Here's the trailer for the 4.0 and the Home of Light expasion. They released both on my birthday :').
First thing I think is "Wait, wasn't Terracorp stuck on the original Argon sectors, so why are they here now? Their HQ is located in *realizes* Home..of...Light."
Derp. I haven't played it yet, but now I think I know where that SETA and Jump Drive are coming from.
I'm a bit scared to go back to my previous save game. Unlike X3 which I played for years and I can jump back to at anytime, I very much rushed X:R so I have absolutely no idea about how to play anymore, how to use the UI or how to control the ship..and I feel that if I load my save, I'll receive 500 messages from new content while my ships explode. I might have to play on a new game to remember it all.
Like Paul I used to hunt ships for sport and I think my whole fleet is comprised of stolen ships of all kinds. I remember taking a loooong time to capture the awesome Fulmekron (or some other kron) only for it to be destroyed by my own ships after capture..so I just gave up.
I even tried to take the "secret" absurdly insane Xenon capital ship, only to realize you couldn't capture it without mods. It was so OP that I felt it was cheating for me to have it, but just fighting it and flying near it felt epic for some reason.
A lot of people are still skeptical. But to be honest, with 10+ mods I had back on 3.53 (or whatever patch came when the Teladi Outpost was released), most of my issues were addressed and it was a fun game. Wasn't the great X3:AP with all the mods, but there was a good amount of fun to be had.
I stopped playing because once you started to actually build an empire or do crazy stuff like exploding huge stations, the game wouldn't behave well or would take way too much time. I think it might be doable now, but I'm still a little disappointed that they might not have improved how trading works. Might still be completely boringly manual.
I had to use mods to make trading bearable and automated back then, and it might still be the case. Same for mining fleets, I think.
I also just used mods to remove or minimize the silly parts of the game after I was nearing the end - like removing small talk and minigames, and being able to buy trade agents. It was literally harming me psychologically.
I remember finding it funny and cool (for being different than previous X) at first, but playing vanilla all the way will definitely make you insane.
Total praise for the modders of this series of games must be given. Back when I played on 3.53, it turned the game from a "Meh..this had so much potential...." into "Hmm..there's fun to be had. Hope the devs improve it". I'm pretty sure a ton of stuff I used to use mods are now vanilla, like the BBS, better economy information and better group commands / fleet management.
EDIT: As I'm almost asleep, I completely forgotten a lot of posts on the last pages of this thread is mine, so all the background info I gave on my previous experience was probably to be found in this same page.