Iwao KishiroSakashiroDrew says space legs take the game into a wrong direction, so he wouldn't care about EDO even if it was technically solid. That's where I disagree. Odyssey could have been amazing if implemented properly. On-foot pew-pew is optional. It adds gameplay options without taking anything away, just like CQC did. The poor implementation is the problem. And of course the player base fragmentation that has resulted from it.
I mean, this is why I repeated a lot of times that space legs was unnecessary despite part of community wanting it, because Elite has always been about the STARSHIPS.
Odyssey was pretty much a bad luck name, because remember it took Odysseus ten years to get back home after a lot of misadventures.
Oddity's digression from the core of Elite, "Starships", isn't the issue. The concept actually adds immersion. It gives those Starships a sense of perspective, and it does so without actually changing anything about their core. Anyone playing Horizons can ignore Oddity, and with a few marginal exceptions, not have their enjoyment of the game harmed.
Put into practice however I agree that Oddity as it stands now, even assuming everything works exactly to our individual standards, as a separate and distinct game within the Elite world is ... disappointing. The grind and lack of depth in the gameplay really hurt it here. Being big for big's sake has always been an attraction for some but turn off for many more (at some point or another). That's bad enough, but on top the lackluster gameplay the reality is Oddity crushed any reason for hope left in any Starship game fan. The reason? 9 years of experience with Elite development and their frustrating refusal to fix anything beyond critical issues.
List of things pre Oddity that people have been hoping to see improved and now almost certainly won't be:
1) Exploration detail (comets, accretion disks, lethal stellar phenomenon instead of exclusions zones)
2) Core issues with the user interface (complete absence of customization, random usage of end scroll wrapping, lack of alphabetizing/ordering list results ie: contact list, the fact that 3rd party tools blow the ingame route plotter out of the water, etc...)
3) Multiplayer. They decided (to much outcry) to go online only but to this day use network coding that is barely sufficient. Instancing is a nightmare, Wing/Team formation is rife with bugs, multi-crew is borderline useless...,
4) CQC There is no reason for it to be as poorly thought out and bad as it is. Competitive online shooters are as old as PC's so you have plenty of examples to be inspired by and instead published this embarrassing garbage,
5) The gameplay being grindy and uninspired (even to this day after improvements Engineering wastes way more time than it should consider it is the de facto standard for all playstyles anymore, Powerplay is just... why? Nobody does it except a few oddballs who really just enjoy the excuse to mess with spreadsheets and that they know more, about something that is meaningless, than others)
#5 is probably the worst because not only is Oddity Fdev's fresh new scoop of slop they will exclusively focus on sculpting in an attempt to hide the rotting gruel underneath, but, it clearly broadcasts that FDev has learned NOTHING from their past mistakes. Protests regarding the use of combined and extremely limited storage to the point we changed Engineering inventory? Hey, lets do that again with Oddity goods! People protest how grindy the game is? Double it! Minor complaints about some aspects of the old UI? Add a completely new one that's even worse AND corrupts the old one even more to boot.
So for the Starship fan all these old issues, and more I'm sure, are all going to be swept to the side (or have strong indications they will be completely ignored forever), for at least another year. Oh, and on top of that the entire time the playerbase will be split amongst Horizons and Oddity, PC vs Xbox vs PS. The game is empty now. I accidently entered Shinrarta Dezra in my exploration Dolphin in Open and didn't see a single player save one docked at Jameson's. Everybody is leaving. Or at best 'taking a break' (which is code for 'am now a potential customer for some other game and will probably never look back when I see how good other things actually are').
You couldn't have asked for a better way to Assassinate Elite:Dangerous save a gianormous solar flare that destroys all electricity on the planet for years. It will take a miracle for Elite to ever come back to any semblance of its former glory, and there just aren't enough blind sycophants left to make that kind of effort worth it on FDev's part. I fully anticipate FDev giving up in the near future. My guess is they'll release the console patch, wait a fiscal quarter, release the Thargoid ground combat patch, and when that doesn't meet their expectations announce they're giving up by the end of next Fiscal year.
Elite has this very old and rich lore, and there's a lot of fan fiction out there, so it's very easy to create a character with history and identity within that lore. And once you do that, you become attached to it. It makes you see things in the game that are beyond the actual gameplay mechanics. It's addictive.
I'm a huge fan of Fallout 4, but Fallout 76 was such a disappointment.
. In the end I believe it's a huge risk to trust nothing FDev will happen somewhere during the 2-3 hour trip.