I prefer thought that timelines is just a preparation to a new DLC with a playable xenon faction or something telling more about these enigmatic machines.
rtx 4090 and 12900k cpu 32GB ram and the game hardly uses them but lags to hell even on lowest gfx settings. and its on an m.2 drive. looking at my HQ brings fps to a crawl.
More sectors? Yep. More ships? Yep. This expectation that everything Egosoft puts on the charcuterie board is going to be to everyone's taste with every DLC release is . . . just not realistic. This is the second time I've seen Egosoft depart in any dramatic way from their bread-and-butter game (the first being X-Rebirth). I didn't care for Rebirth. I do know lessons learned from that release lent knowledge and experience to the creation and continued development of X4. I expect Timelines will do the same. What I see is a company growing artistically, willing to put that bravado on the table, and their history leads me to believe that Timelines, like Rebirth, was not a wasted effort. I also see a game that has deep modding community that stretches back at least to X2, and Egosoft has embraced that mod-ability in every X game they've released. FOR FREE. No Creation Club nonsense, no "credits" need to be bought and spent. They've kept whatever capitalist yearnings they may have out of the modding community.
I agree with a lot of the things you said in the video, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'd also add that there are many more reasons to like Timelines other than the challenge. I genuinely found the narrative to be engaging and enjoyable, the characters to be interesting and likeable, and the whole mystery of the station and the Sohnen to be pretty thrilling. I had fun doing the missions and then checking back with the characters to see if they had any new dialogue, and then started a new sandbox playthrough and started off by collecting the new ships. It was a fun new way to start a game, and encountering the new faction ~20 hours of gameplay later was really cool. For me, the DLC was overall more enjoyable for me as an experience than Kingdom's End. I love the Boron and the new sectors, ships, and building modules they provide are great of course, but the storyline from a gameplay experience perspective was pretty underwhelming for me. Had much more FUN with Timelines, and I don't see how having challenging content is a bad thing. As you mentioned, it's not like you can't pass with a 1 star rating, and several of the missions that were not my favorite I did indeed skip to the next after putting up a 1 star. But to be honest, I don't think it's even that challenging in general. I'm not a super skilled gamer or a very experienced X franchise player (like 500 hours in X4 and that's it) and I was still able to get a 5 star in half of the missions within my first few attempts.
After 1500+ hours, Timelines was a little refreshing in terms of activities i never done my self. But again, after so many hours i still found a way to perform trading missions with highest efficiency. I know the turn rates and speeds of almost any ship in the game making combat challenges more or less easy. Manual and speed mining were very new to me, i never mined a single asteroid in any of X series, ever. Did more or less well under time and hostile preasure. I do have to say, for fleet battles, Timelines was a very good example. Never had a fleet in sandbox (carrier based + destroyers), never seen a benefit in it due to small ships having a big advantage at dissarming capitals and and chewing slowly without any retaliation. Still, new ships are a perfect reward for all the efforts, unique, special. Always wanted ships that only player could have in the game, to actually become a faction of my own. Maybe in the future Egosoft will treat us with something fancy, maybe something close to Yaki hybrid ships. Or maybe a research tree with own ships to research, build and use in the sandbox.
Egosoft has refused to do a fundamental rework of X4 for years, preferring to bring out 1000 new things. Fans are supposed to collect ideas that are then ignored, and that's exactly what Egosoft is being penalised for. Timelines is just a vent of the frustration that has been smouldering for a long time.
I'm pretty much wasting time for nothing The games not bad, it's just really boring. It's just everything the same over and over. Nothing. Univen battles If they did that, the game will probably be much better
Like for instance, guys and girls. I play the game, it's not bad. Or they need to add a lot more stuff. It's pretty boring Like there's nothing new at all, the battles the same, ship modes of the same, everythings the same. There's nothing different it all. No new types of battles or bigger map with battles Ilost Thief in this game I thought would be the best space game. It's really not -_-
I refunded it after playing 1 hour. Did 4 missions. Buggy, uninteresting, more anoying than challenging. At least for me. If i want a real challenge i would play games like Elden Ring or Cuphead for example. I think most of X players wants to expand their universe sandbox. Thats why they supported the X4 project. I dont know what Egosoft was thinking but they really need to sit and rethink. Cause "challenges enthusiasts" are not going to pay for their bills. Simple as that.
Unfortunately this is the worst dlc. I thought they learnt the lesson of rebirth but clearly they didn’t. This dlc locks all the new stuff you pay for behind game mechanics you don’t want to play. The game is overall a 4X game so all add ons should add to this game mechanic not add ones none of us want. If we wanted it we would buy something else, a sandbox 4x is what X4 is.
I think I like the way the DLC was released better than having it added as another bloat to the sandbox. The missions are very performant and run fluid while the sandbox universe usually gets slowed down after a few days because of things like the massive snub spam of VIG. Of course the DLC has some weaknesses - the entire part with Mitsuno feels... silly, and I certainly wouldn't have named the systems after her. But this DLC was definitely a good purchase for anyone who grew up with the previous X games. The battle against the M0? Awesome, although a bit too easy, and the VA for Ban Danna is hilariously bad. (Oh. This is it.) I will say that the Sapporo alone is a massive plus in my book, even though it is... horrible in combat. The Odachi and the Cutlass are insanely good, though. The X-Shuttle might just be too good for the sandbox, but the player can regulate themself. A lot of the missions were neat, but only a very few stand out. Much more interesting are the hidden achievements in the missions. Missions, missions, missions! I don't think the Quettanauts would have been needed to get added to the sandbox as a faction, but grinding rep with them to get the Antigone station parts is not bad at all. All in all, I think the DLC was a better purchase than Tides of Avarice, which I only bought for the closed-loop system. In fact, with Split Vendetta being #1 and the Boron and Terran DLCs sharing #2, I think Timelines scores a solid #3. I know many people will not share this opinion, but I'm fine with that. Having the X2 Mission Simulator back is really neat.
I am definitely in the camp that played through the missions once to unlock the main campaign stuff and will literally never touch them again. My only real issue is that it feels like Egosoft playing to their weaknesses rather than their strengths. I've always found the scripted sequences to be the weakest parts of the series by far (some of the interactions are so bad it loops round to being endearing), so I will always rather they focus on introducing new ships, new races/factions, map extensions etc. I'd love a DLC focusing on bringing back some of the old corporations like OTAS. I'd also love an overhaul of the captain AI - many of the ship functions are very unintuitive or borderline broken. Fleets are still barely functional. A lot of the game feels like herding mentally unstable cats. That said though, I was gonna buy this and support them regardless. 4 out of the 5 DLCs focused on the exact kind of stuff I wanted and I'm perfectly okay with them experimenting, trying new things and catering to other players. It's obvious there are people who enjoy this DLC a lot, just not me and maybe not the majority. Which is perfectly okay. I saw someone on the forums claiming that there is some kind of betrayal here, as if they are entitled to personal approval of every DLC release. That's just not how the world works, we don't get to like everything and that's okay.
I remember the OLD tutorials... "hmmm...okay, lets try youtube, alt+F4" - and then I found captain Collins and learned to set ships for auto-mining , pilfer battle remains etc. and really got into it.
I really hope Timeline will be like others expansion which like another story in open play. Which is quite disappointment, yet perhaps this new way of play can bring fun. And honestly new expansion will always buggy. Not just X4 but also another games. That is why i never have any expectation on new expansion to have perfect run. Thank you.
What does he think aux is, mobile viewing platforms? It's a repair and resupply ships, they do that by carrying the items that a shipyard would do, so cargo matters, the more cargo the less it need to gather resources.
There is nothing worse than when a developer add mission(s) you cannot work around or have alternative routes. The DLC should have been added as an extension to the sandbox universe IMHO, then have options in those sectors for the missions within.
One reason - CASUALS They expect to 5-star everything just because they bought the DLC and that is what most big game-devs teach players for more than 10 years already, like in CoD series... => No 5-star after 10-minutes spent - direct negative feedback. That's very sad! Space sims were always gated by skills and a wish to improve. Even Star Conflict (which is basically Tanks in Space) struggled with casuals, because they die by straight-flying into the enemy line... and then bombard the game with negative reviews. Captain, the best You can do, is to explain the basis of a space-sim: to learn stuff!! We study in school not because that knowledge is going to be used in the future, but because we build a skill-set with it!
Personally I'd love a DLC focusing on bringing back some of the corporations, like OTAS. They were one of my favourite parts of X3 both mechanically and in terms of giving the game a kind of dystopian late stage capitalism feel. I'd also love a bunch of dev time spent on fixing ship and fleet AI and maybe adding some new functions, a lot of them feel borderline broken or at least very unintuitive.
@@jamolotl Anything new is really good. New faction means new ships and maps. But if Egosoft is really hellbent on brining something fresh, in my humble opinion they should improve the first person experience. New character models, add new ship interiors, and more immersive AI walking around those interiors. To make the ship more lively. Maybe utilize the Brig to convert captured people floating in space. Add a mess hall, and quarters etc etc and see your crew going around the ship doing their job. And if they're really bold, maybe add an actual boarding mechanic in the game, where you can join the boarding party and see it all unfold. Maybe add a station invasion too, and steal an entire station.
I'm actually loving timelines, I totally agree with egosoft that this is totally for new players after tutorials and it's good challenge for experienced players. New players can use the scenarios in this after getting 1 star all the way thru and learn essential game skills like attacking stations or capitals and it even let's you put bombs on stuff. My two complaints on DLC. 1. this should of been I'm the base game. 2. Lag spikes during missions really tick me off.
is a very bad DLC no even a challenge is frustration what you gonna find out! just look the reviews half of positive reviews is just for support egosoft
This expansion was sold as finally getting the endgame challenge we waited for, only to receive the beginners tutorial. I had to return mine after less than 1 hour played. The endgame challenge they added is in insult to any x4 fan (you get your whole empire swatted by a bunch of magically spawning enemies). If they had developed timelines AND a endgame expansion that has proper content, i'd have been happy to pay for at minimum one of them. At this point its just pressing the $$$ juice out of the dry lemon.
As a new player, I recently tried out Timelines and found the experience to be quite jarring and in my review, I likened the experience to beginning with a leisurely tour of an airport and then abruptly finding myself in the cockpit of an F-16 fighter jet. Even after completing the basic tutorials, the game prompts directs you into Timelines, assuming you're ready. As someone unfamiliar with the game's lore or backstory, I approached it with a blank slate. While I don't mind diving into action, Timelines does a poor job of providing context or setting the stage. You get the hang of very basic ship controls, and then you're thrust into your first mission: the race. After just an hour or two in the game, suddenly you're expected to master precise ship maneuvers through rings, often overshooting or struggling to keep pace in the fast-paced and needlessly stressful environment. At that point, I hadn't even been introduced to Flight Assist. Overall, I felt like I was thrown in at the deep end without a life jacket. In open play, I can overlook the somewhat odd voice acting-it's functional, doing its job. However, coming from games like Homeworld that feature realistic and well-acted voiceovers, Timelines falls short with a sort of uncanny valley in its writing and voice acting. It feels like a computer trying to simulate human interactions and doing so poorly. Some of the voices even made me cringe, eliciting a genuine recoil reaction. Perhaps this speaks more to my expectations, but that's been my experience. You're spot on in saying that the marketing misrepresents it. This isn't geared towards new players at all, and as for the story, well, it's definitely there, somewhere. Not sure how much AI gen is in there but that is a major red flag as well. A good comparison would be Elite Dangerous or Warhammer 40K, where no matter where you start, you can generally piece together what's going on. X4, on the other hand, is incredibly messy and convoluted, and if Timelines was intended to simplify that complexity, it failed spectacularly from my perspective as a newcomer. The mission summaries were confusing to the point of being frustrating. Trying to make sense of "Incursion of the False Pontifex" without any context was headache-inducing.
Timelines is a recap for veterans of X4 alone, that been said... I would suggest to you start the sandbox first,do the tutorials and immerse yourself with all other dlcs, the fun thing about been a newcomer in the sandbox is precisly be a newcomer, most starts you have would begin as a representative of a major faction, that is just now reconnecting with the galaxy, mostly you don't know the situation out there, you just started, then a good part of the story is you finding out about the story while carving your own... I didn't play Timelines yet, but... I imagine a plot about time travel with the player insertion in certain events from the past of the franchise would be convoluted... So yeah, timelines definitely isn't for newcomers of X4, but veterans of X4 like me who are newcomers in the X franchise...
@@ciel-lf6vd the only "newbie friendly" mode is the Terran campaign rookie start. I forget the name, but it holds your hand a fair bit and is mostly flying focused so you can explore the rest of the game at your leisure. The main drawbacks are that you don't get access to the Commonwealth until fairly late. The bright side is that the Terran systems let you learn all the game systems without having to deal with the overwhelming Commonwealth materials and construction trees. The stories in the other starts all assume you can figure out how to build an economy.
I have almost 2000 hours in X4 and several thousand in the previous games. I was hoping that with 7.00 the still crappy AI would finally be significantly improved. So I reinstalled it when 7.00 was released. And X4 is still frustrating... the AI is so incredibly stupid. And the voice acting of timelines makes me want to vomit. I played a few missions and then gave up. In my opinion, Timelines wasted resources that were desperately needed to fix the main game's quirks and problems. X4 doesn't need more content, it needs fixes. Edit: Addendum
I'm a fan of X3 and X4. Over 1000 hrs in X4 - got all DLC except this one. I have no problem with Egosoft experimenting - but the way how Timelines were marketed left me with many questions, so I just waited for it to release and checked what it was all about. It was not for me: Did not like how it was integrated storywise. Nor do I feel that the ships from Timelines are "must haves" for my sandbox experience. I didn't buy it - so no complaints here. However I dont get the argument "we know that Egosoft releases buggy games" or "Modders will expand content of the DLC" - Negative review because of bugs is fully justified. I trust Egosoft will fix it - but it does not change the fact that it was released buggy. - Modders will add to DLC - The review is of Egosoft work, not modder work. The positive side for Egosoft would be that they added some API for modders. Lastly, I personally dont agree with opinion "To do something we dont like to get something we like" - If in any point in time, I feel that the game gives me anxiety is the point I exit it. In Elden Ring I loose time and time again because I choose some faith paladin build - not other more cheesy builds. So I have to "git gud" with the style I choose - and I'm enjoying it. There are better racing games, better mining games and better space combat games - but there are only few good space sandbox games, X4 included.
It’s not a strong showing from Egosoft at all. It’s a 3/10 score for me. Still purchased to support my favorite game devs. I hope future offerings will be centered around and give more to expanding the main game / sandbox.
It would of been even better if it was actually a aux ship cause ships like these should be able to upgrade or change weapons and upgrades and it should be able to build ships as well
You can only repair items that you crafted. All stuff from drops that shows some Chinese as owner cannot be repaired. No matter if you have blueprint or not
The problem is that no one has prevented Egosoft from making the same story missions in sandbox that will challenge you and require to be highly skilled. What I mean, that most combat missions in storylines in sandbox are so easy, that I always thought about them as placeholders. Maybe except ToA VIG station demolition and Getsu Fune battle in the start of Terran plot
Question, I suck at building houses. I want to use a pre-build blueprint, I have all the material to make it. But how do you place it down on your land?
I struggled with this. I spent hours and hours figuring out how to do it. I thought it was just as simple as clicking the build button and it's gonna automatically build the preset. However, it turned out that you needed to build each piece even if you already have all the materials. I'm not sure if there's a faster way to do it, but that's how I built a preset house.
i used the blueprint then all i had do was get materials and click the walls floors stairs etc no need to build manually just click the buildings blueprint hope this helped.
I don't think forcing me to play timelines to unlock things in the sandbox is fair. I love the sandbox. Bought Timelines to support the devs, but this feels like a bit of a punishment instead of a thank you.
I must be the only person who has no issue with it. I'm in it for the sandbox, but I have occasionally thought a few instant action scenarios would be fun. Now I have it. And I love it. Yeah, it's buggy, but not the worst. But then the engine wasn't built for it. I'm impressed they got it working at all tbh. Also, X4 is not a beginner friendly experience no matter what they do.
Sure people will love more huge fleet battle scenarios and they are maybe not even all to hard to mod. But just big fights where you can clash with another big fleet. Also, for the price of that DLC you go to the cinema once and buy popcorn and a drink and your done in two hours. So i don't think it is to expensive. And it is 2024, watch some streamers and see if the DLC is something for you, you don't buy something you can't know what it is.
I haven't even tried the new Timelines stuff. I was already in late game in my second playthrough when Timelines came out. I got to check out the new sandbox content late, and missed out on some of it due to the the DLC drop coinciding with my Xenon extermination campaign. But I'm happy with it. And when I decide to try it, I have the new Timelines missions available to me. At $15 I think the DLC is nice. It's a reasonable price for a significant addition to the game. Would I have designed the DLC differently if it were my choice? Yes. I would have liked more sandbox content, with additions that are significantly useful (at least as alternatives to prior choices) in early, mid, and late game stages. That's my jam. But what Egosoft added made me happy too. And as a Linux gamer, I appreciate Egosoft for supporting gamer freedom. I'll buy the next DLC too, if there is more to come.
I'm enjoying Timelines. And for all those complaints about forcing ppl to do things they don't do in sandbox - you don't even need to "get good" in order to make it AT LEAST 1 star. You don't need 5 stars to unlock stuff in open world. Just get in, finish the mission and fk off to the next one. Instead of focusing on a great storyline of this DLC people frustrated on thing that is not intended to be focused on. I was amazed with Timelines plot in open world game. It's short, but so nice to find it AFTER completing all this missions.
My complaints with the Timelines is mostly technical. The load times from a HDD are a bit long for something that's supposed to be tried again and again. And the game requires a lot of processing power. It won't be such an issue in the winter but when it's hot you really don't want an extra 500W of heating next to you and it's the reason I've not yet progressed beyond graph 2. The gameplay content is fine. As a kind of veteran of the series I got usually 3 stars on the first try and the challenges were quite nice to play since it's not something I usually get to do. Except the escort mission. It's a textbook case of why people hate escort missions.
I'm sorry but HDDs are just kind of obsolete at this point. If you want to play modern games with reasonable loading times an SSD is kind of mandatory and not expensive. Totally agree on it being badly optimised though in terms of processing power. Later campaigns and large battles make my PC chug and I have a 7800X3D. 😭
@@jamolotl HDDs are definitely getting old and sometimes thy are required for a good experience. However, X4 has worked well from a HDD before. Sure, the initial load was a bit long but once you got in the game everything ran just fine. With Timelines the requirement changed. I do have the space to move X4 to a SSD but for an expansion to force the change I feel like it is a valid piece of criticism.
I don't know if anyone ended up answering you. But you can try going into your Device Manager, go top your USB section (named Universal Serial Bus controllers). Then select your mouse and all USB Hubs/Composite Devices, and for each of them: Go to properties -> power management tab -> uncheck "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power". Next best bet IMO is to go into control panel -> Mouse -> Hardware tab -> Properties -> Power Management -> uncheck the same option, and do this for each item under hardware for your mouse.
I felt like 80% of timelines was an extended tutorial. The "real" missions were great. But then that would be only like 5 mission for one DLC worth of content. I can see that this is a now a building block Egosoft and modders can use to make custom campaigns. Lets see what the future brings. Edit: i did not completly finish the video before my comment. I disagree with you here, they advertised it for what it is, a extended tutorial.
