Elite Dangerous on console won’t receive any new content, including the Odyssey expansion, as developer Frontier Developments has chosen to focus on improving the PC version.
Frontier CEO and founder David Braben announced in a blog post that console versions will now only receive “critical updates” following a “less than ideal” launch of the major Odyssey update on PC last May.
Odyssey was set to be a major step forward for Elite Dangerous but soon gained a “mostly negative” rating on Steam after thousands of players reported performance issues, problems with the UI, and several other bugs and game-breaking glitches.
The game has received a number of major updates to fix the issues on PC, but Braben said there was still a lot of work to be done, and the entire team needed to turn its attention to improving that version.
He said: “Since Odyssey’s release in May 2021, we have worked tirelessly to improve the Odyssey experience on PC, and whilst we have made great progress there is still more to be done. We have been supporting the pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey codebases since.
“Over the last several months, we have been wrestling with the best way to move forward, and it is with a heavy heart we have decided to cancel all console development. We need to be able to move forward with the story of the game, and in order for us to do this we need to focus on a single codebase.”
Odyssey is the second paid expansion for Elite, and added planetary landings, FPS combat and more. It was originally set to launch for console in Autumn 2021, but the negative response to the PC version saw it pushed back indefinitely.
Elite Dangerous is still available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and will seemingly continue to be playable for the time being, as Frontier Developments didn’t indicate that console servers would be shut down despite the lack of support going forward.
Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer who occasionally remembers to tweet @thelastdinsdale.
