What X4 needs is not bug fixing

[Warnoise]

By that i don't mean because it is not buggy, but it is because even if Egosoft fixes all the bugs, there are some core stuff that need to be overhauled in order to make X4 a good game.

Economy balance: Ok let's imagine Economy is working as intended for a second there. Production facilities (especially those wares for ship production) require too little resource to make it "hungry". Therefore the economy in X4 is not a hungry economy. Within about 5~10 hours, all the stations are working fine and have all the needed resources (assuming Mining and trading ai is working fine here). The player isn't needed here, the only thing can a player affect is "forcing" the economy to change by manually trading the whole time or destroying stations. What i miss here is the areas with broken economies (like devries, or that sector in Home of light which i forgot its name) that player can rebuild and be the main reason of the return to life in the sector. Now, to make it simple, the economy is boring.

Factions balance: This also requires a rework in my opinion. All factions (other than pirates, khaak and xenon) seem to be equally powerful and have equal footing economy wise. The player is not needed here. I saw the HOP being enemies with everyone so i assumed they needed me to keep the balance but no, they are doing extremely fine. There should be better faction balance, more subfactions because current subfactions are just copy paste with no specific economy or military. I miss rebirth subfactions (one specializes in energy trading while the other specializes in agriculture trading, etc..) which really felt like subfactions at least. Also make each faction missing something which needs either the player, or a specific alliance/reliance on another faction in order to be filled.

Weapons: Currently the weapons are lazily implemented. It is as if all factions use the same technology. There should be ship class specific weapons AND faction/subfaction specific weapons. What's the point of continuing playing (military playthrough) if we can have access to all weapons within 2~3 hours of gameplay? I can blame this to lack of content, but also implementation-wise, it needs to be reworked, I mean cmon, an S fighter with a torpedo launcher? The torpedo itself should be the same size as an S fighter...

War/diplomacy: As a player who always focuses on the Xterminate part of "X" series, I always enjoy joining a specific faction and conquer the galaxy together. When i saw the war missions introduced I was happy at first, but then, when got into it, i was very disappointed. It is just a string of missions that give garbage rewards. What's the point?
I think officially joining a specific faction should automatically make the enemies of that faction your enemy too ( at least after reaching a specific rank within said faction). That would make the game more interesting in the way of "you make the choice, now you have to deal with it) however, this where come war missions. The reward should be worth the trouble (for example: exclusive ship, exclusive weapon/weapon mod, even a free station later on, etc...) That would a great sense of progression with the allied faction and make the game more spicy with conquests and battles all the time.

Ship variety and balance/ship designs: Ok, this is a point that i don't really need to explain because everyone knows what I am talking about here. I am happy to see that smaller ships are more useful than they were in rebirth, but i am sad to see capital ships being a lot more useless and smaller that they were in rebirth. Furthermore, the design of the ships desperately needs rework. I see no motivation in playing the game because there is no ship that makes me want to make the effort to acquire.

So in the end, X foundation needs a rework in many core aspects in order to be that X game worthy of being a successor of X3.

[lancing99]

Much of that stuff is part of what other developers would call beta testing.

What X4 needs is more development time, this is not a release product. It is maybe at best a beta product. Fundamental core aspects of the game are broken and its rampant with major bugs. This should be have been sold as a version 0.7 early access release.

So the issue is the game is out in its current condition, now what?

Because so much of the games core is broken I don't think incremental patch updates are going to work here since so many peoples save games are going to be already affected. What they need to do at this point is add training wheels (a master control script) to the game engine and then continue to address broken mechanics and bugs from there.

The master control script would be idle most of the time but would intervene when the economy or factional conflicts got too unbalanced (maybe by max/min presets), and then step in and remove/add resources/ships/assets from the game outside of the players view or sensor coverage. It would strictly control empires and AI factional interactions and leave the player interactions alone. This would allow the game to remain at least semi-functional while they address specific bugs and broken core game elements.

If at some point the core game mechanics are working properly they could simply disable it after.