The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[Menzoberranzan]

Here are my impressions of X4 as a long time X2 through X3AP player:

The Good: Station building via parts. This is the best thing about X4. Congrats EGOSOFT. Completely customizable stations are awesome.

The Bad: Autopilok (again).
Tutorials. Until you get used to the interface and the UI, the tutorials are completely useless without some sort of manual.
Ship Automation. While the concept is good, the implementation is clunker than any previous X game. Setting up a mining ship is not too bad with only 3 (gas) or 4 (ore) items to chose from, but getting the equivalent of a Universe Trader from X3AP takes dozens of clicks. This is not good design. There should be options for categories of wares (food, high tech, ship components, etc), including ones specifically for all wares, all legal wares, and all illegal wares.

The Ugly: Turrets. How in the hell did this fiasco happen? Turrets with any non-beam weapon are useless.
No story. Every X game has had a story. Do not make us pay for one as an expansion.
Half finished universe. Previous X games had Argon, Paranid, Teladi, Split, Boron, Kha'ak, Xenon, and Pirates (later games added Terrans). Previous X games had a large universe for those races to live that got larger with each game. X4 removes races and makes the universe smaller. If this is just to sell it back to us as an expansion, it is a bad move.

Suggestion before making X5: This should have been done instead of making X:R, but you should completely and 100% faithfully remake X3(R/TC/or AP) in your new engine. Use this as a base going forward. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel (round works stop trying to give us octaganal ones). Then test the f*ck out of it. Hell, I would be willing to buy this.

[EmperorDragon]

I am totally looking forward to building modular stations!

The rest I can live with, although autopillok improvements will be most welcome. Storyline is not that important to me, never played through a storyline in an X game and I always preferred sandbox gamestarts. I did play X3 Reunion and Rebirth's storylines about halfway but always ended up switching back to a sandbox gamestart.

Turret accuracy is surely a bug and I actually expected a fix for it by now, I'm sure we'll see a fix soon since it can be a bit of a gamebreaker. Combat is a pretty big part of the game, after all.

The universe size I agree with. Rebirth's universe was already way too small and all additions to it came as paid DLC stuff. I really expected them to go all out with X4, but no. It looks even smaller. Cannot judge yet but it does seem like there will be no real exploration to the far reaches of space like it was in X3, and no faraway unknown sectors to discover and build in. It will most likely grow larger over time but, I fear this will come in the form of more paid DLC scumming.

[toxima]

Well, the full name of X4 includes the word Foundations. So I would expect that they will continue to support it with expansions and free content updates(i think they did it wit X: Rebirth that way) among the regular patches and quality of life improvements