual bugs, as well as some fixes for the much-maligned UI redesign.
The patch—coming in at around 5.2GB—seems to boast a pretty lengthy list of fixes and tweaks. There are just under 30 fixes for audio alone, mostly fixing the sound mixing, adding missing dialogue and audio cues for things like switching legal/illegal modes on tools.
Surprisingly, there are only three fixes for crashing and stability issues. Fixes for softlocks occurring when rapidly switching perspectives during a reload, melee, or grenade throwing have been addressed, along with a fix for crashes that were happening when applying the Weapon Handling mod.
Other squashed bugs include loot not spawning in habitat building lockers, health deteriorating rapidly when logging back in at a social space, tweaked lighting and VFX effects, and numerous fixes for missions that weren't completing or starting up properly.
Greetings Commanders. The first Elite Dangerous: Odyssey patch is now live and the Elite Dangerous servers are back online. Click here for the patch notes: https://t.co/r23ZLhymS8 pic.twitter.com/9bLIdQNJ2rMay 27, 2021
By far the most fixes in the patch are for the UI, which has borne the brunt of many negative Steam reviews. While it doesn't seem to fix the crux of many people's frustrations (mostly that now everything requires more clicks to complete), issues with unclear or broken UI and HUD problems have been dealt with. The HUD should now be able to render properly to non-16:9 screen ratios, data should appropriately show up in the cockpit, and that pesky "ghost" mission should disappear. The 'reset to orbit' loop when returning to Horizons from Odyssey has also been addressed, and some (but not all) of the transaction server errors have been sorted.
There's a whole mountain of other patch notes to check out on the official Elite Dangerous forums. Frontier says it's aware the patch doesn't address a lot of the main concerns that have caused the expansion to accrue a mediocre 31% positive rating on Steam. "We would like to reassure you that we are aware of other concerns raised from our community, which aren't addressed in today's update," the introduction reads. "We continue to investigate your concerns around performance, UI, and Odyssey's planetary tech and will share information with you as soon as we have it."
The backlash to Odyssey's launch has been painfully clear. The negative reception led Frontier's CEO David Braben to publicly apologise, telling players "we take these issues very seriously and that they are our top priority and focus."
