Unpleasant visuals & sounds in X4

[LuxxCapacitor]

I'm struggling to find enjoyment or immersion in X4's look and feel.

As a huge X3 fan, I feel like the atmosphere of the universe has been completely lost. Everything feels like a weird mashup of generic surfaces and particle effects. I'm only a few hours into the game and while I'm still struggling to pick up on the newer controls and menus, lack of mission explanation, and strange ship movement, it's hard to want to continue when there aren't even appealing visuals to raise interest. I'd like this feedback to be useful to Egosoft because I care about this series and I want them to succeed, so I'm going to try to break down my feedback in a way that is (hopefully) usable. Sorry if it gets a little long.

Stations

There is not enough sheen, no glitter of light, no mood, and not enough polish. Instead of massive and awe-inspiring, stations seem clunky and awkward. You can't tell where one begins or ends. There is no gravity to the station's presence in the environment, they're just... there. They're cluttered closely next to each other in a tight little ball of space with endless emptiness surrounding them. Get too close to a station, and you're bombarded by several swarming civilian ships. Get too far and they just look like unappealing flotsam on a backdrop of black space. Stations look bland and out of place even while circling them attempting to scan them (why do we still have to mindlessly scan stations piece by piece?). There are few surface reflections. The lighting feels stale and unmoving.

I miss the massive feel of the Solar Power Plants in X3. I miss the orange glow of Crystal Fabs. I miss the mist and bloom effects that made outer sectors seem spooky, when suddenly a giant metallic station emerges glittering from the space fog. Every station in X3 had that sharp silver sheen to it that really made them seem alive and high-tech, and they had a distinct profile so you could tell what kind of station it was in the distance even before it showed up on radar. I'd rather have every station silver and metallic than dull with blurry textures.


Stations (interior)

I really didn't enjoy walking around in X Rebirth and I still find it unenjoyable in X4. Maybe some folks at Egosoft truly believe that the next great thing in space simulations is NOT flying around exploring space, but instead walking around aimlessly in sterile stations. There seems to be an odd recurring theme of interacting outside of spaceships and leaving your cockpit. It's a grandiose ambition that's executed poorly. Unfortunately this poor execution highlights Ego's limited resources as a small developer. Someone obviously spent far too much time and energy planning this aspect of the game, and perhaps now the team it too afraid to cut their losses and abandon the whole mess. I can't imagine they are satisfied, and while I sympathize I also believe this awkward part of the game is really affecting the success of the franchise and resulting in poor reviews.

To elaborate on some of what I think needs improvement in order to be playable... The NPC graphics need a lot of work. Station graphics need work. NPCs need more content. Perspective and game feel is way off. The space needs to be way smaller especially when there are so many stations. Basically, this is not what a modern game should look like. NPC faces are like plastic masks, they're wearing polygon bags for clothes, and they walk like robots. They have no personalities, no name, no actions, and almost no purpose. They just stand there looking strange.

Walking around the station takes forever, and as a player you're greeted by nothing except generic boxes and walkways. You have 300 civilian ships buzzing around a station, and they all eagerly collide with the player's ship anytime you try to dock, but once you land there are only four people on the entire station, and none of them want anything to do with you. "Sorry, I don't know!"

If there was a mod or in-game option that completely removed the on-station experience and replaced it with a simple comm channel like in X3 I would install it in a second. I don't want to walk around giant, ugly, empty stations.

One small thing beyond the look and feel of stations: the feeling of entering and exiting your ship is very anti-climactic. As with maneuvering in open space, there is no weight to your ship on liftoff. The whole process of entering and exiting the ship feels very artificial and forced. It doesn't feel like "docking" or "launching". The ship goes up and the ship goes down. The movement doesn't feel right.

Voice work

Most voices are strange and unnatural in their tone and inflection, as if the voice actors had no direction and were reading from a script that read "sound VERY excited!" or "sound VERY happy!"

Flying around sectors gets annoying very quickly with the frequency of comms. Why is every ship broadcasting their communication publicly for everyone to hear it? There are few moments of peace in a populated sector. The absurd frequency of voice comms also highlights how few voice lines were recorded for this radio chatter. After hearing the same annoying human pilot say the same line ten times, I turned off voice sounds. This was only two hours into the game. I can't imagine spending 100 hours listening to that.

Music

The music so far has been pretty generic. I was such a fan of the X3 soundtrack that I used to listen to it even while I wasn't playing the game. I'm listening to them again now and they still give me chills. I haven't heard any new music tracks that I'm remotely interested in repeating. The newer tracks don't bring the universe to life for me. I'm not sure if it's still Alexei Zakharov or Thomas Egeskov Petersen, but if it is them then they seem... bored.

Combat music is fine so far, I will say. Unfortunately, the combat music has been playing on loop for 40 minutes after I shot down a single criminal ship. It even continued after I docked at a station. I realize this isn't intended, but it ruins the experience.


Ship & weapon effects

Ship models seem mostly uninteresting so far. Like stations, they have no sheen and no style. Just generic, matte hunks of material floating around with blue lights stuck on the back for thrusters. I can't tell which are Argon and which are Teladi, Split, etc...

Control-wise, ships are a mess. The range of ship speed you get is nonsensical, and again there is no feeling of weight or momentum. I understand Ego has removed jump gates from the game and now thinks endless empty space is enjoyable, but it doesn't work when you get two ships next to each other and a laser distance of only a couple kilometers. How are we supposed to have an enjoyable ship battle when both ships and fluctuating wildly between 10m/s and 1,000m/s?

Laser effects are uninteresting and don't carry much weight to them. You know in Star Wars when they show a laser cannon fire, and the barrel kicks back, and there's a real feeling that this projectile will HURT. There's energy in that shot, and it feels significant. Weapon fire in X4 feels like shooting a pellet gun. I started the game with the Argon Elite. The teeny tiny blue lines spouting from underneath my ship cockpit seemed to have zero effect on enemy Xenon. There was the smallest and most insignificant impact for each laser burst, and I saw their health bar go down, but it never felt like I was in a dog fight. This combined with the wild speed and handling of ships makes dogfights feel like drunken jousting with toothpicks.

The PAC and PBE weapons in X3 had much nicer effects, and that's as weak as they came in that series. It still felt like you were shooting a deadly weapon.

Please slow down combat. Tune ship handling. Ramp up weapon visuals. Add some subtle shake and feeling to the cockpit experience. And please add some impact effects that really make damage feel real. Even the explosions enemy ships make when they die is unsatisfying, and that should be a tremendously rewarding feeling.

Sector to sector travel

The empty space gives no sense of travel whatsoever. I find myself staring at my speed and realizing I am going something ridiculous like 3,000m/s. What's the point? When the game was contained to sectors (X2/X3), you had the ability to design an environment around that space as developers, to plot out stations in relation to one another in a defined area, and sprinkle in asteroids or derelict stations. It was more closed, but it still felt like a much more open universe than this does. More importantly, it made travel feel significant especially when jumping between sectors that had drastically different visuals and colors.

The space highways that replaced jump gates are kind of a mess. I'm not sure what advantage these give over simply having jump gates. The giant red energy globs that fly in your face when riding through the highway is strange and seems like something that will destroy your ship. What are those even supposed to be? The whole experience of using highways is unenjoyable.

Space effects

I hope to see more interesting space environments as I continue to explore, but so far all I've witnessed are blurry starfields and generic particles. The blurry starfields are unforgivable in a modern space game. Why aren't these higher resolution? The stars look so flat and lifeless, like a single PNG layer.

I keep coming across blue clouds dangling in space in many sectors. It's all a single shade of plain blue with no color variation. It doesn't move or swirl. It looks flat, more like a curtain than a cloud. You can see the repeating pattern in the texture, and it looks unpolished. This is a poor replacement for the sector fog we had in X2/X3.

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I wonder if there was a major change in art direction at Egosoft since the development of X3: Reunion. Possibly this happened a while ago, close to the days of Terran Conflict when we started seeing a departure from moody sectors and an introduction to the dull empty space of Terran sectors. I'm speculating here. In any case, it just doesn't feel like the same series. This is a totally different universe from X3: Reunion, and it feels like it's clinging to some of that old universe, but failing to really represent it visually and atmospherically. It didn't work in X Rebirth and sadly Egosoft still failed to capture it in X4.

[Kadatherion]

You sumed up many of my own concerns. I'm liking the game A LOT more than Rebirth, and it has indeed taken a few step backs from its wrong direction, but a lot of the design choices still make me miss X3. The station walking, for instance, is way better than that embarassing mess it was in Rebirth, but indeed it still is what it is. Couldn't be otherwise, you can't expect AAA quality on such a fluff feature from a small dev team, but that's the point, a fluff feature becomes detrimental to the experience as a whole, cheapening it. It will never have the resources to feel more than an awkward minigame that, honestly, offers nothing so important that justifies the time spent on it.

X4 does a decent job at making it so you can skip or bypass many of these features quicker than before, but then they become even more irrelevant, making apparent the effort on them, as compared to other essential mechanics, has been comparatively wasted. If you can't really make that feature shine as much as the core ones for a space sim, why not use that time and resources on... those core mechanics?
Plus, this contributes in making the game feel confusing: the old X3 map system, as another example, was no doubt more "gamey", but it felt more orderly, and while the UI per se was unfriendly, at least things like the map worked better with you, giving you a more cohesive experience. And, as you said, sometimes underwhelming visuals don't help.

The game feels good enough to be able to get there, it has all the potential, which it didn't in Rebirth, but there's no doubt mods will more than ever need to be an integral part of my experience for me to really be satisfied. Because certain design choices really are the opposite of what I'd wish for, and you can only hope for modders to go in the opposite direction from the one Egosoft has - for good or worse - taken.