Not another DLC without any highways

[LameFox]

I can think it's a bad idea because it looks terrible and cartoony and, in conjunction with Travel Drive, it turns the game world into a teensy little kiddie park where ships get from one end to the other in the blink of an eye.

It is the travel drive, yes, that destroys all sense of scale or exploration. Scale means nothing, ships and stations feel tiny all because of a game designed around travel drive (And all ships are faster in X4 cruise than ALL 'ww2-style' space sims).
Highways are not the problem, in rebirth highways were everywhere yet travel felt meaningful, it took time, and highways existed...
In the absence of travel drive highways are a tool to create structure, just like asteroid fields or large stations. Nowhere in the history of X games has felt more real than any sector in Rebirth, but travel drive destroys all of this and makes everything feel tiny. Sectors are fishbowls where you just float around randomely, you dont move from point of interest to point of interest, you just point in a direction and hey presto, you are there. Nothing takes any effort.

I don't disagree but having both of them together only compounds it, and I can't picture them deciding to make such a drastic balance change as removing travel drives in this game—yet it already functions fine with highways turned off.

[Omni-Orb]

travel drive destroys all of this and makes everything feel tiny. Sectors are fishbowls where you just float around randomely, you dont move from point of interest to point of interest, you just point in a direction and hey presto, you are there.

They really got the 'feeling' of cruising around in travel drive perfect with toggling flight assist to steer. However i agree that the scale of it is off and doesnt make the universe feel like it is vast and mostly empty with stations and ships being great bastions of life and important points of interrest.

[Axeface]

travel drive destroys all of this and makes everything feel tiny. Sectors are fishbowls where you just float around randomely, you dont move from point of interest to point of interest, you just point in a direction and hey presto, you are there.

They really got the 'feeling' of cruising around in travel drive perfect with toggling flight assist to steer. However i agree that the scale of it is off and doesnt make the universe feel like it is vast and mostly empty with stations and ships being great bastions of life and important points of interrest.

It feels great, I totally agree, but at what cost?
How big do you have to make a ship to make it feel big when the player is traveling at 1000 m/s? Its a very simple problem, and the only answer is to make ships slower. Because ships of 2-5km are already unwieldy and frankly bordering on ridiculous.
Captain collins pointed out the other day that a Nimitz class aircraft carrier is 300 meters long... we think an X4 Behemoth is small... doesnt 'feel like a destroyer' anymore, feels like a 'frigate', its 400 meters!! it is HUGE! It is the speeds we are traveling at that destroy the sense of scale, and that sense of scale impacts everything including combat (projectile speeds).
Rebirths (effective) sectors were far bigger than x4's, but they had much smaller areas of interest and moving around them was very different, it made everything seem huge. I miss that.

I also like a bit of realism, enough to be somewhat plausible. In X4 I can travel at 10k m/s, flight assist off, turn around, re-engage flight assist and be at 10k m/s again in 3 seconds. That is like 800g's of force. People paste.

[grapedog]

I can think it's a bad idea because it looks terrible and cartoony and, in conjunction with Travel Drive, it turns the game world into a teensy little kiddie park where ships get from one end to the other in the blink of an eye.

It is the travel drive, yes, that destroys all sense of scale or exploration. Scale means nothing, ships and stations feel tiny all because of a game designed around travel drive (And ships are faster in X4 cruise than ALL 'ww2-style' space sims).
Highways are not the problem, in rebirth highways were everywhere yet travel felt meaningful, it took time, ships and stations felt massive (even the smaller ones) and highways existed...
In the absence of travel drive highways are a tool to create structure, just like asteroid fields or large stations. Nowhere in the history of X games has felt more real than any sector in Rebirth, but travel drive destroys all of this and makes everything feel tiny. Sectors are fishbowls where you just float around randomely, you dont move from point of interest to point of interest, you just point in a direction and hey presto, you are there. Nothing takes any effort.

You can't blame travel drive like it didn't exist in x3... people just used SETA to accomplish the same goal. Travel Drive as a mechanic is infinity times better than SETA.

[Omni-Orb]

It feels great, I totally agree, but at what cost?
How big do you have to make a ship to make it feel big when the player is traveling at 1000 m/s? Its a very simple problem, and the only answer is to make ships slower. Because ships of 2-5km are already unwieldy and frankly bordering on ridiculous.
Captain collins pointed out the other day that a Nimitz class aircraft carrier is 300 meters long... we think an X4 Behemoth is small... doesnt 'feel like a destroyer' anymore, feels like a 'frigate', its 400 meters!! it is HUGE! It is the speeds we are traveling at that destroy the sense of scale, and that sense of scale impacts everything including combat (projectile speeds).
Rebirths (effective) sectors were far bigger than x4's, but they had much smaller areas of interest and moving around them was very different, it made everything seem huge. I miss that.

I also like a bit of realism, enough to be somewhat plausible. In X4 I can travel at 10k m/s, flight assist off, turn around, re-engage flight assist and be at 10k m/s again in 3 seconds. That is like 800g's of force. People paste.

I agree now that i see it written like this. I see that the speeds (Especially with a modded scout ship) are what makes it feel this way. However a different way of saying it would be this: The distance between stations and gates isnt far enough. A good balance exists between those two points.

And also yes i also reacted to 180 degree flight assist turns being so efficient that the crew would be paste. Its too much.

[Omni-Orb]

You can't blame travel drive like it didn't exist in x3... people just used SETA to accomplish the same goal. Travel Drive as a mechanic is infinity times better than SETA.

Yes it is improved, and yes the system can be further improved

[Gween]

The highways are a terrible system. I understand why Ego put them in to appeal to the folks with short attention spans, but I think adding dlc without them is a big improvement to the universe.

highways were a questionable design choice in the maingame, but leaving them out "mid game" was a wrong choice. We now have small sectors which you can travel through on a highway in under 10 seconds (main game) and at the same time huge, partly empty DLC sectors with no highways (Sol sectors) and some terran ships even only fly around 1000m/s in Travel mode.

We now have highways where they don't make any sense and we lack highways in areas where they would make sense

[Panos]

Highways are a great idea. The DLC sectors are an absolute pain to navigate given how long it takes to traverse them. I get that it fits thematically because pirate sectors are a no-man's-land but I doubt thematic consistency was the driving force for their absence.

There is a mod where you can expand the highways by building them, if I remember correctly.
Also there are mods adding highways

Split space
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/fil ... 2651501884
Terran space
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2656184697

Lost highways from early development that were removed apparently
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2648304620

[mr.WHO]

Actually it would be cool kind of mini-plot, if we could invest in sector development that would spawn pre-defined highways in the sectors of out choosing.

[jasonbarron]

The highways are a terrible system. I understand why Ego put them in to appeal to the folks with short attention spans, but I think adding dlc without them is a big improvement to the universe.

highways were a questionable design choice in the maingame, but leaving them out "mid game" was a wrong choice. We now have small sectors which you can travel through on a highway in under 10 seconds (main game) and at the same time huge, partly empty DLC sectors with no highways (Sol sectors) and some terran ships even only fly around 1000m/s in Travel mode.

We now have highways where they don't make any sense and we lack highways in areas where they would make sense

Remove highways. Cap Travel Drive at something reasonable, such as 1000 m/s. People in a hurry can use SETA. Seriously. If X4 has one really serious flaw it's the fishbowl the TD and SH's turn it into. The answer is not more, it's less.

[Nanook]

For me, the best part of the Creative Custom Start is the ability to turn all in-sector highways off. Before this, I had to use a mod to do that. I'll never, ever play another X game if I'm forced to see and use the highways. As a physical scientist and one who's done graduate studies in astrophysics, the so-called highways are total immersion breakers for me. I don't play space games on rails!

[Matthew94]

As a physical scientist and one who's done graduate studies in astrophysics, the so-called highways are total immersion breakers for me. I don't play space games on rails!

I know how you feel. I have a PhD in electronic engineering and the lack of realism when it comes to technology prevents me from playing the game! Oh wait, it doesn't.

[Tamina]

For me, the best part of the Creative Custom Start is the ability to turn all in-sector highways off. Before this, I had to use a mod to do that. I'll never, ever play another X game if I'm forced to see and use the highways. As a physical scientist and one who's done graduate studies in astrophysics, the so-called highways are total immersion breakers for me. I don't play space games on rails!

Isn't that like super ironic? Including the astrophysics part when I happen to look at the planets and constellations...

[Axeface]

For me, the best part of the Creative Custom Start is the ability to turn all in-sector highways off. Before this, I had to use a mod to do that. I'll never, ever play another X game if I'm forced to see and use the highways. As a physical scientist and one who's done graduate studies in astrophysics, the so-called highways are total immersion breakers for me. I don't play space games on rails!

This is quite interesting. Isnt the concept of objects that can accelerate and decelerate ships something that is actually considered by physicists for short range travel in space? It isnt completely outside of the realm of possibility? In X3 the prototype highways had a lot more structure, reminiscent of some kind of coilgun or something, much like X4's accelerators (which are basically coilguns?).
If objects and points of interest in space outside of orbits required short range travel, an object to accelerate and decelerate ships actually makes sense doesnt it?

Ide like to add that obviously we have the accelerators, which you might consider more plausible, but in X4 we have artificial gravity and all sorts of weird stuff, and we saw the evolution of highways from tubes of metal in X3, to tubes in rebirth to lanes in X4. And they do have periodic structures in them - are they really so implausible given the rest of the games technology?

[kmunoz]

And here I am wondering how anyone could possibly find the highways in Rebirth to be anything other than a mess.

[grapedog]

Remove highways. Cap Travel Drive at something reasonable, such as 1000 m/s. People in a hurry can use SETA.

That's a hard pass, SETA is trash. It served a purpose in x3... but it's not needed now.

I'm having trouble thinking of a single space show or movie that doesn't use some sort of high speed tech to move around, and I can't... because space is large and mostly boring and mostly empty...

No one wants to watch Han Solo age 5000 years on his trip to Alderaan...

[jasonbarron]

Remove highways. Cap Travel Drive at something reasonable, such as 1000 m/s. People in a hurry can use SETA.

That's a hard pass, SETA is trash. It served a purpose in x3... but it's not needed now.

I'm having trouble thinking of a single space show or movie that doesn't use some sort of high speed tech to move around, and I can't... because space is large and mostly boring and mostly empty...

No one wants to watch Han Solo age 5000 years on his trip to Alderaan...

I'm sure there's some kind of middle ground

[iforgotmysocks]

The ring highway is a horrible idea. "Let's connect our systems directly with the core systems of our enemy, so the hostile fleets can attack us anywhere they like". I'd be ok with highways that connect the core systems of each faction separately, but connecting the entire ring??? Terrible idea for so many reasons.

[DaMuncha]

I hate having blue lines through my screenshots, and fake ways of speeding through sectors.

[Gween]

The highways are a terrible system. I understand why Ego put them in to appeal to the folks with short attention spans, but I think adding dlc without them is a big improvement to the universe.

highways were a questionable design choice in the maingame, but leaving them out "mid game" was a wrong choice. We now have small sectors which you can travel through on a highway in under 10 seconds (main game) and at the same time huge, partly empty DLC sectors with no highways (Sol sectors) and some terran ships even only fly around 1000m/s in Travel mode.

We now have highways where they don't make any sense and we lack highways in areas where they would make sense

Remove highways. Cap Travel Drive at something reasonable, such as 1000 m/s. People in a hurry can use SETA. Seriously. If X4 has one really serious flaw it's the fishbowl the TD and SH's turn it into. The answer is not more, it's less.

A Travel drive cap of ~1000m/s in X4 is the opposite of reasonable for multiple reasons lol. Lore wise it wouldn't make any sense and gameplay wise it'd make even less sense.