Is walking in station/ship/wherever required to play?

[-Dna-]

So where is this "bible" of computer games development that commands "Thou shalt not have walking in a space sim?"
Why cannot a game that simulates flying in space have RPG elements included?

I have seen Alpha footage from Star Citizen that includes quite a lot walking, talking etc. Are you telling me that this is not also a space sim?

That's quite some projection there, we are only asking how exactly it will work, whether we can skip that particular mandatory walking or not. What people do with that info is pretty much up to them. If you want to walk every single time for full RP and immersion, hey, more power to you. But some of us, we want the option to skip that. (For me, because I play X games for the ships and factories, not for the abysmal character models and interior areas).

It's not a binary choice. You can have your walking simulator, and we have can a real X game that isn't Rebirth 2.0 at the same time.

Sorry but this is a classical passive-aggressive post. There aren't two games in one and there is no XR 2.0 (luckily for you, XR is already at 4.0 version ). There is only one game: X4. It has walking on stations? Yes. Do you like it? No. Then this game is not for you. Simple like that, there is no choice to do in the first stage

Can't you resist the hype monkey on your shoulder and you want to know how much you have to tolerate the fact that you need to play in order to change ship? Just wait... or shut that damn monkey in a cage

In the Elite forum they want "space legs" since the kickstarter! This means something, right?

[26072013]

So where is this "bible" of computer games development that commands "Thou shalt not have walking in a space sim?"
Why cannot a game that simulates flying in space have RPG elements included?

I have seen Alpha footage from Star Citizen that includes quite a lot walking, talking etc. Are you telling me that this is not also a space sim?

I don't oppose walking around in a space sim per se. It's cool to see huge ships in first person perspective and being able to seamlessly walk from one to the other is great. For a few times.

But when I want to switch between two ships in a space sim, and I would have no other option than to walk for one or two minutes to do that and I'd have to do that again and again and again, then walking is just a barrier to the actual gameplay. That's what I described in my post, and that's what I don't want in a space sim.

Perhaps walking in a space sim can be interesting, but I haven't seen a good case for it yet. IMO it was rather awful in X:R, and what I've seen from Star Citizen in that regard looked rather boring and cumbersome to me, too.

[sd_jasper]

Y'all know there is a teleporter specifically designed for moving from one of your ships to another, right?

[jocan2003]

I remember when i saw the first armed guard in x rebirth and said to myself, its only a matter of time before they blend in fps in the mix, we also have spacesuit that plant bomb now so we are getting closer to being a fully immersive fps/ space game

[spankahontis]

I remember when i saw the first armed guard in x rebirth and said to myself, its only a matter of time before they blend in fps in the mix, we also have spacesuit that plant bomb now so we are getting closer to being a fully immersive fps/ space game

Thing is, they're all doing it now.. Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, Eve Online probably do and there are a dozen tinier companies that are trying to catch up.

Space Sim Market is probably one of the most competitive game genre markets out there next to Battle Royal at the moment.
They need to compete with these big companies.
Lagging behind could lose them a big slice of that market and most the big boys have a station walking feature of some kind.
So no turning back.

[gbjbaanb]

I remember when i saw the first armed guard in x rebirth and said to myself, its only a matter of time before they blend in fps in the mix, we also have spacesuit that plant bomb now so we are getting closer to being a fully immersive fps/ space game

If Star Citizen cannot do it with multi-million dollar investment, egosoft won't be able to do it. This is the primary reason for not having walking around - do 1 thing well, rather than dilute your product by wasting your efforts on side projects.

But the idea that walking is an alternative to menus is wrong, it simply adds a level of tedium (or "immersion" YMMV) to achieving the same thing - you walk to someone and pop a menu to buy whatever, or you sit in your pilot chair and pop the same menu (with a video-conference talking head, perhaps) without the walking bit.

[spankahontis]

I remember when i saw the first armed guard in x rebirth and said to myself, its only a matter of time before they blend in fps in the mix, we also have spacesuit that plant bomb now so we are getting closer to being a fully immersive fps/ space game

If Star Citizen cannot do it with multi-million dollar investment, egosoft won't be able to do it. This is the primary reason for not having walking around - do 1 thing well, rather than dilute your product by wasting your efforts on side projects.

But the idea that walking is an alternative to menus is wrong, it simply adds a level of tedium (or "immersion" YMMV) to achieving the same thing - you walk to someone and pop a menu to buy whatever, or you sit in your pilot chair and pop the same menu (with a video-conference talking head, perhaps) without the walking bit.

As I pointed out earlier, X:Rebirth had a series of UI Hotkeys that you could press to get you back to your Ship instantly without having to walk back.
If Egosoft haven't implemented this yet, they'd be fools not to eventually.

But it isn't just Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous have already implemented their "Holo Me" feature, walking around on stations is a future project for them, so it's a thing that more and more Space Sim franchises are playing with.
Egosoft simply can't live in the past and let the more conservative of fans have their way, otherwise they lag behind and if other space sims decide to mimic X's Empire Building features, they are effectively screwed cause now they have a serious competitor on their Hands.

[atavistuk]

And incidentally Star Citizen HAS done it.

You Spawn on a Station, walk around on said station, up to the landing pad, board your ship, fly off somewhere. Land on another station, get out of your ship, have a shoot out with someone on said station (First Person Shooter style) get back in your ship, fly somewhere else. Heck you can have a shootout IN your ship if it's more than just a single seat fighter!

Elite players are getting increasingly annoyed at 'Space Legs' (frontiers version) taking so long!

EvE Online toyed with it with the Incarna Expansion...

No Man's Sky of course was mostly about exploring worlds and stations on foot (And the 'space' part is more... arcadey than sim)

In fact, most if not all space games (Sims or not) are heading towards that horizon...

Whether it's a 'fad' or not remains to be seen of course, but the trend is there. If you don't like 'walking' in your computer games, Space Games might not be your thing anymore.

[Chris0132]

For things like selecting ships, walking around is an intuitive alternative to menus, you go to where the ship is and get in it, it's not as fast as hotkeys sure but it feels right and lets you know exactly where you're going to.

Similarly, I think a good use for the walking around system would be letting you set up rooms full of terminals which shortcut to particular menu screens for your empire. So a particular station management menu for example. Then rather than having to navigate through to it through nested menus, you can just lay out the room such that there's a visual representation of the station and you can easily access the various parts of it. Ideally too you could project some of the info displays into the room in real time, such as recent sales, operating budget, total profits etc. Then the room space lets you get an at-a-glance view of how your stations are doing.

Walking around allows the potential for use of spatial locations as organizational aids, which given you're going to spend a lot of time in menus, might perhaps help make it feel less sterile than X3.

Especially if you tie access to these things to certain ships/station modules. It'd be quite interested if owning the X4 equivalent to a hyperion really did offer you a luxury manager's office which you wouldn't get on a cargo freighter

[jocan2003]

oh yeah i know that, i just cannot wait to see egosoft take on the genre with the vastness they already provide.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

One of the things that is almost impossible to grasp in previous X-Games is a sense of scale. Things always appear a lot smaller than they actually are.
Yes you could eject and view your spacesuit against the ship, but even so it was always lacking.

Now I can climb down and walk all the way around my ship. I can look up at the immense structures around me and I can watch ships going about their business.

I am half expecting to bump into a group of guys in anoraks, with notebooks and pens at the ready, recording the comings and goings of all the ships. Yay ship spotters.

This gives me a sense of being a person in this universe not just the soulless AI (or artificial eyes) in a ship. Once you have teleportation then you should be able to move from ship to ship without
the walking around. So I assume this will operate in stations.

[BlackDog]

Heh its funny you mention a soulless AI, with mods in X3 i would pick a Rouge Xenon AI start to headcanon explain why I was able to do everything i could so fast and so much better than the NPCs.

Its kind of like the hypothesis that in fallout 4 you are infact a synth and not a normal person,as synths are explained to be able to rapidly learn how to do things, they are stronger than normal people, they heal faster, they have insane charisma and more, how else could you explain that within say 1 ingame month you can go from a complete nobody, to the ruler of an entire army of minutemen, or rise to second highest rank in the BoS, or conquer an entire raider city, unite them, and then use them to invade the commonwealth. All within ONE MONTH. Your a friggen monster in F4, and in the X games with my disembodied...body, I always did feel more like I was the ship, compared to a captain onboard giving orders.

I look very much forward to being able to stand upon my bridge, looking out over the battlefield, and ordering fighters to launch from their bays, and commanding my fleet of ships to sweep the enemy away....or standing on my bridge while it begins to spark, catch fire and explode as everything i did lead to my inevitable doom.

[DaMuncha]

Well I would like a repair lazer when I go space walking so I can do my own repairs on my ship like X3. If Its not in X4 by default you bet some one will mod it in.

One thing that realy annoyed me in XR was the repair drone cost half a million credits.

[jocan2003]

i dont even remember a repair drone i stock xr

[sd_jasper]

There are Construction Drones that can be used to speed up repair on Cap ships... but I'm not sure if that is what is being referenced.

[LittleBird]

Space Sim Market is probably one of the most competitive game genre markets out there next to Battle Royal at the moment.
They need to compete with these big companies.

How so?
Space genre in general lacks a big player. And you can count the newest space games on one hand.
Also the X series has no competition for ages (Egosoft was nearly the last developer who kept the genre alive).
Keep in mind X is singleplayer where EvE and Star Citizen clearly focus on multiplayer (the SC campaign has nothing to do with a large universe where you can trade and build. So no, Squadron 42 is not a competitor). What's left is Elite and that lacks the entire build part.
Conclusion: X has no competition... yet.

So walking on stations to compete with a few games that are hardly rivals would be a stupid reason. But it is never bad to advance. Future competitors will rise. That is for sure.

[eRe4s3r]

Now Limit Theory cancelled and Star Citizen becoming more a hamster-wheel-finance cult with zero progress than anything else I really don't see any space games coming up besides this one, the Warframe addon coming up looks pretty interesting though. NMS has been out for years now, and so has ED so if you like those I assume you are already into those.

Compare this with Egosoft who currently has the reputation to release broken games with bad writing and even worse setting and even worse, the entire X series looks "simple" after The Expanse came to mainstream attention. I can't even look at the trailer without thinking "Wow, this would be so much better if they just copied the Expanse..." which is of course a failing on my end, because I find well grounded sci-fi far more interesting than whatever X is after having been exposed to it.

LittleBird is spot on, there is no competition. But more importantly, mainstream expectations have changed too. X3 was a long time ago (2005) We now have 2018, that's 13 years for 1 game (Rebirth) and 2 addons (X3 AP/TC) which I just found interesting enough to mention without reason. Anyhow I wish you all a nice day or night

[Graaf]

There's also the cut-scene bits where you walk to the pilots chair.

That was XR. If you want to walk to the chair in X4, you do it yourself; there's no cutscene involved.

But you still have to walk.

[CorruptUser]

Its kind of like the hypothesis that in fallout 4 you are infact a synth and not a normal person,as synths are explained to be able to rapidly learn how to do things, they are stronger than normal people, they heal faster, they have insane charisma and more, how else could you explain that within say 1 ingame month you can go from a complete nobody, to the ruler of an entire army of minutemen, or rise to second highest rank in the BoS, or conquer an entire raider city, unite them, and then use them to invade the commonwealth. All within ONE MONTH. Your a friggen monster in F4, and in the X games with my disembodied...body, I always did feel more like I was the ship, compared to a captain onboard giving orders.

In fairness, 1) you were an army veteran who had been surviving for years or a housewife with an implied intelligence agency background; it's possible you already had those skills prewar and leveling up was nothing more than "recovering" from the effects of 200 years of cryogenics, and 2) everyone else had been suffering from horrific radiation poisoning, only just barely surviving, plus all the horrid mutations that while not visible were not exactly good for health/intelligence, whereas you spent your entire life in a world with vaccines and healthcare.

As for the X games, the easiest explanation is that the average life expectancy in space is about 24 hours, so virtually everyone you meet is a combination of insane and stupid, or just incredibly desperate due to the Xenon always being on the verge of overwhelming everyone, and don't know the importance of retreating when they are in a M3 while you have a M7 with flak weaponry.

[ajeffco]

It will be fine.

Easy to say when you don't physically get sick from it.