Something EGOSoft Devs are finally understanding about Space `sim`s.

[Socratatus]

They`re not just about the economy, spaceships, or the planets or even space-

It`s about the LIFE too. People make, live in and maintain all these things, even if they are dwarfed by their inventions. I always found X games were too dry and sterile- Just a spreadsheet, no LIFE- Why could we not have both? Sure, in the early days pc limitations prevented that, but with later games it was clear this could be done.

Adding people busy at Stations, legs to the Player so he can travel around on foot and see all these things is what makes this game finally work for me. heck, just walking around my personal ship, sat proudly docked, makes much of the experience for me.

You have the right idea, EgoSoft Devs.


post scriptum:I just wish WW2 sims would allow the Player Pilot to walk about his aircraft one day and have busy airfields (but that`s another story and a different genre).

[CaptainX4]

I agree with your sentiment. I wish the teladi station lounge to reappear in x4 on all the stations. i wouldnt even mid if they would all look the same and not just static characters but people coming in and out from/to ships. even if its just landing a ship, the captain runs down the lounge, checking the monitors, running back to the ship, leaving the station.. would add so much to the liveliness of the game

[Morkonan]

Just a note, but in X3, all the ships in that game were going somewhere and doing something... They were "alive" in a sense, there just weren't any humanoid/other avatars walking around on some dock, somewhere. You could, if you had the right equipment, detect what their destination was and follow them all the way there - They were doing something similar to "life." And, there was that X3 toggle feature for "life" (whatever it was called) too. I don't remember what it enabled, to be honest, since I always enabled it anyway.

The point being that X3TC/AP did have "life-like" simulations of ships with a purpose, going places purposefully and doing things that "looked" significant, like Prison Ships delivering prisoners to work at stations/complexes. It really didn't mean anything, but if you saw a Prison Ship delivering prisoner "Passengers" to a farm out in the middle of nowhere, you automatically roleplayed it into "Prisoner Labor Force" and were instantly rewarded with the feeling that it was a "living" universe, even if the farm would work just fine without those prisoners.

So, the series has had this sort of "simulation" for a long time. They just took it to its natural "next level" with the addition of a new point-of-view depth in the player's experience - First Person.

[Karvat]

I don't agree instead with the fact that for doing so, they didn't make a universe big enough, and they didn't put enough ships in the game

[ADMNtek]

i find the station walking rather useless so fart in X4 it was OK in XR but in X4 meh.
you cant really talk to people because every time i have tried the responds was either "i don't know" or "I'm not helping you". the security office is empty the engineering section is empty. the manager does noting from what i have seen. it feel like a giant step back from rebirth. having npcs walk about is cool so is seeing the ships land and start but that gets boring fast. there is almost nothing to do on stations.

[DollopOfCrazy]

I agree with this post but the live at various stations REALLY needs to be less repetitive. At each of the stations, the AI takes on scenario and drives it in the ground over and over and over until if I'm at a station more than 3 minutes, I have to turn the sound of because I've heard the same scenario play put five time by then. It quickly becomes the equivalent of being on phone hold and listening to the same sales pitch every minute over and over.

[RWolf]

There was life in X3 as well... you just had to add a bit of "imagination" to the mix. Just because you don't walk around on a station, doesn't mean you can't imagine the life going on in them. That said, X3 felt more "alive" than X4, meaning there was "life". I think XR did a better job at depicting that "life" on stations, but they seemed to have lost that again with X4.

[Requiemfang]

I don't agree instead with the fact that for doing so, they didn't make a universe big enough, and they didn't put enough ships in the game

Give the devs time the game will expand as time goes on, they're likely to add a lot of things in the future before the first major DLC arrives.

[SamuraiProgrammer]

I don't agree instead with the fact that for doing so, they didn't make a universe big enough, and they didn't put enough ships in the game

I saw evidence of things existing in the area of a sector beyond the display. That is to say, I got a taxi mission for a location of over 800km away and found multiple stations. This happened virtually at the beginning of the game. It may be that there is a lot more to the initial size of the galaxy than what you see at the start.