So,we don't have the XL class non-carrier warships in X4

[Warnoise]

Unfortunately, I believe we'll have to rely more on mods for that this time. Ships feeling, looking and behaving like smaller ones is in good part a result of how the universe and traveling works now. You have to travel long distances, gone are the jumpdrive times that would instantly pop you into a smaller, enclosed sector, so you can't really have the sluggish and incredibly slow behemoths of X3, it would mix badly with the flow and feel bad gameplay wise to many players. There are those who wouldn't mind though, and mods will probably cater to that audience.

At this rate Egosoft should just open source the whole thing and let the modders make their game. Recently Egosoft is getting worse and worse with X rebirth and now X4 and i personally think rely too much on modders....i hate those who abuse the goodwill of others tbh.

Have you actually played any X games at launch besides rebirth? X3 was far worse, faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar worse than X4 is in terms of release quality.

X3 after 3-4 years isn't the same as X4 after 3-4 days.

To be honest I didn't notice a big difference in release quality, AI ships bumping into stuff and dying? check. Trade ships stuck? check. Game murdering your CPU? Check. Etc...

The problem here, I don't see much improvement in quality throughout the years. It feels like a loop.

At least in X3, it had decent content so it was forgivable, but X4 content to be honest is pretty lame in my honest opnion...

[nighthaunt]

With X games the first month after release is learning the game - practise how to capture and how to impact the economy - learn the tricks you need - at the same time the scripts are updated by modders in the community and we start to see the game improve.

I remember Autotrader was a mod script for X2 the threat - it wasn’t hard coded in the game but egosoft are very good and engaging and encouraging their users to code into the game - it’s user code that’s added so much of the functionality that made X2 and then X3 - missile defence on turrets - improved accuracy as script becoming purchasable upgrades for ships in game.

I’m enjoying the game so far and am looking forward to seeing the game develop - it’s the combination of Egosoft vision and community engagement that makes the X series games so great at what they do - and it takes some time to come to fruition.

[comieodor]

Unfortunately, I believe we'll have to rely more on mods for that this time. Ships feeling, looking and behaving like smaller ones is in good part a result of how the universe and traveling works now. You have to travel long distances, gone are the jumpdrive times that would instantly pop you into a smaller, enclosed sector, so you can't really have the sluggish and incredibly slow behemoths of X3, it would mix badly with the flow and feel bad gameplay wise to many players. There are those who wouldn't mind though, and mods will probably cater to that audience.

I think there is a way to still incorporate this into the game as it is currently - it comes down to acceleration and deceleration into Travel Mode; you can still keep the high overall top speed, and create the feeling of piloting a mammoth sized (pun intended) star ship.

To put it Nostalgically:
Every X3 player remembers their first Elephant, Yeah?

Yes the first thing you did was fit a Jump Drive; bit still - trying to drive something the size of some stations through crowded sectors or Asteroid Belts was such a cool experience.

Even with the larger sector sizes, this could be recaptured in a fun way that creates strong gameplay elements. Imagine having to choose how to come range of a station by either:
A - shooting just over the bow of a station then take yourself out of Travel mode whilst still nearly 40 kms away, disable steering assistance; flip your bird 180 degrees (slowly, these big birds don't turn so good) and full burn in the opposite direction so you don't reverse into it, or
B - Disable travel mode whilst still 50 - 80 kms away and watch your speed slowly wind down with reverse thrusters engaged to pull you up nice and close to do the final docking manoeuvres.

---

Maybe it's a pipe dream; but even with the enhanced details, big stuff just doesn't feel as big as it used to.

[Playbahnosh]

Word by word my own thoughts, Playbahnosh, except for one thing: there were - and are - indeed a lot of people pressuring for the station interiors. ...

"Space legs" was a huge request in a lot of space games, including the X games and recently Elite Dangerous as well. With this people usually mean to walk around FPS style. The only thing people can't understand is, a space sim and an FPS game requires wholly different game engines and mechanics to work. There is also a difference between "it would be cool if" and "I will not buy this game without it". Most space sim players understand, that space legs is not really feasible in most games. Usually the game engine is simply not equipped to handle NPC animations, walk cycles, facial animations, FPS pathfinding, etc. In most cases the only way to implement this would be to rebuild the game engine from the ground up, and that won't happen. But even if it did, the FPS part needs at least as much development effort and time as the space simulation. A lot more assets and designs need to be created, animation cycles, body language, facial expressions and animations, interactions and interactable objects, lighting engines, visual and sound effects, etc. That's like creating an entire new game inside a space sim. It's more than double the development time and resources (since the two also has to be integrated, which is another huge feat to accomplish). But this same thing could be said for landing on planets as well, which is another long requested feature.

But there is another solution: the illusion of station interiors or planetary landings. The exact thing Freelancer was doing way back in 2003. The stations had different "rooms", the bar, the trader, the equipment dock, etc, and you could press a button to move there. Sure, it was nothing more than a static set with some pre-cooked animations, but I actually felt like I really was on a station. That's the thing about gamers and video games: we don't need much to be immersed, the threshold for suspension of disbelief is relatively low if you do it right. The same thing with planetary landing. All you did was pass through a docking ring, a landing animation would play according to what type of planet it was and you got the exact same rooms as with stations, but maybe you could see some landscape out the window instead of open space. "Freelancer 1-1, this is planet New Berlin, you are clear to take off. Good luck out there!". And it was enough! It was nothing more than a few canned animations and static backgrounds, but it was enough for me to believe I was actually on the planet or on the station, visiting the different sections of it! And it was actually more immersive this way, than the broken FPS mode of Rebirth with the horribly frightening NPCs. And I bet it took a tiny fraction of resources and dev time for Freelancer to do it this way than what rebirth did. Sure, for some people this wouldn't be enough, but for us space sim players, even this would've been an incredible leap of immersion compared to the dry text menus of X3. And actually less immersion-breaking than a horribly broken and misguided FPS mode.

Fact is, Ego often has nice ideas, but the execution is chaotic, a disorderly ragtag of a function that mindbogglingly forgets how the same result could be obtained in much easier, less confusing and more functional ways.

That's exactly what I meant up there. See, there is a saying in engineering: "Something is not finished when there is nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to take away". Making a device perform it's intended purpose is only half the work. The other half is streamlining and optimizing it until it is as simple and easy to use as possible, without compromising functionality. The less moving bits a machine has, the easier it is to use, maintain and a lot less ways it can break or malfunction. In a game like X4, a simple, easy to use and intuitive interface is worth infinitely more than flashy design elements or ancillary bs like that. "Form follows function" is another golden rule. But with EGOSOFT, it seems to be the exact opposite. They envision something flashy or cool, and then try to desperately code it into the game, regardless of how unintuitive, convoluted or dysfunctional it will be to the player. One of the best examples of this is the station traders, crafting benches and hunting down NPCs. Sure, it might be immersive or "cool" to the player the first few times, "yay I can walk around on stations" and stuff, but forced to do it for the billionth time because there is simply no other way to trade inventory wares or do crafting, or talk to NPCs, that's just unacceptable. Again, "Do you not have phones?!" It's a totally legit question, from a player standpoint and also from an immersion and design standpoint. Why can't I just open the comms menu and friggin call the station manager or the security office or the trader or whatever? Why do I have to trudge all the way to the other side of the docking bay to sell a friggin piece of majaglit or do crafting when I could do the same by opening a context menu under no seconds flat? Why do I have to slug around on stations clicking on NPCs to hire people? Where's the BBS? Why is there not a Recruiting Board, where I can see prospective employees along with their stats, so I can easily select the best one for the job I want? Why do I have spend friggin hours flying around stations looking for stupidly small nodes to get missions? Where's the Job Board?! Or hell, even the system from X3 where I could see icons with the job type over stations or ships and I could directly call the NPC to see what the job was about in seconds. These new "additions" in X4 just making the game a living hell for me. None of these "mechanics" make a single bit of sense, not logically, not gameplay-wise, not lore-wise and definitely not in immersion. It's just pure frustration that the game is forcing me to jump through completely unnecessary hoops to achieve the same thing I could do in X3 with the press of a button. It makes no friggin sense at all.

... let's be honest: a game makes most of its profits right after its launch, so from a publishing standpoint it's often more important to have some intriguing promises rather than actually delivering on them...

Sure, you can do that... once. But after losing the trust of your community, there is no going back. This is exactly what happened with Rebirth. People weren't so sad and angry at Rebirth because it was a bad game (or not only), but because they felt betrayed, swindled, lied to. EGOSOFT promised the the proverbial paradise of space sims with XR, but what we got was anything but. I was friggin livid when I first started XR and saw just what unmitigated disaster it was, and the fact it wasn't an X game at all. I was beside myself for weeks, "how could you do this us Egosoft? HOW COULD YOU?!". Sure, they told us it "wasn't going to be X4", and that it's "different", but I don't think any one of us was prepared for the fact it won't even be an X game. That's where EGOSOFT lost all respect and faith I had in them. Quite honestly, I wasn't even going to buy X4 at all. I only got it because I watched Cohh play it and I saw it was actually the game we all wanted, or at least a Foundation of it.

Dev studios and publishers have a certain amount of goodwill put into them by the gamers. It's like a currency. The more better games you release, with mechanics the players actually like or desire, and the more you communicate and listen to them, the more goodwill you gonna get. Just like CD Project Red, Owlcat Games or Digital Extremes for example. But when you lie to them, trick them, scam them or betray them, like EA, Activision, Ubisoft and Bethesda does on a daily basis, that's when you lose goodwill points. Lose enough goodwill and people will stop buying your garbage. The goodwill for EGOSOFT comes not from the fact they release good games, because they don't. Their goodwill comes entirely from the community, who ultimately fix and extend their games with mechanics and functionality we do want. Take that away, and they got nothing, but a broken mess nobody wants to play. Just imagine if modding was not possible for X games? Scary thought, isn't it?

[Kadatherion]

Heh, was the same for me, wasn't going to buy X4, then Cohh's stream made me positive again. As for the game mechanics, like the stupidly nonsensical station scanning, the lack of simple alternatives like bulletin boards, galaxy news et cetera, we again are on the same wavelength, it's basically all I've written on my steam review ( https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/765 ... ed/392160/ just for the sake of argument ).

But, you see, there's another similarity between you and me: we both are old farts, hell I've started being a space sim fan with Frontier:Elite2 in 1993! (BTW, @comieodor: what you propose is similar to what happened in Elite with acceleration / deceleration and newtonian physics. I loved it. The current generation? Not so much, which is why it's a model that nobody does anymore, relying on more "arcadey" gameplay design choices).
While X games still are somewhat niche, there's no doubt they also evolved to cater to a wider audience (X4 has been for a bit at the top of Steam sales, this must mean something), and the compromises this requires, while I often hate them as a space sim aficionado, I can understand can be beneficial from an economic and marketing standpoint.
CBJ in another thread the other day was pretty "blunt" about this: people nowadays are very vocal about such features, and Egosoft came to the conclusion without them they would keep getting blasted when compared to a certain other game (which he didn't name, nor will I, let's just say it's actually not a game but the biggest scam the industry has ever seen ), so they pretty much chose to follow the trend. For me it's shortsighted to chase after the competition, because these are often the results, but I also tend to believe when applied to the grand scale of current customer base, indeed it can be a better marketing approach.

I do agree though that when you go overboard, you can damage your reputation, at least if you are a smaller company like Egosoft. The companies you have mentioned keep screwing with their customers, and yet every time they buy their games again. Maybe - just maybe - Fallout 76 will hit hard future Bethesda forays into the franchise, especially because it came after an already mildly disappointing (but with record sales) FO4, but usually those games sell just based on their IP. Let's be honest: do we really think the next Elder Scrolls or Fallout game won't sell like candies?

P.S. To those going about "have you seen X3? It was a mess too blah blah" without evidently actually taking the time to read the conversation: look under my nickname, see that registration date? Try to guess. That's exactly what we are talking about.