Your honest opinion?

[ero_sk]

My honest opinion is- wait until it's patched, some features changed and new features added. I've bought the game and quickly realised that it's not quite there yet. I was close to hitting 2h threshold for a refund on Steam, but decided that I'll continue playing a bit longer and not ask for a refund as I still think that Egosoft deserves support. But now I just stopped playing as I decided to wait until some things are fixed/changed, and more features added. IMHO the difficulty in term of economy is way too low, the missions pay ridiculous amount of credits. I still remember enjoying earning my first 10k, 50k, 100k, 1m and so on in X trilogy. Here that's not the case, which should be changed. Sure, there are people out there who want easy money, so to meet requirements of both types of players Egosoft should add some setting for rewards- something similar to Kerbal Space Program perhaps.

Also I completely don't feel the atmosphere of X world that I used to feel when playing X2 and X3 trilogy- I think the main reasons for that are- too much noise on stations (and engines too noisy in general, even in space), no descriptions of sectors (huge factor for me), missing description on many things, shy Betty and some X:R-style things such as police on stations. Why adding earth-style police signals in such a futuristic world?

I think that the game at its current stage doesn't deserve some of the bad ratings, however it doesn't deserve 9 or 10/10 either, like some people say. This must clearly come from fanboys, because by any objective criteria the game still needs some polishing and more features added. I would give it 5/10, with perspective of raising this after the game gets some further work done. Note: Unlike many people these days, 5/10 by my criteria means average, not bad like some people tend to think. Because you know, 5 is in the middle between 0 and 10. Why many people forget it and think that a game with score below 7 is a bad game? I don't know...

Oh and I don't really like the mishmash of travel modes- in turns out there really is 4 (or 5?) travel modes- standard, boost, the actual travel mode (high speed), highways and jump gates. I would prefer stations to be in closer proximity to each other and get rid of boost and travel model.

Probably most important point: this game is not worth its current price, as simply it isn't a finished product.

[sd_jasper]

I'm having a blast so far. The learning curve is back... some much has changed. But the more I play and get to know the new systems, the more and more I am enjoying the game. I had some issues with the "ship modes" tutorial, which caused me to give up on the others. Which was a BIG mistake. After going back and doing the tutorials, I'm enjoying the game immensely!

It does seem some folks are remembering how complex previous games were. Folks played X3 for so long, they might have forgotten how complected that game really is. And X4 *is* more complex than X3... but that's a good thing IMO. It's just going to take some time to figure it all out.

I have had a few bugs... but nothing like previous X titles. And my frustrations have been mostly from my own doing (not doing the tutorials). That said... I do think a better "new guy" start is needed. I chose the first option which seems to just be the "free play" option that drops you in with no guidance. Maybe I'll check out the others later.

[BlackRain]

I'm sorry, the UI is just so so bad. X3's UI is so superior in functionality AND it was easy to understand. Why change something that isn't broken?

The UI is not bad, you just don't know how to use it well. The UI is quite good once u get the hang of it.

Ahhh yes it is bad, it took me 15 min to understand how to issue orders, trade, create wings, behavior in x3. Here I am 20 hrs into the game and i'm still struggling with the new one.

So yes, it is bad, very... very bad and don't give me crap about "getting used to it" or "you're just bad" arguments because going from 15 min to 20 hrs is to big a discrepancy and from what I've been reading both here on the forums and on steam I'm not alone with this opinion.

Once you know how to do it is even easier to set up commands for your ships in X4, including setting up patrols, squads, everything. It takes time to become familiar with it, but once you do you can see how much easier it is. Saying that others on steam share your opinion means nothing as the majority of people enjoying the game are most likely not complaining.

By the way, it doesn't take 20 hours to learn the controls. If it took you that long, than the issue is with you. I went through the tutorials once and learned how to do everything with relative ease.

The issue is clear to see, the UI is something brand new and unfamiliar and drastically different from before. People don't always adjust well to change. Whatever, I won't argue this anymore but the UI is much better. The information you can get is quicker, more streamlined. Everything can be gotten from the map, it's great.

[nickolaiproblem]

Honestly I am really enjoying I get the feeling it's like mount and blade simulation and intensity and elite dangerous combat and maneuvering. I like trade aspect once you get handle on UI its pretty good I also think it needs some polish technical aspect so they are less bugs but I am almost 41 hours in and I'm really loving this game. Solid 8/10 honestly I think that what egosoft should do is rework their tutorials so that more people are able to use ui thats really problem is that its a new ui that people are unfamiliar to.

[Shimrod]

I'm enjoying X4. I think the game is back on track, relative to what I'm looking for in the game.

I've been exploring teladi sectors and figuring out the basics how to claim and give other ships instructions.

Finally found the 3 wares needed for main quest but it seems quest has disappeared. Flew back to nav beacon no boron dude.

Game shows modified but swear I never touched it your honour.

Will be well chuffed once it gets a bit.of.fixing and enhancement.

[Shadow1980]

Once you know how to do it is even easier to set up commands for your ships in X4, including setting up patrols, squads, everything. It takes time to become familiar with it, but once you do you can see how much easier it is. Saying that others on steam share your opinion means nothing as the majority of people enjoying the game are most likely not complaining.

By the way, it doesn't take 20 hours to learn the controls. If it took you that long, than the issue is with you. I went through the tutorials once and learned how to do everything with relative ease.

The issue is clear to see, the UI is something brand new and unfamiliar and drastically different from before. People don't always adjust well to change. Whatever, I won't argue this anymore but the UI is much better. The information you can get is quicker, more streamlined. Everything can be gotten from the map, it's great.

Perhaps, but learning how to accomplish things isn't easy.

Tutorials have all stalled or broken in some way - making it hard to get used to the game. The presentation of info can be quite unclear. Ordering staff around is quite confusing - especially as you can't seem to order them from the one place you'd want to: the full staff list in the player empire overview.

Most importantly, it's just really unclear how to do some things. The info is there, somewhere, but surfacing it can be unintuitive. I've played ten hours now and "playing" is a big word - I am flying around aimlessly. I am currently on a mission to hire a station manager and I am yet to find a single person with station management skills of any kind, never mind the required skills.

Similarly, I had to scan a data leak and the mission failed without any further explanation of why it failed. There was no time limit when I accepted it and no mentioned fail state. It just abruptly ended when I scanned the red bit on a station it lead me to.

Same inside the station build mission, when you go there the first time in the main plot. No idea how to de-select a selected component/section, or how to rotate things. There's simply no indication and no button combo I tried works. Most of the time you accidentally close the builder and have to start again. I am sure it's great once you get the hang of it, but actually getting the hang of it is pretty difficult.

Overall this has potential. It's not Rebirth. But I am also yet to have any fun - whilst I absolutely love the series. Something feels off - it all feels abit... lifeless? Without personality? Frustrating? I can't quite put my finger on it but it's definitely not *enjoyable* right now. It almost is, but the game seems to fight you every inch.

[BlackRain]

I think all the issues are really with just the unfamiliarity with it. I struggled for a bit at first too, but now it is very comfortable and easy. Also, it feels lifeless because of a lack of activity I think (well enemy activity). This is something which needs balance. I am playing around with modding this aspect myself

[MegaJohnny]

Once you know how to do it is even easier to set up commands for your ships in X4, including setting up patrols, squads, everything. It takes time to become familiar with it, but once you do you can see how much easier it is. Saying that others on steam share your opinion means nothing as the majority of people enjoying the game are most likely not complaining.

By the way, it doesn't take 20 hours to learn the controls. If it took you that long, than the issue is with you. I went through the tutorials once and learned how to do everything with relative ease.

This 100%. I'm finding out how to do things way before I'm able to actually do them, thanks to context menus and the behaviour tab. And the level of fine-grain control you have over your ships now is absolutely bonkers. I do feel a bit of information overload at times, but it only takes a few clicks to turn all the overlays off.

I have one other gripe that I forgot - the ambient travel music is too low-key IMO. Both X-trilogy and XR had nice enveloping ambient music, something to fill your ears while travelling, but with X4 it's very slow and subdued. That works for spooky or deserted sectors, but if I visit Argon Prime it feels a bit unfitting.

[Shadow1980]

I think all the issues are really with just the unfamiliarity with it. I struggled for a bit at first too, but now it is very comfortable and easy. Also, it feels lifeless because of a lack of activity I think (well enemy activity). This is something which needs balance. I am playing around with modding this aspect myself

For sure - though I don't agree on the enemy activity part. If anything that's too much - I had to restart due to pirates killing my ship during the very first mission in the first plot. Enemies are everywhere and this feels nice.

The emptyness is due to;
1. Lack of Betty calling out things you target.
2. Lack of interaction with stations (think elite style docking clearance, small immersive elements)
3. General lack of the game providing you with information, or rather the manner in which it chooses to present information (or not present it)

For example, when I command a member of staff, his picture appears and he appears to speak (maybe) or confirm the command. However, there's no voice over to accompany this, it's just the guy on a screen saying nothing.

Right now, my biggest issue is that the game is fighting every step along the way: tutorials don't progress, missions fail without any kind of information and I spend at least 30m to an hour on forums and Reddit for -every- action I wish to take. Currently, I am stuck on a mission and trying to figure out on Discord with a number of friends how on earth we hire a station manager or even find one ANYWHERE. It shouldn't be this unclear.

[Isaacadah]

Played Albion prelude about 500 hours. I'm 8 hours into X4, that was all yesterday. I can honestly say I'm hooked even in spite of the few issues I've had. It took me about an hour to get comfortable with piloting after binding controls.

I knew about how complex the keybindings are in X games coming into this so I knew how to approach it, for newcomers to X series I can definitely see complaints. My only advice for people daunted by keybindings is this, just worry about basics like flight and combat, think how you want things if you were playing a FPS, everything else leave default and learn as you go and customize as you get more comfortable with the game. AND REMEMBER!, you can save keybinding profiles up to 5 slots I think, use them all, treat them like a second set of game save files, and use all slots, that way you can rollback changes you made and might not like. You get a crap load of control in this game and it takes time to learn it all.

I feel like it will be at least 50 hours for me maybe 100 before I can really say it's great and what I always wanted from X games, but I feel like they might have nailed it, but just need to work out the bugs. I am prepared for another day of binge playing X4 today

[maxolina]

X4 Foundations is a pretty accurate title because that is all this is.

A foundation upon which a nice game can be built on.

Things that must change:

-OPTIMIZATION (No matter how complex and deep the simulation, dropping from 100 fps to 25-35 fps when approaching a populated station is a sign of bad CPU / GPU workload split, most likely due to bad assets optimization and LODs). (some decorative plants near the landing pads have more detail that the entire station workshop area with props on display and everything)
-BETTER GRAPHICS (mainly explosions, weapon effects and volumetric effects in space). (look at EVERSPACE for modern space-game graphics)
-COMPLETE UI REDESIGN (the map is good, all else is buried deep in menus and everything looks like placeholder programmer art).
-BUGS due to unneeded simulation detail (if I hire a captain I must effectively wait for him to physically go to my ship which makes sense, but often he just keeps standing where I hired him doing nothing). (fix by teleporting all standing crew to ship on take-off if all else fails)
-MORE CONTENT OVERALL (ships, weapons, anomalies, voice lines, everything should have an encyclopedia entry, etc...).

As long as I see progress form the devs towards these things then I'm happy. I already knew the game wouldn't be perfect at launch.

[SwordBreakerX]

after readin all replays I must say a part of we would love to try it out to be honest but yeah 0 income for last 2 years ain´t gonna happen and well today demos are not that common anymore

[daraba]

Its a box with no sand in it.Flashy lights and nothing else behind them.

[Wintersdark]

With regards to the UI:

It's different. I got pretty used to the X3 UI, and was able to accomplish things very quickly with it, but that was familiarity and not any great accomplishment in UI design there. The X3 UI was horrible. The X4 UI is decidedly better, but it does take a lot of learning. I understand how some will say they don't like it out of hand simply because it's all new and different (and still quite complex) so it's requiring learning whereas the X3 UI at this point just feels "natural." I'm a big fan of how there's vastly less menu nesting going on in the X4 UI, and though I'm still learning how to do everything and am not going to pass final judgement on it yet I do feel it's substantially simpler than the X3 UI was.

I'm really enjoying things, though I'm quite frustrated by the terribleness of the tutorials (though I'm happy they're there!) and general lack of information in what things are and what they do. Steep learning curve is basically a feature of X games though, so that's a thing.

[birdtable]

1. Judging by the Forum it is not the shitstorm when Rebirth launched so something must be right.
2. Tutorials are for wimps ,,,, Took me 40 minutes to learn how to claim a ships because I never read everything and did not CONFIRM.(marine)
3. Learning new stuff ...
4. Learning new stuff ...
5. Loving it.... Bloody marvellous

[rusky]

I'm happy with it but expect a lot of work to finish it / bring it up to actual released game standards

I played X3 AP for over 1k hours and hated XR.

X4 is very promising to me. It has a "foundation" on which to build an amazing game with mods and future patches/expansions.

I keep seeing people say the UI is worse than X3 and I have to scratch my head a bit at that since X3's UI was pretty bad and made certain things almost impossible (pretty much anything to do with managing more than 2 or 3 ships was a nightmare)
It's a new UI, it's clearly not going to win any UX awards, but I am very excited about what can be achieved with it as it is very moddable and clearly supports far more interactions than X3 ever did.

Same for other parts of the game like the modular ships (no more 6 fixed turret banks that all fire at the same thing etc). All of these make me excited about future mods and possible expansions to the game.

Yes, the game is very buggy at the moment. Most scripts are at best partially working. There's very little information on how to do things, the ingame descriptions are sorely lacking etc. , but that is fixable. Unlike Rebirth, this is a what I was hoping for in an X game.

Also, the immersion in this game is truly amazing. The idea of something like Litcube's in X4 is very exciting to say the least.

[ZacUK]

Some of my observations. Long time X player, including a restart of X3AP recently to get myself prepped for X4.

1.) The MAP screen is a bit of a mess, there's too much information at any one time, especially as half of the screen is taken over by the information presented on the left hand side. I can't seem to work out the layers.
2.) NPC interaction is woeful. I hired a pilot for my starter ship in order to proceed with the PHQ mission. I hired someone from the dockside, I assigned them to my Vanguard, and they proceeded to climb halfway up the boarding ladder and just sat there, didn't budge. I tried to order the ship to do something and kept being told that there was no captain assigned, even though there was. I tried to fire the person, and that didn't work. Tried a few more times to fire them and eventually just restarted the game. This seemed to fix it.
3.) The mission progression in the PHQ plot had me tearing my hair out. The stage where you have to build a dock on the PHQ. There is zero help in the mission brief about what you have to actually do, it took a Reddit post to actually teach me how to use the plan feature. Even after getting all the resources delivered by NPCs, and a 30 minute fun quest to find a TL to assign to the planning job, the dock is built, but the planning screen still says that there is no dock installed. Well there is, because I landed on it, and the next part of the mission line came up.
4.) Not sure what's going on with the game engine. I've got an i7 7700k, 32GB ram, a GTX1080ti, all on SSD. Windows task manager tells me very little actual CPU being used, and only a max of 2.9GB GPU memory in use. I run at 1440p, with a Gsync screen.
5.) Why can't I remotely trade with my Mercury trader ? If I want to manually do a trade, I have to fly over to wherever the ship is, and get in the captains chair to actually trade. In X3, with Trading extensions installed, I could remotely buy/sell.
6.) The mining ships seem to be hit and miss if they'll actually mine and autosell.
7.) The layout of the universe seems a bit random.
8.) Auto-pillock v001.45.66.7 Alpha seems to have been coded into the game engine, it's useless.

Those are my bad points, but I am sticking with the game.

[Grudd]

To quote a good steam review I saw, its an undeniably great game that is undeniably unfinished.

The idea that they didn't even populate the basic faction descriptions before shipping the game is a bit crazy.
We still don't know what service crew are even for. Pilots can't level up. There are items in the game that are currently unusable.

I love the gameplay, and I see the huge amount of promise that the game has, but I need a bit more context to become immersed in the world.

[diggzakk]

My honest opinion, its not X4, it is Rebirth 2.

[Manddrack]

Long-time player of the X series after 4 hours I cannot complain.
It feels much more like x2 – x3 I haven’t done to much in 4 hours but the UI is far from being such a pain. The logic of x3 menus are in there the layout is a bit different but that’s all.

Regarding the docking it literally took me 30 second to understand the concept, heavy borrowed from elite I still don’t get why they did not come back to the docking tunnel and station interior ship berth that was in x2 that was fun, but well this is what it is.
Engine wise I’m with a i7 5930, 32 GB of ram and a GTX 970, I’m on high with gsync active 3440x1440 not 60 FPS but no sluter or lags event though I went to high for the graphic card.
For a game that was released 48h ago by egososft, I’m quite impressed by the stability, I played X3 TC at release and it was buggier than this one, I will not comment on X rebirth.
Couple of point I think worth to correct
Keyboard
-- Keymapping, if I change a key assigned I like to be told so than to try to search what I unbinded

Interaction menu
-- Allow interaction menu with the station even if we have selected only one corposant
-- On the interaction menu please give us number shortcut

In the encyclopaedia
-- Bring back betty
-- Give reference where to find the good we observed once we have found a station that sell it

In navigation
-- If our scanner spot something on long range (like gold or purple) please give us a rough location on the map and the distance to travel to get to it
-- Station scanning sometime don’t trigger on flight by

That’s all for now, but so far so good much more like to old X than X Rebirth was (could we get the sectors on Rebirth added in X4 ?)
ith the station even if we have select