Sirrobert wrote:And yes, it's amazing how the one big dream of a mod creator is that his mod is no longer useful, because the function has become vanilla.
Egosoft is concentrating on the unique features of their game series and that is a good thing. But i think there will be massive shackles on the dynamic universe and ship building part. With no spawning there would be no way out for the NPC economy if the last transport ship gets destroyed. The territores will most likely only change on a very limited degree with big economic safe havens for each faction. So my bet is that we will need pandas, or at least modders to make something like Mayhem for X4 too.
myrmidon wrote:We have a quest/big picture objective that has nothing to do with visiting generic stations and looking out a window at generic manikins walking around.
Well spoken. I can think of 3 reasons why you would walk on stations:
1. Doing presumably "cool" stuff like hacking the station, exploring, looting; immersion, you feeling small and as part of the gameworld > Granted, but you do it once and you do it twice. Then it is just a waste of time and too much production effort from the developer. Egosoft wanted to have catchy stuff they can write in XRs feature list. A "Han Solo" experience with a charismatic protagonist, who can smalltalk and haggle. But they haven't thought about the actual gameplay and if this is even fun to play for extended periods of time. I think the smalltalk minigame was coded in 3 hours before releasing 1.0 because they simply forgot they needed to abstract the rhetoric skills into a time based minigame or everyone would simply take the best dialogue option
In the X4 presentation Egosoft also said they plan to make smaller, "unique" station parts like appartments you can only visit as part of a mission. This would indeed be a better approach.
2. there will be a trade area or trader NPCs and hirelings on stations > Egosoft patched in a mobile phone for XR to get rid of this tedium = enough said
3. switching ships = same as 1. It's boring if you have to jog to the neighboring docking bay. They said they are going reintroduce something like the Transporter Device (teleportation) so this also gets redundant.
All in all the first person gameplay with bland environments, terribly voiced and ugly NPCs is a time eating, performance draining, visually flawed dead end for Egosoft. It's a walking simulator that weakens and distracts from the core gameplay. But they already went on this path with XR and won't back down now. ES could have had so much (even fan made) unique content if they'd went for a 2D adventure like art style for landing on stations and planets. The walking part also seems to be what the people want. If ES dropped this or made it 2D they'd shout "downgrading! This isn't the 90s anymore!" and sales would drop. It's just sad. I hope for mods to skip this walking part altogether.
myrmidon wrote:The map looks nice, but is a "sink dev time into building a new menu" trap...what particularly was "wrong" with X3:AP menus?
After faction ai and the promise of getting rid of spawning equipment, ships and stations this is the third big feature in my opinion. Multi selection, seeing waypoints of ships. Map filters, drag and drop interaction... This is just great.
I'm used to the controls of X3. But looking at it unprejudiced i have to admit it feels like a convoluted mess. And an unnecessary one too. Sadly Mayhem cannot fix these menus.