2020 - The problem with X4

[DaMuncha]

And all these regular missions … well I think that highschool student could write for you hundreds of variants with good unique story behind each for few hundreds of dollars even it it is still simple find and kill, go and bring. Just copy, paste and you make lots of people happy. Simple as that. During last two days I recovered 4 wedding rings, 3 paintings and few family heirloom.

Nooo.. Thats boring as hell, its still just "This guy stole my priceless art" or "This guy stole my wedding ring" repeated missions that have you do the same thing. What happened to mission chains? Diplomacy mission chains like in XR? Its not hard to come up with a story chain like that, say for esample a Teladi Company mission chain where you do a couple of trade missions for a company, find out one of the executives is working behind the back of his peers, he asks you to do a mission just for him so that he and you split the money, but before he gives you the money, instead after your trade is complete he keeps all the profits and a bunch of pirates show up and try to kill you, you fight them off and report the teladi scumbag to one of the Teladi Company faction and get your reward. Then later more pirates show up and send you a dialogue message saying theyre there to kill you for that scumbag who has escaped and is hiding on one of the M ships commanding them. You force him to eject then collect him and turn him into the local police for a nice bounty.

THAT is how a mission chain should be handeled. And it is easy enough to do with the systems Egosoft has already put in place, it just requires an imaginative mind. In fact Im going to open a new thread for little stories like this for mission chains.

[Nort The Fragrent]

Don't forget X4 is nothing but the foundations, the real game has yet to be conceived !
And that I think they are struggling with, and we are soon to get the Split. Whip de doo !

The 3rd video log told me what is was anticipating, they are all wrapped up in a rock turns into a ship ! Gosh !
Just what I wanted to know !

I have not played X4 for an age, I am flying my Asp in ED. Least in that game, the playground is huge. A bit boring visually, but believable space. X4 is pretty in one or two sectors, the rest are dull, similar to ED, but with a very small playground.

The solution ! MORE SPACE TO PLAY IN…….

X4 has such huge potential, if only they would stop looking inward.

ES have made some brilliant advancements over X3, but the core game of X4 is what ? I don't know ! It’s small, flat, and beige, just like a new concrete foundation waiting for the builders to arrive, and get working on the real game.

I will support ES in the hope they get going, and give us a good space game…..

[mrg81]

Nooo.. Thats boring as hell, its still just "This guy stole my priceless art" or "This guy stole my wedding ring" repeated missions

Well no! Each mission could be an interesting or funny short story. Every time you would at least have something new to read, once in a while you might even have a chuckle after which you tell to your self "ok, I fell ya dude, I will kill that bastard for you". It would not be different than just reading short books or jokes which most of us do just for fun anyway. I am suggesting this because even if egosoft is completely out of resources an approach like this would be piece of cake. There are people out that who could wite hundreds of short funny storries for almost free and implementing it would be almost like a copy and paste for crying out loud. But it would give us 'something'

But chasing same guy all over again about a wedding ring is boring. Even my 6 years old son watching me play was like "wait, didn't we just do it? "

[CBJ]

...an approach like this would be piece of cake.

With all due respect, this kind of false assumption doesn't help. At the very least this would require all these variations of the text to be translated into almost a dozen languages, and that's not taking into account the overhead of managing and maintaining all the different versions of the missions, their testing, and so on. And all that work would result in numerous missions which, despite the veneer of difference, were exactly the same and would quickly be recognised as such by many players. While we do already make use of different fictional backgrounds for some missions for a bit of variety, over-extending that in the way that you are suggesting would not be an effective use of time and resources.

[mrg81]

...an approach like this would be piece of cake.

With all due respect, this kind of false assumption doesn't help. At the very least this would require all these variations of the text to be translated into almost a dozen languages, and that's not taking into account the overhead of managing and maintaining all the different versions of the missions, their testing, and so on. And all that work would result in numerous missions which, despite the veneer of difference, were exactly the same and would quickly be recognised as such by many players. While we do already make use of different fictional backgrounds for some missions for a bit of variety, over-extending that in the way that you are suggesting would not be an effective use of time and resources.

They don't even have to be same in every language. Just find someone in every language who will write for you dozens of funny/good reasons to kill someone or force to drop an item. And just copy and paste them into this type of missions. There is nothing to test here besides reading it and making sure there are no typos. The missions are mechanics always the same - fly to a randomly generated guy in random sector and shoot him. Same what happens right now with 'Recover a ring" or "get that paint back" . That's just text isn't it? Just change text every time. Please forgive me if I am wrong but text should be just a variable.
Finding people to write these for you shouldn't be hard too. I am sure that if you would ask people around here on this form, you would get hundreds to chose from in no time. Even I would try to come up with something better then "get my ring back" absolutely for free! And I have zero talent

I don't know, I guess If i would be a creator of such a great game (because the base is really good), I would do something like this and I believe this wouldn't add too much work comparing to all the other stuff which is in this game. I am sure people even would comment on the forum all the funny/good stories they had even if it is always go and kill, go and deliver.

[X2-Illuminatus]

That's what everyone involved in text creation loves to a read: "Hey, your job is so easy, that everyone could do it better - and for free - even without experience or talent!"

[CBJ]

I don't know, I guess If i would be a creator of such a great game (because the base is really good), I would do something like this and I believe this wouldn't add too much work comparing to all the other stuff which is in this game. I am sure people even would comment on the forum all the funny/good stories they had even if it is always go and kill, go and deliver.

Let me tell you a story. A frequent request for the X series games over the years has been for in-game news stories. Way back in the days of X2, people like you said "oh, this should be so easy" and "just ask players to come up with ideas" and "you'll get hundreds". So we did, and we we did indeed get lots of text submitted. Then we had to process them all, eliminating and adapting texts that were unsuitable or didn't fit with the lore, tidying up the texts for grammar, spelling and general writing quality, making them fit into the space available for display, and all the other things that you have to do to turn "raw text" from enthusiastic, but not necessarily qualified, players into usable content. This supposed "easy" task ended up absorbing a huge amount of time and resources, probably even ending up taking more work than it would have taken to just write the news stories ourselves. And after all that work the result still wasn't that popular; much like hundreds of variations of the same mission would be, it was seen as being just "fluff", and dismissed by many players as pointless, despite the whole process having been their idea in the first place.

They don't even have to be same in every language. Just find someone in every language who will write for you dozens of funny/good reasons to kill someone or force to drop an item.

No, this makes it even worse. Instead of doing all of the above once and then getting it all translated, we would have to do it all once for each language (and that's even assuming we were able to get the same number of submissions for each language), and the people who would have done the translation would have to do the editing work instead.

Not to put too fine a point on it, if solutions to things like mission variety were as simple as you seem to think they are, don't you think we'd have done it already?

[DaMuncha]

Well, we dont know. Its not for us to know. Egosoft could be working very hard, long hours, or barely working at all, who knows? what we as consumers care about is the final product, and the entertainment it provides. and currently, in my opinion, the game doesnt provide more than a few hours entertainment unless the player him self is the one to push the narrative forward himself.

[Chris0132]

If I was going to suggest anything news related for X4 it'd be something that plots the war updates you already get, but like, chronologically and spatially. So you could see a sort of timeline of war events. The info is sort of presented to you but you can't like, look for current conflict hotspots, or check the history of events in a sector.

Something like that would help, I think, with making the world feel more alive, because you don't get to see a lot of what actually goes on. Which is a shame because I know it's simulated.

[CBJ]

Well, we dont know. Its not for us to know.

We don't expect people to know. It would be nice, however, if once in a while people would actually accept that it's not that easy when we explain why, rather than insisting that they know better.

[DaMuncha]

If I was going to suggest anything news related for X4 it'd be something that plots the war updates you already get, but like, chronologically and spatially. So you could see a sort of timeline of war events. The info is sort of presented to you but you can't like, look for current conflict hotspots, or check the history of events in a sector.

Something like that would help, I think, with making the world feel more alive, because you don't get to see a lot of what actually goes on. Which is a shame because I know it's simulated.

As far as I can tell, there is no war updates, the war "missions" it gives you are just 3 random jobs to do, just like any other mission in the game, except you dont get paid untill all 3 jobs are done.

[radcapricorn]

Let me tell you a story. A frequent request for the X series games over the years has been for in-game news stories. Way back in the days of X2... ...and after all that work the result still wasn't that popular;

It's important to compare the comparable though. X2/Reunion BBS, which presented those flavor stories and also non-plot missions, were on stations. Naturally, this limited, severely, the amount of players who would just go looking for them for the sake of reading them. I'd wager that if those BBS were accessible at any time in game, the story would've been different. But now that the "modern" missions are "in your face", their genericness gets old very, very fast.

much like hundreds of variations of the same mission would be, it was seen as being just "fluff", and dismissed by many players as pointless, despite the whole process having been their idea in the first place.

Well, the current dozens of variations of the same mission in X4 are fluff, and pointless. Most of them can't even stand up to Rebirth missions, let alone X3 or X2. And there are a few reasons for that:
1) No ship spawning - this of course limits the ability to just script in whatever one would like
2) Player teleport - this thing ruins 90% of suspense and makes most timed missions nonsensical
3) Mundane repetition - you literally get the same missions in the same chain, having you do the same thing over and over again. The most notorious being "prospecting", which amounts to dropping the same one or two probes inside the same sector multiple times.
4) Lack of cohesion - there are no logical bonds between missions in a chain, no measurable consequences and no measurable repercussions; sometimes the missions don't make any sense at all - like being sent to "stop" "unsanctioned" scientists by boarding their ship, which turns out to be a military destroyer, of the very same military who offered the mission; a destroyer which shows no intention of doing what the mission says it's supposed to be doing, and instead just merrily patrolling; or a pirate destroyer that's plundering and is also not carrying any scientists to Xenon space...

And the sad thing is that you do seem to be adding more, but the new ones suffer from all of the above as well

[DaMuncha]

Player teleport was a test feature in the game for testing ships etc, its still included in the release of X4 because X4 is still very buggy and teleporting to another sector some times fixes the bugs. Last version I played was V2.6 for a few hours and I STILL kept clipping through asteroid and station geometry and getting stuck inside. I guess the game engine wasnt built to handle collisions with complex geometry. I dont ever see that bug being fixed.

[X2-Illuminatus]

Player teleport and removal of jumpdrives were announced way before the release of the game. There wasn't a version 2.7 of X4: Foundation. The current version is 2.60, with 3.00 being on public beta.

[GCU Grey Area]

As far as I can tell, there is no war updates, the war "missions" it gives you are just 3 random jobs to do, just like any other mission in the game, except you dont get paid untill all 3 jobs are done.

That is incorrect.

The war updates are notifications of what's going on in the various wars, informing the player of which faction's doing what & where. This info appears in the bottom left of the screen (same place mission details are provided). There's also a section for war updates in the logbook.

Faction missions vary in number between 1-5 jobs & you do get paid for completing each one, as well as an additional reward for completing the entire mission chain. Some of them are worth doing, particularly those which provide components for ship mods. Also happy to do missions which involve station building, as long as it's for one of my favourite factions, regardless of reward. Don't really care about the reward in such cases, indeed most of the time I make a significant loss. Most stations I build for NPC factions include at least 10 million worth of defence modules (it's a dangerous universe in 3.0) & often several more production modules than strictly necessary.

[DaMuncha]

Thats why I never do those station build missions. They should pay you for what is on a station rather than a set lowest ammount.

Teladi says building stations for Teladi is not profitable.

[GCU Grey Area]

Thats why I never do those station build missions. They should pay you for what is on a station rather than a set lowest ammount.

Teladi says building stations for Teladi is not profitable.

It is useful however. Playing as an Argon, so profit motive isn't quite as central. ARG & ANT have taken quite a pounding, so I'm really just helping out with the rebuilding effort. Prefer to build them stations which are moderately useful (i.e. defence stations with more than 2 guns) & if they ask for, say, a Hull Parts factory I'll usually build them one with multiple production lines & a couple of free metal refineries. All helps to strengthen their economy & might make a difference in their fight with HOP. Anyway good proportion of the building materials used generally come from my factories anyway, so in the end I'll probably get most of the money back, albeit indirectly.

[Chris0132]

There absolutely are war updates, especially frequently in 3.0.

I also think that the teleportation function is one of the best additions, as well as the removal of the jump drive. Because it means that your presence can be moved about at will, while your assets still obey the logistical requirements of the gate network. The jump drive really broke a lot of the game in X3 and I'm very glad to see the back of it. You actually have a reason to use something other than endless universal traders with jumpdrives that can supply all possible logistical demands in the universe because every sector is one jump away.

[mrg81]

Well, we dont know. Its not for us to know.

We don't expect people to know. It would be nice, however, if once in a while people would actually accept that it's not that easy when we explain why, rather than insisting that they know better.

But many of us do know quite well this business. We are not kids anymore. I did a lot of programming too and I did have clients with no clue asking for impossible as well. But we are not asking for impossible here for sure You already did the impossible with the base game!
You guys wrote a gazylion lines of great code, designed excellent graphics and you can't write stories? Come on! Current go and kill missions literally look like a temporary placeholder for something that never came. I didn't even mention main plot because that is hard a lot can break, I get that. But these regular missions are just …don't know how to call it.
Don't get me wrong, you guys did really good. It's just, the x4 without main plot and with only a couple of variants of regular missions is like this dream soccer/football team which got to the finals and lost only because they decided to play without a goal keeper for some reason this time. Yeah, goal keeper doesn't score but is needed too. It's like I love you guys and hate at the same time
ok, if you don't want community to create storries then fine, egosoft should just hire someone to do that. I think we were very loyal, and we deserve a goal keeper.
peace

[DaMuncha]

I read a reddit post on the Bernd AMA yesterday. He was asked how long/involved the story missions in the DLC are gonna be, he replied that the new missions in the 3.0 update are longer than the missions in the DLC. That is very disapointing.

Most indie devs will put new stories and content in the game first, and then translate it later.