2025 Christmas XLOG: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

[adeine]

IMHO the main problem Egosoft introduced for themselves here is the removal of the ship reactors and their possible energy output for weapons and shields. Instead of evolving that idea they just cut it. (we could have energy management / energy-profiles-by-ship-role by now! )

So choosing the proper weapon loadout was also important because your ship maximum energy could not sustain more / powerful weapons. This introduced real drawbacks and made it fun to balance it out. Want a fast fighter? Better use ammo based weapons because they have low reactor values. Why are the terrans superior? Because they have the superior reactors. Why are Borons so tough? Because they have specialized shield recharge. Teladi have huge shield capacities and huge ships, but lousy reactors. So once the capacitors are dry the recharge takes ages. So they had to rely on ammo based weapons (energy pulse, gauss cannons, missiles) - which they could because they have huge cargo holds!

A lot of the boringness of the X4 weapon design stems from those cut reactors. Every ship can fire endless volleys of plasma fire. There is no need to bring huge battleships / destroyers. Just bring many S ships and they can outgun everything - because there is no energy problem for them. Picking the proper ship with the proper energy output and the proper weapons for the job was what made X³:TC so great.

Exactly this; I've been asking for something like this for years. It's a fairly big change/a decent amount of rework, but with the scope of changes planned perhaps we can be more hopeful this time around?

[mr.WHO]

According to new x4 lore, terran ships have superior Heath dissipation - it would be nice if this would aktualny be reflected in stats.

[Worilio]

Happy celebrations.

Dealing with technical debts is a good idea, but it would not harm to add some more end game cotent to deal with after completing all story lines and wiping out Xenon sectors. Something like AI controlled expeditions on an entirely different global multiplayer map, repeating crises with technological breakthroughs as rewards, providing additional terraforming missions per installed DLC like "Timelines", etc pp.

[alecz]

Great news!

Is the 90% off deal available on GOG as well? I couldn't find it.

[BitByte]

Great news!

Is the 90% off deal available on GOG as well? I couldn't find it.

There's no X4 base game in GOG so answer is no. You can only find Discovery Pack which includes X4 + Timelines in discounted price.
Community of Planetes (game + DLCs excl. soundtracks) is very tempting option if planning get X4 now as it's only 30€ (approx 13€ more compared to Discovery Pack) in GOG.

[Caedes91]

Watched the Xlog on the youtube. So the only thing that will get changed about the ships, is downsizing the weapons?

[chew-ie]

Watched the Xlog on the youtube. So the only thing that will get changed about the ships, is downsizing the weapons?

How did you come to such a conclusion? And do you really think that Egosoft will coin a new major version "just for downsizing the weapons"? (rhetorical question)

[decifer]

Watched the Xlog on the youtube. So the only thing that will get changed about the ships, is downsizing the weapons?

To my understanding they're reworking the weapon and turret models so all models physically fit all corresponding hardpoints and ships. They also rebalance them and maybe introduce some more compatibility between some weapons and ships.
But that's just a teaser for one thing in the patch they're willing to share.
Another thing are the priority commands, that override orders in the queue. There's very likely more and they'll share it over time and when confident they can deliver.
And then there's DLC content on top, as usual. Pretty sure there'll be at least one new ship that can use a different combinations than the existing ones.

[Caedes91]

Watched the Xlog on the youtube. So the only thing that will get changed about the ships, is downsizing the weapons?

How did you come to such a conclusion? And do you really think that Egosoft will coin a new major version "just for downsizing the weapons"? (rhetorical question)

I was specifically referring to the ships. Because all they literally showed, was shrinking the weapons on a Nemesis. Nothing else. At this stage you can't talk about "redesigning". These are tweaks at best.

[chew-ie]

Watched the Xlog on the youtube. So the only thing that will get changed about the ships, is downsizing the weapons?

How did you come to such a conclusion? And do you really think that Egosoft will coin a new major version "just for downsizing the weapons"? (rhetorical question)

I was specifically referring to the ships. Because all they literally showed, was shrinking the weapons on a Nemesis. Nothing else. At this stage you can't talk about "redesigning". These are tweaks at best.

The thing about Egosoft is that they don't show all the details. Also, trying to tell from the background video what's to come is your issue. Listen to what Bernd says - that still won't give you the whole patch content but way more then some moving background images. The video is really just some eyecandy in the background and a major version in X games means a lot of changes (just check every changelog to get an idea). And it will be a redesign because they redesigned the way the turrets visuals are working in order to create a new baseline which then enables the mechanical redesign (again, listen to what Bernd said).

[decifer]

Watched the Xlog on the youtube. So the only thing that will get changed about the ships, is downsizing the weapons?

How did you come to such a conclusion? And do you really think that Egosoft will coin a new major version "just for downsizing the weapons"? (rhetorical question)

I was specifically referring to the ships. Because all they literally showed, was shrinking the weapons on a Nemesis. Nothing else. At this stage you can't talk about "redesigning". These are tweaks at best.

I mean, yeah, judging after barely watching and not even listening to what's actually said in a video is very fitting these times.

[Caedes91]

How did you come to such a conclusion? And do you really think that Egosoft will coin a new major version "just for downsizing the weapons"? (rhetorical question)

I was specifically referring to the ships. Because all they literally showed, was shrinking the weapons on a Nemesis. Nothing else. At this stage you can't talk about "redesigning". These are tweaks at best.

The thing about Egosoft is that they don't show all the details. Also, trying to tell from the background video what's to come is your issue. Listen to what Bernd says - that still won't give you the whole patch content but way more then some moving background images. The video is really just some eyecandy in the background and a major version in X games means a lot of changes (just check every changelog to get an idea). And it will be a redesign because they redesigned the way the turrets visuals are working in order to create a new baseline which then enables the mechanical redesign (again, listen to what Bernd said).

I am not saying that the patch will be barebones. Given the track record of the past patches, I also think the 9.0 patch will be somewhat substantial.
But the thing I am solely interested in, are the "ship redesigns". That's what I am asking about. Nothing more, nothing less. It's cool, that you all have your own theories or assumptions. But I can only go off from the X-log, the most up to date information as of the time of writing this. With that said, all that was shown, was shrinking the weapons. Even with the commentary of Bernd, it's only about the turrets/weapons. When I hear the word "redesigns" out of Egosoft's mouth, I think about the E-variants of past patches. No such actual redesigns of the hulls were mentioned. All I am asking about, is whether that was all of it (only tweaks to the existing model) or if more effort in redesigning them is actually planned.

[chew-ie]

I was specifically referring to the ships. Because all they literally showed, was shrinking the weapons on a Nemesis. Nothing else. At this stage you can't talk about "redesigning". These are tweaks at best.

The thing about Egosoft is that they don't show all the details. Also, trying to tell from the background video what's to come is your issue. Listen to what Bernd says - that still won't give you the whole patch content but way more then some moving background images. The video is really just some eyecandy in the background and a major version in X games means a lot of changes (just check every changelog to get an idea). And it will be a redesign because they redesigned the way the turrets visuals are working in order to create a new baseline which then enables the mechanical redesign (again, listen to what Bernd said).

I am not saying that the patch will be barebones. Given the track record of the past patches, I also think the 9.0 patch will be somewhat substantial.
But the thing I am solely interested in, are the "ship redesigns". That's what I am asking about. Nothing more, nothing less. It's cool, that you all have your own theories or assumptions. But I can only go off from the X-log, the most up to date information as of the time of writing this. With that said, all that was shown, was shrinking the weapons. Even with the commentary of Bernd, it's only about the turrets/weapons. When I hear the word "redesigns" out of Egosoft's mouth, I think about the E-variants of past patches. No such actual redesigns of the hulls were mentioned. All I am asking about, is whether that was all of it (only tweaks to the existing model) or if more effort in redesigning them is actually planned.

I see - those ship redesigns you are hoping for will only happen on a few selected occasions. The primary focus is to make a combat rebalancing possible. So you might get some very outdated ships from the release version get geometry changes (in order to make the new weapon mounts possible) - but I'd say don't get your hope up for lots of new "-E" versions. That's not what Bernd was talking about in the XLOG video.