What should your X-Game look like and what should it contain?

[Falcrack]

Talk of X5 is very, very premature. There is enough of a base game for X4 to build upon without starting from scratch.

My X4 wishlist:
-More in-depth civilian economy, so that war is not the only or even primary driver of economic growth
-Greater simulation of civilians, consuming goods, civilian mass traffic serving more than cosmetic purposes
-Wages, other recurring expenses
-Greater need for workers on stations (ie only very small production efficacy with no workers)
-More reasons to own sectors (sector owners collecting taxes)
-NPCs and factions deal with credits, just like the player. No credit spawning.
-To help with above, better AI to deal with AI maintaining profitability.
-Jumpdrive for L and XL ships
-More of a 4X RTS feel, maybe a gamestart where you start as a faction and are competing for control of the galaxy
-Fleet combat that is not convoluted, is responsive to player commands
-Improved carrier and wing functionality
-Improved AI combat and pathfinding algorithms

[Nort The Fragrent]

We have this magnificent dream that X could be better!
And yes it can and will be, but we have to wait !!!

My quandary is !

With X3 (in all its forms) there were some very very goods parts. And some complete failures.

I loved AP (its size, and plethora of ships)
I loved Rebirth, (the visuals) the rest well!!!

I was kind of expecting X4 to be a pleasant blend of the best bits of the old games, updated to be a smooth vast almost never ending universe of joy wonder and hardship.

As it stands it is quite small, and way too easy once you get started.

Building stations is wonderfull, such an improvement.
A couple of comments though! They get built far to quickly, they are not module interdependent. By that I mean, if over lapped they are not damaged! If disconnected they still function ! why?
There needs to be more logic to a build work flow. By that I mean, if the habitation is between production and storage, the stations needs to be less efficient.
Solar panels ought to be directional and work best if directed at the sunlight! If positioned incorrectly they need to be next to useless! This would add a neat more thinking aspect to a build design.

Flat docks!
Landing ships alight on the top, some! if the station is busy get sent down inside! This is a good feature. Would it not be more practical for the departing ship within, to exit out from the under side! This is space ! And this would give a more efficient loading unloading protocol.

Most of the ships from X3 were believable in there design, even when viewed from close up they looked the business. Some of these X4 ships are hollow, dull, boring, and are ripe for destruction.
Please put some design time into better looking ships, ( freighters in particular )

Ventures!
Haven't yet fathomed that one. What is it all about?
You send your ship of to who knows where, and may be it comes back!
You don't get to see what it see’s, and it’s out of your control.
Whats the point?

Right!
I am looking at my map, I have stations and ships all over the place. I have billions pilling up. And have just about saturated the map.
What next? ( twiddling my thumbs )
Nothing left to explore!
Starting a war is futile!
I could wiz round and round in Matrix #451 mopping up the last remnant of grey ! ( Huff )

Come on ES, give us a Universe, not this back garden.

[Kadatherion]

Litcube managed to make X3 somewhat playable with huge fleets and assets,

Wow! I see you are easily pleased..
I happily played thousands of hours of X3 without ever using Litcube's mod (which I'm sure is a great mod.)
This won't be popular with the instant gratification crowd; but since X4 is new and still being updated/improved/added to, why not wait to see how it looks with all the DLC that is promised as well as the regular updates before we try to get it reverted to a throwback game? If I wanted this game to be X3 I would just play X3. I would rather see the new and different stuff that will be added soon.

Considering X3TC/AP was pretty much Egosoft's Reunion + community made assets from previous overhaul mods, there actually wouldn't be anything strange in expecting Egosoft to include (or mimic, or take inspiration from, whatever) what the modders have done previously, polish it further and put it into their new game, you know?
Not that this was the point of my post - not by far - but if you really want to go there...

And yes, two years from now the game might have more features and some more content (much of which seems is going to be 2 races that were simply cut out of first release, which never happened before, but still), and I would bet mods will once again (if the modding community survives long enough: compared to X3 the modding community is much smaller and less active, and there's a reason for that, the same reason why even this general message board has slowed down DRAMATICALLY in just 4 months) find a way to work around some of the silly limitations caused by the amateurish UI design (which is not going to be revolutionized, it will be polished for sure, but that's what the game was built upon and it's not gonna change nor it could, it's too late for that): the fact remains that the game came out being a step (or two or three steps) back compared to what was reached before.
Granted, it's nothing new in the industry (just think of The Sims' syndrome of coming out each time having to all over again crunch out a dozen DLCs to have all the features the previous game had), and to an extent there's also good reasons for starting from a blank slate - no other way to have innovation - but starting fresh having learned from past mistakes and taking inspiration from what the community did with your previous work is one thing, starting fresh by reinventing the wheel yet making the same - when not even worse - mistakes you have already done in the past is another.

[Kadatherion]

I told egosoft ages ago to hire litecubes devs and mayhem dev lol for X4
The community usually knows better when it comes whats tedious and frustrating UI wise and gameplay wise because we fix most of what can possibly be fixed.
I am actually more kinda frustrated a little that its this long into release and X4 STILL does not have close to Mayhem did by introducing AI fighting for sector control and exhange of sector control along with the player able to do the same.
IT was touted as a feature of X4 but alas like usual a lot of the promised things have not been seen on launch.

If I'm not mistaken, I've read that the creator of the Mayhem submod hated X4 and refunded it, so there might have been some... conflictual design philosophies that wouldn't have made it possible anyways

Jokes aside (well, relatively so: it's not a good sign when several of the most prominent modders who have helped keeping your old games relevant for 10 years show no interest whatsoever in your new ones) it's obviously not about "hiring" modders (although sometimes this has been done and appeared to be a successful choice), but learning from them first. Seriously speaking, while Litcube's and Mayhem make X3 immensely better as a game (and not just bigger, as a different kind of overhauls, like XRM, do), they are far from being something a game dev should copypaste 1:1. For obvious reasons: these are mods, jury rigged, usually made without having access to the tools and hardcoded mechanics only the dev can work with, so they can never be really polished and usually have to work around limitations and get to a working end with a lot of ingenuity. Litcube's especially is one of the most polished mods I have ever seen for any game, how it makes several vanilla mechanics work better both in playability and performance while still being pretty much vanilla is astounding, but for instance if a game dev used the same way Litcube's used to let you control a fleet of 100 ships (IE: hours spent pre-programming every ship class automated behaviour), that game dev should be fired. Because while Litcube had no other way to make fleets somewhat work and be manageable with the UI and scripts he had to work with, a dev is supposed to shape the UI in a way the same result could be achieved with 1/100th of the effort for the player.

One could also argue that the biggest selling point of X4 - the dynamic economy and wars - was indeed inspired by these (among others) popular efforts from the modding community. Fact is... it was jury rigged. So much jury rigged that, like you say, it didn't work AT ALL at release, wasn't even really implemented, and still isn't working now, although it's slowly getting better (while new issues surface with each patch, which is common for rushed games that really are early access in everything but name). Nor the UI, again, although it tried, is obviously enough to make all of it really manageable in a decent fashion. Given that was one of the main selling points, it's quite bad: it's like they made a soccer game that's incapable of having teams AI work and pass the ball, but hey, you can kick the ball with the little guy you are controlling, right?

Ironically, the scenario we are presented is pretty similar to my above-mentioned example: we have been sold a product that often seems to have been built by a lone modder that had to try and work around the system to make something somewhat work (when it does work, and, as said, often doesn't yet), instead than by a dev team with all the tools to shape the core game the way they needed to get to their end goals. This shows yet again something that we have grown to know isn't going all too well inside Egosoft's: work management issues, a clear focus. They themselves built the game on and with a UI that works not only against the players, but first and foremost against them too when they try to implement certain features. An AI coder for example could work all he wants on making the ships' AI behave better than it does now - and someone sure needs to do it, badly - but if the result of his work has then to be managed through an UI that doesn't easily let you control those behaviours, with orders overlapping and so on, then even a decent AI per se will feel clunky, unresponsive, dumb to the player.

This is the kind of thing Egosoft often stumbles upon: they have several pretty awesome individual ideas from various aspects of the game, meaning they have some pretty awesome individual devs. But when it's time to put them all together in one coherent package, they have no idea how to do that making every component work well together with the others, and the result is a broken mess of good but unpolished and underdeveloped ideas. Whether they lack communication, focused leadership, common sense on the drawing board, developing time and budget or (more likely) a mix of these and more is up to debate, but the final result is pretty much this. And sooner or later the reckoning will come, if it hasn't already: Rebirth was a harsh trainwreck to rise up from, and now those bad reviews on Metacritic and Steam for X4 too don't bode well, at all. Just as these forums getting so much slower so quickly isn't a good symptom as well. The Split DLC, like all DLCs, will bring some attention back, but is it going to be enough? I hope so, but I'm beginning to be more and more pessimistic.

[Misunderstood Wookie]

Interesting you should say a lot of that.
You should feel lucky this is not the Star Citizen community, I had objected critiques in similar over there about Chris's skills and past dev work and oh boy it was a shit storm.

I was sure what to expect, I would have thought it perform better the UI be better it looked better during the initial showcases pre-release but I also in the back of mind knew it was going to be slightly clunky around the edges, I did not think the AI was going to be this bad tho then again I never gave X:R any attention I was to downvote it as being a shit game, because well it was at launch for many months after it was terrible excuse for an X Universe title.
I thought the devs who defended it by saying its designed not to be X4 and not to be like X3 to "bring more people in and make the experience better" was a load of shit, I thought it was pretty simple what happened X:R, all of its budget on the engine and scale none of it on the gameplay they had a heap of assets for the universe but no time to make cockpits or player empire aspect around the new engine so X:R became a marketing spin-off due to time constraints and management level decisions.

Hence we got a flyable ship with the X universe aspects around it, Skunk always felt like a placeholder to me as if they went with this SKUNK concept due to the running of money or time to make the rest. With the most recent updates I am sure it plays fine but the mere fact I was stuck with the skunk and those lousy few weapon choices and lacking X3 aspects I still to this day have not picked it backed up.

I decided to grab X4 for one reason and one only, if this ship sunk there will be no more Egosoft the last remaining set of X3 fans will probably bail if this game does not turn out to be a true successor.
I do expect more from them this time around, the same things we saw with X3 and XR will not fly this time at least not with me, they should have learned by now that whatever they did with X:R internally magement wise to keep in touch with the player base and their target is WAAAY OFF and learned what needs to be done for X4.

I don't think they have learned much yet, it is almost exactly as you said, X4 feels like a MOD in a lot of ways for X:R the engine has similar bugs, the AI behaves similar-ish and buggy I told my friend who asked about X4 that right now it is playable it can be fun at times but it is still quite boring a lot of the time and feels like a re-skin of X:R to please the X3 crowd than a true game right now.
The only thing X4 has better over X3 right now is graphics and I have to say not by a great deal I prefer some of X3's gfx a little bit more it was a more simple design I think if your going to go better gfx the animations needs reflect this as do the effects and textures. X:R gave us nice gfx but no gameplay IMO a whole lot of something going on but never anything to interact with it all. X4 gave us the X3 empire feel back but lost some of the attention to detail in some areas of asset design.
and they are STILL up to their old tricks rehashing only a dozen or so NPC's and station tile sets.

It is not bad this time around as each race has their own unique look but they do rehash the textures for the entire race, I feel this time around all the budget went into getting the Empire stuff working and all the design of fly anything that we really just got a beta of a game. Egosoft is not speaking about what they have actively been working on and I hope its deep engine issues that eventually fix player seen problems and not just adjustments too little things, I want to see fixes with collisions, AI Spinning around due to no collision when player is not in sector, the AI to make smarter pathing choices general speed improvements etc etc. because under my management I would be halting every bit of DLC funding until the AI and all of the game breaking shit was fixed, then I would split the DLC team in two and have a core set of people work on design with the AI coders while the models made assets for the DLC, the coding and gameplay of the DLC would be the LAST thing I put dev time into. If Egosoft end up reading our two little posts I hope they get the message that the core X3 guys and those who stuck around for X4 want the Engine code to run up to snuff with a player-friendly UI we don't want DLC or efforts on that right now IMO DLC of SPLIT and prob Barron follow the same reasons for why X:R had no damn fly anything they ran out of time or money again why else would you release X4 missing a number of its X3 races instead of introducing new races for X4, My guess is that X:R did not give the boost they wanted and this was rushed out the door and DLC for SPLIT at least to me makes me a little angry.

There would be no time for anything else in the studio than polishing what we had already if let in my control while the 3D model team work on assets to fill the universe with the rest would be in the same room working together to bring ideas and fixes together with the coding team so it all comes together before December.

I still have no idea how some ideas make it past the screening phase, either the UI was going to be more than it is and they did not get around to polish or.... well I could just go on but in the end I wrote above what I think, its the same deal as X:R a lot of ideas half done.

[Nort The Fragrent]

Reading all this is inspirational to make me want to develop my own space game.
I know how I would like it, yet do not know how to do it.

In some of ES early pre-release pod casts, they were more interested in the swivelling gun then the new game play.
This ought to have been a warning to us, that they were doing what they wanted and not what the customer was wanting.

Any business has to take note of what the customer wants, as it is the customer who pays the bills in the end.

I will not be paying ES any more money for any more as they have not delivered on this first effort of X4.

Wow, they not only stung us by depleting the number of races, but they give us s—t ships, and very little space.

Any one want to help me make our own space game?

[spankahontis]

"What should your X-Game look like and what should it contain?"

- Blackjack
- And Hookers!

http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2011 ... fender.jpg

[spankahontis]

Interesting you should say a lot of that.
You should feel lucky this is not the Star Citizen community, I had objected critiques in similar over there about Chris's skills and past dev work and oh boy it was a shit storm.

I was sure what to expect, I would have thought it perform better the UI be better it looked better during the initial showcases pre-release but I also in the back of mind knew it was going to be slightly clunky around the edges, I did not think the AI was going to be this bad tho then again I never gave X:R any attention I was to downvote it as being a shit game, because well it was at launch for many months after it was terrible excuse for an X Universe title.
I thought the devs who defended it by saying its designed not to be X4 and not to be like X3 to "bring more people in and make the experience better" was a load of shit, I thought it was pretty simple what happened X:R, all of its budget on the engine and scale none of it on the gameplay they had a heap of assets for the universe but no time to make cockpits or player empire aspect around the new engine so X:R became a marketing spin-off due to time constraints and management level decisions.

Hence we got a flyable ship with the X universe aspects around it, Skunk always felt like a placeholder to me as if they went with this SKUNK concept due to the running of money or time to make the rest. With the most recent updates I am sure it plays fine but the mere fact I was stuck with the skunk and those lousy few weapon choices and lacking X3 aspects I still to this day have not picked it backed up.

I decided to grab X4 for one reason and one only, if this ship sunk there will be no more Egosoft the last remaining set of X3 fans will probably bail if this game does not turn out to be a true successor.
I do expect more from them this time around, the same things we saw with X3 and XR will not fly this time at least not with me, they should have learned by now that whatever they did with X:R internally magement wise to keep in touch with the player base and their target is WAAAY OFF and learned what needs to be done for X4

Felt the same way at first, but XR turned out great after fixes and tons of free content.
But in the end, most focus on release and if you fail that, you're screwed and your game only gets remembered for the critique.

Reading all this is inspirational to make me want to develop my own space game.
I know how I would like it, yet do not know how to do it.

In some of ES early pre-release pod casts, they were more interested in the swivelling gun then the new game play.
This ought to have been a warning to us, that they were doing what they wanted and not what the customer was wanting.

Any business has to take note of what the customer wants, as it is the customer who pays the bills in the end.

I will not be paying ES any more money for any more as they have not delivered on this first effort of X4.

Wow, they not only stung us by depleting the number of races, but they give us s—t ships, and very little space.

Any one want to help me make our own space game?

They could have a ton of ships, 100 more sectors, 50 more Factions, every Race and new ones, even a Billion Guns (Sorry Borderlands 3 just got announced ).. But in the end, I feel like something is wrong that I can't put my Finger on that goes beyond the lack of Races and Sectors Etc.
Maybe 3.0 will change that? But at the moment I feel a sense of "meh" about X4.

[Kadatherion]

Interesting you should say a lot of that.
You should feel lucky this is not the Star Citizen community, I had objected critiques in similar over there about Chris's skills and past dev work and oh boy it was a shit storm.

Interestingly enough, I believe some of the issues come right from that: trying to emulate what other games like SC are doing (or, well, are supposed to be doing, we can't even call SC a "game" yet). In the first days after launch, quite a few debates orbited around the explorable platforms in X4: a feature that, sure, is fine (and it sure got better than it was in Rebirth), but it's still obviously and inevitably underdeveloped and, in the long run, can feel detrimental to the experience since it forces you to waste time walking through the same, empty corridor for the 1000th time just to reach a trading UI panel (and it also takes resources away from core game mechanics at least some of us believe to be much more important).

A reply on the matter from CBJ I still remember was more or less this (not word by word ofc, but the meaning): "we can't afford to NOT have 1st person exploration anymore, given the comparison with other games players will inevitably do" (and we all knew what "other games" he was referring to). Whether he's right or not I can't say (personally I'd say it's very wrong, but I also don't represent the "casual" players, which make for the majority of the market, and they have to make money, not just please the "hardcore" fanbase), but if you stretch yourself too thin for your means just to put a checkmark on every thing the competition is doing, instead of focusing on things you can do BETTER than them, you end having... nothing better at all, just a collection of barebone "features" that don't go anywhere really relevant. And as such you risk losing both the "casuals" AND the "hardcores".

Hence we got a flyable ship with the X universe aspects around it, Skunk always felt like a placeholder to me as if they went with this SKUNK concept due to the running of money or time to make the rest. With the most recent updates I am sure it plays fine but the mere fact I was stuck with the skunk and those lousy few weapon choices and lacking X3 aspects I still to this day have not picked it backed up.

Truth be told, the one playership only design decision for Rebirth was taken much earlier than any time or last minute money constraint potential roadblock, so yeah, it really was a free choice. A bad one, I agree, it backfired (at least as it was a controversial choice presented together with a game that was also lacking in so many more other aspects, wouldn't probably have been so bad if, on a tradeoff, the rest of Rebirth had been amazeballs), but it was planned, that wasn't a lie.

The only thing X4 has better over X3 right now is graphics and I have to say not by a great deal I prefer some of X3's gfx a little bit more it was a more simple design I think if your going to go better gfx the animations needs reflect this as do the effects and textures. X:R gave us nice gfx but no gameplay IMO a whole lot of something going on but never anything to interact with it all. X4 gave us the X3 empire feel back but lost some of the attention to detail in some areas of asset design.
and they are STILL up to their old tricks rehashing only a dozen or so NPC's and station tile sets.

Yeah, the overall quality loss in ships and general assets design has been another major issue. Graphics per se are much better obviously, at least on the engine level, but the actual designs... ugh. Seems to be both caused by the loss of artists and the new constraints given, once again, by a choice that on paper might have looked fine, but in the actual game tied their hands: that very 1st person explorable platforms concept that forced them to make many ships look the same blocky mess to allow for those generic, cubic landing platforms you can walk on. It's a feature I personally like, it adds immersion, but when the price for it is having spacefaring dildoes, hairdriers and bricks, then maybe it's not worth it. Again, better to do something relatively simple mighty fine, than biting more than you can chew and doing something more complicated just barely decently.

I hope its deep engine issues that eventually fix player seen problems and not just adjustments too little things, I want to see fixes with collisions, AI Spinning around due to no collision when player is not in sector, the AI to make smarter pathing choices general speed improvements etc etc. [...]

Heh, I wouldn't expect *too* much. They can fix things, even pretty big ones, but they can't bring a game that's already "finished" (in a sense) back to the drawing board. As previously mentioned, as an example, they can for sure make the UI better, polish it here and there and fix some of its issues, but they won't be able to redo it from scratch, for obvious reasons, even though some of the issues are inherently by design and solving them would require no less than that. This is why, while for many reasons it is of course premature to speak about any "X5" like it has been done a bit in this topic, it's also not uncalled for to chat about things we'd like to see in an X game that we know won't ever be able to end up in the current one. In my first post I mentioned a "real" RTS/4X UI style for macromanagement, for instance, as what I'm probably missing the most: like it or not, it would never be a feature that could be developed for the current game. It would mean remaking from scratch half the game, not something you can do when the game... well, is actually already here, development cycles have rules you couldn't break even if you wanted (simply put: you need money to do such work, a lot of it, and money in the gaming industry comes - much like it happens for the film industry - 95% from the first couple weeks after release).

I still have no idea how some ideas make it past the screening phase, either the UI was going to be more than it is and they did not get around to polish or.... well I could just go on but in the end I wrote above what I think, its the same deal as X:R a lot of ideas half done.

That's unfortunately a feeling that's becoming more and more common in the industry as a whole. "How could they release that certain game without noticing that thing didn't work AT ALL? Have they even played their own game?". The answer to that question sometimes differs, depending on the case: time constraints from the publishers or bad management (hello Bioware, how did you like that Kotaku article? Still burns, eh?), to sometimes the very fact devs really don't play their own game if not in separate chunks, never really putting to the test the whole product before giving it to the public and letting them do the rest as paying beta (when not alpha) testers. Which is, in itself, the result of a strange, silly direction the industry has taken, but also a direction hardly any single dev team can escape from even if they wanted, if they want to stay competitive.

[Misunderstood Wookie]

I did read your write up about the RTS/ Stellaris style map control which is what I originally thought it was going to be but I also kinda knew there was no that much detail would be put into the UI (no offence egosoft)
As for "Drawing Board" I dunno a few games went back to that level to re-design core broken mechanics NO MANS SKY being one such title with a few of its design choices it re-designed the entire thing within then engine they had already made.

It sounds like we're both are pretty critical of Egosoft, I am sure they put effort into both X:R and X4 I mean X:R ended up alright... eventually, I would play it if not for the single ship as I simply don't agree that a 4x game should revolve around such at least not the kind of game they went with it can work for roguelikes and that top-down build a single ship and do 4x things with it arcady like games but they went for the traditional X style with updated engine and it indeed bit them on the behind.

I disagree that "they have no choice but to include 1st person walking around on stations, while I can appreciate it is not for every game, the other games who let you do this do not have a station building I mean you don't see Elite Dangerous saying 'everybody has fleets we need fleets' It comes down to game mechanics and design choices so as you said throwing everything into please everybody is taking away from the core mechanics which made X-Universe fun, to begin with, and it shows given that x4 has spent time on those features at the expensive of improving the core gameplay and making that run well.

[Falcrack]

I disagree that "they have no choice but to include 1st person walking around on stations, while I can appreciate it is not for every game, the other games who let you do this do not have a station building I mean you don't see Elite Dangerous saying 'everybody has fleets we need fleets' It comes down to game mechanics and design choices so as you said throwing everything into please everybody is taking away from the core mechanics which made X-Universe fun, to begin with, and it shows given that x4 has spent time on those features at the expensive of improving the core gameplay and making that run well.

1st person walking around is in the game, that ship has sailed a long time ago. It's not going away by complaining about it.

[ignis_alas]

- more ships and more varied formats
- better AI offcourse, on npc faction managing, on war strategy but very importantly also on enemy piloting (auto pilot also), and fleet guiding in combat
- expanded ship interiors, its not necessary every nut and cranny, but to actually make it feel like proper ships so that players don t just feel they re flying assets
- rearranged capital ship interiors because capital ship cockpits (bridges) just feel as a huge cockpit, not a proper bridge of a massive ship and that allow for a much better clean view of whats happening outside
- modular pieces for ships, mainly very different cockpits
- new station modules that bring a space city vibe and gameplay to the stations, instead of just stop points
- more complex behavior and crowds of npcs giving life to these spacestations
- quite distinct space 'regions' in look and 'topography' like x rebirth had
- a story dlc (trying to cram everything at release is just fatal)
- brutal ingame cinematics and effects
- (fundamental) at least 5 player multiplayer co op

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

X4 Version of Gwent

[mr.WHO]

- expanded ship interiors, its not necessary every nut and cranny, but to actually make it feel like proper ships so that players don t just feel they re flying assets
- rearranged capital ship interiors because capital ship cockpits (bridges) just feel as a huge cockpit, not a proper bridge of a massive ship and that allow for a much better clean view of whats happening outside

And what do you expect in that interior? It's not like they can put Mass Effect Normandy interior into every?
Regarding bridges too small - have you tried Paranid Zeus bridge? Great view, great style and very spacious. Teladi is second to that and Argon is kinda crampy.

[ignis_alas]

And what do you expect in that interior? It's not like they can put Mass Effect Normandy interior into every?
Regarding bridges too small - have you tried Paranid Zeus bridge? Great view, great style and very spacious. Teladi is second to that and Argon is kinda crampy.

nothing peculiarly special, nothing excessively detailed or big (for an x5 dlc yes, but for x4 just something that is there) (and yes, i wrote x5 )
But a couple rooms showing that its a functioning crewed 'real' ship, not assets with dashboards, but also nothing specially fancy. for example, just do what the skunk albion had, add a toilet with shower (mini cubicle style), some foldable beds and some windows to see realtime outside and voila (the windows are IMPORTANT, LOOK AT ME WRITTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, ITS IMPORTANT).
About capital ship bridges, i think they have the issue that they all just seem normal cockpits, just bigger, and if one or two were like that, that could be related to a species cultural thing, but all are like that. I hope in the future dlcs they could just spend a little more time and thought (now that they have 'put the house in order' so to say). Like capital ship bridges that you can see 360° (naval style), having a couple of communications sounds in the background reverberating through the bridge, the ceilings higher than they are now (not just in one), and a few actual 'blinking' screens on the wall (for example) will for sure give an absolutely different feel, make the elevator open in a floor under and we go to the bridge through stairs, this would give quite an impact. These would be 'proper' bridges

(BUT SERIOUSLY, WINDOWS)

[Nort The Fragrent]

A thought about ship design, and developers budget restraints.
Would it not be a good idea to put to the open design community a brief as to what X4 requires as the ships necessary components and dimension points.

Let the imagination of the masses submit designs for inclusion into the game. ( Free designs, no reward other than seeing your ship in the game )

Each race would have it’s Theme, and ES put there ship performance values as standard. These they all ready have so no expense there for them.

Having a multitude of ship designs, can’t be that hard. It’s the design time that is the restriction I think. So put the design out to us budding ship dreamers to willingly fill the gap and allow the X4 ships to show a better futuristic look. Some look like they come from the first world war ! Not the future. !

The work ES have put into the docking is nice, I do like the way we now get to land and take off. Full marks. One niggle is when docking inside with a small ship I am left sitting looking at the wall ! Can we be turned around so we can see the other ships that are docking/undocking. ( The wall is dull )
Plus my new shipyard that cost me a bundle to build has not got my logo on the outside ! Or indeed on the wall I look at when docked. It would be a neat touch to have my logo on my stations as it is with the ships.

[Misunderstood Wookie]

A thought about ship design, and developers budget restraints.
Would it not be a good idea to put to the open design community a brief as to what X4 requires as the ships necessary components and dimension points.

Let the imagination of the masses submit designs for inclusion into the game. ( Free designs, no reward other than seeing your ship in the game )

Each race would have it’s Theme, and ES put there ship performance values as standard. These they all ready have so no expense there for them.

Having a multitude of ship designs, can’t be that hard. It’s the design time that is the restriction I think. So put the design out to us budding ship dreamers to willingly fill the gap and allow the X4 ships to show a better futuristic look. Some look like they come from the first world war ! Not the future. !

The work ES have put into the docking is nice, I do like the way we now get to land and take off. Full marks. One niggle is when docking inside with a small ship I am left sitting looking at the wall ! Can we be turned around so we can see the other ships that are docking/undocking. ( The wall is dull )
Plus my new shipyard that cost me a bundle to build has not got my logo on the outside ! Or indeed on the wall I look at when docked. It would be a neat touch to have my logo on my stations as it is with the ships.

That's a common tactic IndiDev do to find talent worth hiring as well.
If someone else makes better designs it's worth the company hiring for the production value at the end.
That or you can do what SC did and get the community to make an entire ship (not that right now I like what is going on there just it was worth a mention)

[Buzz2005]

X4 Version of Gwent

OMG that would be awesome!!! Playing it with greedy teladi taking profitsssss from them would be so satisfying

[Marco Nero]

I know X4 has not been on the market for a long time, but the Sandbox X4 does not really appeal to all fans. What would your wishes be for an X5?
X5 as a kind of Best of X-Series - with everything that was ingenious from all parts, in my opinion - yes - THAT would be something.
Imagine:
- The engine of X4
- The station construction of X4
- The explosions and effects of Rebirth (including explosion damage when staying within the blast wave)
- The size of the universe of X3 TC / AP - The different races with all their differences in weapons, rockets, ships, language, history, looks
- The best scripts / mods from X3 TC / AP - such as: trading software MK3, merchandise logistics software MK2 / MK3, utility and supply trader, sales representative, MARS, codea weapon system, MEFOS carrier management relay management, military transport, prospector, security and rescue service, Tender, trade overview with statistics
- Ship command buttons, more shortcuts
and certainly more
- and of course plots - story - to the story X ... - Plots for every breed with background you can do, but you do not have to
- different levels of difficulty

Oh herje ..... what would that be a brilliant game and expandable to infinity ....
In this sense - Long life -

simply 100% correct