When Elite Dangerous: Odyssey went live on PC I was happy to download the update as quickly as I could (doubles the size of the game!) and jump right in, boots on the ground. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite as successful as I’d hoped.

The expansion starts you in a tutorial on a planet’s surface and tasks you with investigating a settlement. It was here that my first negative experience kicked in with the surface textures not loading correctly and the frame rate reduced to a crawl. I might only be running a GTX970 but combined with a beefy CPU it’s been more than enough for Elite Dangerous until now. Even bumping down the resolution didn’t help much. Turns out there’s a few issues, some of which are covered in this Reddit thread in relation to a lack of object culling during rendering. On top of that I wasn’t even able to complete the tutorial as the server was already undergoing maintenance which I assume was the first round of bug fixes… not a great start for the game.

As a result I might wait for a few updates to come through before trying again. I don’t want to be beta testing something that I didn’t sign up for or feel like I need to buy a new graphics card because the game has no optimisation at all. It’s disappointing for sure but I hope the reaction from players is more than enough for a swift response to come from Frontier Developments. Considering it even prompted Frontier founder and Elite co-creator David Braben to make a statement is a sign of it being taken seriously. I’m keeping my fingers crossed…