Struggling to find the enjoyment

[mr.WHO]

I am now in space hibernation, i don't bother playing the game now, as theres nothing to do, discover, or take my interest. The foundation was cool when wet, but now the concrete has set, I am waiting for the building to begin. And that could take years at this rate.

Same here, not much playing since 2.0. Now I'm waiting for 3.0 + DLC to see if things go more interesting,but somehow I don't think it will be a much of change.

[phrozen1]

One of my biggest gripes with X4 after playing for around a 120 hrs or so is actually with the map. Or rather the fact that you spend the majority of your game time looking at it.

I do appreciate the fact that it's your one-stop-shop for all your management needs. But it is just so depressing sitting in the cockpit of your spaceship or standing at a window in your own space station and not being able to take in the environment around you. No, you are looking at a black screen with a whole bunch of neon graphs and icons and spreadsheets. And that is the game. Because the map is its beating heart. And you can't get anything done without consulting it. Which is sad. And while I'm ranting, I absolutely hate the floating menus that obstruct each other and all other information, unless you filter out everything except one or two items.

Anyhow, I would have liked to access all or some of this information in my cockpit screen. I would have liked to be able to interact with objects in space in a more contextual and intuitive way, by for example right-clicking on the space station in front of me and find out what kind of wares are being offered and sought. Or right-clicking onto the spaceship in front of me, which belong s to me, and access all its relevant data like crew, cargo, current orders, etc. and change them there and then, rather than having to dive back into the map, find it in a list, open a million tabs and sort through them. See, this is where floating menus might have been actually useful.

Regardless - what I'm getting at is that it is just sad that all the relevant information and interaction with the universe are buried in the black hole that is the map.
It takes you out of the space game, out of your cockpit and out of the immersion of being in space and sticks you into a black room with spreadsheets and graphs and annoying semi-transparent menus.

That's where my enjoyment really gets severely hampered.

on point.
I can feel the pain... it's just so sad.
Also:
This game needs direct interaction with npc's badly. Communication. Dynamic events unfolding and reacting on what you are doing (other than rep stats).
Also small goals and longtime goals and a real feeling of achievment. There is not much game in X4. A baren sandbox is not enough for a finished full price game.
After a few hours everything is rinse and repeat and wait, wait, wait, wait, wait... but for what? Everything that happens is more of the same...
Please... I see so much wasted potential.

[Gosnell]

The game just feels soulless.I would love to know how x4 was planned out.What the overriding concept was.If you look at the first 3 xgames they each brought some innovation.X1 brouģht the concept.X2 brought colour and depth.X3 brought beautiful art design.
X4 brings .... less.Smaller universe,less races,less ships,less customisation.A broken economy.
To the people saying that x4 ships are better because they have more detail,I counter that x3 ships had more personality.All the x4 ships might be built to accomodate cockpits ECT,but in so doing have lost the spectacle of x3 battles.More pixels make not better game.
Also enough of this "it will get there stuff"Egosoft has nearly 20 years experience .The product they released at triple A price point was barely fit for purpose.If we stop cutting them slack time after time,And relying on modders to fix their game.They might actually return to the earlier successes.

Yes x3 took over 10 years go get to it's pinnacle.Did egosoft just forget everything they learned over that period.
Damn it I didn't want to sound harsh but it's frustrating when something you love fails.

[Buzz2005]

you cant really want no cockpits, that was never a option

[Cdaragorn]

I do think that its weird that we are in a seat though, it should just be a suit with thrusters.

On the contrary. Having thrusters on a fixed attachment (like jetpack, or, in this case, a seat) makes it easy to control center of mass and thus thrust direction. Without such control, you'd always tend to spin no matter which direction you thrust. Having thrusters directly on the suit would require pilot to wave arms and legs, which would only complicate matters. Then again, it's a game. But people are crying for immersion, and that seat is actually it

Nasa discontinued use of these things in the 80's. In X4 we are surrounded by spaceships with advanced propulsion systems, anti gravity technology and teleportation. The idea that people that live in space in the 29th century and get in and out of spaceships all day long would use a massive bulky seat with thrusters is just laughable. The thing in game even looks like the one nasa made, in the 1980's, come on. The 'issues' you raise could be avoided in a thousand different ways if any thought was actually put into it.
Thinking about it, we should be able to manouver much better in eva. Maybe ego should add another upgrade to our suit thats a whole new way to get around. The whole suit upgrade 'system' was actually touted as a cool thing before the game was released... what we got (buying 4 things from an npc) is a joke.

The laws of physics don't change just because you're a few thousand years in the future. The idea that you would use something bulky like a seat is only laughable to someone that doesn't understand why a jetpack is impossible. NASA only discontinued their efforts because they never got them to work reliably. They didn't create a better thing than them, they just gave up on the effort altogether.

[Cdaragorn]

Station building is easy only while you stick to simple stations. Anything complex (lots of modules), and all you get is a green line soup and no easy way to snap the darn things where you want. As for "no loading screens", it was a technical achievement. A decade ago or so. At least for heavy games. And it's not like e.g. Frontier hadn't already achieved that way way before even X-BtF Today? Nothing out of the ordinary, I don't understand why people are making such a big deal of it.

People are making a big deal of it because they actually understand how difficult it still is. Most games still don't do this, and almost none do it at the scale that Ego has achieved here.

Computers are fast.

Please please please just stop saying this. Yes computers are faster today but the idea that that makes things easy or that they're fast enough to do whatever x you think they should be able to do quickly is a complete lie. If this statement was worth anything at all you should be getting 10000 FPS just because your computer is fast. Computers are in fact incredibly slow and we will always have to use tricks and find ways to make them look like they're doing things they actually aren't.

[radcapricorn]

As for "no loading screens", it was a technical achievement. A decade ago or so. At least for heavy games. And it's not like e.g. Frontier hadn't already achieved that way way before even X-BtF Today? Nothing out of the ordinary, I don't understand why people are making such a big deal of it.

People are making a big deal of it because they actually understand how difficult it still is. Most games still don't do this, and almost none do it at the scale that Ego has achieved here.

Nope, there's nothing difficult to it. At all. Heck, in some cases correctly transferring state from one "level" to the other is more tricky.

Computers are fast.

Please please please just stop saying this. Yes computers are faster today but the idea that that makes things easy or that they're fast enough to do whatever x you think they should be able to do quickly is a complete lie. If this statement was worth anything at all you should be getting 10000 FPS just because your computer is fast. Computers are in fact incredibly slow and we will always have to use tricks and find ways to make them look like they're doing things they actually aren't.

That's funny. Computers are in fact incredibly fast. People are using them like they were still 90s machines, is all. Because instead of learning how the machine actually works, they get tricked by stupid tropes and buzzwords. Worse yet, most everyone is still OK with relying on legacy crap written in 80s and 90s and hardly even updated for modern CPUs. Not to mention misusing tech that was never intended for the purpose (cough XML cough).
No, we should not be getting 10k FPS, there's only so much that you can do in 66.(6)Mcycles (60FPS on a 4GHz CPU). Swapping working data sets (which is all there is to removing loading screens) is rather trivial though. A game does a crapton of much more involved work every frame.

[adeine]

or that they're fast enough to do whatever x you think they should be able to do quickly is a complete lie.

Most people saying that aren't asking for black magic though. They just don't want a map screen that breaks the game after a while, for example.

Which is eminently in the realm of the possible.

[radcapricorn]

Anyhow, I would have liked to access all or some of this information in my cockpit screen. I would have liked to be able to interact with objects in space in a more contextual and intuitive way, by for example right-clicking on the space station in front of me and find out what kind of wares are being offered and sought. Or right-clicking onto the spaceship in front of me, which belong s to me, and access all its relevant data like crew, cargo, current orders, etc. and change them there and then, rather than having to dive back into the map, find it in a list, open a million tabs and sort through them. See, this is where floating menus might have been actually useful.

...or, when a ship contacts you to say that it's under attack, have relevant actions in the communications menu. Right now we can't even find out where the darn thing is! "Help! I'm being attacked!" "Oh, let's see... uh. Work somewhere else for me. No, no, this isn't right... you're... you're fired! That's it, problem solved!"

[Axeface]

The laws of physics don't change just because you're a few thousand years in the future. The idea that you would use something bulky like a seat is only laughable to someone that doesn't understand why a jetpack is impossible. NASA only discontinued their efforts because they never got them to work reliably. They didn't create a better thing than them, they just gave up on the effort altogether.

Please enlighten me.... how is a jetpack 'impossible'? SAFER is literally this isnt it? https://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f ... ewalk.html . I didnt say jetpack anyway, to clarify, i said a suit with thrusters - and the issues I assume you are talking about could easily be overcome. In any case, in x4 its a thousand years in the future where people spend huge amounts of time in space in EVA. They are going to design something more compact and convienient. And nasa gave up because they didnt need the mmu? There is going to come a time where people need to get around in space without tethers and nasa will come up with something better.

[Cdaragorn]

Please enlighten me.... how is a jetpack 'impossible'? SAFER is literally this isnt it? https://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f ... ewalk.html . I didnt say jetpack anyway, to clarify, i said a suit with thrusters - and the issues I assume you are talking about could easily be overcome. In any case, in x4 its a thousand years in the future where people spend huge amounts of time in space in EVA. They are going to design something more compact and convienient. And nasa gave up because they didnt need the mmu? There is going to come a time where people need to get around in space without tethers and nasa will come up with something better.

Because the point of thrust must be at the center of mass or you'll just spin in uncontrollable circles. SAFER is clearly not one as it wraps around the persons torso to provide that exact need. It's also proof that you do need something much larger for the other problem it points out it didn't solve: lack of place to put fuel.

I also never said NASA "didn't need" these. I said it gave up because it couldn't solve all the problems trying to make something "compact and convenient" that would also still be able to do what was needed. Being any amount of time in the future does not change this fundamental problem.

[Cdaragorn]

Nope, there's nothing difficult to it. At all. Heck, in some cases correctly transferring state from one "level" to the other is more tricky.

At this point you simply don't know what you're talking about. As someone who has actually worked with 3d graphics apis this is completely untrue. Modern versions (DirectX 12 and Vulkan) have finally made this easier than it used to be but that does not make it easy.

[radcapricorn]

Nope, there's nothing difficult to it. At all. Heck, in some cases correctly transferring state from one "level" to the other is more tricky.

At this point you simply don't know what you're talking about. As someone who has actually worked with 3d graphics apis this is completely untrue. Modern versions (DirectX 12 and Vulkan) have finally made this easier than it used to be but that does not make it easy.

Oh, thanks, I needed a good laugh.

[Axeface]

Please enlighten me.... how is a jetpack 'impossible'? SAFER is literally this isnt it? https://www.nasa.gov/missions/shuttle/f ... ewalk.html . I didnt say jetpack anyway, to clarify, i said a suit with thrusters - and the issues I assume you are talking about could easily be overcome. In any case, in x4 its a thousand years in the future where people spend huge amounts of time in space in EVA. They are going to design something more compact and convienient. And nasa gave up because they didnt need the mmu? There is going to come a time where people need to get around in space without tethers and nasa will come up with something better.

Because the point of thrust must be at the center of mass or you'll just spin in uncontrollable circles. SAFER is clearly not one as it wraps around the persons torso to provide that exact need. It's also proof that you do need something much larger for the other problem it points out it didn't solve: lack of place to put fuel.

I also never said NASA "didn't need" these. I said it gave up because it couldn't solve all the problems trying to make something "compact and convenient" that would also still be able to do what was needed. Being any amount of time in the future does not change this fundamental problem.

Nasa gave up with it because they didnt need mmu's for what they were doing, they could accomplish the same tasks with tethers. In the future we will need more.

And you can circumvent that problem with adding thrust to other places... arms, legs, feet... and training on how to operate it. Plus, X4 has anti gravity technology... this is a sci-fi game. And being in the future absolutely does change solutions to fundamental problems. For example, thrusters and their fuel can get smaller, allowing you to place more of them all over the suit. Computerisation can automatically account for thrust distribution. They can get smaller while providing more thrust too... and whatever, I didnt say jetpack, although SAFER is absolutely a jetpack. The dictionary definition of jetpack even explicitally states 'used by astronauts' https://www.dictionary.com/browse/jetpack. Ill be frank, to say that a jetpack is 'impossible' is laughable too.

Anyway, this is a sci-fi game, something like this would be fun https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsEjha7Yigc