Your honest opinion?

[MegaJohnny]

5.) Why can't I remotely trade with my Mercury trader ? If I want to manually do a trade, I have to fly over to wherever the ship is, and get in the captains chair to actually trade. In X3, with Trading extensions installed, I could remotely buy/sell.

You can definitely do remote trading - the workflow is something like:

• Make sure the ship has a pilot (I know you know this, since you have automining working, but just in case)
• Find a trade offer: you can right click a station and click "trade offers" on the context menu, or right click one of the wares in that trade overlay thingy
• Use the slider to buy/sell and click on the button

The behaviour is like XR, so if you've not played that: when you confirm the trade offer, the ship will fly over automatically and do the trade. If you're buying then you pay immediately, and if you're selling you get paid when the trade completes. And you can repeat the above to queue up trade orders for the ship.

[smt]

My honest opinion is that while most of the game feels amazing, the AI is currently infuriating to try and reason with, and the lack of clear information given to the player about why AI can't/isn't doing something is a massive issue, improving AI generally and giving the player better information on who is doing what and why would improve the experience a lot

[RWolf]

As I said, you used X3 GUI for too long and just wanted to have X3 like menu in X4.

X3 GUI is an abomination - whatever you wanted to do you had to go through 10-15 nested menus and there was not many mass command in vanilla.

In X4 I'm not even sure if I had to go 3-4 levels deep into nested menu to do something.
X3 is a clickfest/menufest.

1. Getting used to any GUI can be the excuse for liking any GUI, so its not really a good argument. Same goes with X4's GUI.
2. You are making vast assumptions as to what you think I would want in X4, and automatically assume that I want an exact copy of X3's GUI in X4. Why would even make that assumption other than to confirm your own biases?
3. X3's GUI is not an "abomination" and you are being extremely hyperbolic in your description of it. The X3 GUI acted more like the interface of an OS or a piece of simulation software, and if you not dumb as bricks its fairly easy to spot the logic behind the GUI. Furthermore, for a GUI to be intuitive, it needs to be familiar. X3's TC/AP (excluding reunion) was intuitive in so much that for those who have experienced similar interfaces in software or via OS are not going to feel out of place.
4. X3's GUI still promoted discoverability, each within easily defined categories and obvious hotkeys for the broad categories. Discoverability is the first phase of interacting with a new GUI, then memory location and hotkeys. X3 TC/AP gave the most important information and categories to the player, with the understanding that the players would adopt the hotkeys to access what they needed. This is why complaining about nested menus is a bit silly, just use the relevant hotkey. Thus no, it was not a clickfest.
5. Remember it was a simulation game that targeted a niche, it was not Freelancer or some arcade shooter. This understanding reflected on how users were expected to interact with the said software (and yes, games are technically software).
6. Sometimes streamlining complex gameplay and information results in a negative effect. I am not saying X4 is this, but it is something to remember when designing a GUI.

None of this is a criticism of X4's GUI, but a rebuttal to your hyperbole regarding the X3 TC/AP interface.

That’s all for now, but so far so good much more like to old X than X Rebirth was (could we get the sectors on Rebirth added in X4 ?)

It comes across as a mixed bag of both. It comes across as X Rebirth tweaked to be played closer to X3, but with an odd lack of the things that both did well. Now I hated X Rebirth, so much so that thinking about how I lost out on $50 really gets me a bit angry, and because of that I refused to even consider pre-ordering X4... however a serious attempt to play X Rebirth was made (payed for it after all), and a few observations were made as to the "quality" aspects of X Rebirth that were done fairly well. For example, some of the ships that were available, the uniqueness and design of some of stations that showed industry, agriculture..ect. These seem to be noticably missing in X4, in fact the stations in X4 come across as being worse than those in X3 in many regards.

So what confuses me a bit is that Egosoft, which put a lot of attention to detail into some aspects of XR, chose to toss those out when doing X4. Why? Those are assets they spent time and money on, and the engine is clearly the same so why would they get rid of the few things XR did well enough, or rather the better parts of that game. The use of drones is another one, as well as the clearly different sectors with a varied range of color, depth, and memorability. Did they really just choose to throw all that in the trash and start over with something far less character? I mean if we want X3, then I could understand going back to the drawing board with the art direction, but they chose not to do that. So then with that logic, take what XR did well enough, the best parts of it, and bring that into X4, but they didnt do that either. I really don't know what they are thinking, so much work has been done for them already and to not use it, even the design elements that did work, makes me question the ability of those in charge.

[Ghostar]

It looks half-assed and clearly with less things than X3TC/AP, dont know about Rebirth, did not play it.
Ship design is ugly, you have like 5-7 weapons types?
Tutorial are mostly bad, i have to chek the forums and reddit about how to do basic things. i.e hiring a manager, it needs to be a pilot if not it wont go to the PHQ.

[Manddrack]

It looks half-assed and clearly with less things than X3TC/AP, dont know about Rebirth, did not play it.
Ship design is ugly, you have like 5-7 weapons types?
Tutorial are mostly bad, i have to chek the forums and reddit about how to do basic things. i.e hiring a manager, it needs to be a pilot if not it wont go to the PHQ.

I do think that most of the weapon type and stuff like that can be added along the way.
X4 is what rebirth should have been, they clearly took their directx 9c engine and refactored it to vulkan and gone through a lot more beta testing... you should have seen rebirth on release ... potential, but god that was buggy...
and some things where so silly....

Tutorials can also be fixed, in my case I skipped them and learned things by trial and errors and it did the job, I will not pride myself on this as i'm sure I missed things but I like things that are not prechewed for me.

my point here is that x4 is on much healthier ground that rebirth was and adding stuff like wares and weapons might not be as difficult as it is, the first DLC should apparently bring back the Borons with all that come with it ...

So wait and see.

[Taramafor]

Simply put, X3: Terrain Conflict did it better. Apart from the walking around and immersion stuff. But X4 is lacking in terms of core gameplay and long/end game (there's been forums talking about how the game works to figure it out, including from devs). In TC I could do a combat mission easily. But in X4 it's mainly mine clearing and the like. While this is a nice addition it has REPLACED a lot of what has been in past X games. There's even inactive jumpgates with content that should be in the game right now to be released as DLC. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but let's be honest here, past X games did a lot of what X4 is missing already. There's also a few bugs, like showing up in a whole other sector off the side of the map when checking your map.

This game isn't fully fleshed out and it's not polished. And it shows. We also know this will get resolved in later patches/games/DLC or whatever. But the question I ask is why isn't what we have right now the best of what it can be? Why do we, once again, have to wait a year or so before it's fully fleshed out? If this was NEW content we'd be waiting on, well and good. But we're basically waiting for X4 to RE-ADD what past X games have done. Bigger fights for one thing. Which AP and TC managed to add in.

Treat this game as more of a beta with a LOT of content to be added in the future (patches, bug fixes, new sectors and gameplay changes). Don't go in expecting the best, because while what is here is enjoyable it could most certainty be better in terms of core gameplay. It's also worth noting that even simple things like WEAPON DESCRIPTIONS IN A SHOP ARE MISSING! Which only goes to show how unpolished the game is when you compare it to NPCs running the wrong way on paths. How am I supposed to know how a weapon works BEFORE I buy it? They got a lot of patching to do. Although at what point it will be done I'm not sure. It's going to get done but it could be months or a year. Chances are there will be a so called "new" X4 game (TC as an example. Also AP. They ADD new content into the BASE game) which will basically be X4 now with everything new stuffed into it. In other words what it should be already. A marketing scheme if there ever was one.

Is the game fun now? Immersion wise yes. Gameplay wise it's meh. Will the gameplay get sorted out at later date? If TC is anything to go by then yes. Should we be waiting for that though? Could this game be that right now if they just skipped rebirth? Was rebirth just a means to fund X4? If so there's a reason donations work. This company has a good rep overall. But with the lack of content in X4 it feels like they're repeating X3. Which indicates they didn't learn to WAIT before pushing out a game. At the very least a warning or some indication of this game needing a lot to be done would have been nice. Did buyers get that warning?

Basically all the devs need to do is 1: ADD MORE COMBAT (seriously, it's so lacking. We had this in TC). 2: Do a bit more of what TC and AP did. And THEN we can add the new stuff like more sectors and what not. Which I hope would include A XENON SECTOR WITH A HUNDRED SHIPS LIKE IN TC. Was amazing. I seen little more then 7 in a XENON sector in X4 so far. Pretty sure they're supposed to be swarming. I don't care if "very slowly building a fleet" is a "feature". It's a nice addition but without missions spawning at least ten fighters with a big ship (mid level missions from TC) it's just not fun. And NONE of these missions in X4 seem to be focused on defending a station or going on patrol where you have to get into a fight. There's simply no excuse for the lack of this content when it's been present in past games.

For the record I've played every X game. So this is coming from someone that's spent hundreds if not thousands of hours on the series. Someone new to to this might go "Ohh, shiny game". Us vets know the devs can (and HAVE) done better when it comes to core gameplay. They nailed the immersion, there's no argument about that. But without the fun gameplay it's all moot.

Enemy scaling to keep up with a players massive and well equipped fleet will also need seeing too eventually. but that's way down the line. Hope the devs can nail that somehow.