X4 - Now with more flyable ships

Instead of getting tempted by this, I’m going to look in my steam library and see if there are X games I haven’t played in there.

My history with the series:

X: BtF - Eh.
Xtension - Enjoyed it briefly.
X2 - Horrible interface, I gave up after 3 hours of play.

Looks like I do own X3: Reunion and X3: Terran Conflict on Steam. And Terran Conflict has full controller support, so I don’t have to connect my joystick. Cool. I’ll give that a try.

Downloading now…

I am very curious how this will be for me as I came into the X universe late and never gave X3 or any earlier version much of a chance. I did enjoy X:Rebirth at launch for a short time (maybe 30 hours), but I am hoping I can dig in and learn and appreciate an X game on a broader scale other than just tooling around in my own small ship.

X3:TC is awesome but I would warn you away unless you have some serious motivation to dig into it. It is not a game that immediately grabs you, it takes some work on the part of the player before it starts to pay off. The payoff was totally worth it, though, I had a fantastic time with the game despite the UI and everything else fighting me every step of the way. :)

Awwww. They did a poor job with the interface again? That’s disappointing. I just could not stand the interface in X2. I was trying to do everything with just hands on joystick and keyboard and just couldn’t figure out a way to do it, so I had to do things with joystick, keyboard and mouse, and it never felt good, and was a complete mess.

Looking at the stream above, sure do hope they implement VR.

As a total newbie to the series, how does this compare to Elite? A quick web search wasn’t that illuminating…

Elite is a flight sim with the barest bones of an economy tacked on.

The X games are business sims with a serviceable flight model tacked on.

At least in the early X games, there was almost no combat. And the combat that was there was very poor. It was mostly about buying cargo in one place, and taking it to another place, and making money that way.

I don’t think it changed much between the two, from what I understand, but I didn’t play X2. They tried to clean some things up with X:R but playing that game was the equivalent of voluntarily hanging out in a construction site Honey Bucket so I can’t comment on if they pulled it off or not.

I’m curious what a Honey Bucket is but I do not want to Google it at work.

It’s just a bucket full of honey, right? For bears?

We can hope! :D

Any of you played this yet? The graphics from screenshots and that video look almost the same as Rebirth to me from the screenshots and that preview.

Reviews so far are… interesting to say the least.

Haha, nothing NSFW. :) Portable shitter.

If you mean the Steam reviews, I’d just ignore those. ;)

@Howler

Cheers, Yeah I checked, it does have the space roads :( I am gonna hold my nose and try and avert my eyes from it :) I figured out WHY it bothers me, it makes the game feel smaller.

Agreed. It’s been, what, 2 hours?

I would sooner take my dogs opinion than Steam reviews.

Incidentally her views on X4 are “its it time to eat yet? If I look at you and wag my tail will you feed me?”

I think that counts as a Positive.

Unfortunately, the space roads are a hack around their inability to write traffic management and collision handling, so they’re probably not going anywhere.

Bleh. I wish they had just used personal jump drives then tbh.

Also X4 is currently rated the same as Artifact, so its Valve quality according to Steam!!! :)

I played it for 15 minutes or so before I had to go do stuff. Enough time to set up the controls (and prove most of the negative reviews false, at least on my machine) and poke around slightly. It’s unintuitive immediately (of course) but it seemed like it would at least be decent in that short time.

Their 3D graphics are so alias-y that it almost looks like it’s rendering at less than screen res. Does everybody there play on super-GPUs with 8x AA or something? My PC is good and runs it at a fine framerate so far, but jaggies everywhere I look.