X4 Is My Favourite Nightmare - Impressions and Commentary
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- I played X4, which is a 4X game of sorts, combining the managing of a business/military empire with first person gameplay as you wander around space and look at your cool stuff. It's really good, in principal. In practice it is extremely frustrating, and I got very mad. Let's find out why!
-------------------
Support OffyD's Game Grounds by purchasing the best game on Steam, Godless Tactics: store.steampow...
My gaming audiobooks channel: / gameworldnarratives
My weirder gaming content channel: / @contentforhumans
My website: officiallydevi...
My mostly unused twitter: / officiallydevin
#X4 #4x #x4kingdomsend
I can't believe it took an hour and a half to mention X4 is a sequel to X3. Was very insightful, thanks for the video as always.
Gotta keep people waiting for big reveals like that, what a twist!
"I tended to just die really suddenly and not really know why." - Dude, you are attacking a swarm of xenon p's in one of the most fragile glass canon S-fighters in the game - without any wingman or backup. Of course you are going to die :D
Missed your comment, but the point was that there was a lack of hit indicators and I had trouble with the radar. I don't think I meant anything about the balancing of those ships or what have you.
@@OffyDGGskill issue.
@@WiseOwl_1408 literally, pretty sure with good piloting anything can beat anything else. Was the case in x3 anyway.
seeing you whizzing around the hangar like an excited child and saying you liked it "an obscene amount" had me rolling
I've been playing this for a week it's the most frustrating but equally addictive game I've played for years. After a week of trial and error and searching youtube/reddit I found there is actually several levels of giving ships orders, so you can actually get miners to mine various items and sell them across various systems, using repeat orders.. (effectively setting up a list of chained orders then put it on a loop). So you don't actually need them levelled up. As for the combat you need to do it with your own fleet of fighters set to either defend you or intercept/attack with you.
One thing that the X series kinda requires you to do to more easily progress is to setup an entire economy chain for your self where you mine ore for your factories to produce basic stuff for your advance factories to produce into top of the line stuff that you then sell to the rest of the world for big bucks
And the way to do that?
Start off by buying mining ships, give 'em captains, and guard them while they mine.
Meantime, buy or steal blueprints
Once you have money coming in, build a station to fabricate basic compobents, and have those miners feed the factory.
And then sell the basic components (with trade ships) and use the profit (as well as more basic components) to build further factory stations.
TLDR: Build economy from the bottom up.
@@JoshSweetvale thanks, I'm trying to figure out how to play this game, it seems like a lot to keep track of but i'm going to try
Seems like satellites and resource probes would help out your crew a lot with the issues you're having regarding trading and mining.
Actual scraping ships is a industry on it own. There are specialiced ships that scraps remains into cubes, other that haul them to the stations, and modules that proces that. Very energy comsuming, high profit if you can set an industry next to Xenon Space
Love the video, great commentary. I think the game is good though it would be a lot better if the UX was improved (it's already massively improved from x3)
One thing about the map that took me a few hundred hours to find, you can turn off the map transparency in the top right corner tab
Now there's a revolutionary discovery, I better remember that for when I play again, thanks!
Ah, you already helped them out. :) It's a bummer that this option is that hidden and not active by default, but at least it's there.
X is a perfect example of Stockholm Syndrome. Every part that gets released is basically a buggy mess, the physics glitches out, the AI basically never does exactly what you want and needs to have its hand held all the time, and the UI feels like SAP in the 90s, but I still have to buy every part and enjoy the pain, since Beyond The Frontier. Also the studio is kind of adorable? It scratches an itch that barely any other game scratches. ARMA 3 in capture the island with AI feels similar. I wish there was a game that could do 1st Person large scale commanding/economy l/building properly with really good AI.
Also, what puzzles me a bit, Is that X4 has basically been the same core game since X2 (and Arma 3 since Operation Flashpoint), so in both cases we know that the core game was able to run on early 2000 hardware. Why so some quirks still exist 20 years later? Like AI not being able to drive straight roads in Arma, or AI not giving basic feedback like being unable to sell. Both games need modders to fix basic functions.
This is also how I feel. I am trapped, and looking forward to playing this nightmare some more, if only for the vibes. And I will see if mods can make it play better, there must be good ones after all these years.
Thank you for the video.. Was amusing to watch and very much how I feeel in a lot of areas... I think the management of the egosoft studio fails miserably in setting the right priorities for the game.. Instead of actually fixing massive game bugs they are now saying they won't be releasing more updates until 7.0 which will feature other things... Yeah more things... more bugs... @@OffyDGG I don't get it.... Meanwhile I have almost 200 hours in the game in the last 3 weeks alone... figures....
really wanted to recommend Bannerlord but you dont build much and the AI is... well... its something....
that said you control up to 1000vs1000 man battles from your player character, meaning you're both commanding your troops (infantry forming a shield wall at the base of an elevated area while your archers hold the hill, raining death as you lead your calvary in a charge against the advancing enemy infantry or perhaps harass their archer line) and really can scratch that commander/trader itch. Even heard the X games compared to the Mount and Blade games (in particular X3TC/AP and Warband, but still)
X3 was so broken that mods to fix the broken parts (bonus pack, bounce) are now considered part of the vanilla experience to the point where they don't even disable steam achievments.
@@BobMcBobJrI loved X3 Terran Conflict. One of my most played games after Stardew Valley.
Yet even I know that it has terrible controls, confusing UI and lots of bugs.
The AI when piloting ships is su*cidal, which is the main reason I don’t field Carriers despite them being supercool. Had to deliberately get very slow fighters so they don’t crash.
Still, it’s still one of the best 4X games I’ve played. I can see past the buggy mess in what they intended it to be.
I haven’t played X4 much, as I simply don’t have much time to dedicate to it. Real life keeps interfering.
You can make the map opaque. It is an option, not set on by default, in the filter options of the map screen.
If nothing else, it can save some GPU watts processing vertices that aren't going to be displayed because you're busy looking at the map.
Came here to say this! I can't stand it transparent, it muddles my little brain
@@KushtieM8 I think it's useful when gate camping. You're going to do it, so while you're doing it you can be looking at your map and being a manager (ordering scouting and other tasks to the handful of ships you will have when you're at this camping stage) and use the transparency to see when you need to close the map and start dogfighting what you were waiting for.
Designwise this game/series really covers everything from delightful to completely hopeless. Only watched half your video yet but favorite nightmare describes my relationship to these games perfectly. Just a small tip regarding the map background: I'm pretty sure there is a setting to make it opaque.
Edit: Done watching now. This was hilarious. And you probably turned off sound effects by accident via hotkey, because for some inexplicable reason, the default hotkey for turning off all sound effects is CTRL + B or V or something, which is really close to some hotkeys you use in combat alot, like CTRL + Space etc. I mean this is X4 after all.
Ahh now that would explain it, great detective work!
@@OffyDGG Wait until you find out how easy it is to hit the reload quicksave button when you're not looking.
Its hilarious that the UI in X3 looks much worse but is actually faster and very efficient once you learned a thousand different hotkeys
I soooooo miss that UI
X3s UI was really good once you figured it out. All fairly straightforward for me.
X3 from 2005 looks better than X4 ....
@@TheKetsathose are different games
By many concepts
I usually get like 6 scouts right away, or more even, and I start sending them out to explore, to find the resources. And by the time I(they) are done I I am rich enough to buy big mining ships, and I send them out. I pull my scouts back and they become my personal guard. And running a fleet is cumbersome, even a small one.
Argons ARE humans originally from Earth! They just forgot they are, because it's been so long since they've been stranded there.
The argon’s retconned it out of their history books. The people that knew of earth died off.
@@MrAyybee2cold it's the story for the first x game. Showing the argon they were from earth, they originally removed the data since they didnt want to risk their descendants trying to open a jump gate back towards earth by using the gate at alpha centauri
Most of your stuff being dead was because you were a single fighter up against 4-6 other fighters. So you mostly lost because you got ganked. The "reward" of the fights, especially against the Xenon is not so much monetary but that you slow them down in their Zerg Rush. The problem in your case for "what I want is remote piloting..." is you don't have other ships to be IN. So it doesn't make any difference if you are dead or just see yourself in another random ship.
Seems like a pretty big difference to me - imagine if you could be sitting in your flagship and just remotely take control of a fighter. That way you could enjoy the fighter gameplay without relying on save-scumming or something to deal with the risks. I think that would be good.
The complaint about dying wasn't dying itself but that there was no sound or visual cue for being under attack if the enemies aren't missing you, so you die unexpectedly if you are attacked from off-camera. Only really a big deal in fighters, but still worth noting. I feel most games have some kind of direction marker or warning system for being attacked so its fair to expect that.
@@OffyDGG Except you didn't have a flagship. You didn't have one. That was my point: you don't HAVE a fighter to teleport to/from.
Now, in the general case of "later game when I HAVE a fleet", you should also have the PHQ and teleport, even first level teleport means you do exactly that. Get out of your seat on your capital ship flagship and teleport to a fighter, and if it blows up, you teleport back.
It USED to be, before 3.0, "Game Over" but in the Split update, the base game included an auto exit. If you faff around, you will get targeted in your suit, and it can't take on laser blasts bigger than your head, but you got several seconds to teleport. Why? Because people wanted to teleport instead of seeing the Game Over screen.
Of course, losing an asset worth a couple million early game is a BIG hit, and so many people just savescummed to an earlier savegame where the ship was still alive, so it was only useful "mid and late game" where you had fleets, and therefore teleporting researched. So it was tied to teleporting.
Not that you would necessarily know this, but I was only commenting on your specific case in the video where you had a few scouts and a fighter or two. Not your scenario you just now said.
So you're saying that actually is in the game? Well then that is good news! Personally I would say have that from the beginning, since it's equally unfun to not have in the beginning as it is later, no need to have it be be based on progression if that's how it's meant to work. Or, if it is something that they want to be unlocked as a reward, it needs to be obvious how to unlock it - for example, I played the game a lot and I have no idea what you're talking about. Apparently there are story quests and such that are probably something to do with it, but I literally never saw them, and that's not exactly ideal!
@@OffyDGG As far as Egosoft (and most people, but, and here is important, NOT ALL) is concerned, it WAS obvious! It was obvious you start with the "Young Gun" start, and until you have scanned a station leak, it will bring up a yellow box to RUB YOUR FACE in the fact and tell you to scan it, and they made your first scan option ALWAYS get the start of the PHQ plot. As far as they were concerned, it was only possible to make it more obvious by making it all "grandma, this is how you suck an egg!!!".
Now, some will just sandbox this, and never bother with missions, or station scanning, because they get in the way of just getting down and dirty with playing the game of "lone star pilot", much like you did, and therefore it is obvious you would not get told "in game".
And there is a case of one person who repaired rather than scanned, their first leak, so it was then "random chance until it was the PHQ plot" for every leak.
So it isn't that "everyone got it, so what is wrong with you" here, it is just that there are only so many ways to get the PHQ noted "in game" before it is nagging EVERYONE. E.g. even if you know the PHQ is "find a station leak", it will STILL tell you the first time you get near a leak to scan it, even if that scan is not forced by writer fiat to be a PHQ starting mission leak.
Once you GET a working PHQ, you get told about all the research and you are told, again "in game", that teleportation is interesting, but, and here again is the sandbox and the refusal to teach grandmas, you aren't FORCED to get teleportation researched. To get the working PHQ you need to get a bit of mission underway, so it teaches you that, the mission eventually gets you a frigate free and able to board, teaching you how to board M class ships, and parking on a bigger ship. And to get that far requires you build up a station dock, so that gets taught to you.
There is the attempt to make it "organic", so it isn't gamified and you read up.
Remember, too, you still didn't have a fleet, so teleport would have been no better than a game over screen at that point.
And once you have done the PHQ once, you take that knowledge with you. Even if it doesn't get used again and you never build another station or even the PHQ beyond a L1 teleport research. Once you got the PHQ, you know why the PHQ. It'll still nag you on a new game about "this is how you scan a station leak!!!!".
The game can be played a lot and still only cover 10% or less of the game in toto. Missing this bit is absolutely possible, even if "I played this game a lot", because there is a lot more to the game. It doesn't cast nasturtiums on you that you didn't know. Unlike prior X games with a PHQ, there is research and the PHQ is a nearly game start item. Absolutely no way you know this. However there is only so much a sandbox game can do to MAKE you do things "the right way" before it isn't a sandbox any more.
"I literally never saw them", but you also didn't see the Kaahk. I've never seen the top tier crystals, and according to the video, you never did either. There are people who have done things I haven't, even with 500 hours plus in. There is no end game. It's a sandbox. And so until you've done everything, you won't have literally seen it for yourself. In many games that is 20 hours in, in others 50 hours in, in some 100 hours, in this? You could potentially get 1000 hours in and not have seen it all.
Of course, if you had seen it all 20 hours in, you might have no reason to play to 50 hours. THAT isn't ideal either. Not for a game that can last thousands of hours.
It's all about expectations, yours, theirs, mine, other players, and people who throw the game away in disgust because they expected a 20 hour to endgame pwnage of NPCs, etc.
I have kept it, to an extent, vague, so that you can discover the game yourself. IMO you should be told of the PHQ, but also IMO they did, several times. Because my way isn't the only way, and if I give away more, I'll make you play MY game, not yours.
So since you missed what I thought was pretty obvious (the PHQ) I point out why you may want to do it (you get teleport), and let you decide how you want to do it.
Also note there are other gamestarts, and two that you make up, the first is budgeted and the second not budgeted but gets your game "Modified", a budgeted gamestart means you can do the PHQ in a previous game and then not have to do it any more. Other DLC based starts (two split, two terran, two tides of avarice and two boron) give stories, other starts are unlocked in the base game (as in previous X games) by some unlocks in the game you made, such as "unlocking the PHQ" unlocks one new gamestart in the base game. Story beats were added in the Split start, expanded for the Terran starts and there is even more handholding for the boron starts.
I may give one hint for a boron start. Borons aren't equipped to take on capital ships, they didn't exist in Boron space, only Kaahk, and therefore only fighters. If you go Boron Only, they WILL be a weakness. So either accept it and plan accordingly, or mix it up knowing you're doing so for a reason.
The DLC starts are: split are combat focussed, the terran start "terran only", but if you want to mix up race ships, you might want a Segaris start instead. TOA are pirate smuggling or loan shark enforcement starts, and Boron are pacifist starts. You can work around those entirely, so you could to a pacifist Split start, or a garrulous terran officer start, but those are the "intended" roles.
Young Gun is just the default start and it gives you what is probably the worst ship you can pilot, it is slow, poorly armed and you'll be glad to get rid of it entirely, and it gives you such a bad ship so as to make ANY other ship an improvement. If you see a "special mission" for Reen, take it early. Not because the rewards are worth a lot, not even that the reward is a good ship, but it isn't your starting Elite, and so is an improvement on it, and a decent starter "jack of all trades" ship from which you can do pretty much anything, if poorly.
IMO there needs to be a rebalance for the Elite, as it is, it only has use as a cheap police craft, not anything you want in ANY fleet that has any choice. A few others could do with a rebalance too, so that any ship HAS a niche for a player to have and fly or own, because in any ranking, there IS going to be a worst in category, otherwise every ship is merely a cookie cutter clone. Currently, most most clearly with the Elite, there are some "no brainer, avoid at all costs" ships in each category, and it should not be "no brainer" and avoid only if you don't like X reason, or far better ships for doing Y exists than this.
@@markhackett2302 It seems all I can say is that for all your claims of this feature being obvious, all this 'yellow box' and nagging you are talking about didn't happen to me - as evidenced by me never encountering such things in this video exploring the game and not knowing what you're talking about now! I didn't pick the start you mentioned, and I have no DLC, so that may be part of it. Perhaps it wasn't as 'obvious' that everyone would start off the same way as you insist. [Edit: I should add that I don't know what you mean by 'station leak', 'your first leak' 'repaired leak', for example. Do you mean the thing repairing satellites? I did that only once, but nothing happened that I remember. It is, at least, in the tutorial, the repairing part at least.]
While you say you don't want to reveal this stuff to all players, I would turn that around and say that if it's important, then it should. It's not like it would force you to do these quests, so I don't think that's as railroady as you imply.
Perhaps I am just super unlucky and didn't get to know about this cool feature, and hence liked the combat less than intended (although obviously I did like it anyway).
Another thing I'll note is that if a player wants to complete the game in 20 hours, just make that a difficulty level or a simplified campaign, don't dismiss it. You'll always turn players away if you hide the fun or make it too much work, but you'll gain players who like that sort of thing too. Doing both is totally possible. Not that I would take that up, but I think you are wrong to dismiss that sort of approach, and X4-like games where browsing players can't see why it's good ultimately suffer because of this attitude.
So here's a neat mechanic. The empire AI is partially random.
So in one game you can have hyper aggressive Xenon swarming the universe and destroying factions.
On another the Xenon might be chill ot even getting wrecked by the Terrans but now the Teladi and Paranids are having an apocalyptic war.
Didn't know that! From what I heard, I thought the xenon just always killed everyone. perhaps i will get lucky when i play again...
I think they always hate everyone but it's a matter of how proactive they are about the genocide. It may also possibly be just based on whether their economy is working or not.
x4 and x3 are the best singleplayergames i have ever played!
the game is very difficult to get into, but once you have understood/learned the mechanics and possibilities, it is unique and fascinating!
x3 is one of my favourite games also. I am hoping to properly get into x4 with the kingdom end dlc and give it a full playthrough to see if I can recapture the magic
Diificult, there are tutorials that walk you through practically every aspect. Seriously, what was so 'difficult'? It's statements like this that cause game devs to dumb-down everything to the lowest common denominator.
@@OffyDGGare you going to check out the latest update then? I'm thinking of buying it after watching your very funny review nearly a year ago and I'm still on the fence due to the large amount of DLC, not including music and artwork.
Eidt. I noticed you did a follow up a few months ago just before tb last update. I'll give that a butchers too. Sorry.
@@screamingiraffethe interface was literally written in one night by Hunter S Thompson.
you can get a docking computer right away and then you can dock even at high speeds. leveling up the pilot does let you search within so many systems to sell. Mods really help a ton with a lot of the quirks, like one auto levels all the crew slowly over time and makes it a bit more enjoyable... the game is so slow on the leveling it feels like they want you to solely play this game for years.. The AI is happily stupid and loves to send your slow mining ships into active war zones, mods let you blacklist sectors and such. I like to play most games mod free, at least the first go around but x4 really really is improved with modding, like all his complaints of stupid pilots, that just changes so much when you can hire people who can actually do things. IT suddenly becomes a lot more enjoyable and a lot more like how you expect things to work.
i did really enjoy this game though, especially when you start building stations.
That's all sounds pretty good. Next time I will use mods for sure. Now that I have experienced the game in its pure state, I want to see if I can get a setup I really like.
map transparency can be adjusted. One complaint that can be adjusted. Shift 1 travel mode. MUCH faster but hard to control good for straight lines. use backspace to stop all forward motion relatively quickly. Automine lets you go one system for each pilot star, two star pilots can work through two systems, you can buy seminars from traders to increase the pilots stars. you use resource probes to tell the miners where the resources are and you use satellites for stations to keep track of current prices. so mining ore you used resource satellites to find the ore and you have the seller stations in satellite range , then all is automatic. The dangerous areas "in the void" are survivable if you have a Large size ship, the shields will counter the damage. Lastly, the main story gives you a free station, it takes 3 or four missions to get it.
There's a search box in the top right of the map, if you type in Silicon and press enter it will only show Silicon in those floating trade popup windows. Silicon will be below the search box with an x to remove it. You can have multiple items filtered. You do have to type an exact match of an item in-game, otherwise I'm pretty sure it breaks the whole thing.
(If you click on an item name it also puts it in the search filter)
lol X4 is the BEST space game in the genre by a mile and it´s still actively being update by the developers...As all games in the milky way, this game is not for everyone, but by no means the game is bad, quite the opposite.
Yes it is the best in the genre, no doubt about that, but it's still got loads of issues. It isn't bad by a longshot, I think you misunderstood there.
this was your most complainey video of all time I think. I dunno, I didn't do the %'s.
It was a good listen anyway though and the spaceship closeups were cool. Thanks D
It should be noted that most of what he complains about can be either fixed by mods (such as the one that lets you use all the automation settings at the start there's even an autoscout mod) or game mechanics that he never found. (such as seta which allows u to speed up the game by 65x speed, or the teleport ability that lets u teleport to ur ships. (which can be used in combat to switch ships when the one ur piloting dies)
That's wild, how are such large mechanics in the game but not mentioned? Would have been very happy to use those if I knew.
@@OffyDGG yeah not your fault game has the worst onboarding i've seen. to answer your question for the seta those expesive parts you were seeing drop are part of a set of 3 peices that you need to craft it (crafting bench is next to the trader on the stations.) and as for teleportation you have to research it. (im assuming you didn't find the player hq which you get by going to a station switch to scan mode (shift+2 i think) and finding radio leaks they make a loud sound when near and glow red then you got to get REAL close to it in scan mode. (this is also how you get access to illegal missions and the black market.) the guy that give you the mission is a boron btw. (you may have to find multiple leaks to get the mission.) last thing if you feel its 2 grindy to get these the normal way you can do the creative or budget sandbox game start when creating a character and just start with it unlocked.
@@Ubercharge12 Would not have even imagined that was possible, although I did see something about scanning stations, never worked out how to use it though. Once I come back to this game I'll just use mods and walkthroughs to make it fun basically, but for criticism purposes i wanted to go in pure.
@@Ubercharge12 can t agree with that all, devs make everything easily accessible, get criticised for too much holdhanding, if devs leave things for player to discover, devs get criticised for not explaining
At around 28 minute mark you are talking about you miners not doing anything and not telling you they are not doing anything.
They in fact are doing what they suppose to. The game updates miners in regular intervals, the filling up of their cargo is not continuous but sequented.
When your ppl have any problems they will report, as a yellow exclamation mark next to their ship in the list. It is clearly visible and it also tells you what they had issue with. For example, not finding a station to sell their ore.
Alas, I can understand that this is not clear for the new player. X4 is not a game for the casual.
You need to prees O to take items in space. No need to fly to every single box.
realised this right at the end, much better!
@@OffyDGG The range of the magnet is based on the size of the ship, so an L sized craft can hoover things 6km away, whereas small fighters can only suck up stuff 300m or so away, and M class have a range that gets to about 2km.
for automining, it's better to have a station and then assing the miner to the station, then the miner will mine what the station needs, and they will go to neighboring sectors if the station manager levels up.
Yeah, Egosoft is struggling to make the game more available to people unfamiliar with the X series. The series started as a sizable game already, slowing growing in features, building them one on top of another, each time making the game complicated, but certainly better. It's hard to separate the difficult part without hurting the features.
Fighting games have this problem, but the solution is useful tutorials. They hve a multi-tiered approach to this, but it's poorly presented and so are the tutorials.The thing is, when dealing with a complex game or task, you need tutorials that cater to the stage you're at in the learning process. The whole crystal mining thing is a great idea, but the difficulty in seeing them without mods is indeed a problem. Mix that with the whole sector-changing nerf was not smart. It's an excellent way to familiarize new players with the controls, which was clearly the intent, but the game doesn't suggest that hard enough, largely because it's so hard to see them. Also, the combat tutorial isn't useful when people are going to hit it. And worst yet, the 3rd tutorial appears broken and useless and is more of a tech demo than a tutorial ("oh hey, click these things and go to them to see how to do the thing. btw this is a trading ship, let's leave it do it's own thing." Really?). I genuinely had to look up a number of videos on youtube to find out how to build a station (that's not including the UI nightmare that is how to build one, but specifically the type of ship i have to find or buy. And then there's teh faction rank thing, which goes up too slowly and then too quickly. Look, i need to get in a strong S class or an M sometime within 24 hours of starting up the game for the first time because i'm sick of loosing to raiding parties and RNG, but can i do so without becoming best friends after doing so? Worried about balance, except in that one area. Oh, can we also not have a war that can take up multiple fronts and sectors before I get in an L-class ship which has no chance in this war? Game goes from 0 to 60 in few hours, and somewhere we forgot 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50. Game's hugely improved over the other titles, but this is a bit of a regression. Alot of people came for skyrim in space, not to gain a fear of space roaches and space skynet.
Just so you know a fighter is not the ship for fleet combat...
And a frigate is a missile ship... go with a corvette for the personal ship imo.
I'm curious if you ever used the long range scanner at all?
Yeah that was the reason I ended up flying into the minefield, as the scanner made it show up as a load of ? marks and I thought it might be something valuable. Useful for working out where stations are too if manually exploring, but I didn't do much of that in the end.
omg I've been waiting on u to play this game
Same. I almost bought it, but held off because it looked so complex. I look forward to the next video, but im sold against this game; not for me, it seems.
My favourite part of any Offy D video is learning a new lesson about capitalism.
I was radicalised by X4, the people of the universe must tear off their price tags and no longer be the playthings of the rich!
Starsector its an awesome game, did you ever play it?
Would also recommend Starsector, it's very similar to this in many aspects. Only big noticeable differences is that Starsector is on a much larger scale aswell as the game is played in a top down perspective rather than 3D, simpler graphics too.
Yep I have it, just one of the millions of games I have been saving to play for this channel and will eventually try
Good news is that they will be focusing on all these bug fixes in the coming update since the 6.00 patch
Ideal, I want to play the game again soon, been looking forward to it
I predict this game's interface screenshots ( imagine the map with trading/mining overlays ) will be used in UI/UX courses as a bad example.
And the class will laugh hard when presented the screenshots...
For local automining, you need to find a sector which has abundant amounts of the resource you are trying to mine, and also stations which will buy that resource. That's part of the "think" aspect of this game. If you do this, you can indeed make very good money mining even without a skilled pilot for the higher level mining functions. Argon Prime has terribly low resource levels, so your miners will take forever to collect resources there.
10 minutes into an hour and a half rant and i can see your biggest issue with the game: you don't understand it. To be fair, that's the real problem with X as a series. Other than the flight tutorial and a few quest lines in certain games, its terrible at teaching it's mechanics and quirks. The map being translucent is kinda important: say you're looking zoomed in on another section facing a gate because you're guarding it. Seeing things pop through and create trouble is more helpful to know when to get back to your not-map area, than simply hearing that you're getting blasted with lasers. But there inlies another problem: alot of the design of this game assumes you play and like playing a certain way, despite the potential to play so many different ways. This is really apparent from the whole crystal mining thing. It's chill and boring, and most people just want to get out of that tin can that they start with. And to top it off they nerfed the crystal mining by messing with spawn rates and stuff, so you go from a pain in the rear to a pain in the rear and worse. I get it, you want me to explore, but unless i know the sectors, do i really want to just hop around from sector to sector looking for new 'roids hoping that the sector I'm hopping into isn't a skynet sector?
So everyone runs around looking to veterans of the series for answers which in turn spoils the game for you when you find out certain setups are exploit level helpful taking you from early game to end game without a ton of effort. Like most companies, egosoft doesn't know how to reconcile complete beginners and experienced veteran players.And they don't get that as a single-player game (ventures are not what we mean by multiplayer) you don't need that degree of balancing. The crystal glow mod should've become part of the damn base game, not a mod that bans you from ventures (which makes this half-baked multiplayer even harder to enjoy, despite how much they think you want ventures). Things like the AI potentially taking neutral sectors before you're up and running makes the game punish you as a new player (because you can't just build for free in those sectors anymore) or being a new player.
It's a fun game, but the devs don't see things from the eyes of potential customers. Perhaps that's not a bad thing, though, because when corporations do that they tend to misunderstand the customer completely and ruin it for fans and new players alike (i'm looking at you fighting games).
It's a topic that interests me, this whole balance of veteran vs new player consideration. I suspect X4, being basically an early access game for all intents and purposes, is heavily influenced by people who have long since got over certain flaws in the game that seem really obvious to an outsider. I bet they would actively complain if more tutorial quests were added because they what the devs to focus on other things, or they want to maintain their satisfaction in personally knowing something that is hard to work out for others. Something tells me X4 is much less popular than it could have been because of bending to these considerations.
I heavily dislike reliance on walkthroughs or guides to teach a game, since they will come packed with spoilers and take away the fun of exploring the game for yourself. So if I find a mechanic and can't work it out at face value, or there is no quest/game content that tells you anything the devs think you are supposed to know to be able to enjoy it, I tend to start complaining.
I think for X4 it would be less about changing the game to appeal to new people, and more about giving an easier presentation. For example, I struggled to get mining to work, despite it technically being very simple, mostly because there are hidden details and lots of different places in the UI you need to go to get it sorted. But design-wise it's actually no more complex than clicking a 'number go up' button in an idle game. That's the sort of place where automating something would be great (like looking at a sector's resource list and clicking one 'mine this' to go through the whole setup automatically), since the manual way is hard to teach and is a meaningless challenge to perform.
Another big example would be quests. I never saw a single one in my campaign, and only learned they existed after I stopped. That should be impossible!
Damn, it's easy to get me ranting about these things :D
@@OffyDGG Well no, it's a known thing that the tutorials are a problem, even for veterans becuse the same mechanics change from game to game. For example, in the previous games where you could capture ships, the capture was based on how fast you could train the shields and start damaging the ship (presumably to scare them into bailing). Now there's 2 angles, boarding, but the old way still exists, except it was changed so that every time you deplete the shields (that is, shields must hit 0 but hull damage is not necessary) there's a chance a crew member will bail. If the number hits zero, the ship is yours. I get that EgoSoft doesn't exacntly want us to know that's how the mechanic changed, but its huge and changes how you play and how "leftover ships" (capturable ships left over after a massive fight) manifest. So no one is going to argue with more tutorial as long as it's in the tutorial menu (one of the campaigns, the Empyrion Curs, is a glorified tutorial for the then new piracy features and that is another complaint with the game). The community understands X has an accessability issue because it is for veterans any time something changes. There is the feature that there are certain flaws that we have gotten over, but that's most certainly not one of them. The problem the community has right now is that the community has historically worked together to mod quality of life features in, to the point that egosoft will consider them official and make them not work with the modified tag, but now with the half-baked multiplayer feature known as ventures, and rewards tied to that, people are more leery of mods because it disables ventures. Since the mods are more worth it than the paints you get from ventures, there's a compliance issue that EgoSoft is dealing with.
As for your distrust of walkthroughs, that is a problem. Even in X that's a problem, but due to the fact the community is aware of it you will have people try to avoid spoilers when doing tutorials. The problem with walkthroughs and tutorials are that they suffer the same problem that the dev-created tutorials have: different assumptions of base knowledge. I'm a veteran of the series and i still wasn't sure how you build a station in this game, because the in-game tutorial was worthless and the ones on youtube left me with the impression you didn't actually need a construction ship (i found one that did mention it though). On the flip side, while I just got this thing working better with my laptop so it's playble so i don't know how good the story is, the previous games have all had pretty bad stories that were more or less tutorials for the rest of the game. They've always had potential, but they've never really used it to great effect. Instead, the dynamic nature of the game tends to tell your story (and this happens lot more with x4 than previous games due to how some of the randomized elements can play things out on random station positioning alone). I managed to find a youtube playlist where a guy ends up doing a dramatic telling of what's happening in his game based entirely on what's actually happening on it's own.
As for the mining, yeah command menues and changes have always been among the mods that the commmunity has improved upon. Kinda line skyrim and scripting bugs, the community tends to add extra commands to ships that make it alot better. Some of the features added in X4 were clearly designed based on popular QoL mods for previous games. They clearly learned that the previous games' menus were cumbersome, so they came up with this design, which is a huge improvement on the depth issue (previously menues within menues within menues within menues just to order ships to attack or something), but not in other ways. Previous games you could use number keys to hit into those things so people quickly learned certain number combinations that would lead to certain tactions taking place (usually 4 or 5 menues because the depth was like 6 menus for something like "attack my target"). Still, the thing isn't fit for use while you're under fire and now you have to go searching for everything. Which isn't bad after you've done it for a while, but you gotta do it for a while before you know where eveything is, and it's certainly not organized correctly. And let's not even go into dealing with having over 100 ships...
As for quests, you definitely had some available if you were aware of the missions menu. Going through certain areas will trigger some quests as well. The thing is, certain quests are only started via data leaks, which you ren't going to intuitively discover. EgoSoft has this problem where they make the mistake of assuming the player is going to look at the game the same way they did, which is not how the real world works. And they have had this issue from the beginning and unfortunately, like most game devs, they seem hell bent on making you think the way they do instead of accepting that people are different. But, this hubris is on par with their political inclinations (which is bit to the far left, at least based on what's on the forums, which is odd considering the game itself and the content in the game isn't so): they are completely out of touch in a "hello my fellow cool kids" kind of way. They certainly mean well, but they're out of touch. Instead of creating a system that focuses on freedom of chnging the menus and icons etc (more on that in a separate second reply), they focused on trying to make things work a certain way.
Frankly, what they need to do is have a signup and have 10 random people who are not familiar with the series get free copies of the game in exchange for streaming the first 80 hours of play throughs to a private video thing so that they can see what normal people actually do.
Since the topic interests you, i learned something when dealing with real martial arts vs fighting games, at least in the learning aspect. When you dump overwhelming complexity on someone, you give them alot of potential, but unless they have a 300+ IQ, they're only going to retain maybe 5% of it. So you play through a tutorial in a fighting game, manage to put in hurs to master the weird finger bending combos that veterans say yuo'll never use anyway, only to go into the game and get bodied not just by other players, but by the AI. Why? Because your mind freezes up as you take what you learned slowly and try to react to a real-time situation, while also trying to figure out what of that 5% you actually retained is actually going to work in that situation. By the time you react, teh situation has already changed and you need to think about finding a way to reset the matchup (or situation in X4) back to neutral, and the same thing happens again and before you figure out how to do that you're dead.
So in real martial arts, the instructor tells you the first time you spar, that you're going to use the jab and only the jab, anything else doesn't count, because there's so much to get used to without worrying about the 20 different blocks that are situationally applied to 20 different attack types that were trained, let alone ones that you didn't train that could come out. No, you're going to jab. And when you're wrestling instead of boxing for the first time, your sparring you'll be placed into positions and one guy's job is to try to break that position with what htey learned that day and the other guy's job is to try to prevent them from breaking that position. You're taught a "home position" in wrestling that you're always trying to find your way back to, because that's where the 3 basic submissions you were taught are easiest to perform from, so rather than trying to teach you everything all at once, you're given basic controlled scenarios. However, as you get better in each one, instead of making them only use the cross or only that one position, you slowly *ADD* more punch types (boxing) or submissions/positinos (wrestling) to the allowed list so you gradually increase in complexity.
And yes, this can be done for X no problem. The problem is, the devs aren't going to do it, despite them actually kinda having done that already. For example, that early game crystal farming? Well, the crystals don't shoot back, and while you're blasting those things you're getting practice on maneuvering your ship and aiming your guns. It's slow, controlled, and you can predict what the crystal is going to do (since the asteroid spins at a constant rate and doesn't change directions or move around). That gets your coordination down really, really well. The problem is, you might get mugged before you're done with that phase. Or, in your case, you discovered that other ships getting mugged is an easier source of money (goes back to EgoSoft expected you to mine crystals instad of picking up drops). And manually ordering ships around will prepare you for later on when you actually have a fleet. But what software packages improves the AI by giving you commands that require less baby-sitting? Good question, doesn't seem to be consistent and the descriptions are absent. This isn't as bad in X4 as previus games, but it's still there.
Probably the easiet way for them to handle this is not unlike what they've done before. Create a new start of the "guided" type and have you play a basic story where you have some sort of mysterious benefactor who helps you get started. Hell, you could be really cool and make this guy turn out to be a villain who thought your success would weaken a rival faction and his plan fails. Bam, easy story. The whole questline is his machinations which not only benefit you but teach you how to play the game. Let him mark two asteroids with crystals, and have you look for the little glisten and then require that you mine 4 more asteroids and deliver the illegal crystals to an associate to teach you about patrols and black markets (they acutally already do most of this idea in one of the alternate starts). They then tell you when you should have enough credits to get a medium ship then they make a clear and obvious suggestin of which miner to get and so on. Part of the key to this is that they need to make the player the only random element in this particular game start, that way they can keep the Xenon back for example until it's time to intrduce that complexity. Of curse, making you go through the menus to do these things, too so you know which menus are useful and when.
Question mark
Shiny lamp is not a mine
Its a contaner
Puzzle game
You need to open it or it blows up
(And yes sometimes its a mine field )
Or i missed something and talk rabish
The thing about combat in X4 and the X series in general is that is supposed to be a calculated risk. A "is this worth it and can i win this fight?" mindset. You cant waltz up to a Xenon K in a Discoverer and expect to last more than 30 seconds. You can however, sneak up behind it, destroy its engines and gun turrets and then either destriy it yourself of leave it to be killed by AI ships
@31:19 "All (the pilots) have the same AI."
So, certain behaviors (like running to a nearby station when attacked by pirates instead of slamming the breaks to make it easier for the Skull and Bones,) are actually gated behind pilot rank, and the different races all have slightly different piloting behaviors. Fighter pilots can also only pull certain maneuvers with a certain rank, and low rank pilots are given more chances to make terrible ideas.
Trying to figure out the specifics of behaviors is part looking through code, part hoping that the code being read isn't just weird leftovers from Reunion that don't mean anything anymore, and part trying to figure out what a comet in the sky during an eclipse means according to the local goat bones; and as best I can tell, the developers would either rather die than tell us how the AI actually works, or have so little idea themselves that saying anything might out them as the Wizards of Oz.
10/10 game remember to try the Star Wars mod some time.
You know you could have worked with the repeat order for the early mining? Just buy some basic seminars for the ship captains to level them up to one star, then go to the information section of the ship go to behavior select repeat order and then select a resource, choose mining go to a processing station and chose sell the resource. Until the storage of the station is full or the money drops below the minimum sell value the way works perfectly.
Sounds useful! Still, I'd prefer it there was an easier way in the game - it's easy to think of what to you want to do, but hard to tell the AI to do it, and I find that a little frustrating.
@@OffyDGG I can understand your point of view but if you want to get rid of all the micromanagement that's the easiest way to do so. You can do all that fun stuff and really don't have to care about the miners and they level up your captains as well. So you can put them on the traders after a while to do the auto trade. I know that the series can be a bit unhandy but it also offers good options to get rid of some of these problems. Btw it's gotten a bit better now with 6.0.
@@OffyDGG You can add multiple areas to mine. If the first taps out, they will mine at the second. When the second taps out, if the first is back to snuff, they will mine there. If not, then they will go for a third option, if available, or wait. And waiting is mostly what they did. Prior to, IIRC 4.0, Argon Prime was mining central because it had several ore/silicon places and a need for those wares in the stations. So the yields are backed off SEVERELY to stop people just firing and forgetting and only bothering with Argon Prime. FORCING you to explore.
Which is also why, I suspect, NPCs can't use long range scanning to find stations and gates to 200km range, makes YOU do it.
Excellent content as always Big D, I look forward to the Fishman Saga
see, i want to say to almost every objection you have - 'nope thats wrong - you can do it better'. and it would be true..... i just started playing x4 having previously played x3 tc and ap, and even then i had a few challenges with the UI, but at least i knew more or less what i had to do. but yeah pretty much all your objections are true for someone new to the series. its a challenge to navigate around that ui unless you know what you SHOULD be able to do
In my opinion this game is burring crap grinding crap. AI and market still worthless.
I love playing this game, the AI is crap, but I'm addicted.
That was pretty much my feeling too :D
There was a game that tried the ‘Newtonian physics’ thing, Frontier: Elite 2.
If you can find a copy, and make it work, you can experience the horror of it, and swear it off forever.
There was another game that did it; Terminus.
@@miclam00 another one was Independence War 1/2 from the 90's, and of course Space engineer
@@davidrenton No, IWar and its sequel HAD a max speed. Areas enforced it around stations, and most of your missiles were attempts to stop you speeding off. IWar did have good ideas on how it WOULD be "realistic", and hence you got the Linear Displacement System, both drive and shield, but it still had a max speed without your LDS engaging, because no realistic space ship gets a good acceleration, and various forms of "impulse drive" is invented to get around that and make something you can watch.
@@markhackett2302 I'm not sure the problem with a max speed as without it it provides little gameplay benefits in games with a limited play space.
So it's one of those things, yeah sounds great but actually makes bad gameplay.
The other thing is the timeframe of acceleration. So what exact gameplay benefits to it are thereby not having it.
the other thing is we arbitrarily in games picked a frame of speed esp for combat that feels familiar, i.e. WW1/2 Dogfights.
which is a thing that might be or not be the case in reality.
I suspect not, as by the time we have actual space dogfights, it will more be a case of automated missiles, railguns, and the like and very little human involvement.
So the battles could be at multiple range, and speed scales
@@davidrenton Max speeds mean some ships are faster than others. Acceleration means some ships are better in a furball than others. These are all ways to find balance to ships. If we had "realistic flight physics" for space, we'd not get them. The frame of speed isn't "feels familiar", it is what makes bullets miss and makes you see those graphics on ships. So the smaller the ships, the closer combat is, or all that detail in graphics is wasted effort nobody will see. The slower the bullets, the closer combat has to be, or you will miss too many shots.
The battles COULD be at multiple ranges. And is. Capital ship battles are at 3-7km range. Fighter battles are at 1-2km ranges.
And automation of missiles and railguns and no human involvement means no game, because without human involvement, there is no need for you, a human, to play the game.
Wait, you’re the voice actor from one of those many history channels. Goddamn.
Funny thing about the acceleration, Elite dangerous let's you accelerate pretty much infinitely when traveling between longer distances in system, if you play manually and don't use the autopilot to decelerate (which is faster) then it's quite tricky and you very well may shoot past your target and have to loop around.
That is what I remember most from Elite, found it hard to ever go some place since you always wanted to get there faster, but then it was hard to stop. need some kind of in-universe thing like a 'net' that just drags you to a halt when you are close to points of interest.
@@OffyDGG What I found worked for me in the end was to turn the auto pilot when you've almost reached the destination. It mostly allowed for speed and not going past destinations. Alternatively maybe the long in system journeys should be replaced with jumps like those between different stars for less frustration.
@@OffyDGG never saw you use "travel mode" Shift 1, that is a LOT faster.
@@OffyDGG Thing is you can choose either to have combat in space, or have "space physics", not both. They tried both in Elite 2, but all you get is a jousting match.
The max speed DOES make some sense, because it really is in a medium and so your ship WILL have drag. Just a lot less than in any competent game. If you want to see real space physics, do Kerbal Space Program. But no combat. If you want "realistic" both, look at the Expanse, the TV series, and how not fun it is because it is mostly at BVR and lasers are pretty much unavoidable. Because your laser goes at light speed and missiles won't stop accelerating either. Big bada boom.
@@markhackett2302 I think the real comparison is 'you can have space physics or WW2 style combat'. You already hint towards the sorts of very large changes in approach that might come with a more realistic space combat system. The expanse isn't realistic either so I wouldn't use that as a basis. My (possibly very wrong) of true realistic space combat is extremely high speed projectiles and lasers being fired at extreme ranges, using radar and such as the main interface for targeting like modern warships. Since you can just invent some sci-fi 'shields' to make this all more tolerable, I wonder i fa system where massive fleets fight without having to actually render too much stuff could be possible.
As for whether a realistic system would be automatically unfun, I don't know. It's so hard to imagine playing something so unusual that I can't really guess what it would be like, but its would be janky, that's for sure.
I think for X4, just increasing speeds and ranges would be enough to get some more action and scale.
play with the vro mod it makes combat like you want it
For rewards paid for destroying enemy ships of a faction. You need a police licence first of course hehe.
I also like finding crystals on asteroids and then shoot at them and gather them. Some are dirt cheap but you get a lot of them, others are rate but each worth over hundred thousand.
I've started playing X when it was first released back in 1999. You make a lot of good points, but the problem is that fan-base of this series have learned to live with these flaws long ago. So much so that it held a lot of aspects of this game back over time. I wish the game was more accessible, but I doubt it will ever really happen.
I do like some of the handwaves space games come up with to explain why their space is an ocean. My favorite is Eve Online, which is basically "The FTL system gives you friction. Because reasons. And you can't turn it off or else the drive explodes."
In Elite Dangerous they say it's the ships computer doing it, which checks out because if you turn off the engine or they get destroyed, you keep going. But not if you turn off the engine with flight assist on, you cruise to a stop. Cest la vie.
Hard choice between overambitious space jank: Elite Dangerous vs X4 - not counting Star Citizen, you know, reasons. Haven't played X4, but Elite was so frustrating, sure it has a huge galaxy, but you know what makes up a galaxy? space. just dull, black, empty, uninteresting AF space. and all the backpedaling between similarly mind-numbing missions, urgh I'm getting mad just thinking about it. with a smaller but better filled galaxy and real factions that game could've been so great, I still adore it's combat even though the UI and controls are as janky as it gets. X4 at least seems to have better space backgrounds.
"Space", yes, totally agree. So they fill it with "trading" and "fightering". Here's a thought for space game developers: what if, when we do get interstellar, there are no fighters? No destroyers, battleships and cruisers? Surely, all flying and fighting will be done purely by automatic pilot? Baffles me how, we've had autopilot on earth for decades, but in Elite, you have to manually fly a little fighter.
And trading. Was novel in the 1980's. But by now, unfortunately, buying goods at A, flying to B to sell them at higher price, then flying back and rinsing and repeating for 100s of hours, just isn't interesting. As someone above said, it's like those playing these games have Stockholm Syndrome.
Basically, in most space games, "Space" is just "Earth 1492 " but with a graphics mod.
i played both, and tbf while i enjoyed ED for the first couple of hours, it got really repetitive/boring after a while for me. I have been enjoying X4 (so far - currently around 10ish hours into the game), even tho it has many issues (the AI squadmate unable to follow my ship is one of my biggest issues) i enjoy it a lot more
you have a very big misconseption of the game xD i guess it sucks to be new into this game try out more options you have on the map i guess
edit: the ui didnt change much during development its more or less the same since 1.0
Probably true, but all the info I got about the game is from game itself, and from being an old x3 player. So if that's causing trouble, the game is in trouble too.
dude, i hate to break it to you but you are wrong about some things in this game. there are a number of things you point out that are like the hardest way to do it such as auto mining and how to run the mining ops.
One thing that should be default. Open the map, click filters on the right, there are 3 tabs to it, the third is other filters, You can turn off map transparency there and its easier to see and use and less resources on pC. Also turning on faction colors, it colors all stations with the faction colors, its a nicer looking map and makes it easier to see who is moving into whose space and just generally makes the map a bit more useful.
i do wish there was a mod for the menus because everything is hard to find... mission one, find your inventory.. good luck. lol. the game def has a design unlike any other.
On that whole space physics thing, Elite Dangerous has an option to turn off flight assist which will make your ship’s speed and rotation continue until you manually provide counter-thrust. Didn’t really enjoy the game overall but that was always one of the cool things that stood out to me about its controls.
I played some elite dangerous, and traveling around was the reason I stopped, I really didn't like how difficult it was to drop your speed when you needed to land so it would take forever to approach a station at a low velocity. Needed autopilot or some kind of tech in the game that made something else stop you when close, the nightmare was too much and I gave up on the whole game.
@@OffyDGG Trick is drop into the blue zone on the throttle - setting a keybind to 70 % throttle when you hit 7 or 6 seconds makes it much easier.
X4 (and alos x3 AP), has that
Just listening to this video from 9:40-12:00 it is clear that you are articulate, intelligent, candid, and easy to listen to. One thing that really sets you apart from so many video game content creators is the use of actual footage that has a connection to what you are saying. You have edited out a lot of the filler. I just checked your video catalogue and wish that you shared more of my particular 'open-world survival crafting" preference. It would be great to hear your opinions of the emerging titles in that genre. Regardless, I've subscribed and look forward to more of your future impressions. Maybe I'll find an appealing game on the periphery of my interests. Great work on this video ... I'm still watching at 20:00 and enjoying myself.
Are you not holding the "O" key to tractor beam that dropped loot into your ship?
i really love this game. it is clunky and a lot to learn. so many menus. and it is frustrating for sure because there not enough good guides out there. u do have to be patient and just read through all the menus. or watch several guides and still read through menus. but i got 120 hours in it now. i really starting to enjoy the game. i can do anything. mange business as stated, or wars. play a fun rpg game if u want. play total war domination. be pirate, etc. board ships and steal them. mine gates from enemies. cyber hack stations etc. so far anything i wanted to do i seen there is a way to do it. just a matter of learning how.
my biggest annoyance is opening up the map. so boring and teidious. i really feel scout ships should have a much higher view range. legit takes hours to scan-open up a sector with a ship. and with a mod auto piloting thank god......... or u be forced to layout the path for 5 mins each time.
then u got to lay out the satelites.........and or probes. ugh.......
so game is NOT perfect. but it is pretty close. imo
8:50 yes u can scrap ships and stations. 1 particular ship will essiantially deconstruct and compact the resources. while a tug ship hauls the cube to a recycler to be sold to faction for ofc scrap. OR u can build ur own scrap station and convert the parts into 2 much needed building mats that every faction uses from start to end game. so there always demand.
personally i cant see anyone disliking this game other than the fact it is very time consuming. its not league of legends. u cant just pop on play 10-30 mins and get much done.
but ofc it is single player and u can save whenever so i guess technically u can play 30 min incremints.
although i really like the game. i respect that someone dislikes it. and from watching the video. nothing you said was wrong. as above with the scrapping u miss somethings. but as a whole u told the truth. the game is not perfect. i feel many expect to much from devs still. but i came from the days of original ninetendo. games like this were pipe dreams........ the more they do these types of games the better they seem to get.
Mount and blade as u mentioned. game 1 amazing for its time.
imo game 2 is way better.
10 years from now i hope 3rd gen game is way better still.
or we can look at EA sports. how they hadd madden football and not changed basicaly anything for 20 years........ and still call it a new game every single year.......... lol.
lets face it. most consumers are dumb.
i somehow watched this whole video lol. funny and true. part of me wants games more realistic. then i play a game like this that takes 100+hours to learn, plus youtube tutorials.......ugh... learning new games nowadays is so annoying. i just rarely have the patience for it.
Looks like you started the game backwards, you like to much to trade slaves, that, you spent to much time in the manager map at the beginning. In the start you go yourself explore the universe, use the ship scanners: the long range scanners and all other goodies you can find in depth of space. You discover, drop satellites at important places then explore the deep space, find crystals that are much more valuable and with that you get the other good loot stuff. The pilots you can train with missions from private missions that pop up on different systems, only if you would have travel more you could have seen private missions for 3 stars (pilot or management) . Is a complicated system of a game at first but the only thing is to learn with open mind do not assume the game don’t have a particular function or command, it has many many surprises in the menu or in the deep space. And the story lines are engaging and hopefully you find the story lines by now😅. A you can hack and steal factory blueprints, don’t need to buy them😮
Update: Boron is out !
You say 'started backwards', and set out that game plan like its intended, but the game doesn't make you do any of that. It's not like I wanted to have a bad time, is it? So it's a question for the devs: do they think the game only works/is fun if played a certain way, or in a certain order? Is what you said here the intentional gameplay experience?
If so, they need to remove the open world aspect and force people to do it the fun way, problem solved. But that would suck, I think. I'd rather they go the other way: make it so different routes to success are somewhat balanced and viable, so people can do what they prefer and get whatever they want from the game. It seems like X4 would be a game like that, although maybe not in practice. Not what they are going for, but it's what I hoped for all the same.
There is a game called Delta V that does that exactly that inertia when you go 100 m a second you’re 100 m a Second you do have to turn your ship around and start after burner so you can slow down before you come to your destination. Try that Delta V.
Yeah I've played it, got a video on this channel in fact, enjoyed it quite a bit!
You can deactivate the map transparency, you can open the filter settings at the top right of the screen and under "other filters" you can switch the opacity on and off.
Maybe you would like Starsector.
In regard of the transparency of the map:
- open the map
- go to filters (funnel icon top right corner)
- go to other filters tab ( 3 dots in a circle icon)
- tick the background opacity option
- enjoy yourself a non-transparent map. ;)
Yes, it's a bummer it's that hidden and not the default setting, but at least you could enjoy yourself with a non transparent map from now on. ;)
Sounds ideal! I didn't imagine there would be a setting so i never looked for it, but a few other people noted that as well. I intend to play the game again soon for a full boron campaign, so I will set things up to my liking as best I can.
Adding in non-transparency might be my fault, I said to do it (because most people didn't want to even see through the map to see if they are being shot at, and making it opaque means the map view could use less power or use its cores for doing something else like OpenAI or whatever.
Thank you for this honest warning, comrade. Still gonna buy it tho gotta be honest
Still a good idea. I actually love the game really, as despite all it's issues, it's still doing something special. Literally just bought the dlc despite all my rants in this video 😁
If you've never had a ship's autopilot or AI crew slam you into a jumpgate, accelerator, asteroid, random station, or passing freighter (which they are famous for doing, especially under SETA) while you're managing your org's production lines two sectors over, then the map transparency is annoying. For everyone else, it's an actual QoL improvement.
Yeah this totally did happen to me, so I see what you mean. I think my preference for something like that would be picture-in-picture, or having the map be in a resizable window. But the transparency option is useful too. I just found it a little hard to look at the map, which already has a lot of stuff going on, when there is something wild happening in the background. I suspect it gets easier with time though.
i had to upgrade to an i9 13900ks and 64gb of ddr5 ram in order to be able to play this along my 3090 with full graphics settings...and of course throw a reshade on top to make things look better. Dont you know that you can select sound warnings for when an enemy enters your radar range and different for when an enemy locks on you? Just like real life you can have sound signals like in modern aircraft.
that was a great video. good that they're currently for 7.0 are specifically targetting a lotta stuff for new players including a reworked tutorial system. can't wait to jump in again.
i think a couple of their decisions you're critisizing is somewhat bound to their idea of ballancing in a sandbox game, like the automining at start, that is actively forcing you to test out the other mechanics in the game, so you don't bypass their sense of progression, but i agree, the way they implemented that can sometimes feel out of place and glued together with very visible marks in between. i do understand why that is tough to do out of the perspective of the dev too, this game does not "just" have a deep ui, it indeed is quiet deep aswell, and putting all that together on a civ management type of worldmap without overcomplicating and cluttering the screen must be quiet the juggleingact. the good thing about egosoft though is, it is not blizzard. first they built their basic builtstones to create the experience and since the first release, they're constantly working on the project till it is what they invisioned at the start. this game already is the top of the top of the space simulationgenre, and when they're done , there'll be a hole lot of nothing between the x series and the second best.
Also
Ones you research teleport
You can switch ships
Too late. I have been playing the X series since X: Beyond the Frontier was first released. So, as far as this series, you're too late, telling me not to play by...oh... TWENTY FIVE YEARS! This seies has been around and longer than a lot of gamers have been ALIVE. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Game time below 1000h are more or less considered rookie numbers for this game :D Granted, the access to the game could be better, the graphics, especially of NPCs was even better in the early 2000 and the AI at times is just below 0. Especially when you see that freighters without escort fly through 3 Xenon controlled sectors to reach a sector beyond that when with a couple jumps more there is a secure route available. Or little pirate attacks on your stations where you have no real way to prevent them except from shooting those ships first, which may make the whole sector hostile towards your ships. These pirates simply hack your station, steel just a couple of goods and then head for their pirate base. Only when they hacked you, you are basically allowed to respond. At this time >50% of food and medicine of that station floating in space and a minute later these goods are all destroyed and the staff of your station just leaves your station as they now suffer in agony and thus either die or leave the station which hurts your productivity. I hinted Egosoft about that stupid game design flaw a couple of times but they never felt the need to really tackle that issue. And as such, I simply stopped playing. While I appreciate the freedom and creativity it allows, I simply can't coop with such stupid decisions, especially when they occur in 5 minute intervals and every system that has a pirate base in it. And when you have like 2-3 fully upgraded Asgard cruisers you more or less have won anyway as such an Asgard literally one-shots I's, the strongest hostile ships you can face, and even fully protected Xenon stations are a two hit for an Asgard main battery.
But in terms of punishment and reward, Hellion, also a space game where you are sent out to colonize an other star system but when awoken just found a field of debris and station parts which you had use to survive, was way way more punishing and frustrating to get into as it used real space physics under the hood. A bit to much force and a station part got uncontrollable and hammered into other parts in that process and damaged/destroyed stuff severely. Sadly, the development was suddenly stopped before it ever got released and as such only people who pledged before production was stopped now have access to what is left of the game.
Buying big sips is not a problem
You can make mony supplying that station with missing stuff
But
There is a chance
It wont buy the amount needed ))
Still
Eventually your ship will be built ..
in 95% chance
I love the commentary about the programmable field array drops... "find a few of these and youre instantly rich" ohhhh the range of "rich" in this is vast. Getting several hundred thousand in the early game seems nice, but man is it a drop in the bucket. Then once you start station building, that's not even a drop in the bucket, its moisture in the air.
I thought you did a good job describing what it's like to play X4.
11:00 Freelancer have these mechanis but it looks like x4 has better graphics and no storyline. However, freelancer is ancient by todays standards.
I now crave an OffyD game design review of Star Citizen show those Hacks how it's done
Alternatively Kerbal space program
The planets are not part of the skybox, these are real 3D objects you can fly into, and there is an unique death message for burning up in atmosphere.
As for exploration, the game has a few things to look for, though mostly in the DLC regions.
Slaves do level up naturally, though it does take a long time due to RNG nature of it. And of course combat pilots level faster than miners shooting at rocks all day.
The "breakage" of miners is intentional. You are expected to use trading stations and fleets of traders to expand miners range.
Economy having gaps is also by design to allow the player to fill (or not to fill) a niche.
Mods of course can "fix" that if necessary, though i personally do not use them.
Ships feeling bland is a matter of the models not being a priority during 1.0 development, these old models are being slowly phased out, and both the improved Paranid models and DLC ones look amazing.
The UI is shit, no argument there. But it is workable once you get used to it.
Both the story quests and a personal office with a chair exist, it's just very hard to find them for some reason. 6.0 streamlined that to the point of getting the chair just for finding the place.
Good luck on the Boron campaign.
had no idea you could go to the planets, guess I should have just pointed myself at them and seen what happened :D
I dont know if you get to it. However. There is a setting in the game where you turn off the background when in the map. Also, it doesn’t seem like you know of the trade filter settings in the top right corner.
Try X4 Teran Conflict, it works mostly, and is fun to play, not nearly as complicated, and a very good tuterial for Foundations. Leona
Every time I encounter one of you videos talking about my favorites games is about you hating the game. Liking the idea of the game but bashing the execution and the final verdict is that they dont have many conveniences. Well the X series is been always a in deep menu game with fleet space fight. I love it on X2, even better on X3, we dont talk about X rebirth and X4 is been the best iteration so far. The release is always underwhelming and it gets better with future updates, they always keep updating their game.
With x4 I was just disappointed because I was a big x3 fan and somehow I didn't feel like things advanced with the series. Despite my complaining, I consider x4 and Dyson sphere project my favourite games of 2022.
Your missing so much unfortunately this game lacks decent tutorial play through but it defiantly is great to play once you work it all out and start dominating sectors of space
For more realistic space flight, there are space program sims, like Kerbal Space Program and such.
Yep, the UI is why I stopped playing. Great game, but what a clumsy chore that UI is.
The only reason this game is my nightmare is because as soon as I start making big bucks, say, 20-30 million, or 100 million per hour, I want to restart and do something else. 🤣🤣🤣 Am I ok?
Makes sense man, getting off the ground is the challenge so I can see that being the most interesting part.
Long live to people who can't difference btween Pirating and Capitalism. x D
I can definitely empathize with the idea that the game is bad, but very enjoyable. I'm pretty sure for example you are one of the only people who played a shit load of Total War Empire, which I also felt the bugs and the bad ai and line of sight issues really hurt the game, but it still is a massive game undertaking an era no other game really touches
Yeah I think empire is another game with great potential that doesn't fully work. Still has my favourite replenishment, building, and travelling mechanics in the whole series.
I thought you were being sarcastic when you were asking about the gov't system.. then you kept describing it, and I'm just like that's a plutocracy dude.
I don't think so really, since the rich people have to go fight wars in person to advance up the ranks, and the government is a separate group. Someone mentioned it is similar to the Roman Republic, some kind of combination of being plutocratic and nationalist/imperialist. But with policies like 0 tax, UBI-but-you-are-a-slave for all non-business owners, and freedom to join the enemy in wars, it's something more libertarian too. Political science must discover the truth behind X4's world somehow.
This game is great ! I think everyone should play it not the other way around
it's amazing how much you resist just playing the game sitting in a cockpit as the devs intended. You kept trying to force your own notion of how this game should be played so much that you just ended up endlessly frustrated.
Examples? Feels like I was using what the game made available. Surely the devs intend you to run mining ships and such?
Maybe it's because I am used to the game but I am about 10 minutes in and I am scratching my head at all of your complaints. I wonder if you'll have positive stuff to say later
It's interesting, veterans struggle to understand how first impressions can be so different, I think its holding a game like this back since the development had been so long. X4 was one of my favourite games of 2022, but people still get mad at me for posting outsider perspectives. I'm not that crazy really!
1:17:40 I would also like to see a physically-accurate game like that.
You really need a couple of the DLC's to get X4 really working well. "The Tides of Avarice" and "The Cradle of Humanity" fix most of the more annoying AI and gameplay bugs. Fleet commands and orders are much easier. You can also get any of the critical information you were looking for once you know how the menus work. you also need to scout out the systems you want to trade/build in by dropping satelites and resource probes so your workers will know where stuff is and who is buying and selling what. Setting yourself up for success is very important in this game.
Though i recommend the dlcs, they are NOT needed cause all the fixes and stuff like fleet commands came with the free side of those updates. They just give you access to the new sectors, ships, starting scenarios and questlines.
Aww man, you brought up some really good points, especially with the steep learning curve, the oddball mission system, and the hard to figure out UX, but then you also have some, let's say controversial opinions in my eyes, for instance with the combat being too hard, and the ships looking bad (although, I have to give you that they are a bit subpar compared to X3, however that game's ships didn't have such limitations as walkable interiors, interchangable modules on ships, ships needing to conform to dock size standards.
Anyway, I believe the main flaw of the UX is that it's inconsistent, as there were too many things cramped into the game from various other titles. For instance, the comms system feels like a redundant leftover from previous titles, thus you don't have too much options to do there, while comms were an important part of XRebirth and previous X titles. A lot of (previously) comms features went to map. I remember back in 2018 when the game launched, I was confused because I couldn't order my ships around the classic method (comm them up and tell them what to do). Well now in X4, the MAP is trying to be your go-to menu where you can get shit done, from telling your captains their next order to managing your space station empire. Almost everything is right on the map.
So what happens if nearly every feature is on a single page? It gets CROWDED. Like, really crowded, with features. I don't think the UI is redo-able/simplifiable for this very reason. At least, not on a systematic level. Maybe on a quality of life level, eg more filters are put in, some things get more color coded, some things get rearranged. But the groundwork for the map system is already set in stone and cannot be changed, or else too many things would break.
FWIW im stuck on the how to fly tutorial. I havent even made it into the game yet.
Your voice sounds so much like the narrator of the channel Kings and Generals its throwing me off thinking I'm listening to a documentary instead of a review.
That's because that is actually me! The channel is run by loads of other people, but I provide the voiceover.
Man, some of the cool features of the game seem to escape you due to limited experience. The map, for example. Yes, as you suggested it is about being able to see what's going on behind it. And it has helped me many times when capturing ships. I often manage my empire while sitting at the rear of a ship I'm capturing, ready to destroy its engines as they get repaired. Missing that opportunity can result in a failed boarding operation when a ship jumps to another sector.
That said, there are some serious issues with the game. The UI could definitely use work. Ship physics is infuriating at times. I think it's ridiculous that bumping into a satellite with my destroyer can result in my destroyer being stuck moving in circles for a while. Or that a little fighter is capable of getting stuck on a destroyer or carrier and pushing the massive ship around more than the massive ship's engines can.
The game has issues. But damn, I love X4.
Bad first impressions is, for me, the number 1 problem in X4. You can get used to all the UI stuff, but having new players see how messy it is comes across as unprofessional, especially in comparison to X3 which doing the same things better 10 years ago.
From people's comments, there are various interesting things that I never noticed in my ~10 hour look at the game, and that's gonna be the case for most players not using walkthroughs or online help. I would imagine the devs don't really care about that, but it's still hurting them.
As a massive X3 fan, X4 still managed to be one of the best games I played in 2022, but I also was disappointed from the very start with so much of it, as ranted about in this video. I just want "X4 but it's 10/10" to exist, and I feel I've waited too long for such a thing.
Menu and UI design needs someone competent to work on for a few months. A slick menu would make this so much better.
But I have to disagree. Combat is extremely important and makes you a lot of money. As you did notice, the faction need materials to build ships as well - the whole market exists to build ships, weapons, turrets, missiles and shields - and for that to work, ships need to be destroyed. That's why you need war.
Every ship destroyed is more money you can make.
That's true, and a good way of looking at it. I was thinking more like the bounty you get for killing enemies isn't enough to justify a) the time it takes (since you could have made more doing something else with that time) and b) the risk of losing something. But I think on a more industrial level, war is certainly going to be useful, especially if you are strong enough that risking damage in combat isn't relevant anymore. This was all my extreme early game impressions so more interesting stuff didn't really come up.
@@OffyDGG Oh yea I got that, I was disappointed by the reward at first as well, but than I noticed my miners making more money again, because the demand was crazy since their wharf and shipyard started printing them ships again.
Also, leveling captains is difficult. What I would suggest, if you have the player HQ and researched personal teleportation, to get to over 27 reputation with a faction of your choice, so you can teleport to their stations. Than you can visit the managing office where there can be 0-4 people possible to recruit and with some chance, you get a 2 or even 3 star pilot (they cost a million to hire). Which shortens the time considerably.
So first things first, crew is important, service crew helps at everything but combat. Loading cargo, mining and so on. Marines help defending boarding, boarding and turret accuracy. But still, get one less in crew than needed for a ship you plan to have a good pilot on.
Even if you have to chose the pilot to build, when there is 1 space left for crew, when you hire someone of the station, you can select that the new hire is the captain and the old one will go to the crew. That's how you can start with better pilots for your ships.
knew many X's ago they were not for me
The whole video feels like a troll.
How so? It's all legit. I will be making an even bigger vid based on the newer version soon.
@@OffyDGG Well, if the vehicle feels slow with 200 m/s just press shift+1, and if you want to return to average speed press shift +1 again. Once you did not mention this approach, I started to keep your video as disinformation. This is not a bad game at all. I like it. This is all basics of the game and I expect tutorials to be done by pro players with plenty of experience.
@@Tommi_P_Laiho not sure what you mean, as I talk about all that in this video, it's just a bit later. This isn't a tutorial, it's a first impressions commentary, just saying what I thought as I started playing.
Why complain about the travel speed, when.. you say it yourself, no game does it any different. And if you would travel at lets say 10 000 meters per second they had to place things way more apart so you have at least a little travel time and you would end up exactly the same time in your ship. Basically no travel takes longer than 5 minutes and later in the game you can instant teleport to every place which is friendly to you.
Sure, but that's no reason not to complain, right? Just feels like doing high risk high speed flying would be cooler, and I am sure a lot of the time the travelling is something people aren't that interested in if nothing much happens along the way.
@@OffyDGG That is why you can research teleportation in the game. And i am also sure that people would hate it to crash into stuff when ever they don't pay attention. After all it is an economic simulation. But sure you are free to have this opinion. Likely you could even create a mod that would work in that way, after all the game is fully modable.