Anti-wishlist for the next game

[Nikola515]

When it comes to fleet/escort AI sucks.... Also path finding is not good as it should be..... For example if you have cap. ship and to that ship you assign 3 cap. ships as escort. They will lag behind it and they won't jump at same time or match each other speed. Also there is no fleet formation and if you call that ship there is 50/50 chance that it will come to your location ( depends if anything is in it's way) and other 3 that are escorting it will 50km away...

[mr.WHO]

Well I know about the formation issues, but for now it can be mitigated by assigning faster ships as escort to the leader.

I'd love to have a squad of Balor attacking in line formation like this:
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.c ... B5B82E437/

(note it was an accident - the Balor leader engine blew up from salvo from hostile Balor, so my escort Balor could level with leader and fire salvo in the same time - still epic look).

[Nikola515]

That would be awesome Also they should stay behind and just snipe from distance.... Same thing with that terran capital ship and it's main cannon ( i wish that weapon was huge beam instead of those projects). I like how formations work between capital and S ships in XR. If they could do same for capital too.....In X3 litcube universe mod he made something simular to this with MLCC

[Lord Crc]

I don't want overcrowded zones. Large freighters should stay far away from stations (several km), small ships/drones should take care of the loading/unloading. Having large ships so close to each other and to stations makes absolutely no sense.

Maybe, but really hope they don't change that. Spend a lot of time aboard my capitals, in some games it's more than the amount of time I'm flying the Skunk, which becomes little more than a short range shuttle for trips to stations or to gather salvage after a battle. Like to see what going on around me (much better view than from the cramped confines of Skunk's cockpit) & making capitals stay well away from other ships & station would spoil that & greatly diminish my enjoyment of the game.

I understand what you mean, as I too enjoy spending my time on a capital ship and watch the surroundings. But having large capital ships anywhere close to a station, especially "docking", makes zero sense on multiple levels and it also leads to a lot of issues such as ship-station collisions and poor path finding.

Also, station and capital ships are still quite large at a couple of km distance, it really shouldn't reduce the "spectacle" too much.

Also, no fighter pilots. Fighters should be replaced by larger drones. Again makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to fly those things, having a life expectancy of seconds once a firefight starts.

Also disagree with this - I want to be able to start the next game in one those fighters (preferably the cheapest, most rubbish one in the entire game) & work my way up from there.

My point was that tiny manned fighter ships as they are in XR do not make sense. If you want to work your way up from a tiny manned fighter ship, then they will have to be used in a very different way and context than they are in XR. The majority of "close air support" for capital ships and stations should be done by drones.

Otherwise you'd have a 90% chance of facing Game Over on your first mission, and where's the fun in that.

[GCU Grey Area]

Otherwise you'd have a 90% chance of facing Game Over on your first mission, and where's the fun in that.

I like 90%+ failure odds. Makes it a fun challenge just to survive & incredibly satisfying to beat those sort of odds - the worse the odds the more I enjoy it.

My favourite starting conditions in the old games were often those which had considerably worse odds than 90% - in particular have very fond memories of 'Khaak Invader' (where you're shoot on sight for virtually everyone in the universe) & 'Lost Lar' (where you're stranded all alone in the middle of a Xenon sector, in a TP, with an exceptionally long journey to anywhere even remotely safe) - certainly both of them took a LOT more than 9 attempts before I even lived long enough to get out of the starting sector.

Compared to those starting conditions, starting XR in a crappy fighter doesn't seem anywhere near as suicidal.

[wwdragon]

2) I don't want copilot comments to be longer than 3 short word. Simple Yes, affirmative, copy, acknowledge is much less pain in the long run that "Shut up Betty", "transfering coordinates to following ships" and several other needesly long comments.

4) I don't want any NPC comments about "swetty male clothes", "not cleaning", "rubbish dump" or other stupid comments that you wouldn't say to someone who just paid 100k to hire you.

7) I don't want to go to NPC stations to hire personel / I don't want my stations to be populated only by my workers

8 ) I don't want ANY-minigames that aren't optional

9) I don't want any ships that don't work (Sulleccus I'm watching at you)

10) I DON'T WANT GUI that force me to make a thousands repetitive push/clicks to to simple things all the time (like assigning ships to leader, selecting trade ship in trade menu, finding anything in property menu)

11) I don't want NPC/Pirates/Xenon/Khaak to spawn out of thin air (with the exception of BB missions)

12) I don't want NPC shipyards to be constantly occupied by building NPC XL ships (e.g add second XL dock to each SY similar to L docks that rarely got ocupied both in the same time)

13) I don't want to be limited to NPC shipyard for ship production

14) I don't want multi-product stations (e.g. drone factories) to randomly switch between production with no player control.

15) I don't want to pay 200% shipworth of drones only to see that they are useless and die en masses.

18 ) I don't want NPC indestoyable stations

19) I don't want OOS repairs to be so rudiculosly fast - the repair speed should be the same no matter if you are present or not (there is no point of using SY repairs right now as it's not free and take ages for ships to dock at SY).

21) Don't want orange orbs of energy that slow-you down during superhighway cruise (I though we get rid of highway mini-game? this must be leftover)

Yup, I agree with these.
In fact drones should be completely automated, with me just giving an order such as hack target and they go do it themselves.

[Matthew94]

Contrary to many here I actually really liked the more cinematic elements of the new game. I just wish it was less buggy.

The mission where you had to build and upgrade your own station was near impossible for me to complete. I had to resort to XML editing in the end which was not fun at all.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

The mission where you had to build and upgrade your own station was near impossible for me to complete. I had to resort to XML editing in the end which was not fun at all.

All you had to do in that mission was to hire a few marines and an officer, put on your pirate hat and go to Albion to fish for some metal/reactor-rich freighters. Quite fun.

[MegaJohnny]

Yup, I agree with these.
In fact drones should be completely automated, with me just giving an order such as hack target and they go do it themselves.

Yeah, I totally agree. Having some manual piloted combat drones is nice, but AFAIK we still don't have Yisha piloting the Skunk to defend itself (as they said she would pre-release ).

I would much prefer if hacking drones went straight for your current target when launched, and took a semi-random period to complete. Higher tier drones move faster, are more durable, and are better hackers.

[Killjaeden]

1) First-person movement around stations

Look, it's just taking art-development-ressources without delivering proper gameplay. Additionally it's exposing the creepy npc models, the poor dialoge and the generally copy&paste feel of the stations. Getting rid of it now would nullify those issues and prevent further problems down the line, like when introducing new race/station designs.
Focus on spaceships (including cockpits) and station exteriors instead.
Reserve it for plot only options if you really want to keep it.

2) overpowered miniature battleships with fighter speed termed "corvette"
It's freaking boring having a game tailored to one shiptype only. We could see the beginning with X3:R with the OP-as-**** Hyperion which then continued with Hyperion & Springblossom in TC (to be fair they where OP-as-slightly-less-**** than in X3R). In XR the whole game is designed around this freakship beeing OP and "special". In X3 it was at least optional. I do NOT wish to see a continuation of this trend!

3) many others that are already mentioned

[bambikaka]

2) overpowered miniature battleships with fighter speed termed "corvette"
It's freaking boring having a game tailored to one shiptype only. We could see the beginning with X3:R with the OP-as-**** Hyperion which then continued with Hyperion & Springblossom in TC (to be fair they where OP-as-slightly-less-**** than in X3R). In XR the whole game is designed around this freakship beeing OP and "special". In X3 it was at least optional. I do NOT wish to see a continuation of this trend!

this is something i very much agree with. i quit playing x3r when i have found the hyperion. the entire game just became pointless. in AP i had to mod the centaurs they were so freakin op. even when its optional its annoying and then you get a new episode when this op thing is forced on you... bahhh

[GCU Grey Area]

Yup, I agree with these.
In fact drones should be completely automated, with me just giving an order such as hack target and they go do it themselves.

Yeah, I totally agree. Having some manual piloted combat drones is nice, but AFAIK we still don't have Yisha piloting the Skunk to defend itself (as they said she would pre-release ).

I would much prefer if hacking drones went straight for your current target when launched, and took a semi-random period to complete. Higher tier drones move faster, are more durable, and are better hackers.

Disagree - I'd prefer to keep hacking as a gameplay option (rather than automatic success). It's one of the reasons I prefer XR to the older X games - it's much more fun to be a pirate & part of that is stealing stuff from stations (also switching off their guns, sabotaging production, etc). If the drones could do this entirely on their own playing the pirate would be a lot less fun, there would be fewer things to do. Anyway, apart from a single instance in the XR plot, hacking is an entirely optional activity in XR - please don't ruin it for people who do enjoy it.

[ALien8ed]

I dont want a console port.

Pretty much sums it up.

Hopefully lessons were learnt after Rebirth. I guess time will tell.

[caleb]

I do not want X-Rebirth 2. That's pretty much it. It does not have to be X4 either. Actually, I do not want X4, I want something bigger.

If for some dumb reason we are going to get an X-Rebirth 2 (I hope not!) then PLEASE make the player ship a capital ship, and the drones regular M3-M5 size. So we can take out a decent fighter for a spin, and not a useless tiny whatever that is.

No, just don't make X-Rebirth 2. Oh, and forget about pre-ordering, I'm never pre-ordering from Egosoft again. You get my money when I see somewhat decent reviews from other people. Not going to fall for that crap twice.

[khartsh]

+1

If I even smell an Xbox vibe so help me god.

[JimmiG]

- no ridiculous trading system that requires to babysit the freighters (that you can not fly because... it is too slow !!!)

No. They finally made large-scaled trading fun for me. Should be kept for next game, just add an alternative

I like the new system too, now that it works properly. The problem was in earlier versions, where trading ships would often get stuck or otherwise fail to complete trade orders so you had to monitor them constantly. I like being able to command my trade ships while I zip around in the nimble Skunk. I really miss the Trading Software upgrades, though. There are a few autotrader mods, but they're not the same as an official feature. Also the option to manually fly the ships should obviously be there.

-The minigames need to go away. This is not a mobile game.

Don't think they should just "go away".

Some of them could certainly be improved, however don't think it would be good if, for example, players could easily steal resources & products from station storage modules without having to do anything.

The worst one is the minitalk one. It should simply be removed IMO. In theory, the different topics could be used to teach you more lore and give you tips. Unfortunately, you only hear the same 3-4 canned responses every time. They'd need to record hours of additional dialog to make it interesting. You have to play the minigame once for every trade agent you want to place. With hundreds of stations, that makes starting a new game pure torture unless you use mods.

[GCU Grey Area]

The worst one is the minitalk one. It should simply be removed IMO. In theory, the different topics could be used to teach you more lore and give you tips. Unfortunately, you only hear the same 3-4 canned responses every time. They'd need to record hours of additional dialog to make it interesting. You have to play the minigame once for every trade agent you want to place. With hundreds of stations, that makes starting a new game pure torture unless you use mods.

For you maybe (if so then strongly suggest you use mods), but not for me & I tend to restart fairly frequently - usually a fresh start every time there's a new major beta to test, so every few months I need to get a new batch of trade agents in place.

Also do a lot of smalltalk to get trade discounts, normally 3 or 4 times for every trade run dealing with high profit wares (e.g. drones) & whenever possible to get a discount before installing expensive new equipment on the Skunk. Must have heard every line of smalltalk dialogue many hundreds of times by now & it just isn't what I'd consider 'pure torture' - it's just listening to an NPC chatter for a few seconds.

Would welcome new topics & several have been added over the past couple of years. However the only thing that really bugs me about it is being not being able to initiate the conversation & having to stand around waiting for an NPC to talk, particularly when there are time constraints involved (e.g. trying to get all my discounts in place before my freighter docks at the station to take on cargo). Could perhaps also be improved by being able to select the topic, maybe with choice of topic influencing difficulty (e.g. chatting about tech with an engineer being more appropriate than discussing trade opportunities in De Vries).

[pja]

Each to their own I suppose. I find minigames in long open ended games are OK the first few times but get boring very quickly (with the exception of Gwent in the Witcher3). There is no skill in smalltalk, you hear the same conversations over and over and its a reaction test to click your mouse at the right time. I would be quite happy to see it removed completely.

[GCU Grey Area]

Each to their own I suppose. I find minigames in long open ended games are OK the first few times but get boring very quickly (with the exception of Gwent in the Witcher3). There is no skill in smalltalk, you hear the same conversations over and over and its a reaction test to click your mouse at the right time. I would be quite happy to see it removed completely.

Well it's mostly it's use to obtain Trade discounts that interests me. Can be really quite lucrative on high value items such as drones, where the profit margin on a batch of drones can often be a million or more. Also gives me something productive to do while waiting for the freighter to arrive. All in favour of improving smalltalk, or replacing it with something better. However simply taking it out of the game without putting something in it's place just means there are fewer things for the player to do to influence the profitability of trading. For all smalltalk's flaws playing a pure Trade-based game without the option to obtain such discounts would be significantly less satisfying than it is at present - more waiting around for things to happen & fewer things to do to pass the time in a profitable manner.

[pref]

Gwent is a real game, but these minigames miss the game part entirely.