Some takeaways from our 2022 player survey

[waadaa85]

I'm glad that you want to reinvigorate your comittment to modding and open the possibility of signed-mods / official bonus pack.
Having to choose between lackluster Ventures and mods was rather poor choice.
Having Shuul and Kuertee on team will be great addition - their mods are high quality and content rich.

Still not keen on idea to push for ventures, Multiverse and possible co-op - there is large and cutthroat competition in MP featured space games and having SP/MP hybrid will surely negatively impact SP experience, while still underperforming coparing to MP-focused competition.

SP and huge moddability was always X-games greatest advantage - sacrificing it for vague opportunity to get the overcrowded MP cake is recipe for disaster.

Even on survey it's barely 50% of people who would want ot try MP features.this doesn't even account that for absolute majority, it would be just a fad - like ok, I'll play it for a few hours and never return to it.

I fully agree with Mr WHO's comment on SP and moddability and very pleased that Egosoft is seeking to keep both aspects central to the X4 series
When I completed the survey, I was a bit concerned for the potential outcomes over the game's future direction if the survey results would have been strongly pointing toward MMO. Glad to see that some Coop gameplay has been expressed as desirable by the X4 community.

With both Shuul and Kuertee now onboard with the dev team, they can definitely help Egosoft to improve/ease the gameplay mechanic from a player POV. And I like very much the "mod signing" approach where Egosoft would be able to preserve X4 game balance while authorizing use for Quality-of-life mods. I'm eager to get such features' bonus pack

Cheers all
Waa

[Arlan]

Still not keen on idea to push for ventures, Multiverse and possible co-op - there is large and cutthroat competition in MP featured space games and having SP/MP hybrid will surely negatively impact SP experience, while still underperforming coparing to MP-focused competition.

SP and huge moddability was always X-games greatest advantage - sacrificing it for vague opportunity to get the overcrowded MP cake is recipe for disaster.

Even on survey it's barely 50% of people who would want ot try MP features.this doesn't even account that for absolute majority, it would be just a fad - like ok, I'll play it for a few hours and never return to it.

As someone who also voted yes on multiplayer, my vision for multiplayer and what I'm hoping ego is poking around at, isn't "overcrowded" mmo style persistent universe. Merely 2-4 player co-op that could be hosted on a dedicated server or local session. This is quite abit different than the idea of an mmo, which I have no interest in.

I voted for multiplayer and that it exactly what I meant. I'd like for Egosoft either to create local server for 2-4 players where they can start together or allow for other player fleet invasions (after selecting right window in options). The invasions could work similar to ventures or Invaders in Darksouls. The whole SP world would be intact, it would just add second player fleet that could wreck havoc or/and have objectives to fulfill

[waadaa85]

Actually, without going down the MMO rabbit-hole, designing Coop gameplay mechanics may hold several opportunities to improve individual players game's performance on central aspects like trading, or other parts of the game that is the most CPU intensive. Just imagine if you can isolate the whole trading facette into a dedicated process or executable. Which in turn could be run on a dedicated CPU or better, another local machine.

Such modular design would greatly help breaks the current performance barrier currently experienced when X4 is run on a single machine. Thus help to pave the way toward a more dynamic limitless open-world.

Pushing little further the concept, it could be possible to assign a dedicated process/executable which can oversight some key sectors responsible to animate the local "trading+piracy+policing fauna", keeping updated locations/behaviour and micro-managing individual NPC ships without taxing the main workstation's resources (which should focus on 3D rendering). Such dedicated processes/executables could indeed be specialized in a more granular manner to manage specific game's aspects like:

• overall/common trading mechanics functions and calculations,
• universe's overall macro-economic dynamics evolution and behaviours,
  • could be event-influenced,
  • could be modulated by sectors,group of sectors/factions,
  • could be parameterized through a autonomous "mission creation tool" (see post below from memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=543922, etc.

• in-sector economy along resources availability and variations+trends by sector and group of sectors owned by the same faction,
• resources' prices evolution able to take into account the local conditions influencing each sector
  • is it War-torn? piracy-plagged? peaceful/terraforming? frontier-edge ?
  • "soft"/white collar criminality (hacking-embezzlement,etc.)

• in-sector NPCs ships' behaviour & responses facing events or modulated by player's own behaviour
• out-sectors NPCs ships' locations updates, NPCs flight-paths calculations - destination "reachness", pre-processing of NPCs ships' status and possible outcomes from Piracy, ongoing Xenon/factions war operations, police interdiction, event-driven effects (Leap of Waith access could be a good use-case along "Tide ridding" automation for NPCs in Avarice Sectors)
• Specific sector authority behaviour (good example is VIC autority and policies enforcement in Windfall)
• could also be to support internal functions likes preprocessing menus' lists associated with each "zoom levels", everything that could lower the charge over PC Resources
• etc.

Game performance really need a bit of love at this point of the game life-cycle imho.

In my current vanilla game (v5 HF3) running on a 1yr-old high-end Workstation with Intel i7 unlocked multicore, Radeon RX6900XT 16GB DDR6 and 1TB SSD, at some point, simple actions like single-clicking and double-clicking on objects or give buy/sell orders using the prices sliding bars requires a careful sense of timing... (not too fast-not too slow) for the orders to be correctly registered by the system...

Food for thoughts

Cheers,
Waa

[jlehtone]

Just imagine if you can isolate the whole trading facette into a dedicated process or executable. Which in turn could be run on a dedicated CPU or better, another local machine.

IF

(said the Spartans)

[Tyranos Strategos]

I pray to all xenon gods if there will be next dlc we get more battleships or destroyers CoH dlc was absolutle example of good content. And paranind redesign was cool too if teladi would get facelift like paranid . Or just more big ships ..

[Ormac]

I think I went with I like Split Vendetta, and It's the Soundtrack that tipped it over the edge.

I've already gone through the Terrans in Space experience via an Argon/Earthling proxy so when DLC 2 was more human "models" and fast ships, It was new audience material.
SV and CoH obviously very close on content and CoH benefits from what was learned from SV.
Both SV and CoH add sectors to Explore although I feel SV provided more "space" to do so not just sectors but headspace as well.

I was stunned when I got to the Multiplayer questions only thing Egosoft is asking the community about this time round. Forgot to fill in additional comments.

Given that there was the starting CE Bundle that was quickly updated to include ToA a few months after that was available.
I feel the X4:Foundation(base) + DLCs [optional] has heavily influenced their approach and the X-Universe has suffered for it.

[Gregory]

Given that there was the starting CE Bundle that was quickly updated to include ToA a few months after that was available […]

That's not what happened, Tides of Avarice was not retroactively included in the Collector's Edition. We've replaced the old Collector's Edition package with a new bundle (different format, where Steam gives to the option to "complete" the bundle if you don't already own all it's individual pieces, at a discount). That new bundle (https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2 ... 22_Bundle/) includes the base game, all expansions that have been released, as well as all X4 soundtracks that have been released.

[mr.WHO]

If not that I already own all of this - the new bundle with -71% discount is a crazy bargain - so much content for less than present day AAA game.

[Raptor34]

I'll support your takeaway that pretty ships is definitely a strong reason to buy a DLC. Even bought that Humanoid pack over in Stellaris because all the base game ships looked not that good.
Like for CoH the moment the Osaka was revealed I already knew it was a must buy.
Not so much for ToA. Disagree on the Erlking being a beauty though, maybe for X3 Teladi connoisseurs. And the Astrid despite looking good is also shit to fly so you should definitely not repeat that in future DLCs. Looks can carry you so far, but they must also feel good to use, which is why despite thinking that the Osaka looks superior to the Syn, the Syn has grown on me because of how damned comfy it is to fly with it's agility.
Like seriously, I don't know how anyone personally flew an Astrid and thought it was fine. Perhaps it should finally be allowed to upgrade it's thrusters to the Mk.3 version? Don't know why my "luxury" yacht is still stuck with cheap Mk.1 thrusters.

[Karvat]

I wonder if I am the only one who keeps buying DLCs to finance next Egosoft's projects, will it ever become a publicly traded company?

[fallenwizard]

Nicer ships = higher approval rating?
The results of these survey questions lead us to assume that the popularity of expansions among players of X4 is driven primarily by the ships that we introduce in those expansions. In particular, we interpret this result to mean that the ships from X4: Cradle of Humanity are your favourites, resulting in it receiving the highest rating at 40%. Are we right in our assumptions, or are there other factors that led you to your answers? Feel free to let us know in the comments section for this article.

For me it wasn't really about the ships. I always end up using Split or Argon ships.

The best thing about CoH was the music (Rise of the Protectorate is my favourite song in the entire game), the interesting (and amount) of sectors and the plots are far more fun to play though compared to the ToA ones.

Spoiler

Show

The throwback to older X games like the Torus mission were great and I really want to see more of those in future X4 expansions or X5.

Also Boso Ta was included far more in CoH then he was in ToA. I want to see more plots involving him.

[Loltak]

Hi all,

I would have thought that more players had responded. I'm glad to be one of them .
I just want to add some personal insight for some questions:

How many hours have you invested in your most advanced savegame so far?
For the moment only 200h but it's often by several dozen hours that I'm playing that I "need" to change game.
I spend almost 500h on X-rebirth (including a faire amount of hours during the beta) , so I will probably spend at least that amount of time.

- How many times have you started a new game
For now probably only 3 times and I don't think I will raise this number a lot; one at the launch and twice after a big patch launch. Playing X game is a long run and I don't like to start over and over with the risk to not see the end-game.
"Finishing" a game is not my talent .
To be honest I had not check how the custom game work, I might try it after your description.

Which (gameplay) element of X4 do you enjoy the most?
A difficult one for me, I like all and I'm not sure we were able to put 20% in each category. Exploration become less important as go the playtime but I like it at the start.

Multiplayer questions
I'm not a multi-player at core even with few years of playing WOW.
If I had to imaging this kind of functionality it's the possibility to have a friend who join your mostly solo game, so it's more your coop kind that the Asynchronous Multiplayer kind. (Or both at the same time perhaps?)

Do you use game modifications (mods) when playing X4?
None at this time, but I'm not against as I run few ones on previous X games.
As I previously said I tend to play on the long run I would not be "blocked" the modified game status for the Multiverse but also because I think I'm still in the process of dicovering the game and so far I had no urge to load a mod to correct something I don't like.
To be more precise, with the years I tend to use less mod on my (all) games so If I do, it likely be a QOL mod.

That all for now guys and good playing time

[dreamer2008]

Nicer ships = higher approval rating?
The results of these survey questions lead us to assume that the popularity of expansions among players of X4 is driven primarily by the ships that we introduce in those expansions. In particular, we interpret this result to mean that the ships from X4: Cradle of Humanity are your favourites, resulting in it receiving the highest rating at 40%. Are we right in our assumptions, or are there other factors that led you to your answers? Feel free to let us know in the comments section for this article.

I don't agree with this assumption at all. What I liked most about Cradle of Humanity was the Yaki plot, which was very good, fun to play, and leading to interesting looking npc's to recruit. Also the dlc had good looking sectors, good music, a strong faction that could alter the galaxy either by getting into big wars against existing factions, or helping out against Xenon. The ships were good too, but that was the least interesting aspect for me.

[argantonio]

i will 100% go with a co-op gameplay mode, i don't wanna play mmo... i wanna play WITH and AGAINST my friend in the same world and to let you guys know similar game that i wanna play with and against (same friend we like this kind of games xD) is bannerlord... we both been years waiting to play this kind of games in co-op but man there's so little co-op games out there :/

[adeine]

The problem with ToA is that a lot of it is kind of gimmicky (tide/protectyon) and does not integrate well with the main game.

Both SV and CoH feel like they should have been part of the game to start with in an ideal world which is a much better way to flesh out the game. I just wish CoH's Terran economy/tech tree wasn't as barebones as it is.

[Starlight_Corporation]

Feel that the ships were the selling point of the CoH expansion is the wrong take-away. Ships is something Egosoft does very well I feel, making great thematic ships for each race/faction/DLC.

For me CoH just ticks every box for an excellent DLC. It offers nice plots (introduction into the Terrans through the protectorate plot + the continued Yaki plot + the Terran/argon plot that can shake up your universe), great sectors to explore (sol system, love visiting it), economic challenges (sunlight changes + different economy + size).
The rep being tied to inner Sol access gave to more meaning beyond a means to unlocking ships, weapons & stations.
Also Terrans don't let themselves be ignored, they will come in your sandbox & play too. With Vendetta & Avarice, if you don't seek them out, they don't affect the universe much. Terrans on the other hand have their Intervention fleets & they will come into your space & fight the Xenon, whether you like it or not.

Split Vendetta was great too, as it gave us great ships & the Mk4 Split engine is a great combat engine to use (at the cost of traveltime), also gave us a ton of sectors to play with, which compensates for the lack of introduction plot imo (would been neat to have a small plot introducing us to the Split & their Zyarth/FRF rivalry). Note the main Split Zyarth/FRF plot is neat, it is just locked behind the Hatikvah plot
The Xenon sectors in that expansion also gave a nice economic/military challenge if you wanted to help the Split.
Also love the look of Zyarth's Dominion sectors (star being drained by a neutron star) & the Litany of Fury sector (that red glow)

Avarice has neat plots & enjoyed the ones introducing you to the pirate side of life. Love the looks of the ships & stations, fitting the theme of pirates & survivors lacking resources. Also enjoyed the Paranid ship redesign, they look great! I did miss the exploration & economic challenge in this DLC due to the small size. Kinda hoped on some extra (neutral) sectors to find, either tied to Avarice/Windfall or scattered across the (base) universe opening up some extra connections between sectors. Enjoy seeing what visuals egosoft comes up with for new sectors.
Something that found odd was that the new dormitory building didn't make for more crew diversity when used on my own stations, hoped to get some Pirate-dressed folks among my station crew when I built one.
We did got two new gameplay elements to deal with, the scrapping system, which is a great addition to X4 imo, tying combat & economy together & ofc the Tides of Avarice, which offers something new & looking forward on what can be done with it + a nice trade-off for so much energy.

Edit; forgot to mention, but really enjoy the different corridors introduced in the Avarice patch, much more variety now when you visit stations & go to the various subsections.

[waadaa85]

Just imagine if you can isolate the whole trading facette into a dedicated process or executable. Which in turn could be run on a dedicated CPU or better, another local machine.

IF
(said the Spartans)

Indeed, That is a big IF ! I have not taken a look to the code and I totally understand this will certainly be a tall order. But if dev team is looking into coop gaming, I guess it would require significant refactoring. Timing could be good.
Cheers,

[multox]

That said, we definitely see possibilities for more direct cooperation between players of X games in the longer term. The Multiverse online mode, originally announced in 2021, will be a first step in that direction. We are still working on that Multiverse online mode, which is itself a development of the “Ventures" feature that was in some earlier versions of X4. We're making good progress on that, and are hopeful that we'll be able to tell you more about it in 2023.

I feel like this is a misinterpretation of the survey results. When people think co-op, they mean playing together, not playing at the same time in different universes. I love co-op, but IMO the X4 Ventures stuff wasn't even vaguely interesting. Especially since it didn't work with mods.

I fully understand that the X4 code base isn't multiplayer-ready. But I don't think that the survey results were an endorsement of Ventures.

[adeine]

I feel like this is a misinterpretation of the survey results. When people think co-op, they mean playing together, not playing at the same time in different universes. I love co-op, but IMO the X4 Ventures stuff wasn't even vaguely interesting. Especially since it didn't work with mods.

I fully understand that the X4 code base isn't multiplayer-ready. But I don't think that the survey results were an endorsement of Ventures.

+1, especially the part about not working with mods.

I think if you want true multiplayer, it needs to be a separate game (like an X based MMO or MMO-lite, but it would be difficult to maintain the series' core identity in that context). For a mainline X game, there's still interesting things you can do in the vein of faux multiplayer that doesn't exclude what is from the survey results a majority of players. Where online features are explicitly enabled you could do things like:

- Stock market(s) based on overall player base economy stats
- Venture ships and invasion fleets (simple enough to either keep it between cross-compatible mod installations or just filter out invalid ships/loadouts)
- Creation of AI controlled 'player company factions' based on real player assets - send a fleet and a custom built headquarters and it will spawn in another player's game as a rival faction/trading faction, etc.
- World events developed by Egosoft in the vein of what they've hinted at with the multiverse seasons - open a new jump gate corridor leading to a Xenon/Kha'ak invasion, established factions changing their diplomatic relationship/going to war with one another, special plot lines, etc. etc.

These are just a few off the top of my head that wouldn't take a lot of wrangling the code base to implement or cause compatibility issues. Worst case scenario, it could break your local game (say you're playing a total conversion and it tries to create vanilla assets that don't exist in your game), but in that case you can always disable online features and be just fine. It's always better if the decision rests with players - less overhead on Egosoft's part, and less needless fracturing or exclusion of the majority of the game's player base.

[Maebius]

Although surveys are important, they only get answered by people that bother to do them.
Gaming surveys like these usually have either mildly positive bias, or very negative (unhappy customers that are so unhappy that they even bother to answer a survey )

Do you mind sharing how many participated in your survey?
If not, I hope you have a lot of data to analyze as you can't just say "oh 33% of players like the economy" and leave it at that.

Some deep dives on your survey data need to take place.

Like, what did the people who played very little (under 50hours) answer?
Did the guys that played just 5 hours answered that they're (5) very happy? (and so on...)

Also, I feel that a question "do you like walking around in stations" was missing from the survey, but I'm thinking that it might have been on purpose.

All the best.