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How long did NMS take to get where they are now? Find out.
The imagination is great isn't it? The reality is much tougher.
Also, it's kind of a running gag for ages. I'd say before there will be planet landing there will be multiplayer. And the latter is highly controversial to begin with....
The thing about possiblity: from a technical PoV there is a lot possible. Just not everything at the same time. NMS or Empyrion would beg for mercy with the same level of simulated content of X4 AND a small team like Egosoft - just like X4 is.
Having said that I'd love to have some rudimentary planet interactivity. Starting with direct access to their encyclopedia entries when looking at them (ship scanner yadda yadda instead of navigating boring tree menus), Freelancer like mini-locations to land on and / or Sins of a Solar Empire like abstract trading / planet development. I wouldn't need neither atmospheric flight nor navigating over empty procedural grounds with repetitive content.
No Man's Sky is actually the perfect example of that - you have billions of planets and a giant-ass universe, but there's absolutely nothing to do there. Tons of different weapons, biomes and spaceships... and it makes nearly zero difference which you pick or where you go.
It's boring and shallow as hell.
If you want to have planetary landings you also need a gameplay reason to land on planets. You need stuff to do there.
Stuff that adds something to the game it doesn't already have without diluting the core experience that your fans play the game for - because i sure as hell don't play X4 for some kind of trashy, procedurally generated walking simulator experience like NMS.
Would be cool to maybe go down to the surface using the station as well, even if you could only explore a small part of a planet at a time, maybe set up small settlements or something, although thats getting dangerously close to Starfield, lmao, but being able to set up settlements as an alternative to building stations would be interesting.
In all those games planets have problems. They're either tiny, or they're resemble each other too much. Space Engineers and Empyrion have baby planets. No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous has same-looking planets.
Having life-sized star systems that move would be a much more interesting feature.
Planetary landings are immersion features. Their primary purpose is to increase positive feelings in playerbase and attract more players. Because "spacesim where you can land on planets" is more interesting than "spacesim". By adding more of those features you'll be drawing more people in. NMS did this, for example, when they added fishing. Because "space flight game where you can FISH" sounds more interesting than one where you can't fish.
There are a ton of activities that would be possible on planets and not on stations. Primary one would be racing, then base building, then interior construction, then maybe ground combat, atmospheric flight, and so on.
In context of X4 the easiest feature to ask for would be landing on asteroid or planetoids. One of them is in teladi space.
I'll remind you that in Elite 2 frontier it was possible to land on planets. Though there wasn't much point. And X3 Reunion had planetary flight mission, with a chase through the city. Though admittedly it was quite horrible.
Your question was "Mechanically, what does it do over a station?"
That creates expectations that you have combative stance towards planetary landings, and will attempt "reduction ad absurdum" where you'd argue that lack of mechanical benefit means the feature is not worth considering.
Wording of a question matters.
Play Elite Dangerous, pick a planet, land on a biggest crater, walk outside, look up.
Or, play Rebirth or Rebirth VR and zoom around Omycron Lyrae, Radiant Heaven zone. This area:
https://ibb.co/MhsjCgq
X4 operates on a very small scale for a space game. Sectors are mere hundred kilometers across. You can run out of bounds if you have a 20 km/s ship, before it finishes accelerating. The game has difficulty demonstrating scale, and everything usually looks and feels small. That creates distinct feeling that you're not flying in a space but on a gigantic abstract space grid.
Planets are colossal objects. They're humongous. They exist to drive point home, that you, your empire and fleet are an insignificant spec of space dust that will become invisible from just a hundred kilometers away.
However, because human depth perception stops working at something like 200 meters, and because with lack of atmospheric effects humans have difficulty estimating scale, to demonstrate how large something is, you need to approach it, or land on it. Otherwise a planet will look like a textured ball in space.
The scene above is efficient in demonstrating scale, because superhighway zooms you around a sector, first it demonstrates you a planet from afar, then from a closer spot, then the game slams the surface in your face.
That's the point of planets and planetary landings. To make the game feel like space, by demonstrating how huge space is, and how small you are. Then the space will feel real.
As for the rest of what you said, I guess my follow up is going to be: what is the goal of the scale added by allowing a planet to be fully interacted with? What would be the scale of that X game? Would it just be around a planet or 3? I'm pretty sure that would go over about as well as Rebirth did with the community. Like literally what is the level of expectation here? These planets we have in the games are absolutely massive. Like let's just take Shiokaze over in Getsu Fune as an example. It's estimated between 2-10x larger than Earth. That puts it around 25,484-127,420 km in size. Are we expecting this to be the size of the sector as well? Maybe an extra couple hundred-thousand km? Split up into a dozen or so sectors? Are we expecting it to be densely packed with stations like the satellites around our own planet? Are we expecting the ground of the planet to be littered with stuff? Cities? Are we expecting to only have chunks of it that we interact with? Or the entire planet? Is all of this supposed to be expanded to other planets as well?
Like, yea, the space we interact with is small in the grand scheme of the concept of space, but like...what the hell are we filling all this space in with? I can usually fit a pretty dam overkill solution of a factory into just a 7x5x4 area, much less the 20x20x20 area the game allows and far from something as expansive as even a small dwarf planet (~950 km). I guess those would be more of the goal here? Dwarf planets? At least they could realistically fit into some of these sectors we have in-game or at least wouldn't be much bigger than some of them.
Though I'm'a be honest, I certainly would appreciate it more if they focused on the space part of the space game instead of trying to add an entire other game into it. I need a game that can handle a few thousand ships before we can start talking about a few thousand stations, much less a fully functioning planet infrastructure.
The goal would be to make space game feel like space. And not as a grid.
Have you ever tried to do this, for example?
https://ibb.co/cTp7xjw
Why would it matter? Effectively this is feedback/feature request. "Would be great to have planets". It can be vague and unspecific. Dev would normally evaluate whether this is worth investing into, or then do something. Or do nothing. You, however, are not a dev.
That's overcomplicating things. Sectors exist for convenience and do not have any significance. It is just a small zone where people spawn. That's it. So sector size does not need to change, as it means nothing. Space, in the first place, is not made out of sectors. Sector is a waypoint that exists at some location.
To answer the rest of the response:
* No, you do not subdivide everything into sectors.
* You fill space with void. Also see realspace mods.
* Not, that's not one other game.
* No, there won't be thousand stations.
A lot of those small questions can be answered immediately with a very obvious solution.
Play Elite and see how it works there, eh?
You could ensure that it still feels somewhat believable by only allowing landings at connection points that boost you to the surface, like the superhighways that boost you through a large sector. (otherwise it would take hours to land anyway)
It could come with a "civilian economy" that is not based on building ships and stations, and that can only be traded there, such as rare Teladi art from Ianamus Zura that the space Teladi want to buy at their trading stations, or 3D religious artefacts that could be smuggled from the Godrealm to the Holy Order planets.
Anything else would probably be a long way from what they can actually achieve with the engine and the resources they have.