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[Dontero]

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GOG

PLATFORMS:
PC only

WHAT IS X4 ?

X4 is space sim game where core part of game is sandbox gameplay where you FIGHT/TRADE/EXPLORE/BUILD.
Unlike games like Star Citizent or Elite Dangerous and much like Eve online game doesn't stop when you acquire best ship in game.

Like in case of Mount & Blade you start from 1ship and slowly you build up yourself getting better ship etc. Then you hire people who will fly with you, then you hire traders, then you build stations and in near future you will fight galactic wars with your own empire.

FEATURES:
- Complete sandbox - there is slight story but nothing keeps you from game
- Fly almost every ship in game - You see something flying you can fly it. Whatever it is small fighter or huge ass carrier. As long as it has living crew you can fly it.
- Trade - buy low, sell high. Buy your own AI operated traders that will trade for you, protect your traders etc.
- Fight - fight small ships or big capital ships, do missions or set your own goals like removing whole empire from the game. Board ships and conquer universe.
- Build - Almost everything you can see in space you can build. That missile production factory ? Yep you can build it. That huuuge shipyard producing capital ships ? Yep, you can build it and you can thanks to it build yourself your own capital ships.
- Explore - While game focus is sandbox, galaxy is not random string of numbers and it is mostly hand made. So when you jump toward new sector you will always find something new instead of 54342323 start that look like 343434 other stars you saw.

edit: From watching 4-5 hours of streams so far game seems to be really polished unlike X-rebirth.

 

[ClanOfNone]

Games like this look/sound amazing to me, then the cliff-like learning curve kills it for me. I couldn't even make it out of EVE's tutorial.

 

[Alexios]

So, reviews are very mixed and I'm wondering if it's mostly bugs that we can expect to be ironed out that make people dislike it. Or if the whole experience is compromised like with Rebirth. Or if it's even worse than that but it's the hardcore egosoft fans who make it appear better like they at times elevated the reviews of Rebirth or its DLC by being the only ones who still cared at that point. I want to believe but they seemed to stick with Rebirth for a long while despite its need for a total reworking and put out content for it until recently while this game was only announced like a year or so ago iirc and just released out of the blue. I guess I'll find out eventually. If only we could get a game with the ocean-depth of X but the polish and ease of use of Elite's puddle-deep breadth.

 

[dionysus]

Rebirth was terrible. X3 TC is my favorite game of all time.

Edit. Did they get rid of the god awful and pointless FPS parts in stations.

 

[Dontero]

Seems like people have problems with their flight sticks and poor performance on really high end rigs.
For me it runs locked 60fps on GTX980 and i5-3570@4,5ghz 8GB ram.

also aside from one weird crash when i switched vsync mode game seems to run without bugs.

Games like this look/sound amazing to me, then the cliff-like learning curve kills it for me. I couldn't even make it out of EVE's tutorial.

While EVE is good comparison as what you can do with it, it starts as M&B so while game isn't that simple it is not as overwealming as EVE.
I know because i tried to get into EVE many times in free weeks and always couldn't get past curve. Lack of proper kingdom building didn't help either.

Imho watch stream of someone playing it from start and you will quickly get a hold of what game is and does.

Rebirth was terrible. X3 TC is my favorite game of all time.

From 5-6 hours of stream and hour of my own game i can already say this is X game we fans of X3 waited for.

 

[Alexios]

That's encouraging

 

[TrainedRage]

I will stick to my FPS mount and blade clone...Freeman: Guerilla Warfare.

 

[Gabbelgak]

I love the X games, they take a little bit to get into - especially your first time trying - but man they have so much to do and in any way you want to do it essentially. I'm going to have to wait a few months before I can actually have any time to play but will definitely pick up.

Don't be intimidated by the learning process of the game is my advice to people on the fence.

 

[Woo-Fu]

Much closer to the X3 experience than XR appeared to be. Egosoft redeemed, perhaps. I put a bunch of hours in today, there are definitely some rough edges and all of the station/ship interior stuff is absolutely pointless, but I'm seeing elements of X3 gameplay that weren't in XR.

 

[Alexios]

Yeah I didn't play much but I thought the space stations seemed pointless. First off it was jarring that when on the dock or port or what you call it moving to any direction too far would automatically teleport me inside my ship. Not sure if that was just for tutorial. Then the station interior was not seamless but instead was separated with loading time per area as you travelled between different tiny in that case areas via some sort of lift thingie. Then an NPC alien disappeared Shenmue style as it was exiting the area around the time I was entering it so I caught that in my view when I turned around to try to interact with it. I think there was a menu screen on my ship to do everything I'd want to do on the station through that through so it's good if you can skip it but then why waste resources on crafting all the interiors and alien behaviours and things. Hopefully it doesn't have a dumb and awful story that uses all that in lame cut scenes further wasting resources but yeah. I liked that holding a button down made it so the ship moved a lot like in the simplicity of Freelancer, trying to follow your cursor and stuff. Not sure if that's been in before. If I get into this I'll want to use my joystick anyway though, hopefully the lack of free-aim as with the cursor won't make it feel like it's not balanced for it though. Overall it at least didn't give me the awful first impression of Rebirth, it does seem to be closer to X3 but then again, this is so many years later they will hopefully be delivering something a lot better than X3 in the end. Also performance was very miss for me, it started 60 fps but quickly deteriorated to often being at half that and it doesn't even look that great at max settings (or that different in your average regular use scenario if you lowered settings like not having soft shadows for example). Maybe if you can play it at 4K and/or supersample it it will look good but at native 1080p it was a jagfest with the highest quality FXAA as there's no TAA and I imagine the other AA options are even more costly for performance. I can't imagine what system it will take it to run it with all the bells and whistles at 60fps but maybe I'm just unlucky with performance lately.

 

[dionysus]

Why didnt they kill the walking around stations and ships? Worthless.

I played a little bit and kept having UI errors that had to force a restart. I think I will let this one bake a while with patches and also wait for community mods. I always play X with a bunch of trader and usability mods.

Overall though I am glad to see this is more like X3 than Rebirth. I will definitely eventually sink 100 hours into it.

 

[InvictusBlurp]

I have all X games in steam, never played them. Will get it in the future, right now i'm playing Elite Dangerous on Xbox and Rebel Galaxy on Steam.

 

[TekNav]

After observing sector activity after buying some larger ships, it looks like the economic simulation is solid. Purchasing a ship creates a deficit in the resource account of the station which is immediately met with buy orders going out to sector traders. Those buy orders drive purchases at stations which, in turn, need inputs to replenish their outputs. Now that they've fixed the bugs that were causing conflict stagnation, we should see economic activity take off. It really was a major set of bugs, since conflict (and the resulting ship explosions) are what drives the vast lion's share of the economy's ouput sinks. Exceptions are food rations and medical supplies, which seem to diminish gradually regardless of station activity.

Honestly, this is the best X release I've seen. The economic foundation is solid, the game is stable (for the vast majority of players), and the map design is my favorite yet. I love how the highway creates a ring of "urban" sectors which are fed by "rural sectors" which, in turn, lead into outland sectors.

If you guys haven't seen it yet, Egosoft put out a video on their plans for a 1.5 patch before Christmas and a 2.0 patch between January and February.