MortisLegati wrote: ↑Sat, 15. Dec 18, 04:46
TemporalAnomaly wrote: ↑Fri, 14. Dec 18, 23:38
year away then... egosoft run out of money and we NEVER get another X game. ... are then deprived of "OUR" game. ... not only will they fix the bugs, they will add content for years to come!
This is going to happen, eventually. The way Egosoft has been handling their releases implies
heavily that they're tumbling forwards on the money they get from sales on to-be-completed games. X:R became a full-featured game right before X4 started getting development, most likely, and most likely because they were running out of money and needed something new to sell. This can work fine, if they can make their previous iteration acceptable before they start on a new one and begin relying on good-will again. If they trip up, the X series is dead. Or, well, if another developer manages to do a game with an economy simulation that rivals this one with a decent enough game in front of it.
They've been doing the Early Access thing without it being codified for years. They're taking heat right now because it's become painfully obvious at this point and concerns diehard fans because you can't tell exactly why Egosoft was running out of money. Did they work too much on Rebirth before starting X4? Or is it malice?
Then why not communicate ? Crowfunding to help with the extra miles ? Or just plain early access because they need the cash intake to move on. They all know we're passionate about this game. I'd gladly pay a 100€ to help fund a subgenre that has given me countless hours of fun, from X games to Freelancer to even Homeworld, Empyrion or No man's sky. I'd rather give 50-100€ to Egosoft than 30€ to EA and i'm not the only one. "Hi guys, this is Egosoft. Look, we've been working on X4 and it's looking great so far but the studio is starting to run into many economic problems. We believe that, with your help, we could make it the way we envisioned it". This is their mistake. They chose to not communicate. They could have made a dev blog with their current reasoning and have
feedback, or a semi-public beta or what have you.
Their strongest asset is their passionate community and they did not take advantage of it.
I'm playing a game where one of my destroyer patrolling randomly jumps into another sector and attacks Xenon stations with no warning and is attacked by invisible fleets on the radar. A game where large cargo haulers book trips for 1% of their haul with no option to actually control their behavior and circle around warpgates (???), a game where ship boarding is mainly fighting against the complete stupidity of everything (UI, your troops, allies) and wing control is so buggy and unresponsive you'd think this is an outdated X3 mod. A game where the UI has exactly the same issues as previous games : it's not thoughout for mass engagements and economy. Why not go for dettachable and customizable widgets on the map ? Why not have sub categories and different menus for different ship classes (XL+L/M/S/Station) ? Why no tick box for crew management ? No, let's put 200 people and that ship and make them manually click on each and everyone of them ! UI is such a pivotal and key component of X games. It needs to be a well oiled machine or else the game becomes unbearable to play after a while.
I'm sorry to sound so abrasive, and I definitely do not intent to jump at you. I just need to jump at something. The wall ? A Split ? Or maybe give me some of that space weed to calm my nerves after seeing every single trade ship crash into my wheat station because the waypoint (wth why not setup a zone instead ?) is in a module ! God damn it Egosoft ! This is not alright. Just as OP, seeing 1.5 and 2.0 feature list actually deeply concerned me because there are far more pressing issues than player shipyards to fix and I was hoping we'd actually hear about it from the devs themselves. We're gonna depend, again, on modders to actually fix many of the simple oversight in the game and each patch will be terrorizing because we'll have to update our mod list and pray that things still work.
So yeah ! X4 has so much potential but we're not there yet.