A common trend that people aren't taking seriously enough these days since the days of Mass Effect 3's Day-1 DLC is corporate pressure on studios to release games and expansions that aren't fully developed or given the proper testing to ensure that upon release day they will be stable enough to play with little issue. This is not one of those cases, in fact it reminds me so much about Fallout 76 and it's bizarre but expected bugs upon release. The differences between the alpha and full release of Elite Dangerous: Odyssey is clear cut and evidently not ready for us. The game has legs and they forgot to stretch before the sprint and it has fallen flat on it's face when the whistle blew.
Within the first two hours of play the game has crashed at least 4 times. One was an unexplained crash inquiring me to fill out what happened-the next three were two code Yellow Adders and one Scarlet Krait. Most of which were crashes due to issues with the transactions server. When downloaded the expansion will load shaders and adjust your settings accordingly to your system to ensure performance is optimal. Despite this and meeting the requirements to run the game optimally the frame rate has taken a severe drop from a consistent 60-115 FPS to 40 and under with most of it clinging around 30 inside stations with stuttering. Turning off Vsync helps but will cause screen tearing and sudden stuttering when entering areas on foot. Most of the lag is in the new on-foot station sections, planet surfaces, approaching stations from supercruise, and even a crash during a frame shift jump to a nearby system. I also found my view outside my canopy being obstructed by a faded black screen when entering the hangar at almost every station I have visited since the update. The ship upon logging in looks like it was bathed in turpentine and had all the details washed right out for about four seconds before the textures finally pop in and look normal again.

At first I thought the darker and the more dim looking instruments in my canopy were a graphic error of some sort, thankfully not-this was fixed by turning up the gamma. Speaking of colors and lighting the texture improvements for the most part are excellent. The station lighting, hull textures, planet surfaces, and even the frame shift jump sequence looks better even if the initial countdown from 3 gives off an effect that looks more like Industrial Light and Magic's sparkly table scraps. The visual design of the stations at their worst feel like they are bare and standard-more like meeting an expectation of a functional environment than exceeding them. The panels and tools are alot of fun to play around with but if I put down this game for a week or so-im gonna need to do the tutorial again to find out how they work again. Credit here where it is due-it does feel like they tried to do these stations and the mission functions/equipment to the best of their ability but they could seriously use some more inspiration. As for the guns! I was expecting the guns for your boots on the ground missions to have some real interesting designs and dimension to them. Again they are functional and certainly server their purpose but they all look like cheap 3D printed etsy replicas rather than the actual guns. The suits are nowhere near as well designed at the clothing you can dress your commander up as that are already in the game. I have bought at least two of the sets of clothing that ask you to dabble into micro transactions to obtain and to my dismay the duster scarf from the western desperado looking clothes get in your view when flying your ship and if you pan your camera around to look at your shoulders it really looks Second Life as hell. Do not buy it. I don't even know how this got past testing. You would need to wear it and pan your camera or just simply fly your ship for it to get in the way of your vision. I wrote this part thinking I had way more positive things to say.

It was nice to see that the engineers got a little bit of love and you can walk up to them now to do business instead of looking at their portrait inside your ship and placing an engineering order like you are placing an order at a drive-thru. Some of their new pictures are kinda funky looking, especially Marco Quent's new silvery hair and Broo Tarquin's subtle transformation into a balding Peter Cushing. This is such a small thing but it's a nice touch : ) It's a real shame we still cannot walk inside our ships still but I can understand why this would be a bit of a problem so I can at least give you a break there. Would mean more loading screens, dangerous to be away from the canopy when cruising, and not to mention it would require developing a sandbox space for every ship. Let's face it-you go into your ship then what? You can look at it sure, and your module placement but after a few times doing that you won't really do it again.No windows to look out, we got camera modes for those. Sure, all that stuff you do like calling your ship at the spaceport, going to the landing pad, climbing into it, turning it on, requesting permission to leave, etc... it's cool the first few times you see it, but after a while it becomes tedious routine. Won't be any different if you could walk inside your ship.

And finally, playing with your friends. It's nonfunctional.
I have played with three others and more than on one occasion we have had trouble getting each other in the same instanced area and took several supercruise jumps to fix it. When you are landed on a planet for a mission this is a huge waste of time. Means someone who we cannot see needs to get back in their ship, take off and get out of the mass lock, point up 90 degrees, and supercruise. Turn around, then come back. Then hope it worked. Once it did we were all fed up of trying to get it to work. Did the missions, failed, and ended up at a station a long trip away from the mission start and at least one of my friends can now no longer play the game. He crashed on fail while he was in an SRV and he has not been able to log back in since yesterday despite an attempt to run a file repair and restart 8+ times. All he gets is a crash error repeatedly. At this point he simply doesn't want to play the game anymore and he has given up. And this is someone who played Elite long before I did.

To sum it all up. This expansion is bankrupt, broken, unplayable, and not worth your time or money until it is FIXED and apologies are made to the alpha players, consumers, and what (if any) testers they had. It is absolutely irresponsible for Frontier's corporate team and project managers to release this game in this state and the community has spoken about the bugs, crashes, and sub-par performance they are experiencing from a $40+ CAD expansion. Disappointment doesn't quite cut it here. It is unacceptable and should not be bought by anybody until it is finished. It is still feeling like an alpha and the expansion has broken the game. An expansion is designed to add more to existing content, elevate experiences, and provide a fun and challenging new bucket list of things for your consumers to enjoy that makes the time spent to develop it worth their purchase. Elite Dangerous Odyssey is not an adventure-it is a pending Exodus unless something is done about it.
Get it together. Hello Games did it.
Do it better. Elite has been around since 1984, have some respect for your IP.