This video is the final part of my Elite Dangerous Odyssey review and it will be a summing up of my feelings about Odyssey overall. I'll also be giving my answers to two questions that I often get asked, is Elite Dangerous dead and is Elite Dangerous Odyssey worth buying in 2021? To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications and to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. To understand Elite Dangerous Odyssey and the community reaction to it it's important to reflect on the circumstances around the games release. There's no way to sugarcoat the fact that the released version of Elite Dangerous Odyssey was pretty horrible. When the Alpha arrived whilst it was generally well received as an Alpha there were concerns within the community that it was very late in the day before the full product was due and the Alpha wasn't being followed up with a beta test. Those fears were unfortunately fully realized when Odyssey resolved to be buggy and unoptimized at launch. There was anticipation that the game was about to get an injection of adrenaline to move into a brave new era and that with its launch we'd possibly see new ships, new stellar phenomena, new SRVs and be standing quite literally toe to toe with Thargoid invaders. The reality was however quite different and at that point at least if Frontier had any plans for new features they simply weren't saying. The promised refresh of planetary rendering and up close planetary details that came with Odyssey also fell quite literally flat. Whilst the new tenuous atmospheric effects were undoubtedly impressive and seeing that thin veil of atmosphere from orbit will never get old finally seeing blue skies above our heads after years of pitch black peppered with stars was without a doubt a watershed moment. When you reach the planet's surface however gone were the vertiginous mountain peaks and precipitous canyons and valleys we'd become accustomed to in horizons, instead replaced with a new terrain engine that left everything to be honest feeling somewhat bland, vanilla and featureless. Whilst dealing with pantheonic disappointments like bugs, framerate issues and on foot content it also became apparent that Odyssey far from being an inclusive expansion that acknowledged what had come before, intertwined with it and then added to and enhanced it was in fact a completely separate layer on top. There were no enhancements to the stellar forge, no functional or visual updates to phenomena like black holes, no additions like comets, no revisits to systemic asteroid belts, no surprises at all in fact, the vanilla space game was just the same on May the 19th as it had mostly been for the 7 years previously. Compounding the feeling of a layered rather than integrated product is the fact that you could in theory play Odyssey completely on its own, largely ignoring the flying spaceships part of the wider game if you chose to. Physical multi crew and the Apex shuttle system allows the player to move around the galaxy without ever getting involved in the vanilla game and yet as a new player if you want to play Odyssey you still need to own Elite Dangerous. It almost feels like Frontier nearly made the expansion as a standalone expansion but then backed away from the idea at the last minute or perhaps intend to revisit it in the future. Odyssey currently sells for 30 pounds, Elite Dangerous is 20 pounds when it's not in a sale making Odyssey a 50 pound game for a completely new player. For such a problematic product at launch that's an expensive proposition. Frontier I'm sure know they messed up with Odyssey, they've been told by the community enough on forums, videos and social media and we've spoken before on this channel about the real world costs of a launch like Odyssey. These kinds of collateral impact points don't go unnoticed and unrecognized inside large corporations. Bugs and optimization issues aside a huge amount of the negative feeling around Odyssey was undoubtedly caused by community expectation management. Historically this is something that Frontier have always struggled with and been chided for by their community on numerous occasions with little change from the company as a result. In that regard it does seem that Odyssey has been something of a watershed moment. We've already seen a significant change for the better in the way Frontier communicates with its public audience in the weeks and months following the Odyssey backlash and I'm seeing no signs of that letting up now, far from it, in fact they're actually getting better at communication the longer it goes on. At the start of this piece I posited two questions, is Elite Dangerous Odyssey worth a buy and is Elite Dangerous as a franchise dead? I'll cover that last one first. If viewing all of the above launch problems from the outside you'd be forgiven for thinking that Odyssey was utterly devoid of value and that the Cambridge developers flagship space trader franchise Elite Dangerous had just weeks to live. When it became apparent that Odyssey was in trouble the company also immediately publicly started setting about fixing the situation. Frontier's most upfront of front men Arthur told me when talking about fixes for the beleaguered game has since day one repeated over and over quote we're not stopping unquote and I can attest that very much seems to be the case. Whilst as I speak these words Odyssey is on the cusp of point release patch number eight there have been innumerate smaller patches and updates across both horizons and Odyssey since May. The game clearly hasn't seen the level of player retention that perhaps everyone expected it to see but along with its problems the expansions launch did coincide largely with the end of lockdown from the pandemic and the start of the summer holidays. Without a shadow of a doubt however Odyssey lost Elite Dangerous as a franchise a bunch of its player base but I suspect that real world circumstances have somewhat exacerbated and amplified that perception of a player exodus. Ultimately as a franchise prior to the Odyssey launch Elite Dangerous was bringing in a significant portion of Frontier's annual revenue. Its input into the company coffers were on a par with titles like Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo and Jurassic World Evolution and the company's stock market predictions still place it on an equal footing with those titles going forward. Whilst Odyssey will have underperformed on expectations it's still making a significant amount of money for Frontier and they're therefore not going to just close that revenue stream. So is Elite Dangerous as a game dead in 2021? No I can see no evidence whatsoever of that being the case and I've seen no compelling fact backed argument from anywhere else that the game is anywhere near to being dead. Elite Dangerous even without Odyssey has seen the welcome return of Galnet with associated regular very well constructed ongoing event driven narrative in the game and there is still a large portion of players engaging with the game on a regular basis. People are playing it on consoles on PC in Horizons and in Odyssey and it's still being developed and worked on and it's still making money for Frontier and all the time this is happening Frontier will continue to support it. But what of Odyssey then five months after launch is it worth a buy? The answer to that question is obviously much more personal and much more nuanced. Here at the Burpit we've always believed that Odyssey was to be a platform. It's the next step no pun intended that Elite needed to take to move the franchise forward to the places that David Braben promised to take it all the way back in the Kickstarter days of 2012 and 2013. In order to get to the spacewalks ship interiors and Earthlight worlds we're all dreaming of seeing from the cockpit of a Cobra Mark 3 you have to start with Odyssey. To a degree we expected it to be a somewhat minimalistic version of the space legs dream to enable those next steps. Had the Odyssey that we have today have been delivered back in May instead whilst there would still be problems the dialogue around those problems would undoubtedly be of a different flavour to what we've all endured these last few months. Whether Odyssey is worth the price of admission for you personally will very much depend on your relationship with Elite Dangerous. In many regards Odyssey is a revolution, in just as many regards it's more of the same but from a different perspective. Elite Dangerous has always very much been a framework, a game about existing in a sandbox universe that leaves the player to find their own sense of purpose and direction. It's the choose your own adventure of space sims and that's one of the reasons that so many people often struggle to understand the appeal of the game. It's also the reason that so many people, yours truly included, adore the game so much and will evangelise its many nebulous plus points at the slightest hint of interest from an unsuspecting victim. For my own part I cannot imagine playing Elite Dangerous now without Odyssey. It's been absorbed into my greater Elite Dangerous experience and I'll happily flip between the ship game and the feet game never really seeing the join in between anymore. Just this week whilst in a team with a friend I left the bar area of a starport walked purposefully across the landing bay and jumped into my Cobra Mark 3, seamlessly slipped out into space and after a short super cruise ride dropped out of orbit onto the surface of a tenuous atmospheric world met my friend who landed nearby in his Aspect Explorer and together we drove our SRVs to a waiting industrial settlement and then crouched together on the rooftop popping off the patrolling guards with Odyssey's version of a sniper rifle before clearing the unlucky remaining buildings of life room by room and then stealing all their stuff. It was a fantastic gaming experience given the ease with which we were able to identify what we wanted to do concoct a plan and then execute that plan reacting to the wrinkles that the game put in our way as that plan unfolded I'd put it in my top 10 gaming experiences of the last 20 years in any game let alone within just Elite. Frontier are now finally talking about the future post launch. We're seeing work in progress screenshots of megaship interior spaces coming with update 8 a new multi-crew capable SRV has finally been teased on foot player remotes are being introduced and fleet carrier interiors are on the way as well as new missions being worked on and new NPC behaviour is also being introduced to further flesh out the Odyssey experience. Frontier assuring us that this is just the beginning and there is yet more to come further down the line. Taking a more holistic view before Odyssey launched the company had started to address some of the long-term player concerns with the vanilla game. Ship-borne combat payouts from bounty hunting and Thargoid combat being just two examples and just recently they reached out to the AXI for commentary on balance changes to the anti-Xeno toolset they'd like to see. It does feel like Frontier is at least trying to be the company that everyone has been shouting at them to be for the last few years. There's still plenty of features that I was disappointed to not see in Odyssey, power play is still neglected, squadrons still feel woefully underdeveloped and devoid of features, weirdly virtual multicrew has some persistent oddities with it that aren't present in physical multicrew and there's of course the lack of expansion to the wider galactic stellar landscape. That all being said, ultimately the question is this, is Elite Dangerous better with Odyssey? For me it's a solid yes absolutely, I do find the gameplay Odyssey brings to the table very compelling. Whilst at launch it was barely a minimum viable product, as more features get added to it as we've seen with Elite's previous iterations it will undoubtedly get better, fleshed out and closer to the vision that was sold before the Alpha launched. When Horizons launched it was a base version of what we see in the game today, as it matured, the gameplay and systems it contains were expanded on and improved and we've no reason to believe this isn't also the case with Odyssey. If you're not yet sold on Odyssey and what it offers but you are still a fan of Elite, then of course hold off, but maybe keep an eye on where it goes from here, see how the newly announced features pan out and see what gameplay wrinkles they introduce and then decide if it's for you. Either way, I don't believe Elite will be going away anytime soon so you have as much time as you need to make up your mind. So what are your thoughts on all things Odyssey now? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now, thanks very much for watching, if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel and maybe take a look at one of our other videos linked on screen right now.