Super Highway..Wow

[ShadowTek]

Been playing for 100+ hours (GOG) and I never got the super Highway until now, I only ever played X2 so when I went into a "super highway" I always moved (thus breaking the flow) Only now do I realize (cause I had to take a pi$$ after I went into a super highway) that they take you on a massive huge tour of 10 or so sectors.

LOL how cool is that! Also I'm an idiot for always moving after 1 jump thus cancelling the whole "trip"

[Swagmaster Love 🇪🇺]

The highways are awesome.

Combined with no loadingscreens ever, this is incredible.

[ZombieHunter]

I love how people complain the highways aren't realistic but are ok with ships that can accelerate from 0 to 5775 m/s in mere seconds and slow down from the same in mere seconds. In real life you would become a strawberry sundae splattered all over the ship if this occurred.

0 to 5775 m/s in 30 seconds which is the fastest the Discoverer Vanguard can travel is a G force of 19.63 G's. In other words, death.

5775 to 0 in 10 seconds like in the game is -58.89 G's.

No aircraft or structure we currently have can withstand those kinds of loads. 19.63 is doable for most fighter aircraft frames but not for any length of time and not for the pilots. And -58 G's is not doable for any airframe structure or pilot.

[Defektiv]

I don't think there is g-forces in space where ships would fly, only around celestial bodies where gravity exists. But I'm pretty sure spaceships don't exist so it doesn't matter.

[Arbadacarba]

Originally posted by ShadowTek:

Well, I think they are really cool despite other opinions

I like them too, I understand not liking the implementation in XR but in X4 they are fine. What exactly don’t people like?

[DasWulf]

Originally posted by Defektiv:

So you prefer a feature that is different than the feature a developer chose to use. I don't think there's a lot of races in space, nor energy strips that propel ships along them in space, or even spaceships. But I do know humanity has never been very far in space either, so getting torn up about how fictional aliens might or might not travel in a video game just seems a bit silly to me. You just said that one fictional technology would never exist and then named several other fictional technologies as more logical replacements.

Its more of "I don't prefer" gimmicky features that were not necessary before in X games being added as a means to attract casual players. As Bernd stated in a QA regarding rebirth, the highways were their way of getting players into the action faster, and they even designed a minigame around it at the time. The only it did was look cheesy and make the universe smaller due to no cost nature of travel. Visually, it serves nothing more than to add image saturation.

From a design standpoint, it offers very little good to the franchise in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience.

In the past, if you wanted to get somewhere fast, you could warp there but not only did you require the part to do so, but energy which you could either purchase or generate from solar power plants. This not only allowed for players to go far quickly, but also made the decision to jump meaningful because it required resources.

The further distance you travel, the more lucrative the trade is as well, thus bigger ships would require more energy to jump to a new sector. This made the action, even decision for trade, to mean something, you spent money or resources to make money or resources.

By just jumping on a highway to get the same effect totally removes the intelligent design behind those former mechanics.

[ZombieHunter]

Originally posted by Defektiv:

I don't think there is g-forces in space where ships would fly, only around celestial bodies where gravity exists. But I'm pretty sure spaceships don't exist so it doesn't matter.

Forces are not caused by gravity alone. There are forces acting on bodies in motion at all times regardless of gravity. We use G as a relative baseline for force but due to momentum and inertia forces most certainly ARE exerted on all spacecraft at all times. So G is the unit of measure not the force causing it. G forces apply in deep space or in LEO.

Forces do not only happen within gravitational fields. That is 'one' force. There are many others. Torque, mass moments of inertia, etc, etc. And within the atmosphere there are aerodynamic forces as well.

[Defektiv]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

Originally posted by Defektiv:

I don't think there is g-forces in space where ships would fly, only around celestial bodies where gravity exists. But I'm pretty sure spaceships don't exist so it doesn't matter.

G forces are not caused by gravity alone. There are G forces acting on bodies in motion at all times regardless of gravity. We use G as a relative baseline for force but due to momentum and inertia forces most certainly ARE exerted on all spacecraft at all times.

Fair enough.. I was just being overly nitpicky for no reason.

[Ragnar LootBlock]

STFU! Highway to Hell! Smoke some Weed.. it's just awesome and no loading time! ♥♥♥♥♥♥.

[DasWulf]

Originally posted by CodeDJ:

So we should have a system where you come from a gate to go into another gate immediately, to reach the gate on the other side of the sector. Wormholes sounds worse than space highways.
Hyperdrive doesnt make sense just to use it between gates when hyperdrive itself is faster and has more freedom than the gates system in the X series.

They did highways so they dont have to put some sort of gate or accelerator at each station and at each gate. Any other way to move your ship faster in any direction woud dumb down the game even further.

Not necessarily. I did not say it has to involve one gate leading to another, but speedy travel does not require literal highways floating in space.

Wormholes sound worse than spacehighways? I hate to tell you this but they are already in the game. Better tell Egosoft they suck then. Again its an example on how many approaches one can have to get to distant places.

They put highways, in their words, to get players into the action faster (instant gratification is not good game design), which when you look at their comments about appealing to a larger audience and consoles, you get the idea they were going for.

In X3 you had jump drives. Jump drives allowed the player to jump to a new sector, this worked because it also cost power cells. Power cells are a commodity. Meaning, it had value. The further you wanted to jump, the most expensive it is. This worked because the player had to chose if the cost was worth it to do some trading in a far off sector, or to get to where a war is raging. Your fleet were all capable of doing the same assuming they had power cells and hyperdrives.

This also made owning solar power plants important to the player who wants a trade empire as it was a resource your own ships could use. The commodity had a purpose.

In one mission, you had to chase down a ship that was jumping to distant sectors. This was a good mission, and you had to wait for them to run out of that said commodity in order to get them. There was value in that kind of travel, you gave up resources to get something in return.

A space highway cost nothing to the player or the economy. Power cells as a commodity suddenly lose a purpose and their value to the economy in that way.

Think.

[ZombieHunter]

They put highways, in their words, to get players into the action faster (instant gratification is not good game design), which when you look at their comments about appealing to a larger audience and consoles, you get the idea they were going for.

Neither is delayed for the purpose of delaying and nothing else. Many games try to make things seem bigger by making travel difficult (aka Elite Dangerous). But it adds nothing to the game but tedium. Neither approach is good game design.

You are confusing gratification with simplification and accessibility. There is nothing wrong with making your game accessible and simple. Highways make the areas more accessible. There is no reason to force players to travel from A to B in ten minutes. This was actually one critique of the very first X game. But you don't have to take the highways. Now you can use fast travel, etc. Large ships can't use the highways but thankfully we have travel drive. There is no point in making things take longer b/c its more realistic. At some point you admit it is a game and that players have a limited time to play and thus you want them to be playing instead of waiting. So many games today have taken the route that slow tedium is fun. I'm waiting for this to craft or that to craft or this to fill up or that to fill up. It is annoying beyond measure and not respectful of my time. All of these timers and artifical time wasters put into games need to go back to the mobile game development hell they were birthed from.

If you want travel to take long then go get ED. It is the game for you. It takes minimum 8 to 10 real in game hours to travel to the core. But X4 has more depth packed into its 40 to 50 sectors than ED does in its entire 50000 lyrs across galaxy.

[Swagmaster Love 🇪🇺]

Why do we need to be so incredibly elitist about it?
Its a fun feature, it doesnt hurt anybody and it shows off the no-loadingscreens perfectly.

If you dont like it and others feel the same there will surely be mods out there to remove the highways entirely, replace them with gates and artificial loading-screens and remove travel-mode while were at it / restrict it to 800m/s.
That seems to be "good gamedesign" apparently.

[Defektiv]

This cannot be settled. We must go to war with each other, the victor claiming logical applicability to the idea of highways in space.

[rubyismycat]

i could literally weep bitter tears over superhighways i hate them so much i loved the gamewhen every ship had seta and you just had to fly to terracorpe in home of light to get a jumpdrive when the borons the taladi the split the argons all had their own empires their own architecture their own ship and ideologies everything that made the x series magical for me was destroyed by rebirth and space highways symbolise that for me

[Defektiv]

Don't cry over the pixels.. they mean you know harm. Come on just try them for a little bit.. get on and ride just this once. You'll love them I'm sure of it. I won't tell anyone I won't even look.

[Dice T]

Much like real life, if I don't like something, I simply choose not to use it.