Big news on the Elite Dangerous front, as Frontier’s CEO David Braben shared that the game will no longer have active development on console. As they move forward with the game, they’re focusing on a single codebase, so all future content will be PC-only.
The announcement comes as a sudden end and the Frontier team does understand it might be disappointing to the Elite Dangerous console community. Braben mentions that that "Odyssey’s launch was less than ideal, including the need to split the PC / console player base to focus on a PC-only launch”. Odyssey released last May and they have been working to improve the experience on PC. There’s still more work to be done, and the complete announcement does also affect development as a whole. Frontier still has more to do to support the game as well as the community. Since Odyssey’s release, reception wasn't up to what they hoped for, the team has focused on improvements and development for both pre-Odyssey and post-Odyssey code bases.
The decision to move to a single codebase is to make additional content to move forward with the story of the game. In order to do this, all console active development will come to an end. Consoles will still continue to run the game and get critical updates or fixes, but all of the new content will be PC-only and will be based on the post-Odyssey code base.
Braben also expresses understanding that the console base may be disappointed by the company’s pulling back, but after consideration, this is how Elite Dangerous moves forward. The move is intended to shore up the long-term future of the game.
While there is no new development news yet to share, the update does say that more news on what they are planning next will be coming. There will be an official new update next week. On PC, of course.
