Ahh yes, the good old fan favorite - selection bias.RedFlashyKitten wrote: ↑Sun, 23. Apr 23, 16:55And to those complaining that Ego spends company resources on that: Tough luck, guess their surveys showed that youre the minority not wanting ventures.
Could it perhaps be that the people who are active on the X4 communities are more likely to both see these surveys, and participate in them? Is there perhaps a chance that the people who are more actively participating in the online communities would have any sort of biases with regards to the feature's they're looking for... Perhaps more... I don't know... Community related online features?
It's appalling how little actual progress has been made on the franchise since X3 - a game that launched 18 years ago. And now this? Half-baked online functionality in a single-player franchise, tacked onto a game that launched with 0 online features - this is where Egosoft chooses to spend its resources?
I bought this game when it was a practically unplayable mess so I could support Egosoft in actually doing something decent. It still barely passes for fun, and the only reason I play it is because X3 is now so dated I can't stomach to launch it. Goodwill from nearly two decades ago can only go so far. All of the developers making space sims seem to be stuck in some bygone era. They're unable to merge the good ideas they had decades ago with the innovations of the modern gaming industry, and always somehow manage to make these quasi-modern games that feel like they were developed a decade or two ago using more modern engines and hardware. All this does is ensure the good ideas they had all that time ago aren't iterated upon, and are poorly meshed layered with some more modern ideas that absolutely don't synergize with the strengths of the titles.
I felt this at launch, but seeing this new direction, I'm almost more certain than ever that this will likely be my last X title as I'm all out of good will after the last two. Beyond that, perhaps this will be the last title overall... Machine learning is going to make some big splashes in game development within the next few years. It'll empower smaller teams to put out bigger and better games for cheaper than ever. Sooner or later this will translate to more competition in niche genres that have traditionally been dominated by a handful of companies. I don't exactly expect Frontier or Egosoft to be able to adapt all that well based on their track record, and Starfield will probably inject a good amount of interest in the genre to boot, assuming it doesn't flop.