• X4 Foundations Gameplay Preview
    27 replies, posted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6s9sXjqCME&t=164s Comes out November 30th
Really excited about this one. X games are always a janky and mostly broken mess, but this looks like it could be the best janky ad broken mess they've ever put out.
I can't ever find any discussions about this game series and I've been interested in it since I saw the X4 trailer. Any series veterans able to explain what the core gameplay loop is like? I've heard someone say it's like Mount and Blade in space which was very interesting to me.
It'd be hard to top the jank that was X Rebirth on launch. Anyway this is the first I'm even hearing of this game and now that i know it's out next month a super hyped. I love the X4 series even though I'm fucking terrible at them, mainly due to my impatience.
I'll just pretend Rebirth dosen't exist Basically X3 starts out with you flying around in a fighter or freighter and plays similar to titles like Freespace, visit a station and trade goods or take missions and kill people or run errands. Mid to late game is when it gets interesting as you start building space stations, purchasing capital ships and eventually have a huge empire of hundreds of assets that you can automate or micromanage down to very fine details. You can use this empire to conquer the universe (with some light modding) or become space Jeff Bezos It all sounds great on paper but theirs enough jank to outdo or rival Fallout/TES, the UI is also extremely clunky and tedious at times. Its an acquired taste to be sure.
Hookers AND space weed, you say? My interest is now piqued. I've had a passing interest in the X games, but have always been a bit overwhelmed with which one to get into. Opaque and complex doesn't deter me, but there's so many pros and cons to each version of the game and everyone and their mother has their own opinion on which is the best to start with and which is the best to play (and those two are often not the same game). I'm hoping that X4 will simplify that equation a lot and I'll just be able to get into the series with it. Here's hoping that it doesn't disappoint. I've heard lots of shade thrown at Rebirth, so here's hoping X4 doesn't repeat whatever it is Rebirth did.
I'm being cautiously optimistic about this. The last X game I played was X2, I think I'd played the demo for 3 earlier but barely remember it. But my eX2perience was a poor one, it didn't play nice with my joystick and I hated the flight physics. I know it's space, but everything's too floaty and weightless. The gold standard for spaceflight mechanics to me is the Freespace 2 mod Diaspora (Based on BSG, it's short but I can't recommend it enough). The ships feel like they have weight to them, you can kill damping thrusters to drift and murderfuck some cylons. Speaking of which, it sounds like they are adding a "disable flight assist" in the same fashion as Elite, where doing so stops the thrusters from compensating for axial motion. I hope to fuck that it's separate to disabling automated deceleration, because unless you really know what you're doing and ideally have an ultra-expensive HOTASs setup you're fucking yourself by using it.
That's so weird for you to say that X2 feels floaty because that's the exact opposite of what it is. X2's flight was on rails in a hardcore way that felt completely stupid and awful. X3 fixed it completely by letting ships slide around and giving them momentum. The combat was similar to Disapora where you could slip and slide all over the place and strafe, though there was no button to completely kill the damping thrusters. I played a lot of X3 with a HOTAS way back when because of how great strafing around enemies while flying worked. The AI sucked and so did their guns so they could basically never hit you. The combat in all the X games has always been complete trash and I don't really expect X4 to be any different. It's one of the first things that I start modding to fix. The AI in X3 couldn't handle flying around though and were game-breakingly bad at flying. Any fighters you own are a waste of money because they will inevitably crash into something (or you) and destroy themselves on impact. For some reason Egosoft thinks extremely harsh collision damage in a game where you can win fights by just sitting next to a space station and watching all your enemies fly into the station or each other is a good idea.
I stay cautions with X4. I am a long time fan of the series and have always gotten the retail copy, but Rebirth left a weird taste. So this time no pre-order or collectors edition for me. It should be a lot better, especially from everything I have seen and heard but you never know. My biggest concern is that, even though it won't be limited to one ship, there will still be a limit in terms of ships compared to X3. They only talked about like 3 races being the main races in the game. So that leaves me with a few worries about the overall scope.
Raw ship count doesn't really bother me all that much. They added flavor to the world but there was always (intentionally? I think?) one best ship anyway that you would buy if you wanted something good at something. What I care more about is that the game works. Like I would gladly take the game being reduced down to even just 2 races if it meant that all of a sudden the game was polished, smooth, didn't crash, and all of its features were actually usable and fun. The X series has never had a problem with sounding awesome on paper. It's always in the execution that it's been completely broken.
Cautiously Optimistic
Did they finally figure out how to do it? It's been a while since I played X3, but even in TC I recall nobody was able to make a mod which removed collision damage because it was hard coded into the engine. I remember the best somebody was able to do was completely disable collisions in specific circumstances so that ships could fly through each other unharmed. There was a bounce mod too where if a ship got too close to another it would magically push it away to prevent a collision. I also remember making threads pushing for Egosoft to add a difficulty option for collision damage because some insane people thought your ships all killing themselves by crashing into each other was a good thing and I didn't want to piss those people off in my quest to fix the game. Was there actually a mod that just turned off the damage entirely without making ships fly through each other?
I really like those control/building interfaces. Management sim was my favorite bit in TC. But it was really hard to figure how to deal with orders at first. Not sure I care for the "walk around" thing to be honest. I really hope that I can do everything remotely and can turn off transition stuff after the first time of looking at it.
Eh, I wouldn't say "completely fixed". Stuff like fighter combat was pretty bad regardless of which flight model the game had because they felt so unbalanced. You never fly scouts and light fighters like the Buster as they're cardboard incarnate (didn't matter if the AI's aim sucked, they spam their gimballed guns and one hit would probably scratch 60-80% of your shields... and in X2 they were literally flying caskets) and heavy fighters like the Nova were just too slow and kept getting outrun by the insane amount of scouts that you were forced to fight, making it tedious. X2's flight model would've worked had there been actual balance between ships, fixed weapon mounts and better AI... basically make it something like Wing Commander or source coded Freespace; they prove that unrealistic models work, why developers refuse to copy the good parts of those games' combat boggle my mind. Speaking of, they most likely kept the fancy subsystems in capships from Rebirth, so at least that will have some depth.
I remember playing X3TC ages ago, having a lot of fun when I finally figured out how to automate the trades and stuff. The combat in this game is absolute trash though, and trying to manage a fleet for combat is even worse. It's botherline impossible to do anything for combat with a fleet in the base game.
X3 TC was a lot of fun and the dynamic universe was really cool, my fondest memory is just having bought a decent frigate and feeling bold enough to scavenge in a active warzone. As soon as I approached some wrecks two opposing fleets with absolutely massive dreadnoughts warped in on both sides of me and I was in the crossfire of ships that eclipsed my puny frigate. The way TC protrayed scale was magnificent, seeing those dreadnoughts with turrets as massive as my puny frigate was awe-inspiring. Too bad the rebirth supposedly sucked ass, but this one looks really good and its weird it has stayed under the radar like this.
why tf would anyone buy into this shit after the shitshow that rebirth was
mostly because they seem well aware of how much of a cluster fuck X Rebirth was. They practically spell that out in this video.
There is a straw poll on the subreddit that had about 50% of fans saying they would wait for an trusted review before a buy. I know that's how I'm going on this one since I never got rebirth as I don't pre-order stuff anymore at all. That being said, I am optimistic and hopeful that X4 will become as good of a buy as X3 and subsequent expansions were to me.
It just dawned on me. There are so many of these types of sims but the stuff I'm usually looking for in Sci-fi games is the crew, interacting with the world and generally being on the ground. I actually have a couple of these sims because I want to get into them for space trucking but the often times I'm stuck in menus for stations, half dead NPCs or just...no one there.
Oh wow, it's basically a singleplayer Star Citizen Except it's actually gonna come out.
Oh wow didn't know this was coming out this year. Been playing TC again lately. Here's to hoping boarding isn't such a pain. I can handle keeping the shields down, but that interface is a pain to use every time. Also, he only mentioned Argon, Teladi, and Paranids. Are the Boron and Split cut off from the rest of the universe? I couldn't get into rebirth at all so I don't know the story there if anything happened. Split had some nice ships, and Boron had the most relaxing sectors. At least there's still Hyperions(or a new m6) with the paranid around.
Ah yes, boarding Spend hundreds of millions purchasing an M7M, the entire fabrication plant to build missiles and dozens of hours of training marines to watch it all go up in smoke in seconds when you make a slight error Hopefully they'll just use rebirth boarding, while that game was a dumpster fire it did do a few things right.
I don't remember much about X3, besides the soundtrack being amazing: https://youtu.be/fc058ye4zys
I mean yeah but the small talk is what I mean which is honestly nearly impossible all things considered.
Aye, Alexei Zakharov's a bleeding legend. The OST in Rebirth also holds up really well and I can't wait for what X4 has in store in that regard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAFn4-5O7yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pF2MOzIYSA
Man, I remember downloading all of his other music and modding it in X3 as sector themes. I wonder if I still have it.
It can have all the jank it wants. Between Star Citizen vaporizing under scope creep and a severe lack in scope in the other space sims, This is exactly what i've been wanting. Didn't even realize they went this overboard with it. It's like they saw Star Citizen's initial scope outline and beat them to the punch by not being idiots.
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