Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[dennislp3]

PTW

[Senator Jim Death]

Dunno. I bought X3 'cause it sounded interesting. Couldn't get into it, and now I forget why.

(I am a consistent source of masterful-quality posting.)

[Gabeux]

The game's coming out this Friday if anyone interested in it missed it.
Hoping to give it a whirl this weekend, even though it's only safe to touch EGOSOFT games 6 months after release. 

[Biowraith]

Didn't realise it was coming out so soon.  I hope they learned from XR and built on the strengths of X3 this time around - from the blurbs on the store page it sounds like they have, but between the price-tag and a backlog of games vying for my time I think I'll hold off on this one until the verdict is well and truly in.

[Gabeux]

Aye. I'm really really looking forward to the dynamic stuff, and to the fact the the economy should be real now - with everything coming from somewhere and going from somewhere, and ships and stations all being built with gathered resources.
I kinda doubt it will be like that though, because they tried a bit of that in X:Rebirth and it would take ages for anything to be ready by using the actual economy. But I'd love to see if they tweaked it to actually work..even if some ships spawn out of thin air, it would feel really satisfying to actually see a faction ships and station numbers go down or to see them struggle to get anything done.

[Folly]

Got my pre-order placed and am eagerly awaiting the 30th. This is easily the game I'm most excited about right now, mostly because X3 was the last game I played in the genre and that was more than 10 years ago.

[Folly]

Pre-Launch gameplay livestream!

[Gabeux]

Ohh boy, I'm not able to watch at full at the moment since I'm working, but the map and the ability to save/load loadouts for ships is probably two features everyone that played any X game always wanted. I literally quit damn long playthroughs of X3 due to being complete hell to outfit multiple purchased ships, and the mods that were supposed to provide that would constantly break or simply not work.

Being able to choose each component for each slot and hardpoint is great to finally be in. There also seems to be explicit crew numbers and stuff like that, and I wonder if component + crew damage does anything on small/medium ships, or makes a difference at all. Would be pretty cool if, for ALL ships, each individual component can be damaged like the capitals/freighters from X:R, along with maybe lowering ship efficiency and boarding defense capability by causing crew losses.

I also wonder what's the role of S ships in this game, because the streamer was showing some ships and a freighter could have 40 of them. In X:R, S ships felt like they were there to bother the player and each other, and nothing else. They were a complete waste of money, meanwhile you could use those in X3 for scouting/exploration and other roles.

I really want to have a look on whether being able to go into your spacesuit and actually do some shenanigans is real.

[jocan2003]

Well thats a bummer... now that the livestream is over, the video doesnt exist anymore... i missed it by a margin... great....

[Gabeux]

Fear not, my friend.
Here it is.

[dennislp3]

Oh damn...forgot about this...just dropped a bunch on Hitman 2....no way I can convince my wife to also get me this right now 

Get paid next week though....so I can just buy it then

[Dutrius]

Watched the stream footage linked above, which the following is based on.

Observations are in no particular order:
No super annoying co-pilot. Whatsherame got irritating fast in X:Rebirth.
The main character doesn't have a super irritating voice either.
The heading markers in third person are a useful addition.
The anomalies are a cool feature, potentially hilarious and/or confusing if you fly into one without seeing it.
The UI looks well crafted.
Sectors are a good size and the map is good.
Travel mode is a good feature, makes travelling around much less tedious.
Highways are better than in X:Rebirth.
Not 100% sure about the station scanning, but it looks better than in Rebirth.
Long range scanning is about the same as in Rebirth, but I'm fine with that.
Landing on stations is very similar to Elite:Dangerous. Docking computer speeds things up massively.
(Optional) Newtonian flight model looks fun, otherwise ships handle similar to earlier games.
Ship customisation looks good, although the ability to compare ship modules would be nice apparently you can, but you need to have a module installed first.
Oooooh, looks like flares are a thing. I'm guessing they're anti-missile lockon consumables.
Capital Military ships require a license to purchase, but that's about the same as the reputation requirements in X3:TC. Large transporters don't seem to have as much of a reputation restriction.
Crafting is still a thing.
Space suits use the Newtonion flight model, and have a repair laser like in X3:TC.
Looks like the AI uses the boost feature in dogfights.
Looks like your shields don't constantly recharge during combat like in X3:TC, instead they wait a couple of seconds after taking damage before recharging.
The docking indicator lights are very useful when docking with large, complex stations.
Looks like there are differences between different races ship components. For example a Teladi Mk1 shield seems to have different stats to an Argon Mk1 shield.

Large Teladi ships look massively different to what I'm used to (X3:TC). They resemble giant mushrooms with thrusters. Smaller ones look broadly similar to X3. The Kestral looks about identical to in X3:TC, which I approve of. I like the Kestral.
Paranid ships look broadly similar to what I'm used to (X3:TC), both large and small.
Xenon ships still look like Xenon ships.
I haven't seen many Argon ships, so I can't really comment on those. The Elite design has changed from X3:TC, where it looked like a cross between a Buster and a Nova. From some earlier footage released by Egosoft, the Nova's design has changed a lot. I hear that the Disco still looks like a Disco, which I hope is true.

The addition of tutorials is very nice to have.
I have absolutely no idea what the main plot is like, the guy in true X fashion just flew off and did his own thing.

Overall I'm optimistic, which makes a nice change to my general pessimism regarding the games industry these days.
I give the game 0/10 for lack of Boron. Wait! I see a Boron! 10/10!

I find it amusing how the guy was praising the autopilot for not flying into giant space rocks, then the autopilot flew straight into a giant space rock. Good old auto-pillock.

[Gabeux]

Thanks for the summary! But...What, Borons are in? You should have placed that under spoiler tags though, because no one was expecting them giving that Egosoft explicitly said they wouldn't be in lol

Regarding designs, I expect Argons to have largely different designs especially because the Argon Government, AFAIK based on X:Rebirth, got split in half. A lot of the military was staged in Omycron Lyrae when the gates collapsed, so the government left at Omycron Lyrae (which you encounter in X:R) were super militarized and very pissed off. I have no idea how X4 connects to X:R, and whether Argons managed to find each other again, but I would expect so.

I'm currently listening to the just-released Soundtrack of the game. Note that I was warned not to read song titles as there seems to be spoilers in it.

E: New ongoing stream.
E2: Honestly, I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen so far (although I haven't seen much). The complete UI overhaul and that strategic map, it just makes me want to cuddle with it.
I also appreciate the scale/feeling it gives out of walking inside and outside the ships, I wasn't expecting they try making that work, along with walking NPCs on stations (if I understand correctly, NPCs actually walk around the stations and may fly away?).
And overall, I really like how it has an improved mix of the better scaling of ships from X:R, with the spacing/vastness of X3. It looks different from previous X games to me, in a good way. The clear inspirations from Elite:Dangerous in the landing/landing pads and HUD is pretty funny, though..

E3: There's another stream up, much better quality for me. Damn it looks gorgeous, especially with 60fps.

[Ygdrad]

Having watched a couple hours of stream from ObsidianAnt today, I can say that the game looks good for the most part. Seems to be an improvement on X3 in more or less every respect and I'll be grabbing and playing/streaming it tomorrow.

One problem I have noticed though is the enemy combat AI, during the whole stream it was incapable of posing any threat to a small ship, this isn't anything new in the X series, but still disappointing. Basically ships are entirely incapable of maneuvering to shoot at a nimble ship following them because they don't make use of the maneuvers the Newtonian flight model allows so it's just a long boring fight of chasing a zigzagging ship(they don't even use seem to use strafe thrusters lol) while chipping at it with your small ship's weak guns. Wasn't much better in outnumbered fights since almost every strafing run from the enemies the player wasn't focused on failed to hit the small ship, but that's less an AI issue and more of a side effect of the projectile speeds and sizes in the X games since almost no game on the market has an AI capable of mapping curved trajectories when aiming, but usually a fast or large enough projectile still manages to hit or graze moving targets. As usual, the only threats to small ships will be the kha'ak's lazors, nimble missiles, some forms of flak, and most hilariously, inaccurate weapons.

I wish the game had improved on that past problem, but hopefully someone will mod advanced combat AI down the line. This isn't me bashing on the game but rather hoping they improve on one of the game's weaker points to make it near-perfect, the rest looks pretty amazing.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Oh, also, it seems the player HQ is making a comeback, which is nice, but from what we saw of it, it's likely to require a huge resource grind in this game too, which is less nice

Edit: Do save often and on multiple files, there were some crashes and I think one case of save file corruption. But for the most part the game didn't seem too buggy.

Edit2: Also, don't leave your autopilot unattended, just like in previous games it has a tendency to ram things.

Edit3: Seems there is a legit problem with enemy combat AI. Some streams have shown enemies just spinning without firing their weapons once you get up close.

[Gabeux]

Oh it's pretty sad that AI is derpy. Egosoft was watching and replying streams, at least the CohhCarnage one, so they will probably realize that the first issues people will bump into is autopilot issues, enemy AI, landing animation can make your ship go below the floor without collision and come back, and there's some way to break the game by being in a certain screen and dying, or something like that.