Frontier's approach to their communication channels have lately returned to an abysmal state, and admist all the recent controversies and issues, it's really no surprise that a lot of popular discussion around the game carries a tone of despair, there is genuinely nothing tangible to look forward to in the game anymore stemming from the confusion as to what the game might even do in the future. Overall, this is a rather depressing atmosphere compared to the game's first couple years, though it did have its issues.
Disclaimer: I personally really appreciated many facets to Odyssey and overall really enjoyed it, though hitting a wall a few dozen hours in from lack of appeal to go forward (which is actually much better than Horizon's launch which eventually killed my interest for a year), I also find myself going against a lot of popular rhetoric in the community about the game's future; I think it's completely understandable and justifiable that we don't have things like ship interiors or Earth-like yet, and I think FPS gameplay on planets actually has some really good quirks to it.
We find ourselves at a point where our knowledge and impression of the game's future for many of us is structured as:
– We don't really know whether Odyssey will include meaningful content updates (being things like the blatantly missing space EVA in a space game, or things like base building, or whether Frontier intend to develop planets further within it, not trivialities which should have really been in at launch such as Carrier interiors and the Scorpion).
– We don't really know what Frontier's vision of what the game could grow into looks like anymore, i.e we don't know of any features they really want to add or are actively exploring.
– We don't know whether we could end up waiting 3+ years for the next expansion if it comes at all, and whether our next taste of meaningful additions will depend on it.
– If anything, compared to the past Frontier's approach lately has given a seeming attitude of disinterest so it looks like development of the game would be scaling down if anything.
We find this for ourselves whilst the game has had a catastrophic launch period, console development is cancelled, many respects of Odyssey are still underdelivered and its technical performance whilst playable is still unacceptable in standards, and it is genuinely difficult to feel hopeful for the game when we don't even know how things can get better or make up for it anymore. It feels wrong to be demanding more content so soon after Odyssey's launch, but it has genuinely been that sparse in content. And of course this silence isn't our first time, prior to Odyssey's marketing campaign we went years without knowing what was in store for the game's future but at least we knew that the whole team was working on something big. The CM team blacked out for a whole quarter year after new years and it felt frustrating to be met with "oh yeah hey again, don't forget about Update 11 and btw console development is cancelled"
Compare this to the game's early years after launch. Around launch, we were thrown a dev diary with the developers throwing around all these crazy ideas as to what they could do with the game and by god you could only feel to share that excitment for what they might do, then within less then a year, we had a multitude of regular content updates to the game (and even when the ambitious ones underdelivered hey at least you could still enjoy the speed new stuff was coming out at), Horizons got very quickly announced which led to much of the community's surprise to discover things like CMDR customization and multi-crew coming much sooner than anticipated (and other things like SLFs confusingly coming out much later despite being on the Xbox launch trailer). You still had a complaining community, and of course there was a lot of issues, but at least you always had something forward to look to and the feeling that the devs were excited for it too.
I understand that live service games are really complicated projects to set out on and they've fostered in many respects very toxic rhetoric among game communities: this perpetual monstrous need for more entertainment, facilitating crunch cultures at work, never being sated with a hobby that's essentially supposed to be about having fun and not dealing with real issues. People's demands for live service games and that they match the likes of CoD or Fortnite isn't exactly a reasonable phenomenon. But Frontier's approach to at least just communicating to us what's going on has not been good, even if you want to avoid discussing the pace the game is now moving at. I understand communication is also tricky: Plans change or don't go well all the time, you don't want to mislead the community, having to deal with people constantly yelling at you because they didn't get what they wanted, etc. I know it can be particularly frustrating too because Elite at most must depend on a AA budget but has to creating a compelling, high-fidelity game that caters to a wide variety of playstyles – You literally cannot please everyone at the same time, and some people refuse to acknowledge that hey maybe there's not that much practility with looking into a given feature first. But one thing I feel to say with confidence, the approach to just leave us in the dark is absolutely not any better than a past of saying things people don't want to hear or accidentally saying something that would become wrong.
