[Feedback] Factions - A Missing Opportunity

[JamesTheClarke]

Hey everyone

I've so far "only" gotten roughly 30+ hours into the game so my impressions may be flawed due to lack of in-game progression. Though through reading other posts, watching lets-plays as well as my own experience with the series as a whole I am starting to paint a picture in my head of what X4: Foundations is and it somewhat concerns me.

First things first though: I really enjoy the game so far. I like many of the quality of life improvements over X3 TC & AP - never played Rebirth (I treated it as a non-canon spin-off) but I've read that quite a few positive improvements from that game were brought over to X4 as well. So kudos Egosoft for making an overall good looking/sounding, immersive and interesting game that harks back to what made the series great in X3. Let me clarify that I am a huge fan of X2 & X3 and X4 has gotten me hyped for the series again.


With that out of the way, I noticed some things that are a bit worrying to me in an age of game development where content is being chopped into pieces to be sold at later dates after release:


Missing Factions

I understand that there is a plot reason behind why there are no Boron, Split or Terrans in the X-Universe so far (civilians not counted), but I have to admit this feels quite contrived and it makes me wonder how much of that plotline was based on the possibility that Egosoft didn't have the time to implement all six major factions in time for release. I absolutely adore the Split and to this day I remember the first time I came across a split capital ship in a sector covered in dark red lighting - the menacing angular shapes slowly passing by my tiny scout vessel, not knowing if at any moment they'd decide to open fire. I had similar moments of awe and terror with pretty much all factions of the X-Universe and seeing half of them missing leaves quite the void in the current release. My main concern is whether or not the other three factions will be implemented in free content updates or if they will become the dreaded cut-content DLC us gamers have come to expect from most AAA studios by now. I could not find a clear statement by Egosoft with regards to their faction roadmap and I would greatly appreciate an update post in the coming weeks assuring the fan base that their favourite X2 & X3 faction will be in the game without any additional charges. The one announcement I could find mentions "there will be Expansions, which will bring more races, their ships, stations and lots of missions into the X4 Universe. Our goal is to bring the first big Expansion within about one year.", however so far I've been running under the hopeful assumption that "more races" refers to new original content, not well-established lore and empires from previous games. I truly hope that Egosoft did not half the content of what fans expect to be in an X-Universe title while keeping the price of the game virtually unchanged.


Sub-Factions

The current sub-factions in X4 are neat and an interesting idea, but ultimately they really don't add much to the game as they are visually copy-pasted from their main faction and mechanically only slightly tweaked so their actual impact on the gameplay is absolutely minimal. Here are a few first draft design ideas on how the sub-factions could be given a more unique identity without having to overhaul them too much - I count both Paranid factions as major (not a sub-faction), as they are essentially in a civil war.


1.) I am not sure if sub-factions should have access to XL ship types. If they do it should be extremely limited (e.g. only one active at a time) because fielding an XL ship in my view is what makes a major faction feel "major".

2.) Each sub-faction should have one completely unique ship only they have access to - probably an M or L class to give a bit of a wow-effect. To keep development workload low, said ship can be based on an existing model with new details layered on top of it. Similar to how in X3 TC the Gladiator ship was a base Nova fighter with some extras on top of it.

3.) Sub-factions ships should have unique and impactful mechanic-twists to make them feel less copy-paste. For example the Antigone Republic: they are an upcoming, small, high-tech, aggressive trader league, mostly trying to take away market share from their well-established competitors - the Teladi. Their unique angle could be that they have by far the fastest transporter ships in the verse, sacrificing shields, armour and cargo size for speed to outrun the competition. They may not yet have the logistical set up to move massive bulks of goods in huge space hulks to support entire planets like the Teladi but you need to move some essential Weapon components to the front lines yesterday? Better call the Antigone Republic!


Paranid Empires

Right now their ships, space stations and stats are just too similar to each other - to a degree where it is really hard to tell them apart properly. I don't mind that they use the same ship models, it makes sense from a lore as well as game development sense (though few truly unique ships per Paranid faction wouldn't hurt). But what is missing is a unique identity to each of the sides in this civil war. A prime example of this being done right was the United Space Command (USC) and the AGI Task Force (ATF) in X3. They look very distinct from each other but both clearly belonged to the Terran Empire with their flat plated hulls, wide-angular shapes and militaristic designs. While I don't think the X4 Paranids can be made this distinct shortly after release, at the very least their ship models could be outfitted with more decorative textures to make them easier to tell apart. One of the empires is clearly more fanatical and aggressive, thus a lot of non-functional religious adornments could decorate the hulls of their ships and their prefered weapons could be close quarter high damage shard guns and bolters while relying on heavy shield to get into CQB. The other Paranid faction could specialise more towards long-medium range laser weaponry but due to heavier energy consumption of their weapons shields would be a lower priority. With just these two changes a battle between the two empires becomes easier to follow as it is clear who shoots at what: Projectile VS laser weapons. Traditional Paranid ship look vs lots of fanatical decorations and paint jobs on the hulls.


Xenon & Kha'ak

This point is highly subjective as I have clearly not progressed very far in the game at the time of writing this post. However, I've visited and explored over 20 sectors so far and I noticed that both annihilator factions feel a bit toothless in this instalment. In previous X titles, the Xenon and Kha'ak served not only as a menacing "bad guy" but also as a buffer mechanic to make exploration for the player very dangerous and challenging early to mid-game. There were several choke-point sectors in the past that were fully occupied by Xenon or Kha'ak, forcing you to either a.) explore in a different direction, b.) save up and create a fleet to blast them out of there or c.) charge in head first dodging and weaving through hails of laser fire, boosting your engines as fast as possible to somehow reach the next gate. In X4 so far I have never felt like "oh, I guess I can't go there yet". Considering the lore stating that the gates did not work for quite some time I'd expect especially non-organic races such as the Xenon to have spread wide and far via sub-light travel during the absence of the major factions to the X-Universe - firmly establishing several massive strongholds at key sectors in case the gate network would ever come back online. In the fringe sectors of X3 it was sometimes almost impossible to run trade networks without at least a few fighters for protection of the convoy. Right now, however, I can run unprotected single ship trade M-freighters through deeply red and purple zones without ever really having to worry that more than one single heavy fighter would try to attack them.


Conclusion

The current state of the main faction roster has a noticeable negative impact on the game experience due to the missing factions being in X2 and X3 from the very start. Compare the faction list of X3 with the current in-game content offer and it is immediately obvious that this X-sequel has not expanded upon the previous title in this aspect. The fact that the sub-factions lack a clearly defined identity compounds the issue further.

Aside from releasing the missing three major factions the only thing that would improve the lack of present factions would be an in-depth overhaul of all available sub-factions to make them each feel more unique and interesting.


To reiterate what I said at the beginning of this post, I like X4, overall I really do. But quality of life improvements alone cannot carry a franchise as deep and complicated as this one with a fan base as dedicated as the X-Universe has accumulated over the years. After a decade since X3 we are ravenous for one thing, and one thing alone: well-made content - that includes the factions we have all grown to love.

[Warnoise]

Factions are very badly made: Argon Paranid and Teladi are just there, in the galaxy. No story or purpose of each faction. They all share the same technologies and even some ship designs are similar. 2/10

Sub-factions are meaningless: Literally adding nothing to the game other than giving a fake sense of content for marketing purposes. 0/10

Pirates: Bring nothing too. They just fly the same ships as the big factions and they have 0 impact on the world. 1/10

Khaak: They represent no threat whatsoever. A faction that pops up with a couple of S and M class ships is meaningless.Just to say "Wow cool we have khaak in the game" that's it. 1/10

Xenon: Thanks to Xrebirth they didnt have to work hard to bring the xenon. They just ported the ships from there to here and that's it.. 5/10

The game needs more than patching. It needs a total overhaul. Currently the content is very low level.

[JamesTheClarke]

One thing I really like about the pirates so far: they sometimes "pretend" to be friendly in order to sneak up to your ships and then engage at fairly close range. It's not implemented perfectly yet, but I really like that mechanic.

As far as I remember in previous games the pirates were always marked red on the radar if one has become hostile towards them.

[priestyy]

Hmmmm this points my main issue. The galaxy feels lifeless. We have these absurdly big sectors and all I seem to be doing is travelling around them. There's nothing going on. No plot, no dynamic events. I'm not invested in any factions they are all pretty much the same. Honestly the paranoid look just like teladi without scales.

They haven't even filled in the description and info boxes in the game. Who are the antigone why are they there...... I am really trying to get into the game. I've got a couple of miners going but I have no goal at all. I get it. Its a sandbox but a sandbox with no life or point.... Will end up draining me of any motivation.

It feels like a scalextric set. I opened it for the first time put it together and was like wow these cars are cool.....so is the track. But at the end of the day I'm just pressing the same button going around the same track and nothing else is engaging with me... Maybe when mods come in I'll feel better

[JamesTheClarke]

Have you guys encountered any larger fleet patrols? In X3 I frequently saw capital ships accompanied by corvettes and a few fighters patrolling the outer sectors of a faction's territory.

I'm wondering if I haven't seen those yet because I haven't progressed in the story far enough or if they simply don't really exist in X4.

[mr.WHO]

Factions do have different ships:
Argon Federation - Sentinel variants of shared types, unique Quasar fighter.
Antigone Republic - Vanguard variants of shared types, unique Pulsar fighter.

[VolusRus]

I can run unprotected single ship trade M-freighters through deeply red and purple zones without ever really having to worry that more than one single heavy fighter would try to attack them.

But red and purple zones on the map is just mineral and mineral&gas rich zones respectively

[JamesTheClarke]

Factions do have different ships:
Argon Federation - Sentinel variants of shared types, unique Quasar fighter.
Antigone Republic - Vanguard variants of shared types, unique Pulsar fighter.

This is a bit of personal preference but to me the vanguard/sentinel distinctions do not create a unique look and feel to the Antigone Republic. They are visually too closely related and mechanically identical aside from minor stat differences. X4 offers a really cool ship customisation feature and I would love to see it used more pronounced for the sub-factions. For example, an Argon Mercury transporter might rely on heavier hulls, two shield slots and two turrets, but is significantly slower than an Antigone Republic Mercury with one shield slot, less hull and only one turret but two slots of the fastest Argon engines on the market. When the customisation system is employed right we could have really cool distinctive differences in subfactions while still maintaining the balance between each main faction. In my view ideally the Antigone Republic should be as clearly identifiable and recognisable as OTAS was back in X3 - mostly same ship models, but with a lot of extra detailing, lighting effects and functionality tweaks that make them stand out as their own.

I'm wondering since you brought it up, what do you think of the Quasar and Pulsar ship designs? At first I thought they were Terran ships due to their wide-angular shapes and the flat surfaces. Do you think a Nova will make a return to X4? That was one of my favourite fighter designs in the X universe so far. What are your favourite ships in the X series?

But red and purple zones on the map is just mineral and mineral&gas rich zones respectively

My bad, that's true. I finally figured that out yesterday when I created my first proper mining fleet - previously only focused on pure trading fleets. I misinterpreted the colour-coding of the zones because they coincide with the base colours of Pirates and Kha'ak. One of my main trading routes for microchips is a pirate base sector that is completely covered in red hexagons, so I assumed that labels it as high probability pirate territory. However, the underlying point I was making still stands regardless of the colour coded radar zones: even in sectors with pirate bases I never, ever have to provide security for my M-transporters as the AI simply does not try to mount an attack that could pose a viable threat.

Have you come across dangerous sectors? I've fully explored 25 by now and no luck atm.

[Kadatherion]

Too bad this thread didn't really take off, even though we have discussed these points extensively here and there elsewhere in many others. Guess it's what happens when the OP is written by someone with verbal diarrhea like you or - guess what - me Some of these points are now more or less rendered obsolete by further discoveries we've made in the past 48 hours, but let's see what I can add.

Now, as said we've already got a bit further since the last time you wrote here, but the recap is: yeah, your first impressions have been confirmed down the road. And let's make something clear: yes, there's no denying the whole plot gimmick is meant to justify them knowing they wouldn't be able to put in nearly as much content when it comes to ships as there was before, and the expansions will most likely mainly be the old races. Seems to me it'd be naive to think otherwise, regardless of how we may judge it.
If I were to bet, I'd expect the dlcs to bring back the Terran, Split and Boron, running along with free concurrent major patches that bring something new in the form of subfactions and some unique gameplay mechanic, like the Yaki or more distinctive pirates, together with some new ship class maybe (like the M7 was added only later as a class in X3). It's a "scheme" many companies do nowadays: I'm giving you a nice, major content patch for free that's going to relight your interest in the game, which in turn will make you crave even more the full experience with that paid DLC that just came out in parallel as well. Honestly, when it comes to DLCs nowadays, it's actually one approach that feels more "fair" however you look at it: the free patches aren't worthless, and work better for selling the DLCs too, it's a relatively win-win situation (granted we may still not like the DLC approach in its wider meaning and feel it's "unfair").
Now, no point in going to deep into the rabbit hole the whole "cut content dlc or not" debate is, it is what it is. And, after all, it still will be mostly completely new assets they had to make more or less from scratch as they did with what's in right now, so cynically speaking whether they say those new dozen ships are the old "Borons" or the new "Squigglies" is just semantics, it doesn't really change much.

What we currently have may be realistically justified by the new way ships are modeled, with interiors and cockpits, that makes every ship take probably 10 times the effort one of the old ones took, so I'm even willing to pardon Egosoft for the lacking - and lackluster - roster they have presented us at launch. This doesn't change the fact it's very lackluster and it shows, together with several other underdeveloped features that add to the universal flattening (no weapon or loadout differences between races, even the very ship designs feeling quite similar between races etc). Heck, they didn't have the time to actually write their descriptions or the encyclopedia, it's obvious the game came out months earlier than it should have when even such fundamental and actually relatively effort-free features are left out.
Honestly, I'm not even sure how much we can ask of them in this department: the new interiors system might have really pushed them into a corner, and though the roster will be expanded upon, it's plausible it might never reach what it did in the past games. The whole paintjob system, to mention another thing, screams loudly about how they probably planned to differentiate many subfactions only by textures instead than by actual fully different models, so much they coded a mechanic specifically meant for it. It's a reality that to a certain extent we will probably have to learn to live with regardless of how Ego is known to keep improving their games after launch. It resembles a console game franchise doing it's first foray into a new console gen, the first title on the new gen often has awesome new graphics but is way smaller in actual scale than the previous title, which came at the very end of the last gen building atop the shoulders of the others that came before.

This being said, even if the actual resources might be limited, there's indeed also a lot of holes that come from the rushing that could be relatively easily filled. Weaponry and actual spec differences between races - as you yourself mentioned in your ideas - are some examples. As you've already seen me write elsewhere, we don't just have an issue with visual variety, but with functional variety just as well. There's hardly anything really differentiating a Teladi ship from an Argon or a Paranid one, one shield more or less, a few clicks of max speed more or less, and that's basically it. This is where a lot can be achieved with a relatively lower number of workhours (and as such money). Race specific weaponry that highlights a certain style (the Borons used anti-shield ions because they are peaceful and prefer to disable the enemy instead of destroying it, the Argons have some access to Ions too because they are allied, and so on). All these things that contributed to distinguish the factions and subfactions in previous installments can be adapted in X4 as well. The example you made with the Antigone Republic is very valid as well. Throw in a new ship or two here and there once in a while, and even if in the end we'll still have a smaller roster than in X3 at its development peak, amen, it will still be a solid game.

Going more deeply into specific examples, we now know the Xenons are a non factor not because their big ships have been left out but because the game is unbalanced and they just disappear quickly (they were the easiest to make ships after all, the player isn't supposed to be able to fly them, so they have no interiors, they are mainly just ports from Rebirth). Pirates have this mechanic of camouflaging as legit ships (not really, it's basically said in their name they are pirates, but that's being fussy), a mechanic that I like a lot myself (in X3 only pirate *traders* would have something similar), so it makes sense for them to use mostly familiar ships from the main factions. But yeah, they'd need a couple of their own for their strongholds and pirate bases, maybe the carrack of old, something like that. Apart from that, either the Yaki or an equivalent should take the role of a completely distinctive outlaw subfaction: that's where you should have a unique roster that's at least half the one of a major faction.
As for the Paranids civil war, I'm a bit on the fence yet. The two Paranid factions need difference, but they need to feel much less different than they both should feel when compared to the Teladi or Argon, which means we first need to do the heavy lifting to separate actual races and how they play before we have the luxury of having space for subtleties for these two specific subfactions.

I could go on, but honestly the point is the magnitude of shortcomings right now is often a bit too big to be talking about some of these things right now in any sensible manner. And this comes from one who doesn't give a rat's ass about the Borons or the Splits not being in at launch. They could have given us all new factions whatsoever in a whole new corner of the galaxy, and I wouldn't have budged an inch: because honestly speaking, the story of the X universe has always been quite embarrassingly cheesy and told via pretty bad plots, what gave depth to the experience was that those races, as cliched as they might have been, had character in what you saw in the actual game. Yes, those very Split ship designs you mentioned, the stupidly big and metallic ATF, the fishy (heh) Borons, and so on. It's a videogame, and a sandbox one at that, not a novel (well, I do have a novel in my HD thanks to the collector's edition, but... thanks, no thanks ), the alien races can absolutely have paper thin characterization, it's what is in the actual game that needs distinctiveness, a clear personality. As I said near the start of this wall of text, call them Squigglies for all I care, but make the game have soul, please.