I don't understand the negative reviews

[Cloudy]

I watch a streamer playing this on VR and the performance is fine. I've seen him take out squads of npcs at the outposts (fairly well implemented AI, too, as they duck and dodge, use cover, and out-maneuver him along with periodic reinforcements), and walk around on the stations, and this and that and the other thing, basically just playing the game, and his experience is definitely not reflective of the performance and gameplay concerns voiced in many of these negative reviews.

I mean, what is really going on here? Did one of the FD executives bang a secretary or say the N word or something? What's with all the hate on this game? Was there a day-one patch that fixed all those complaints? Are the day-zero reviewers going to go back and update their reviews?

[ShelLuser]

Did the Tuber play Horizons or Odyssey? The hate isn't hate at all, it's well founded criticism against a DLC that got released while it wasn't even finished yet. Obviously people complained about that, and rightfully so.

[Kosevich]

Every update Frontier fixing some bugs and adding new ones. So for now it looks like a never ending loop. Patch 6 broke lipsync on different languages.
And for playing Odyssey you need a really powerful PC (especially CPU).

[Sighman]

It's a lot better than the reviews indicate unless...

you were expecting higher frame rates than your hardware is giving you
you were expecting ship interiors
you were expecting VR on foot
you were expecting new ships, new srvs, or other 'what if' gameplay some youtubers were theorising about before the launch
you can't handle a bug or three

Each update has improved things re frame rates and bugs, but those early reviews are still there.

I'm loving it and I'm not alone in this, but there was a wall of negative reviews in the first week and it's taking a while for the sentiment to turn around.

i7-6700, 32gb ram, GTX 1660ti

[CMDR WeeJet]

I would say a good 50% of the negative reviews are because the dlc never had features fdev said would not be in the dlc. (Walking in ships and so on)

But on the other hand alot of them are justified due to the performance issues. But like I said alot of its just because of the stupid reason I stated first.

I would say. The dlc in current state deserves a mixed score on steam.

Not the very negative it has.

[Sighman]

I forgot to add - during the first week there was such a huge number of people playing that there were lots of connection problems. That also caused a ton of negative reviews.

[Sighman]

Originally posted by CMDR WeeJet:

I would say. The dlc in current state deserves a mixed score on steam.

Not the very negative it has.

It was actually mixed for a day or two last week (40% positive) then slid back a percentage point or two.

If Update 7 and 8 fix most of the frame rate issues, I'm guessing that will help.

[Agony_Aunt]

Lots and lots of people not happy with it on release due to bugs or performance or lack of ship interiors (which FD never said would be part of the update, but you know, people let their imaginations get carried away)

[funkynutz]

Originally posted by ShelLuser:

Did the Tuber play Horizons or Odyssey?

If you'd bothered to read the first paragraph (instead of just the first sentence) in the original post, you wouldn't need to ask that question

[Jeebs]

I've never had any real performance issues from the moment Odyssey hit Alpha. Sure it made my GPU run crazy hot until they patched it a bunch of times, but I never had any severe FPS drops or any of the crap people have been mostly whining about. Guess it depends on your rig. Not that I'm saying Odyssey was/is perfect or anything. No game is without its bugs, but from my experience it certainly isn't as bad as the reviews would have you believe.

This is why I encourage you to ignore user reviews entirely. The people who write them aren't qualified in any way to be reviewing games. Not to mention that negative reviews are often put out for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the game itself. For example: people review bombing an entire game series because they decided to put out the next game in series on Epic first and they had to wait a few months to get it on Steam or console.

You're better off watching some Let's Play videos and deciding for yourself if it's your cup of tea. For some reason, that doesn't seem to be popular these days. People need someone else telling them what they should think.

[Edelweiss ✿]

Because odyssey pretty much sucks and wasn't even remotely ready for release. Content is sparse, the AI is really not good at all, it just stands there 90% of the time.

[Raingnome Noir]

Planets went from heavily randomised in horizons, to copy/paste tiles in Odyssey, that's my negative review, and no i don't care that the look is prettier. Finding the same mountain-range/pattern 20k light years away from a different planet i saw it before, is the death of exploration for me.

The Steam player numbers speak for themselves, Elite used to have 10-11k regularly at any one time, well before Odyssey had even come out. My own complaint is specialised though not alone, the real issue seems to be that almost no-one likes what Odyssey offered, people wanted ship interiors and earth-like planets, not a lame shooter, and the terrible frame-rate makes all of it unplayable for many anyway.

[Havok]

Probably the one "review" that sums it up well, is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_HTLl1rTqw

The one thing that blew me away is the absolute sponginess of this gameplay

Now I mainly watch these guys (Yamiks for Content and Down To Earth Astronomy for information) but i formulate my own opinion rather than blindly follow the word of others. I have no issue with the *direction* odyssey went, however, my gripe is with the execution. Elite is already a grind, and Yamiks has done 0-Billion speedruns before, and optimized paths for engineering, but ~27 hours to fully upgrade a single suit, or weapon? Thats a little ridiculous imo.

I mainly get 2-3 hours a day, so 9-14 days for a single upgrade, on top of the tedious grind to do nearly anything in ED? thats too much for me.

Ive honestly thought about transferring my xbox assets (about 5 bil) but then i lose my fully engineered Explorer, Python, Conda, Corvette and Cutter. Problem is, while i would have the cash, i would have to regrind all the engineering to rebuild them. Its something im planning to do, but i cant do that on top of the Odyssey grind.

I think the main concern, is that odyssey was supposed to be the DLC that saved ED, rather, it sealed its fate. However, after it all patches out and becomes more stable, I think players will return, problem is, how much damage has already been done vs how much can FDev recover from it.

[Raingnome Noir]

Yamiks is great don't get me wrong, good entertainment, but he's on the more negative side usually when it comes to ED, he's on the opposite end of the scale from the delusionally optimistic Buur pit, personally i think Obsidian Ant is a bit more neutral than both of those, and as such has a more measured view of things.

[Agony_Aunt]

Originally posted by Mama, I'm A Criminal:

Probably the one "review" that sums it up well, is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_HTLl1rTqw

The one thing that blew me away is the absolute sponginess of this gameplay

Now I mainly watch these guys (Yamiks for Content and Down To Earth Astronomy for information) but i formulate my own opinion rather than blindly follow the word of others. I have no issue with the *direction* odyssey went, however, my gripe is with the execution. Elite is already a grind, and Yamiks has done 0-Billion speedruns before, and optimized paths for engineering, but ~27 hours to fully upgrade a single suit, or weapon? Thats a little ridiculous imo.

I mainly get 2-3 hours a day, so 9-14 days for a single upgrade, on top of the tedious grind to do nearly anything in ED? thats too much for me.

Ive honestly thought about transferring my xbox assets (about 5 bil) but then i lose my fully engineered Explorer, Python, Conda, Corvette and Cutter. Problem is, while i would have the cash, i would have to regrind all the engineering to rebuild them. Its something im planning to do, but i cant do that on top of the Odyssey grind.

I think the main concern, is that odyssey was supposed to be the DLC that saved ED, rather, it sealed its fate. However, after it all patches out and becomes more stable, I think players will return, problem is, how much damage has already been done vs how much can FDev recover from it.

Saying you watch Yamiks for content is like saying you read Penthouse for the articles.

[Planewalker]

The negative reviews comes from people who cba to read. (endemic to the interwebz atm)
-as well as people who expected same frames as in horizons. (dissonance is apt there)
(there are exceptions ofc, some of them even well formulated)

There's a post on the official forums from over a year ago that predicted all of it minutely.
(quite the read =)