Mixed Reviews?

[ZeroAffex]

This is pretty sad to see. Game doesn't deserve the mixed ratings and all the flack it's been getting lately. I'd love to hear what other game(s) are so much better that these guys are comparing it with that makes them feel inclined to throwing a thumbs down. Fortnite? Apex? Elite Dangerous?

Game was made by 18 people on much much smaller budget than average Triple A or even Double A's. You compare that to the other big space games out there (that suck worse) like Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, No Man's Sky or hell even one of my other favorites, Stellaris and it's pretty damn incredible what Egosoft was able to do with this game.

Most big game companies have literally 1000's of employees. Even Witcher 3 was made with 150 employees before launch growing upwards to 250. Frontier's Elite Dangerous had over 500 people working on their game. 18 guys & gals made this game and I think what they set out and accomplished was nothing short of spectacular all things considered.

Really sad that people can't enjoy a game unless it's so dumbed down, so stupid easy that it's basically playing for you which is most games on the market nowadways. X4 cost LESS than average games at $50 with DLC's that actually add content for a reasonable price. The new music you get with the damn DLC's is enough to warrant the price let alone the new ships, sectors, game starts and missions.

People pay the same price or more for a single damn skin on games like Overwatch/Apex with all the scummy practices and somehow those games get a pass.

It's nuts. This game offers a staggering amount of replay value. The lore omg..The lore is so damn good. I love just pausing the game and reading about all the planets, sectors, and factions. There's so much I can do in this game that it really feels without limits with the only real one being my imagination. We have boarding, we have station building, a living economy, hundreds of ships to buy sell or build and the list goes on. It can be played solely in first person or 3rd person or from the damn map like an RTS/X4 grand strategy.

There's no other community like this.. ha well maybe there is but X4's community is top notch. Maybe a couple bad apples here and there but mostly, every X4 player is kind and always willing to help new players.

There's literally no other game like it. No other game that gives you the depth and freedom to live and thrive in your own 3D space sim sandbox and yet.. Mixed reviews? Heartbreaking stuff.

It's not easy to get into. It's complex but it's not complex for no reason. Everything has a purpose. It's complex because there's a gazzilion things you can do with this game. It's not bad. It just takes time to learn. There's tutorials. A full fledged in-game encyclopedia. There's guides. There's YT's. There's this awesome community. There's no time constraints or punishment for taking your time so there's no rush. I for one love that I have a game that after months of play, I learn new things.

Yes it can be janky but it's good jank, usually humorous. Yes you might encounter a bug here or there but they're infrequent and by no means gamebreaking. The worst I've encountered is being stuck inside an asteroid. Just had to get up, let my AI pilot sit down and fly us out. No biggie!

Voice acting is cringe but to me it's that B movie type of good cringe. Initially I hated it but after time, it grew on me and I love it.. The NPC's are kinda fugly looking but again, it's part of the appeal for me and fits with the at times silly VA's. I don't think the game is meant to be Pixar level animations (ok I know its not) and the main thing is the most important parts of the game look and sound fantastic. The ships, their cockpits and the universe you fly around in all look so damn good which again, for the limited budget and small team of developers is awesome stuff.

Oh and yeah, this game is demanding but I mean I was able to run it just fine on my old rig that had a gtx 1080/i-7 6700K at 1080p. I am playing in 2K now and yes, it makes my 3080 work. But I am still pulling great fps, well over 90 most times with dips into 40-50's when in large battles or stations. This game is great for exposing weakness in your PC and if your PC is struggling to run it, odds are it's because your setup isn't optimized or whatever. I've had 2 different PC's with all new different parts and the game runs perfect on both. Yet I read guys with better GPU's are getting 20 fps? That's not the game LOL.. I swear, some people just aren't cut out to be PC gamers.. xD

All triple A trash companies literally spend millions of dollars on optimizing their games. Why? So people with potatoes can play them on Ultra (because that's what everyone wants). It gives people with crap rigs a false sense of security because they get amazing fps on a Triple A game with maxed setting, then play an indie game, get their rigs real fps and flip out blaming the game and developers. Seen it not just with this game but lots of other smaller titles that aren't heavily optimized. Like comeon.. The kind of optimization people want is unreasonable for smaller studios to afford.

I digress. I was just pretty bummed to see my favorite game getting dogged on lately with all the negativity in the discussions and the bad reviews on the store page. The fact that you can get 1000's of hours of replay value for less than the price of a normal game is nuts. Plus this game is open to modding and has an insanely talented core of modders which will only double or triple your value. The devs also listen to their community (looking at you Frontier), are active, are still polishing features and adding content 4 years after release, largely for FREE and this is the thanks they get? Whelp..

Sure am going to get burned on this but whatever. I'm losing faith in humanity for real lol..

[StormhawkV]

If it was bad reviews from earlier in the game's lifecycle dragging down the overal score I could kinda understand it. X4 was a dysfunctional eyesore for quite some time after release.

[Micheal]

You might notice that some of the recent mixed reviews are about the late game performance. It’s still an issue for some with massive economies where fps drops so much the interface lags

Edit: There are ways to mitigate this to some extent, filters turned off, swap M miners to L miners, group things into fleets rather than single ships, clearing the log book, not building megastations and splitting things up

[uni790]

I've been on the verge of giving it a negative score just because of the noise the large terran beam lasers make, idk who thought that was a great idea, but it's not.. that mind rending sound needs a change, before it deafens me.

[winslm]

Game was released as a buggy piece of junk... People here acted like some how I should know that this company releases bad stuff and I should have waited a year for a final product. I pay 50+ dollars for a game, I do not care how many employees there are... Junk = negative review.

My final issue was spending hours building a fleet of ships to have the AI ram them all into the enemy station on a suicide run.

[Cellar_Cat]

I must admit, there would be some huge caveats if I were to recommend this game to other people.

The absolute worst of those would be the AI. It's bad. It's really, really bad. Then on top of that they built a skill system that makes it worse on purpose. Nobody is going to like watching their ships clip through each other and stations, ram into things and spin around wildly, commit suicide, fail to attack something because the angle isn't quite what they'd like, fail to attack something because they're in a fleet and there's no logic for defending yourself in a fleet, fail to attack something because they always stop short when travelling so they never catch it despite being a faster ship, et cetera et cetera.

Like, you can say AI is hard, and that it's a small team, but the thing is they didn't design the game around the limits it has, and it shows. A lot of people, when they buy a spaceship game and see that the spaceships fly so poorly that they only work because there's no collision damage, are going to be disappointed.

[Daddy Shark]

Cardi B averages over 100 million views per video posted.

NASA averages about 1000 views per video posted.

Moral of the story - there's a lot of idiots out there.

[Tea Lady]

Originally posted by ZeroAff3x:

Oh and yeah, this game is demanding but I mean I was able to run it just fine on my old rig that had a gtx 1080/i-7 6700K at 1080p. I am playing in 2K now and yes, it makes my 3080 work. But I am still pulling great fps, well over 90 most times with dips into 40-50's when in large battles or stations. This game is great for exposing weakness in your PC and if your PC is struggling to run it, odds are it's because your setup isn't optimized or whatever. I've had 2 different PC's with all new different parts and the game runs perfect on both. Yet I read guys with better GPU's are getting 20 fps? That's not the game LOL.. I swear, some people just aren't cut out to be PC gamers.. xD
.

I am playing at 4k on a lesser card than yours (3060 rtx) with most stuff turned up except AA and I get a pretty steady 60 fps(it could even be better but I have vysnc on), AMD FSR is a god send, gave me like 20 extra fps.

This is a dream game for me, I usually like to have a decent amount of experience before reviewing a game but I am leaving one just because one of the bad reviews was, "Hotas controllers are messed up"
Jesus how can you f up a games review score for one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ feature???

As to the vets leaving bad reviews, well that is for them to decide, they know what they are talking about more than I do. I always find a bad review by someone with hundreds of hours to be worth more than a good review with 10.

[korac]

Good post, OP. Have some points.

Which reminds me, I really should spare the time to post a review...

Originally posted by Daddy Shark:

Cardi B averages over 100 million views per video posted.

NASA averages about 1000 views per video posted.

Moral of the story - there's a lot of idiots out there.

ROFL. Excellent point.

Originally posted by Killable Horse:

As to the vets leaving bad reviews, well that is for them to decide, they know what they are talking about more than I do. I always find a bad review by someone with hundreds of hours to be worth more than a good review with 10.

The problem I have with negative reviews from vets is that they too often seem to automatically down-rate just because they have something critical to say based on their extensive experience. The question is, is that really fair? Did they not mostly enjoy the game for hundreds (sometimes, thousands) of hours before reaching the conclusion that some stuff just irks them too much to continue enjoying the game? Would not new players also still derive immense pleasure and entertainment from the game, if not actually turned off by so many unfair negatives?

It seems to me that it's possible to be highly critical of certain aspects of a game, and to push for improvement in those areas (especially with devs who clearly actually care enough to listen, as the X team seems inclined to) without adding to the overall poor impression and putting off new players.

One thing's for damned sure - a game that stops attracting new players due to too much negativity will end up being shelved before it should be, and that benefits none of us.

[SirProsik]

"All triple A trash companies literally spend millions of dollars on optimizing their games. Why? So people with potatoes can play them on Ultra (because that's what everyone wants). It gives people with crap rigs a false sense of security because they get amazing fps on a Triple A game with maxed setting, then play an indie game, get their rigs real fps and flip out blaming the game and developers. Seen it not just with this game but lots of other smaller titles that aren't heavily optimized. Like comeon.. The kind of optimization people want is unreasonable for smaller studios to afford."

Remember Doom? THE developer of the engine wrote at least one book about his work ethic on game development while writing the engine and supporting Doom well after release. Wish more game developers had his opinion/work ethic.

[Evil Tactician]

I've actually never rated it, as I never felt like I played long enough to give it a proper rating.

I love the game, but I do feel like I spend more time Googling how things work than actually playing. A lot of the UI and map isn't very intuitive, though i will admit it's a big step up from X3. Somehow though, I felt more immersed when playing X3 - whilst X4 is played mostly from the map.

I really wish the game had more plots / more immerse missions (procedural is fine too) and that starting the plots was less of a chore using external wikis to even figure what even exists..

Some of us need a bit of help having overarching goals and a pure sandbox with none of that just makes me bored after a while.

I also wish we could remodel the PHQ - it's so ugly!

I knew what I was getting into though, X has always been janky.

[ormac]

I don't think we can do much to change the initial perceptions If Egosoft seems more intent on putting out they're DLC expansion, fixing the immediately obvious problems and that's it for a year.

Should they have put a patch out between April and Now (December) that fixes a couple of the bugs they had identified as fixed. Maybe but then the feature list for 6.0 sounds less impressive.

Are we to expect new players to work through a vanilla PHQ plot and the Hatikvah plot to find they can't reliably use the Personal Office and then posting a review. Or the Terran PHQ approach and it might affect 0.005% if they jump off the landing pad. I know they're not fixed on the current version 5.10.

Oh and we've tried point out calmly that numerous bugs have been fixed between each patch or major version. I don't think games care too much, Nor much about long term support I feel they see it as 3-4 years it must be fixed or the sequel is being worked on will come out better.

(I'm not looking forward to the next series iteration if the X4 Galaxy is the new basis of the X-Universe going forward)

The lore in the Encyclopedia shouldn't just extend to the sectors , planets and factions but also to a number of items in the game which hasn't improved in the 4 years the games been worked on.

[ZeroAffex]

I mean what gets me is that negative reviews are production killers for small studios such as this. For me to drop a thumbs down on a small studio's game, they'd have to do something quite terrible to warrant it because otherwise, I'd just be ensuring the issues I have with it will NEVER get fixed or polished and for development to cease. But maybe that's what some want. Sure seems that way.

I know I love the X franchise, all it's jank and bad voice acting included and want to see it continue to get the content and polish it deserves for many more years. I'd also like to see X5 but at this rate, that may never happen if people are going to continue nuking this company into the ground.

I've worked with several indie studios over the last 10 years and know first hand how brutal the development process can be. How thankless and exhausting it can be. How expensive it can be and how important a single review can mean. So maybe that's why I am more forgiving towards smaller games such as this and tend to thread lightly when it comes to reviewing my games.

If I don't like something about a game, what I do is give the game a thumbs up (or not review it at all) and tell people what features I dislike and hope change. That's the best way to get things accomplished with indie games. Big triple A companies can afford all the silly bad reviews like a guy having 300 or 1000+ hours and saying it sucks even though they got 300 or 1000 hours of entertainment. They can easily make up for them because they are able to buy reviewers and throw out keys. Indie studios don't have that luxury and a negative review is pretty damning. It's brutal and is a great way to nuke development.

I still have yet to hear of a game that is like this but better. Because the truth is there isn't any lol Least not in a 3D environment. Instead, this game is getting compared to other games, quite often Elite Dangerous which had over 500 employees and about 25 times the budget and has a fraction of the features. Or NMS which sure, was made by nearly the same amount of people but man.. Sony bankrolled their development process and they made a fortune even with the botched launch. It took that game about the same amount of time this game has been out to be just to become playable and even today is still plagued with gamebreaking bugs and honestly, it's the most boring game I've ever played period xD

Anyways..

TLDR - Korac summarized it up beautifully.

Originally posted by korac:

One thing's for damned sure - a game that stops attracting new players due to too much negativity will end up being shelved before it should be, and that benefits none of us.

I'm not saying this game is perfect because it's not. It's pretty janky but the important aspects (for me) are done masterfully. The AI can be laughable at times but it's not enough for me to not enjoy the game.

Reminds me, I remember reading a while back from one of the developers for a bigger space sim game out there like Star Citizen or ED that said coding AI in a 3D space sim is nearly impossible to do because of the pathing in a 3D space requires a lot of complex algorithms to work. Yet these guys did it and it mostly works. All with the fraction of people working on it or the budget..

I don't know. I just wish people could give these gentle devs a little more grace or leeway is all. Breaks my heart because I do love this game and its brought me a lot of joy over the years without breaking my bank. I would be crushed if the development ended before the full potential for this game had been realized or fully unlocked thanks to all the negative reviews lately.

Some I can maybe agree with although they simply could of left their feedback here or on the forums instead of screwing the devs with a thumbs down but some are just plain dumpster juice and those really get me. Seeing people with a 300 to 1000 hours ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on the game is nuts and comes off incredibly entitled. The world I live in.. Any game that gives me more than 50-60 hours of entertainment is a win in my book as that's less than a $1 per hour of entertainment but to each their own I guess.

Another long post. My apologies! I'll just say regardless of what side of the fence you sit on with this game, I do hope you and yours have a wonderful rest of your holiday season and that 2023 is a great year for you! Take care space friends. o/

[korac]

On the plus side, I finally got around to posting my (positive! yay! lol) review and this, together with those from other like-minded folk, pushed the overall rating back into Mostly Positive where it belongs (at the very least). Let's hope it stays there, because it sure as hell deserves to with all the effort and love that's clearly gone into making it...

[Cellar_Cat]

Keep in mind though, when steam prompts you for a review it's not asking if you were entertained, it's asking if you would recommend the game to other players. Perhaps a minor distinction but still not quite the same thing.

There are games which I have put hundreds of hours into that I would not recommend to anyone else. Not quite thousands, but I can see how people would arrive at that. These days a game tends to release in some kind of half baked state and go on for years before it's where it really should have been at launch, whether or not it's in early access. You can play games like that for a long time thinking it will mature into something better, only to grow disillusioned with the game and the direction the developers are taking it, and lose any hope that it will ever actually live up to the potential you saw in it.

There are some I've played that I liked in early access but had quit by the time they launched because I felt they had genuinely made it worse. There's at least one that still hasn't left early access since I first played it in 2016, and the studio had some kind of crisis and started the whole thing over, and it's not entirely clear if people who buy it will ever get a finished game at all. Sure, I got my money's worth, but could I in good conscience recommend that to other people? Not really. And those at least had the honesty to officially be in early access, whereas a lot will be just as unfinished and call it a launch.

X4 isn't in a state where I'd actively recommend against it, only because Egosoft does have a history of steadily improving their questionably-baked products over time, and have actually fixed a few of the things I've reported over the years. If they were less communicative I'd probably be done with it by now. But even still, sometimes I will issue what I think is a basic order and see the game fail at it so spectacularly that I just have to walk away and leave it for a while.

The people who can keep playing a game like this are, I think, a bit "different". It's one of those games where I wish the steam review system was a bit less binary. I'd like to give it a thumbs sideways or maybe slightly diagonal with a prominent asterisk. It's certainly for very specific people.

[GetUrAssToMars]

Originally posted by Cellar_Cat:

X4 isn't in a state where I'd actively recommend against it, only because Egosoft does have a history of steadily improving their questionably-baked products over time, and have actually fixed a few of the things I've reported over the years. If they were less communicative I'd probably be done with it by now. But even still, sometimes I will issue what I think is a basic order and see the game fail at it so spectacularly that I just have to walk away and leave it for a while.

The people who can keep playing a game like this are, I think, a bit "different". It's one of those games where I wish the steam review system was a bit less binary. I'd like to give it a thumbs sideways or maybe slightly diagonal with a prominent asterisk. It's certainly for very specific people.

I think this just about sums it up for me as well. I can't argue with the mixed reviews. I think alot of the complaints could be forgiven if you are willing to put enough time and effort into understanding the esoteric nature of a game like this. But I would argue even those enthusiastic about the genre are eventually going to throw their hands up at some of the QOL design and go "welp this is getting silly".

I love the "spirit" of the game. What it is and what it sets out to do. I never want to see them change/sell out in that respect. I just think they are a bit stubborn when it comes to how they design things. Good for them but I also think it hampers their potential quite a bit.