From what I can tell looking at left over data some of the weapons were cut during the Beta. Since the game felt rushed around release time I would not be surprised if they just had not got around to implementing or polishing all weapons. The projectile stick is likely a left feature from such unpolished weapons.radcapricorn wrote: ↑Sat, 5. Oct 19, 03:30As for some other effects, you really don't notice? Damage effects on destroyed subsystems are just gone, now we only get those same low-res poofs and ugly wrecks. Awesome Plasma/JET beams, or heck, even Skunk's mining laser Mk1 would give a handicap to X4's beams. Thargon Tracer projectiles? Plasma projectile hits? Glowing sticky projectiles (which there's even an in-game mod for stickies)? Where's all this stuff gone?..
The actual missile and beam effects are pretty much 1:1 with XR with exception of any shader differences. Plasma projectiles might be slow but they still act kind of like plasma. HET turrets and Pulse Lasers act kind of similar with exception of Pulse Lasers hitting stuff a lot more easily.
I do agree that some of the artwork does look low resolution and simple geometry, especially with some ships. This is apparently an issue the developers acknowledged and hence promised to improve upon with the Split for the Split DLC. Sadly they also mentioned that existing artwork will not be revised within the near future, I guess due to development resource constraints.