Facepalm: Elite Dangerous has spent almost a year trying to recover from the disastrous launch of its last expansion. Despite progress made by recent updates, the game now suffers another major blow with the cancellation of console development.
Frontier has announced it's cancelling the launch of its most recent expansion for the console versions of Elite Dangerous. Going forward, consoles will only receive critical updates for the multiplayer space sim while the PC version will still receive updates for current and future expansions.
Frontier founder David Braben explained that since the last expansion titled Odyssey, development of Elite has proceeded on two codebases: one for Odyssey players and another for console players as well as PC players who hadn't purchased Odyssey. Braben said Elite's development can only go forward if Frontier focuses exclusively on the post-Odyssey codebase, which forces the company to cease console development. Presumably this means the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games won't be upgraded for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles.
When Frontier launched Odyssey on PC, it was plagued by poor performance and bugs. It still has a "Mostly Negative" rating on Steam.
Soon after launching Odyssey, Frontier delayed the console versions indefinitely while it released patches for the PC, before ultimately making its decision this week. There have been 10 updates for Odyssey so far with the 11th set to go out on March 11.