Players of spaceflight simulation game Elite Dangerous will not be getting any future game developments for console, it has been announced. In a message today on the Elite Dangerous site, Frontier Developments head David Braben has confirmed that the difficulties faced after the console launch of Odyssey have continued to a point where a choice has had to be made.
The statement confirms that the development team at Frontier Developments have been working hard to make progress and improvements to the player experience since the May 2021 launch of the Odyssey expansion. However, this progress has been mainly limited to the PC version of the game. As far as the console player base of Elite Dangerous is concerned, today’s news will come as a real disappointment. Braben explains that after much deliberating, the team have decided to cancel all future console development. Instead, the game will be developed primarily for PC, with future content updates being created for the game’s PC version only.
This is a bold step for the Elite Dangerous team but perhaps, given the game’s recent issues, it’s the correct one. The launch of Odyssey, its most recent expansion, was rocky, to say the least. It met with an overwhelmingly poor reception thanks to a myriad of technical and performance issues, especially on Xbox and PlayStation, but also on PC, where it earned itself a Mostly Negative review rating on Steam. Updates have since improved the state of the game and it was expected that work on the console editions would resume. However, today’s statement effectively cancels any future development and also leaves current content for Xbox One and PS4 dead in the water, with no future updates or support being put in place. Critical updates only will be applied to the console version of Elite Dangerous as things currently stand.
