In fairness, this is the first Egosoft title I've been waiting like a rabid dog to purchase and play on release. And that some, if not most, or hopefully all of my complaints will be addressed in the patches and expansions that I've already put my investment into.
This is my, and many other people's first experience with Egosoft as a day-0 player - so if any of you felt this way in the past releases, please let us all know, so we aren't running around with torches and pitchforks.
I'm hoping we could get some official word from devs regarding the various feedback.
I can live with the janky A.F. autopillok.. erm autopilot. We've been dealing with that crap for years. I know there is a bit of technical challenge to this one feature that still hasn't been mastered. They did do some work with stations and the economy, some fairly decent improvements there in my experience so far. However, they've completely turned a 180 in the wrong direction as far as feedback is the judge on almost every other major aspect of the game. Every aspect of Egosoft's motto or mantra is currently tits-up.
Trade:
- Positive: Sure the trading seems to be a big more in line, with a minimum of cheated economy. I think that if I were to cheat in enough to make a complete production system I could probably make the universe mine, literally -- which is a first for these guys, so I do give them props there.
- Negative: The lack of items and ship differences make this aspect stupidly boring. Also, the economy is in crazy good shape on 3 starts I've tried thus far.
- Positive: At least we aren't stuck with the skunk-and-chain.
- Negative: This aspect is REALLY bad as far as I'm concerned. I hoped for a building on and merger of concepts and feedback they learned from X3 and XR. X3 had the ability to fly everything, and a strong customization of equipment that made the game awesome and unique. Capitals were massive, a great defensive or offensive asset, and had turrets that made sense (aside from some angles being overlooked, and the AI for turrets being a nightmare of friendly fire, and whole groups of turrets acting as one unit instead of individually). In XR, capturing a ship was an awesome experience, aside from the ability to completely cheese it with the poor turret placement and lack of thruster-wash. There are no 'between' ships. Gone is the corvette, the pocket-destroyer, all of the ships that you traded or fought your way up to. Also, I call complete BS on the 'complexity' of the turret system in previous games because they worked and worked well, once you got modded mostly eliminated the friendly-fire issues, and worked on hardware that isn't even good to use a freakin' *browser* on anymore!
- Positive: This aspect is kinda better so far. I like the ability to make a station complex again, while retaining some of XR's feel, and without the nightmares that complexes in X3 had.
- Negative: On that same coin, the flipside is they did take some of the cooler features of XR and toss them. They feel static. Also they kept one of the aspects of XR that feedback was a bit negative about, which is that whole scanning ring around the station thing.
- This one... well, the negatives above just drive us to derision and make the thinking bit an act in frustration.
I *think* that Egosoft knows enough and has the feedback from previous games to have known that X4, in the condition that it's in right now, is a complete let-down and utterly ticks off its fan-base. I'm *not sure what to think* about the lack of attention to detail, the fairly obvious lack of even a single run-through of playthrough testing, and the lack of what I'd even consider to be a feature-complete release.
Hope?
- I really do hope that Egosoft hasn't fallen to the wayside, like BioWare, Bungie, whatever the mess Blizzard/Activision/etc are called these days, SOE and so on. I hope that they are going to address the above negatives somehow.
- I hope that X4 turns out to be the best X game of the series, that ends up as the next standard we hold future releases up against.