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Generally speaking this game is better than X3. Be very aware that it comes with the same (if not worse) epic learning curve, with extremely convoluted issues that you should expect of any X game, so if you're prone to frustration then you might want to tie down your monitor. It still has hundreds of hours you'd potentially want to spend in it if you can bite your tongue for long enough.
Terran Conflict was nice, but this is just one better in my opinion and it's still in development via DLC, with a good portion of tweaks and fixes being made available to the base game and not just the latest DLC. It looks better and things are just that little less stupid, including the AI. It at least knows how to fly in a straight line in totally empty space. You can even afford to tab out most of the time with autopilot on. Some elements (namely weapons and ships) are simpler in numbers but I'd say that's a good thing. X3 was a total mess of wtaf do I do with this and what is this for and why can't I put this gun there but I've never bumped into that issue with X4.
The UI is better even if far from perfect, but the 3D Map makes the game way better and easier to navigate ! more interactive, easy and faster to issue orders.
They are more possibilities for trading, I mean people tell autotrader is hard to get in x4 but they are so many different ways to trade... And they are easy to setup once you know how it works.
Mining is on another level and got even better in 4.0 and now 5.0
Building stations is a lot of fun, watching it grow as you invest more and more credits in it
The economy is real which makes the game so much more interesting...
Just standing on a dock watching ships around you dock and undock is awesome ^^
The way turrets work is better, MARS for x3 was great, but x4 is superior in my opinion.
There is less diversity in ships but they are mods adding high quality L and XL ship models !
(if you like mods) and they are some very good looking ships !
For me this is the best space game I have ever played, sure it's not perfect they are some issues but nothing gamebreaking and even after 1500 hours I can't wait to play it more ^^
can i buy some ships and make mining, trading with automatic system? and control them over the map remote?
ah, can we have satellites to get information from maps or communicate with another station across the galaxy?
when i played x3 i liked having a ship that fired by itself.
and I also liked to have many ships mining for me.
is it possible to do this on x4 as if it were an open world game?
in x3 I also had a mod that activated the plots of the stories, is it possible to do that too? or does it have custom mode on x4?
i have many question guys...
Yes all of that is possible in x4 and much more.
There is also a custom game mod where you chose what plot is finished and how it finished because they are many different outcomes with their own consequences (new factions, relations between them, rewards etc... )
Also it feels better, in x3 it was like all your ships were piloted by AI, no crew or anything, in x4 you hire crew, pilots, train them etc... It feels a lot more immersive.
And yes they are different ways to setup mining, small mining outpost or you can put some autominers or you can use repeat orders which is very powerfull when you know how to use it and is very easy to make loops (mine here, go sell in those sectors at those prices) repeat order prevents ships from making bad trades because you can customize it like you want
Can also grow to a massive mining outpost sell minerals all accros the galaxy with hubs etc...
Sats are used the same way they were in x3
Turrets can fire on their own, M corvettes also have turrets and they are corvettes that rely on turrets and have no main weapons Like the Terran Jian that has 6 turrets and 1 main weapon.
The game is a sandbox at it's hearth, the plots are secondary but they are some very good ones, don't have to do them again if you don't feel like.
There is also terrafoming that is a mid to late game challenge and ressource sink, offers some nice logistical challenges !
They are less mods than for x3 to be honest but x3 took a while to get those total conversion mods and x4 already has a few and they are some great mods on workshop, nexus and Egosoft forum, check all 3 places because some mods are only present on egosoft forum or nexus !
last questions:
- can i 'steal' a ship with a 'recovery ship quest'?
- can i hijack a ship?
Also salvaging ship and station wrecks is coming in 5.0
You can also sabotage stations, disable défenses and or dropp cargo
TLDR: I generally enjoy X4, but ultimately it fails compared to X3 because of the intrusive 1st person gameplay and for introducing too much simulation in the ship construction process WITHOUT improving also the old ware pricing mechanism from X3.
Issue 1)
X4 has gameplay with actual people, you walking on stations and inside ships. X3 only has space environment and menus and leaves the 1st person stuff to your imagination.
All this 1st person gameplay with you walking around looks a lot worse than the space environment and exterior of ships. To me it just has a trashy B-movie vibe, likely caused by the little experience that Egosoft has in this field.
X3 on the other hand always has a coherent flow. Its just spaceships in space and i can completely loose myself in it.
The trash factor in X4 constantly breaks my immersion. People and alien models are ugly. Their production quality is low and they also sound annoying and disrupt the gameflow with their reaction voice lines.
Crew management and station walking serve no gameplay purpose. Its clear that nobody at Egosoft really thought this through from start to finish.
They only had this initial idea that you can seamlessly switch spaceships which are parked on the same station by walking on the surface. But beyond that there is nothing of gameplay value. Its just a marketing feature which looks good on paper. They couldn't follow up with anything meaningful to flesh this idea out. What do you actually do on a station other than walking? I saw this problem coming right from the start before X:R
And even the station environment is unbelievable. Large empty fields of conveyor belts and low poly duffel bags randomly lying next to the landing pads. This is the kind of trash that distracts me from the actual gameplay and drags the entire experience down.
In X3 my mind can wander freely when i'm visiting a space station. Sometimes i'm only focussed on the task at hand and so i'm just skimming through the menus. At other times i imagine that i'm standing in a sprawling plaza inside the station and how i'm visiting the local bar. But i get the choice to imagine that and i'm not presented with the hideous reality that X4 stuffs in my face.
This is not how it should be. Focus your game on the core gameplay loops in space! Don't waste dev resources on useless filler content. Nobody really needs mechanics that feel so disconnected to the rest.
And good lord! The hotkey based input methods of X3 are so much faster. The map opens without delay. Clicking a button is just more efficient than talking to an NPC who still feels like a robot.
Issue 2)
X4 simulates ship construction with actual resource consumption. X3 just magically respawns all ships while the global resource production output secretly despawns in special storage stations.
But X4 AI is unable to handle the amount of simulation that is going on. Egosoft carefully designed a very specific custom gameworld that mostly hides the issue and a typical player won't notice them much.
As soon as you get into real emergent and disruptive gameplay territory with unconventional strategies the facade breaks down.
In a previous game i blocked a supply line that many NPC freighters were using all the time. This cut off multiple shipyards from just 1 of the many different types of resources that they needed to build more ships.
The factions relentlessly sent freighters on this same route and all of them died at the exact same location, killed by my defense platform and the fleet that i had parked there.
They didn't use the alternative route right next to it and they didn't send military fleets to take out the obstacle that i had put in their path. Eventually all shipyards were drained of this 1 component that i blocked from getting there and every shipyard came to a crawl.
Under the hood X4 still uses simple code. Freighters only want to move goods when there is a price gap. But there is no strategic AI which sets these prices to reflect actual demands. If a shipyard cannot produce ships nobody cares. Even if this leads to a faction's annihilation.
If some resource is missing the faction should actually pay premium extra dollar to get it, but they don't. Prices are generated the same way they have been in X3. Its based on individual storage level on the station. As if this shipyard had nothing to do with the larger than life strategic survival of the entire species.
Pairing this simple ware pricing with a ship construction that now requires many different resources is the biggest mistake that Egosoft could've ever made.
This is the reason why everything runs so inefficient after a while. Why so many freighters focus on delivering useless goods and very few deliver the resources that are really needed to keep everything going.
Back in my game all traders rather just wanted to get killed at my defense platform, because they could theoretically make more space bucks on this deal and so they always chose the same way. In the real world my defense platform would've been an obstacle that decreased the value of this trade route, much like piracy. Eventually steering the traders away from it.
The main problem are the fixed maximum price limits. Because real important resource shortages cannot be identified by the profit based AI scripts. The prices can only rise so much and once two different goods have reached their maximum price everyone only wants to trade the more valuable one, even if the other is actually the one causing the stalled ship production at the end of the chain.
Again, in the real world the price of the actually missing resource would quickly overtake everything else and that would steer enough traders in the right direction to fix the shortage.
Once you see through the smoke and mirrors you realize the fundamental flaws that X4 has. The game tumbles over the complexity of its resource based ship construction paired with inherent violations of basic economic principles.
Back in X3 the resource pricing could be basic like it was because X3 never had a real economy and simulated ship construction to begin with. New ships could simply respawn even if no resource ever got delivered to its destination.
X4 gets heralded as super advanced and deep economy simulator. In my opinion this is exactly the part at which fails spectacularly. Most players only ever fight the Xenon which use a much simpler economy and therefore don't have the same problems.
The entire simulation is too ambitious and the strategic AI and trader logic not ready for it.
What Egosoft should have done is either come up with better resource pricing that also incorporates strategic factors like ship building ability and blockades OR keep shipyards simple so that they need much less different components.
The game has to evolve, x3 had 0 immersion when it comes to crew management and stations, station construction was extremelly simple and the stations looked bad in general.
But then this is very subjective... Sure some will love this like me and others might find it to be boring having to dock, walk and talk to people... I personally feel like it adds a lot of immersion !
For the economy I think x4 is going to the right direction, there needs to be evolution between games and I don't want egosoft to keep doing the same games with 0 evolution and stay with fake economy because it's the easy way.
x3 economy has 0 meaning, selling something here or there has no impact on anything, in x4 selling hull parts to a shipyards will help build ships and have a global impact on the faction, selling to a construction site will help build a station that will then consume ressources and produce products etc...
I don't even see how you can compare x3 and x4 in economy, x3 had no economy everything was simulated...
x4 real economy while not perfect makes the game feel alive, everything has meaning, a miner mining silicon and selling it to a silicon refinery has impact on the larger scale.
These days i rather have me some NPCs who cheat a bit if it helps them to perform better. I'm not talking about making it difficult, just about making it somewhat run efficient like it should. I think as long as there aren't any massive improvements on the AI front there should be some compromise in the simulation.
A bit like the Mayhem 3 mod does it in X3. There the NPCs only really need 3 different resources to build ships. There is 1 additional type of resource they use to build missles, but if they don't have it they just leave the missles out. And another resource gets used for laser/shield production. If that is missing for too long they can cheat equip the ship 4 hours later.
And the NPCs build their ships cheaper than you and also have a global magic chest to transfer their resources between all their shipyards.
They need these kinds of buffs because they constantly loose ships you wouldn't loose.
So you still hurt a faction with each freighter you intercept that carries 1 of the 3 critical ship crafting components, but the entire economic system cannot break down that easily.
But If I had a choice between the two I would pick X4 any day. For the role playing aspect mostly and the walking around ships, and you see people and can hire people.
The Ai is about the same with ships, and the missions are about the same. Maybe x4 little better in that aspect. But you can make a lot more money in X3 on missions alone, and add in stock market. And you don't have to do anything.
I didn't refer to the graphics (I'm a pong generation ones) and I refer to the vanilla game (so no mods). The interface of X3 is a very good one, better of the X4's one, but it ends here. For me in X3 there was a lot more micromanagment than in X4. To evolve your humble merchant to a near decent (please note decent) economic power in X3 is very difficult and requires a lot of time (and I like so much :) but ti is personal ). X4 is easier to start, it is impossible to no achive wealth, and for me fleets are still better in X3. Map and stations are a lot better in X4 instead. But in X4 you can be on the deck of your carrier when your fighters start deploying for actions, to not to talk when I was first surpassed in my M deck from a XL at close range. Seeing a I cruiser attach the station you are on it is impagable. I liked X3 but If I have to choose, I choose X4.
now i'll wait for a sale, thanks all you guys.