X4 - Now with more flyable ships

I picked this up as I need to stop play MLB The Show nonstop. Just doing the toutorial s but wow it’s impressive. I found Elite Dangerous pretty but very boring. Hopefully this will grab me more.

There are definitely a lot more moving parts to any X game over Elite, but so many moving parts it can be detrimental. Be wary of jank.

Question, what is the game world actually like? Reading the blurb it says you can focus on exploration? Is it exploration like No Man’s Sky where yes there are infinite worlds but the building blocks are quickly recognizable or have they put genuinely unique things in the universe?

Not like NMS, the universe is built and not procedurally generated. You can explore and find cool things like derelict ships and stuff like that that can be repaired and taken over.

While NMS is an exploration game, the X series is a space sim but it’s also a trade empire management game. The economy is real, for a faction to build ships (either for themselves, or for you) they need all the necessary resources and component factories. If you (or the Xenon or an enemy faction) blows up their miners and their refining stations and they can’t make hull components anymore… well, the go without. There are wars being fought all the time. You can either engage in them yourself or just profit off of them. Factions can lose and rebuild space stations. You yourself can build factories and space stations, command fleets of warships, miners, and trade vessels. You also fly around and pew pew stuff.

So yes, there’s exploration in the game but it’s a fundamentally different type than NMS. I’m exploring because I’m looking for opportunities, resources, new races, etc. You can find some valuable salvage out there, including the derelict ships that I mentioned. And those derelict ships aren’t randomly generated either, they’re in fixed locations so if you can find them in one game and remember where, you can find them in your next.

There’s very little like the X series out there, it’s unique. It has a lot of breadth AND depth. That comes at a cost, as there’s a fair amount of jank like Brian was mentioning. There’s a learning curve as well. But if you can get the hang of it it’s pretty amazing.

Was hopeful 3.0 settled down lots of bugs. Start a new game, go to flight school. Get in the ship and game crashes. Never change Egosoft.

I hear you. I’ve never seen a game made my 2080 Ti run so hot. I had to turn it down to medium.

Haha, ouch. Thankfully I haven’t had much in the way of technical bugs, other than I had an issue landing the Split starter ship (Asp, I think) at Teladi trade stations. I’ve learned that you need to back up just a hair from where the indicator is telling you. Anyway, while figuring that out I got a little aggressive with directional thrusters and ended up “falling through the floor” of the space station and got stuck there. So far, that’s the only major bug I’ve encountered thankfully. I’m sure there will be more.

What’s interesting is my RTX 2080 ran hot as hell but my GTX 1080 is a cool cucumber. For the 2080 I found turning down AA but keeping the other settings up did the trick and gave me a huge performance boost along with it. Changing AA settings on my GTX 1080 doesn’t seem to have much of an effect.

Huh. Is this just on this game or any game? That’s good to know regardless.

Just this game. I’ve also heard that for cards running hot, enabling vsync can help. I’m guessing it’s limiting the FPS to whatever your display supports.

My kid is playing on a 3 year old game laptop with an older vid card…and it runs fine. Loading the game takes eons but it seems To run ok.

Thinking I may finally bite before the sale runs out in … 11 minutes. Spending an extra $29 for the Collector’s edition is nuts as the Collector’s edition Content is … $23.99 on sale. Still scratching my head on that one.

Tried to get into this game again and still couldn’t…I had just sunk 100 hours into No Man’s Sky and was looking for the next step. I dunno what it is about this series. I always tried to get into it and find that I get overwhelmed just trying to remember the controls.

Sometimes I find presentation is a detriment and I certainly found how X3 shows pages of items and stuff made my eyes glaze over

There is a second large DLC due this year, the CE covers you for that too.

I checked on that; the CE content also gives that. Just a weird pricing bit. Went for it, and Steam won’t let me buy the CE upgrade, now, saying I have everything so I should be good.

The X series requires a big up front commitment of time and learning. It’s a difficult series to get into.

Okay, so any must-have mods for a first play through or is vanilla the best way to dive in?

I like Crystal Finder and Signal Leak Hunter for QOL reasons. I hear the VRO mod is a good balance overhaul mod but I don’t know enough about the base game yet to recommend or not. Those are on Nexus Mods, not sure if on workshop.

Avoid the Faction Enhancer: Catch-up Module. It has a really bad bug in it right now that can kill your game save (speaking from personal experience).

Much appreciated!

It’s self promotion, but I recommend Escape Teleport and Better Kill Credit even for otherwise vanilla playthroughs.

Sorry :(
It’s actually a bug in their engine when a certain mod flag is used. I sent them a reproduction case with an empty mod so hopefully they will fix it soon.