I’ve not used the autopilot once. Haven’t felt the need. Plus they were garbage in the other games.
Heh, I apparently never found the quest path at all. I even went back to the starting area and pinged all the stations just to make sure there were no triggers. I’m starting to worry that it’s broken.
I don’t really want any spoilers, but… since it’s Egosoft I need to at least make sure I shouldn’t be making a bug report ;) Should I have found a story mission in close vicinity of the start position of the human game start?
Nope, I’ve found it in three different places so far.
I’m pretty sure by now that the mission I stumbled on doing a close range scan - where you hunt for the noisy little light on a station’s surface like in the tutorial - is the main story. It was literally the first one I did on some random station in the starting area. I may have just gotten lucky?
Still enjoying my experience, I’ve completed the first set of missions in this story and been given a a handful of goals - one of which is a very Morrowind “go level up with a faction, maybe?” suggestion.
I did my first random mission, transporting a person to his ship. Had to catch up to a freighter and dock with it, which got me more use to getting around and using autopilot and space lanes and whatnot. I did encounter my first bug, which teleported me way off map when I was trying to dock with a ship that was just entering a gate. Had to load a saved game to recover from that.
But, my mission was a success and I’m in a system with a shipyard and equipment dock, so now I’m going to browse equipment for a bit and buy myself some docking and trading software, I think.
That may be the issue. My reaction to that mechanic was “that sounds dumb and boring” so if it’s needed to launch the main quest that’d be why I can’t find it.
It’s neither dumb nor boring. You can find all sorts of neat things that way, from story missions to secret missions to blueprints.
Found out how to do it!
The first few mins of this vid shows how. Now I know you can see and accept quests when just cruising on the highway its a LOT easier.
edit, nm you found it :)
Well, I disagree in the specific context of driving around a random NPC station looking for a little effect (unknown objects found in the wild is different to me, like the data vault I found), but in any case, that was it. First one I found hooked me up with the story.
I gave up on X4 for now and got a Steam refund. After patch 1.10, the game glitches, refusing any input and the graphics start blinking as if I were in a basement club with nasty stroboscopic lights.
It also crashed my joystick drivers, which I think is a sign that joystick support wasn’t a priority.
I will keep an eye on this thread and on the game to see how it goes over the next few weeks.
Thanks all for the advice.
I am now having a blast (literally when I blew my own ship up for the “mission” :)
The most annoying thing for me is the way the game keeps turning off flight assist at the drop of a hat.
That said this is a unique and meaty game which is well done. It kinda demands you approach it on its own terms , this weird, alien bunch of planets you are thrown into. It does feel very small though. Its basically 50 levels. Which is fine but I am now used to my space games being vast proc gen galaxies.
Nicely fully featured though, it does some of the things Star Citizen & Elite have talked about for years but never actually done then implements them in a smaller but easy to use way. I feel the game has my back most of the time and isnt just throwing busy work at me, it wants me to play and have fun.
It seems to be an undocumented feature of Long-Range scanner mode that it turns off flight assist. It’s nice in that you don’t immediately bleed off all your speed in Travel Mode, but it confused the hell out of me.
Ah ha! Thank you!
There’s a really good game here, but in typical Egosoft fashion it is absolutely riddled with bugs. That’s especially problematic because the X series is also very obtuse, which means I spent many hours today attempting to complete various missions just trying to figure out if I’m doing something wrong or the mission itself is bugged. There’s not a lot of information out there yet on the web and Egosoft’s forums have also been in the shitter most of the day, which hasn’t helped.
I found a really cool derelict Peregrine Sentinel while out exploring, which looks like maybe a medium or large ship? In any case, it’s about 10x the size of my current fighter. When I discovered it, the game popped up and advised me to start the Capture Ship tutorial. Exciting!
I had to approach the ship carefully because there were mines littered all over, and the game is very poor and indicated how close is too close. I made it to the ship though and followed instructions. I hopped out in my spacesuit, floated over, flipped on scan mode… and then I was supposed to look for the signal to override near the airlock. Problem number one was: it’s a friggin’ big ship, what the hell is the airlock?
Long story short, I floated around that damn ship in my spacesuit for over an hour and a half just trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. I tried restarting the game, going in and out of my ship and scan mode, and attempting to wedge myself into every orifice I could find. Nothing. There wasn’t much information online and what there was made it sound pretty simple. You just flip on scan mode, look for the obvious signal, then the ship is yours.
After asking around on Reddit, another user said that he had a similar situation and that it’s his belief that only Small-class ships can be captured in this way. For anything larger, you need to board it with Marines. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any marines on me so I had to let the ship go. When I returned to the zone, it had despawned.
So that was a couple hours of my time or so. After that, I attempted and failed various random missions to earn some scratch. I’d say I was able to complete only 20% of them or so, the rest bugged. Even missions which I had completed successfully before (and thus knew I was doing correctly) were bugging out. For instance, there’s a mission to repair data leaks on a station, which means climbing out in your spacesuit and repair beaming the busted areas. I’ve done this before, but 3 of these missions in a row bugged out on me because the damaged part was stuck inside the station geometry just enough that my repair beam couldn’t hit it. This is yet another “known issue” along with mission NPCs spontaneously dying randomly and a bunch of other bugs.
Still, there’s a great game underneath the Egosoft crap, it’s just unfortunate I spent the majority of my day dealing with bugs or obtuseness. For anyone considering picking the game up, I’d probably consider waiting at least until Christmas and hope that they get a patch or two out to smooth out a lot of this stuff. Despite this post sounding negative, I’m really liking the game but the only reason I’m putting up with it is because I know the payoff that’s there from my experience with X3.
If it makes you feel any better, if you had launched marines you could watch them loop around the ship in an infinitesimally shrinking orbit for 30 minutes because the AI is too dumb to figure out it should just stop and line itself up properly.
What I am taking away from this thread is:
Core foundation of the game is back to what made X3 great, but it needs more time to bake in the oven. Doesn’t sound like all this is going to get fixed by Xmas.
If yes, I will pick this one up down the line - but I just have such a massive backlog right now I can afford to wait. I might just play some X3 in the meantime.
It does need more time to bake but to be honest Egosoft never gets things polished, so it’s a matter of determining what your individual pain threshold is. Right now things are a little more frustrating than fun for me, but in terms of gameplay I’m liking what I’m seeing and looking forward to playing it more. I might wait for the first serious patch to clean up the low-hanging fruit before sinking more time with it, but everything I’m seeing in terms of the game itself is really positive for me. That’s starkly different from X:Rebirth, which was cosmic butthole and buggy to boot when it launched.
I am still loving it. My fledgling trade empire is now growing. I sit on the looping highway in the comfort of my pleasure barge while updating trade prices on the loop for my traders who make the money. Occasionally if i see a mission that takes my fancy I debark and go do that for some credits.
It is buggy (although the least buggy X game i have played, patches or no) but the bugs are not terminal for me. I do wish they could have programmed a better save game system though. You cant name them correct? Or is this something else i am missing?
As far as I know you can’t name them.
That sounds very encouraging! My pain threshold is usually pretty high but Rebirth made me wary. If it’s a question of slogging through the usual Egosoft jank - but this time with a pearl of a game at the center - that’s a different story.
I’m enjoying myself even with the jank.