Bought the game before reading the discussions

[Padashar]

I played X1 when it first came out and was impressed by what they did with what was available at the time. I was really looking forward to playing X4 but I am having a hard time justifying installing it. Most of the discussions are how borked the game is and important functions of the game do not work correctly. When I commit to a game I commit and before I do that I was wondering if anyone could give me some positive aspects of the game or what to avoid that is buggy. I do not want to drop 100 hours and then find out some system in the game is going to prevent me from completing a goal or a detrimental trading issue. Thanks in advance.

[AccelToWinYT]

The game's fine. I have 600 hours in the game.

[simeon]

As always there is a lot of grey between black & white.
So play the game to develop a personal opinion - or rely on steam comments, burying your motivation before you even started playing. ;)

[Gibbo]

Yeah the people complaining have hundreds if not thousands of hours in the game. Some give it a negative review after a few thousand hours.

Welcome to the internet.

[Bug RU-MOW]

Originally posted by Padashar:

Thanks in advance.

Save before every story decision. You should be able to lose 10 hours of the game instead of 50 hours.
At the moment there is only one problem, the main enemy Xenon dies without your participation and you can do nothing about it. Egosoft does nothing about it.

[Bug RU-MOW]

Originally posted by Gibbo:

Yeah the people complaining have hundreds if not thousands of hours in the game. Some give it a negative review after a few thousand hours.
Welcome to the internet.

Negative reviews because the game was broken after 7.10

[Deceiver9811]

The trade AI is awful for supplying your own stations and the main reason I keep quitting the game... I still have over 1,000 hours and I regret nothing.

I don't think in my time of playing I've ever come across a soft lock or anything actually preventing me from progressing, I've just been demoralized by the amount of time I'd need to spend fixing my logistics because I keep relying on the AI to automate things instead of setting repeat buy/sell orders so I don't have to. You can still manage your empire just fine, especially if you have the Terran DLC and can make use of their simplified logistics chain, but I've so many hours in the game that empire building is basically the only thing I haven't experienced and I keep finding problems with the trade AI that bottleneck that goal. You'll still be able to gather the funds or resources to build whatever ship you want, fly whatever fleet you want, and do basically whatever you want to do.

[flywlyx]

Originally posted by Bug RU-MOW:

Negative reviews because the game was broken after 7.10

Or 7.5, I saw a lot players complain about the new flight physics.

[MarStrMind]

Originally posted by flywlyx:

Originally posted by Bug RU-MOW:

Negative reviews because the game was broken after 7.10

Or 7.5, I saw a lot players complain about the new flight physics.

There's always VRO or REM at your disposal.

[OldPayphone]

Run, the devs are incompetent and ignore the players who have been telling them what has been broken for the past SEVEN YEARS. They do not care, they rather sell us another terrible and overpriced DLC. I have nearly 500 hours and after finding out that as usual they improved and fixed nothing in these last few major updates, I finally quit. I now only come to these forums to tell new people such as you OP to either mod your game heavily because modders do a much better job than the actual devs, or to save your time and money and quit while you're ahead. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME VANILLA.

[DaBa]

Here's how I can describe this:

Yes, the game has myriad of issues still, but pretty much all of them have workarounds of some kind and can be accounted for. Yes, the game is rough around the edges, but that's just price of the ambition, after experiencing just how vast and complex this game is you start understanding why it's not a perfectly polished product.

But the core of the game works well, and what is there is good enough for me to sink in hundreds of hours into it and still keep coming back for more, with no desire to stop anytime soon. What is there is literally so good and cannot be found anywhere else that for me it is a no brainer to put up with some inconveniences. Besides, mods are always there to address some of the problems you might have.

So the question isn't really if the game is good enough for you to justify playing. The question is this: "How much do you like space sims?" Because whether you will be able to appreciate this and what what it has managed to accomplish, and whether you will be able to put up with it at it's worst, depends ENTIRELY on the answer to this question.

And regarding "functions of the game" not working, there really isn't anything super critical that absolutely prevents you from enjoying the game as is. From the issues still remaining that are of note and have constant, real impact on the game I'd list the following:

- L and XL ships with main guns still have trouble making the best use of them when fighting other large ships. This is solvable with mods in two ways: either get a mod that puts more emphasis on turret combat for large ships, or get a mod that helps the AI use the big guns better (I used such a mod in the past and it really did make a difference).

- AI ships being poor at following targets and not efficient when moving towards things. Can be improved with mods, but can't be fixed entirely. Game breaking? No. Annoying? Can be. You learn to live with it.

- Further weird behavior of L and XL ships when engaging stations, especially when they move in a weird fashion and suicide into them. Completely solvable by mods, or by babysitting your destroyers on the map screen and doing OOS (out of sector) station sieges to simplify simulation.

- Story missions occasionally breaking. I had this happen only once after like 500 hours and it made one of the missions impossible to finish. But it can happen I guess. Sometimes you can recover from this by loading the game or editing the save file.

Apart from that I don't think there is anything else in the game that can have a big impact on your experience that cannot be worked around or outright fixed yourself in-game. At least nothing comes to mind.

[Darllock]

Mods saved this mess, 19000 hrs later Mods mods mods thank god for modders, The vanilla is Ok and did improve over the years. Give it a try, watch a lot of yt vids and if you are a star wars fan (I never was until this game) SW Interworlds mod is awesome.

[cfehunter]

It's significantly better today than it was at release. I dropped 300 hours into a run over the past few months.
Are there bugs? Yes.
Is it worth playing? Also yes.

[Gibbo]

Originally posted by Darllock:

Mods saved this mess, 19000 hrs later Mods mods mods thank god for modders, The vanilla is Ok and did improve over the years. Give it a try, watch a lot of yt vids and if you are a star wars fan (I never was until this game) SW Interworlds mod is awesome.

Holy crap 19,000 hours! I've never seen that. That's over 2 years on one game.

See what I mean OP. Still call it a mess despite nearly 20,000 hours. You'll see a lot of that and not just after 7.10. I was having this argument with people on 6.20 (the game was pretty good then as well). Just go and look at the negative reviews, when they were posted and how many hours were played when the review was posted. Steam keeps track of all that. You'll see what I mean. Some very ungrateful, spoilt people in the world.

Also, you should never buy a game based on discussions. These forums attract the worst and angriest gamers. I look at reviews and more importantly, is anyone still playing it because a lot of games have very good reviews, but no one plays them. Well they can't be that good if no one is playing it.

[ChuffChamp]

game is awesome and i never had any game breaking bugs that couldnt be solved by saving and reloading

[「Hliey」]

Originally posted by Gibbo:

Yeah the people complaining have hundreds if not thousands of hours in the game. Some give it a negative review after a few thousand hours.

Welcome to the internet.

Just means they know the game and it's issues better than someone with 2 hours and refunded. Bad argument.