If you happen to like internet spaceships, the devs behind Elite Dangerous have some good news for you. Last year when Frontier finished off the development of the console versions of Elite to focus on PC, fans were disappointed. The general feeling is that the game was being essentially left to rot on the vine. The general feeling of the most recent content update, Oddysey, was that it was unpolished and unwanted. The hybrid online spaceship exploration title has had a rough few years, and fans are eagerly awaiting for more news and updates. Maybe Elite Dangerous Update 16 will turn those fortunes around.
The update was supposed to land a bit earlier, but the launch has been pushed back about 24 hours. Update 16 will now be releasing Tuesday, August 1st 2023.
The biggest addition in the new update is the expansion of Thargoid-related content. The alien race will spawn in some new events this time around, although a lot of mystery remains. The mysterious menace has been abducting humans for some time in-universe by kidnapping escape pods. This particular event began in 2017, and has been left intentionally vague since then. The fans will continue to speculate after this update, but hopefully there’s some light being shed this time around. New engagement AI and sound effects are part of the 3 GB update as well, again related to the Thargoid content. Players will likely find themselves face-to-face with the new Hunter-class Thargoid that’s prowling around. It could be that more content is being rolled into update 16, but there’s not a lot of specifics.
The bulk Elite Dangerous Update 16 will focus on bug fixes and a few minor tweaks. Most of the features being worked on right now involve closing out existing issues with Oddysey and the new launcher that came out this past month. So let’s talk about it.We begin with that launcher update, which went live last Monday… and subsequently arrived with some problems including an installation loop bug that got fixed pretty fast.
During the process of rolling out the patch, Frontier will also be streamlining some of its background processes. The latest news roundup confirms that the developer is rolling out closures for a few tracked bugs. Elite Dangerous Update 16 will see three different bugs marked as closed in the issue tracker for the game. A GPU/CPU utilization bug that drops FPS is being marked as fixed after “the team have worked diligently throughout multiple updates to address performance related issues.”
Another set of bugs relating to Anti Aliasing not working correctly has also been patched. Finally, there’s one bug that the team is giving up on. There’s a persistent application hang issue that happens when you close the game where “no further action will be made into a resolution. Where this may be disappointing news, we’d like to thank you for your understanding on this decision.”
Though there is some light at the end of this dark tunnel, as Frontier aim to “release another stability update for release between Update 16 and Update 17,” according to the updates.
