X4 Is My Favourite Nightmare - Impressions and Commentary 

Gotta keep people waiting for big reveals like that, what a twist!

Missed your comment, but the point was that there was a lack of hit indicators and I had trouble with the radar. I don't think I meant anything about the balancing of those ships or what have you.

​@@OffyDGGskill issue.

@@WiseOwl_1408 literally, pretty sure with good piloting anything can beat anything else. Was the case in x3 anyway.

And the way to do that? Start off by buying mining ships, give 'em captains, and guard them while they mine. Meantime, buy or steal blueprints Once you have money coming in, build a station to fabricate basic compobents, and have those miners feed the factory. And then sell the basic components (with trade ships) and use the profit (as well as more basic components) to build further factory stations. TLDR: Build economy from the bottom up.

@@JoshSweetvale thanks, I'm trying to figure out how to play this game, it seems like a lot to keep track of but i'm going to try

I soooooo miss that UI

X3s UI was really good once you figured it out. All fairly straightforward for me.

X3 from 2005 looks better than X4 ....

@@TheKetsathose are different games By many concepts

Came here to say this! I can't stand it transparent, it muddles my little brain

@@KushtieM8 I think it's useful when gate camping. You're going to do it, so while you're doing it you can be looking at your map and being a manager (ordering scouting and other tasks to the handful of ships you will have when you're at this camping stage) and use the transparency to see when you need to close the map and start dogfighting what you were waiting for.

This is also how I feel. I am trapped, and looking forward to playing this nightmare some more, if only for the vibes. And I will see if mods can make it play better, there must be good ones after all these years.

Thank you for the video.. Was amusing to watch and very much how I feeel in a lot of areas... I think the management of the egosoft studio fails miserably in setting the right priorities for the game.. Instead of actually fixing massive game bugs they are now saying they won't be releasing more updates until 7.0 which will feature other things... Yeah more things... more bugs... @@OffyDGG I don't get it.... Meanwhile I have almost 200 hours in the game in the last 3 weeks alone... figures....

really wanted to recommend Bannerlord but you dont build much and the AI is... well... its something.... that said you control up to 1000vs1000 man battles from your player character, meaning you're both commanding your troops (infantry forming a shield wall at the base of an elevated area while your archers hold the hill, raining death as you lead your calvary in a charge against the advancing enemy infantry or perhaps harass their archer line) and really can scratch that commander/trader itch. Even heard the X games compared to the Mount and Blade games (in particular X3TC/AP and Warband, but still)

X3 was so broken that mods to fix the broken parts (bonus pack, bounce) are now considered part of the vanilla experience to the point where they don't even disable steam achievments.

@@BobMcBobJrI loved X3 Terran Conflict. One of my most played games after Stardew Valley. Yet even I know that it has terrible controls, confusing UI and lots of bugs. The AI when piloting ships is su*cidal, which is the main reason I don’t field Carriers despite them being supercool. Had to deliberately get very slow fighters so they don’t crash. Still, it’s still one of the best 4X games I’ve played. I can see past the buggy mess in what they intended it to be. I haven’t played X4 much, as I simply don’t have much time to dedicate to it. Real life keeps interfering.

x3 is one of my favourite games also. I am hoping to properly get into x4 with the kingdom end dlc and give it a full playthrough to see if I can recapture the magic

Diificult, there are tutorials that walk you through practically every aspect. Seriously, what was so 'difficult'? It's statements like this that cause game devs to dumb-down everything to the lowest common denominator.

​​@@OffyDGGare you going to check out the latest update then? I'm thinking of buying it after watching your very funny review nearly a year ago and I'm still on the fence due to the large amount of DLC, not including music and artwork. Eidt. I noticed you did a follow up a few months ago just before tb last update. I'll give that a butchers too. Sorry.

​@@screamingiraffethe interface was literally written in one night by Hunter S Thompson.

Seems like a pretty big difference to me - imagine if you could be sitting in your flagship and just remotely take control of a fighter. That way you could enjoy the fighter gameplay without relying on save-scumming or something to deal with the risks. I think that would be good. The complaint about dying wasn't dying itself but that there was no sound or visual cue for being under attack if the enemies aren't missing you, so you die unexpectedly if you are attacked from off-camera. Only really a big deal in fighters, but still worth noting. I feel most games have some kind of direction marker or warning system for being attacked so its fair to expect that.

@@OffyDGG Except you didn't have a flagship. You didn't have one. That was my point: you don't HAVE a fighter to teleport to/from. Now, in the general case of "later game when I HAVE a fleet", you should also have the PHQ and teleport, even first level teleport means you do exactly that. Get out of your seat on your capital ship flagship and teleport to a fighter, and if it blows up, you teleport back. It USED to be, before 3.0, "Game Over" but in the Split update, the base game included an auto exit. If you faff around, you will get targeted in your suit, and it can't take on laser blasts bigger than your head, but you got several seconds to teleport. Why? Because people wanted to teleport instead of seeing the Game Over screen. Of course, losing an asset worth a couple million early game is a BIG hit, and so many people just savescummed to an earlier savegame where the ship was still alive, so it was only useful "mid and late game" where you had fleets, and therefore teleporting researched. So it was tied to teleporting. Not that you would necessarily know this, but I was only commenting on your specific case in the video where you had a few scouts and a fighter or two. Not your scenario you just now said.

So you're saying that actually is in the game? Well then that is good news! Personally I would say have that from the beginning, since it's equally unfun to not have in the beginning as it is later, no need to have it be be based on progression if that's how it's meant to work. Or, if it is something that they want to be unlocked as a reward, it needs to be obvious how to unlock it - for example, I played the game a lot and I have no idea what you're talking about. Apparently there are story quests and such that are probably something to do with it, but I literally never saw them, and that's not exactly ideal!

@@OffyDGG As far as Egosoft (and most people, but, and here is important, NOT ALL) is concerned, it WAS obvious! It was obvious you start with the "Young Gun" start, and until you have scanned a station leak, it will bring up a yellow box to RUB YOUR FACE in the fact and tell you to scan it, and they made your first scan option ALWAYS get the start of the PHQ plot. As far as they were concerned, it was only possible to make it more obvious by making it all "grandma, this is how you suck an egg!!!". Now, some will just sandbox this, and never bother with missions, or station scanning, because they get in the way of just getting down and dirty with playing the game of "lone star pilot", much like you did, and therefore it is obvious you would not get told "in game". And there is a case of one person who repaired rather than scanned, their first leak, so it was then "random chance until it was the PHQ plot" for every leak. So it isn't that "everyone got it, so what is wrong with you" here, it is just that there are only so many ways to get the PHQ noted "in game" before it is nagging EVERYONE. E.g. even if you know the PHQ is "find a station leak", it will STILL tell you the first time you get near a leak to scan it, even if that scan is not forced by writer fiat to be a PHQ starting mission leak. Once you GET a working PHQ, you get told about all the research and you are told, again "in game", that teleportation is interesting, but, and here again is the sandbox and the refusal to teach grandmas, you aren't FORCED to get teleportation researched. To get the working PHQ you need to get a bit of mission underway, so it teaches you that, the mission eventually gets you a frigate free and able to board, teaching you how to board M class ships, and parking on a bigger ship. And to get that far requires you build up a station dock, so that gets taught to you. There is the attempt to make it "organic", so it isn't gamified and you read up. Remember, too, you still didn't have a fleet, so teleport would have been no better than a game over screen at that point. And once you have done the PHQ once, you take that knowledge with you. Even if it doesn't get used again and you never build another station or even the PHQ beyond a L1 teleport research. Once you got the PHQ, you know why the PHQ. It'll still nag you on a new game about "this is how you scan a station leak!!!!". The game can be played a lot and still only cover 10% or less of the game in toto. Missing this bit is absolutely possible, even if "I played this game a lot", because there is a lot more to the game. It doesn't cast nasturtiums on you that you didn't know. Unlike prior X games with a PHQ, there is research and the PHQ is a nearly game start item. Absolutely no way you know this. However there is only so much a sandbox game can do to MAKE you do things "the right way" before it isn't a sandbox any more. "I literally never saw them", but you also didn't see the Kaahk. I've never seen the top tier crystals, and according to the video, you never did either. There are people who have done things I haven't, even with 500 hours plus in. There is no end game. It's a sandbox. And so until you've done everything, you won't have literally seen it for yourself. In many games that is 20 hours in, in others 50 hours in, in some 100 hours, in this? You could potentially get 1000 hours in and not have seen it all. Of course, if you had seen it all 20 hours in, you might have no reason to play to 50 hours. THAT isn't ideal either. Not for a game that can last thousands of hours. It's all about expectations, yours, theirs, mine, other players, and people who throw the game away in disgust because they expected a 20 hour to endgame pwnage of NPCs, etc. I have kept it, to an extent, vague, so that you can discover the game yourself. IMO you should be told of the PHQ, but also IMO they did, several times. Because my way isn't the only way, and if I give away more, I'll make you play MY game, not yours. So since you missed what I thought was pretty obvious (the PHQ) I point out why you may want to do it (you get teleport), and let you decide how you want to do it. Also note there are other gamestarts, and two that you make up, the first is budgeted and the second not budgeted but gets your game "Modified", a budgeted gamestart means you can do the PHQ in a previous game and then not have to do it any more. Other DLC based starts (two split, two terran, two tides of avarice and two boron) give stories, other starts are unlocked in the base game (as in previous X games) by some unlocks in the game you made, such as "unlocking the PHQ" unlocks one new gamestart in the base game. Story beats were added in the Split start, expanded for the Terran starts and there is even more handholding for the boron starts. I may give one hint for a boron start. Borons aren't equipped to take on capital ships, they didn't exist in Boron space, only Kaahk, and therefore only fighters. If you go Boron Only, they WILL be a weakness. So either accept it and plan accordingly, or mix it up knowing you're doing so for a reason. The DLC starts are: split are combat focussed, the terran start "terran only", but if you want to mix up race ships, you might want a Segaris start instead. TOA are pirate smuggling or loan shark enforcement starts, and Boron are pacifist starts. You can work around those entirely, so you could to a pacifist Split start, or a garrulous terran officer start, but those are the "intended" roles. Young Gun is just the default start and it gives you what is probably the worst ship you can pilot, it is slow, poorly armed and you'll be glad to get rid of it entirely, and it gives you such a bad ship so as to make ANY other ship an improvement. If you see a "special mission" for Reen, take it early. Not because the rewards are worth a lot, not even that the reward is a good ship, but it isn't your starting Elite, and so is an improvement on it, and a decent starter "jack of all trades" ship from which you can do pretty much anything, if poorly. IMO there needs to be a rebalance for the Elite, as it is, it only has use as a cheap police craft, not anything you want in ANY fleet that has any choice. A few others could do with a rebalance too, so that any ship HAS a niche for a player to have and fly or own, because in any ranking, there IS going to be a worst in category, otherwise every ship is merely a cookie cutter clone. Currently, most most clearly with the Elite, there are some "no brainer, avoid at all costs" ships in each category, and it should not be "no brainer" and avoid only if you don't like X reason, or far better ships for doing Y exists than this.

@@markhackett2302 It seems all I can say is that for all your claims of this feature being obvious, all this 'yellow box' and nagging you are talking about didn't happen to me - as evidenced by me never encountering such things in this video exploring the game and not knowing what you're talking about now! I didn't pick the start you mentioned, and I have no DLC, so that may be part of it. Perhaps it wasn't as 'obvious' that everyone would start off the same way as you insist. [Edit: I should add that I don't know what you mean by 'station leak', 'your first leak' 'repaired leak', for example. Do you mean the thing repairing satellites? I did that only once, but nothing happened that I remember. It is, at least, in the tutorial, the repairing part at least.] While you say you don't want to reveal this stuff to all players, I would turn that around and say that if it's important, then it should. It's not like it would force you to do these quests, so I don't think that's as railroady as you imply. Perhaps I am just super unlucky and didn't get to know about this cool feature, and hence liked the combat less than intended (although obviously I did like it anyway). Another thing I'll note is that if a player wants to complete the game in 20 hours, just make that a difficulty level or a simplified campaign, don't dismiss it. You'll always turn players away if you hide the fun or make it too much work, but you'll gain players who like that sort of thing too. Doing both is totally possible. Not that I would take that up, but I think you are wrong to dismiss that sort of approach, and X4-like games where browsing players can't see why it's good ultimately suffer because of this attitude.

That's all sounds pretty good. Next time I will use mods for sure. Now that I have experienced the game in its pure state, I want to see if I can get a setup I really like.

Ahh now that would explain it, great detective work!

@@OffyDGG Wait until you find out how easy it is to hit the reload quicksave button when you're not looking.

Now there's a revolutionary discovery, I better remember that for when I play again, thanks!

Ah, you already helped them out. :) It's a bummer that this option is that hidden and not active by default, but at least it's there.

The argon’s retconned it out of their history books. The people that knew of earth died off.

​@@MrAyybee2cold it's the story for the first x game. Showing the argon they were from earth, they originally removed the data since they didnt want to risk their descendants trying to open a jump gate back towards earth by using the gate at alpha centauri

Didn't know that! From what I heard, I thought the xenon just always killed everyone. perhaps i will get lucky when i play again...

I think they always hate everyone but it's a matter of how proactive they are about the genocide. It may also possibly be just based on whether their economy is working or not.

Yes it is the best in the genre, no doubt about that, but it's still got loads of issues. It isn't bad by a longshot, I think you misunderstood there.

Fighting games have this problem, but the solution is useful tutorials. They hve a multi-tiered approach to this, but it's poorly presented and so are the tutorials.The thing is, when dealing with a complex game or task, you need tutorials that cater to the stage you're at in the learning process. The whole crystal mining thing is a great idea, but the difficulty in seeing them without mods is indeed a problem. Mix that with the whole sector-changing nerf was not smart. It's an excellent way to familiarize new players with the controls, which was clearly the intent, but the game doesn't suggest that hard enough, largely because it's so hard to see them. Also, the combat tutorial isn't useful when people are going to hit it. And worst yet, the 3rd tutorial appears broken and useless and is more of a tech demo than a tutorial ("oh hey, click these things and go to them to see how to do the thing. btw this is a trading ship, let's leave it do it's own thing." Really?). I genuinely had to look up a number of videos on youtube to find out how to build a station (that's not including the UI nightmare that is how to build one, but specifically the type of ship i have to find or buy. And then there's teh faction rank thing, which goes up too slowly and then too quickly. Look, i need to get in a strong S class or an M sometime within 24 hours of starting up the game for the first time because i'm sick of loosing to raiding parties and RNG, but can i do so without becoming best friends after doing so? Worried about balance, except in that one area. Oh, can we also not have a war that can take up multiple fronts and sectors before I get in an L-class ship which has no chance in this war? Game goes from 0 to 60 in few hours, and somewhere we forgot 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50. Game's hugely improved over the other titles, but this is a bit of a regression. Alot of people came for skyrim in space, not to gain a fear of space roaches and space skynet.

realised this right at the end, much better!

@@OffyDGG The range of the magnet is based on the size of the ship, so an L sized craft can hoover things 6km away, whereas small fighters can only suck up stuff 300m or so away, and M class have a range that gets to about 2km.

I was radicalised by X4, the people of the universe must tear off their price tags and no longer be the playthings of the rich!

There was another game that did it; Terminus.

@@miclam00 another one was Independence War 1/2 from the 90's, and of course Space engineer

@@davidrenton No, IWar and its sequel HAD a max speed. Areas enforced it around stations, and most of your missiles were attempts to stop you speeding off. IWar did have good ideas on how it WOULD be "realistic", and hence you got the Linear Displacement System, both drive and shield, but it still had a max speed without your LDS engaging, because no realistic space ship gets a good acceleration, and various forms of "impulse drive" is invented to get around that and make something you can watch.

@@markhackett2302 I'm not sure the problem with a max speed as without it it provides little gameplay benefits in games with a limited play space. So it's one of those things, yeah sounds great but actually makes bad gameplay. The other thing is the timeframe of acceleration. So what exact gameplay benefits to it are thereby not having it. the other thing is we arbitrarily in games picked a frame of speed esp for combat that feels familiar, i.e. WW1/2 Dogfights. which is a thing that might be or not be the case in reality. I suspect not, as by the time we have actual space dogfights, it will more be a case of automated missiles, railguns, and the like and very little human involvement. So the battles could be at multiple range, and speed scales

@@davidrenton Max speeds mean some ships are faster than others. Acceleration means some ships are better in a furball than others. These are all ways to find balance to ships. If we had "realistic flight physics" for space, we'd not get them. The frame of speed isn't "feels familiar", it is what makes bullets miss and makes you see those graphics on ships. So the smaller the ships, the closer combat is, or all that detail in graphics is wasted effort nobody will see. The slower the bullets, the closer combat has to be, or you will miss too many shots. The battles COULD be at multiple ranges. And is. Capital ship battles are at 3-7km range. Fighter battles are at 1-2km ranges. And automation of missiles and railguns and no human involvement means no game, because without human involvement, there is no need for you, a human, to play the game.

That's wild, how are such large mechanics in the game but not mentioned? Would have been very happy to use those if I knew.

@@OffyDGG yeah not your fault game has the worst onboarding i've seen. to answer your question for the seta those expesive parts you were seeing drop are part of a set of 3 peices that you need to craft it (crafting bench is next to the trader on the stations.) and as for teleportation you have to research it. (im assuming you didn't find the player hq which you get by going to a station switch to scan mode (shift+2 i think) and finding radio leaks they make a loud sound when near and glow red then you got to get REAL close to it in scan mode. (this is also how you get access to illegal missions and the black market.) the guy that give you the mission is a boron btw. (you may have to find multiple leaks to get the mission.) last thing if you feel its 2 grindy to get these the normal way you can do the creative or budget sandbox game start when creating a character and just start with it unlocked.

@@Ubercharge12 Would not have even imagined that was possible, although I did see something about scanning stations, never worked out how to use it though. Once I come back to this game I'll just use mods and walkthroughs to make it fun basically, but for criticism purposes i wanted to go in pure.

@@Ubercharge12 can t agree with that all, devs make everything easily accessible, get criticised for too much holdhanding, if devs leave things for player to discover, devs get criticised for not explaining

I played some elite dangerous, and traveling around was the reason I stopped, I really didn't like how difficult it was to drop your speed when you needed to land so it would take forever to approach a station at a low velocity. Needed autopilot or some kind of tech in the game that made something else stop you when close, the nightmare was too much and I gave up on the whole game.

@@OffyDGG Trick is drop into the blue zone on the throttle - setting a keybind to 70 % throttle when you hit 7 or 6 seconds makes it much easier.

X4 (and alos x3 AP), has that

Sounds ideal! I didn't imagine there would be a setting so i never looked for it, but a few other people noted that as well. I intend to play the game again soon for a full boron campaign, so I will set things up to my liking as best I can.

Adding in non-transparency might be my fault, I said to do it (because most people didn't want to even see through the map to see if they are being shot at, and making it opaque means the map view could use less power or use its cores for doing something else like OpenAI or whatever.

Still a good idea. I actually love the game really, as despite all it's issues, it's still doing something special. Literally just bought the dlc despite all my rants in this video 😁

Yeah this totally did happen to me, so I see what you mean. I think my preference for something like that would be picture-in-picture, or having the map be in a resizable window. But the transparency option is useful too. I just found it a little hard to look at the map, which already has a lot of stuff going on, when there is something wild happening in the background. I suspect it gets easier with time though.

That's wild, never would have imagined that. Seems pointless if there is no gameplay associated with it, but I like the commitment!

@@OffyDGG It's actually been that way in the X series since the very first game (X Beyond the Frontier). Most people when they see the planets think they are skyboxes, but they are 3D objects. Stars are skyboxes though.

@@michaelbennett7561 now you mention it, I have this vague memory of crashing into a planet in x3! I only hope it isn't impact performance too much to have that massive thing out there, I would be fine it is really was just a pretty image. Thanks for the info!

Ideal, I want to play the game again soon, been looking forward to it

Same. I almost bought it, but held off because it looked so complex. I look forward to the next video, but im sold against this game; not for me, it seems.

That was pretty much my feeling too :D

Yeah that was the reason I ended up flying into the minefield, as the scanner made it show up as a load of ? marks and I thought it might be something valuable. Useful for working out where stations are too if manually exploring, but I didn't do much of that in the end.

Would also recommend Starsector, it's very similar to this in many aspects. Only big noticeable differences is that Starsector is on a much larger scale aswell as the game is played in a top down perspective rather than 3D, simpler graphics too.

Yep I have it, just one of the millions of games I have been saving to play for this channel and will eventually try

It's a topic that interests me, this whole balance of veteran vs new player consideration. I suspect X4, being basically an early access game for all intents and purposes, is heavily influenced by people who have long since got over certain flaws in the game that seem really obvious to an outsider. I bet they would actively complain if more tutorial quests were added because they what the devs to focus on other things, or they want to maintain their satisfaction in personally knowing something that is hard to work out for others. Something tells me X4 is much less popular than it could have been because of bending to these considerations. I heavily dislike reliance on walkthroughs or guides to teach a game, since they will come packed with spoilers and take away the fun of exploring the game for yourself. So if I find a mechanic and can't work it out at face value, or there is no quest/game content that tells you anything the devs think you are supposed to know to be able to enjoy it, I tend to start complaining. I think for X4 it would be less about changing the game to appeal to new people, and more about giving an easier presentation. For example, I struggled to get mining to work, despite it technically being very simple, mostly because there are hidden details and lots of different places in the UI you need to go to get it sorted. But design-wise it's actually no more complex than clicking a 'number go up' button in an idle game. That's the sort of place where automating something would be great (like looking at a sector's resource list and clicking one 'mine this' to go through the whole setup automatically), since the manual way is hard to teach and is a meaningless challenge to perform. Another big example would be quests. I never saw a single one in my campaign, and only learned they existed after I stopped. That should be impossible! Damn, it's easy to get me ranting about these things :D

@@OffyDGG Well no, it's a known thing that the tutorials are a problem, even for veterans becuse the same mechanics change from game to game. For example, in the previous games where you could capture ships, the capture was based on how fast you could train the shields and start damaging the ship (presumably to scare them into bailing). Now there's 2 angles, boarding, but the old way still exists, except it was changed so that every time you deplete the shields (that is, shields must hit 0 but hull damage is not necessary) there's a chance a crew member will bail. If the number hits zero, the ship is yours. I get that EgoSoft doesn't exacntly want us to know that's how the mechanic changed, but its huge and changes how you play and how "leftover ships" (capturable ships left over after a massive fight) manifest. So no one is going to argue with more tutorial as long as it's in the tutorial menu (one of the campaigns, the Empyrion Curs, is a glorified tutorial for the then new piracy features and that is another complaint with the game). The community understands X has an accessability issue because it is for veterans any time something changes. There is the feature that there are certain flaws that we have gotten over, but that's most certainly not one of them. The problem the community has right now is that the community has historically worked together to mod quality of life features in, to the point that egosoft will consider them official and make them not work with the modified tag, but now with the half-baked multiplayer feature known as ventures, and rewards tied to that, people are more leery of mods because it disables ventures. Since the mods are more worth it than the paints you get from ventures, there's a compliance issue that EgoSoft is dealing with. As for your distrust of walkthroughs, that is a problem. Even in X that's a problem, but due to the fact the community is aware of it you will have people try to avoid spoilers when doing tutorials. The problem with walkthroughs and tutorials are that they suffer the same problem that the dev-created tutorials have: different assumptions of base knowledge. I'm a veteran of the series and i still wasn't sure how you build a station in this game, because the in-game tutorial was worthless and the ones on youtube left me with the impression you didn't actually need a construction ship (i found one that did mention it though). On the flip side, while I just got this thing working better with my laptop so it's playble so i don't know how good the story is, the previous games have all had pretty bad stories that were more or less tutorials for the rest of the game. They've always had potential, but they've never really used it to great effect. Instead, the dynamic nature of the game tends to tell your story (and this happens lot more with x4 than previous games due to how some of the randomized elements can play things out on random station positioning alone). I managed to find a youtube playlist where a guy ends up doing a dramatic telling of what's happening in his game based entirely on what's actually happening on it's own. As for the mining, yeah command menues and changes have always been among the mods that the commmunity has improved upon. Kinda line skyrim and scripting bugs, the community tends to add extra commands to ships that make it alot better. Some of the features added in X4 were clearly designed based on popular QoL mods for previous games. They clearly learned that the previous games' menus were cumbersome, so they came up with this design, which is a huge improvement on the depth issue (previously menues within menues within menues within menues just to order ships to attack or something), but not in other ways. Previous games you could use number keys to hit into those things so people quickly learned certain number combinations that would lead to certain tactions taking place (usually 4 or 5 menues because the depth was like 6 menus for something like "attack my target"). Still, the thing isn't fit for use while you're under fire and now you have to go searching for everything. Which isn't bad after you've done it for a while, but you gotta do it for a while before you know where eveything is, and it's certainly not organized correctly. And let's not even go into dealing with having over 100 ships... As for quests, you definitely had some available if you were aware of the missions menu. Going through certain areas will trigger some quests as well. The thing is, certain quests are only started via data leaks, which you ren't going to intuitively discover. EgoSoft has this problem where they make the mistake of assuming the player is going to look at the game the same way they did, which is not how the real world works. And they have had this issue from the beginning and unfortunately, like most game devs, they seem hell bent on making you think the way they do instead of accepting that people are different. But, this hubris is on par with their political inclinations (which is bit to the far left, at least based on what's on the forums, which is odd considering the game itself and the content in the game isn't so): they are completely out of touch in a "hello my fellow cool kids" kind of way. They certainly mean well, but they're out of touch. Instead of creating a system that focuses on freedom of chnging the menus and icons etc (more on that in a separate second reply), they focused on trying to make things work a certain way. Frankly, what they need to do is have a signup and have 10 random people who are not familiar with the series get free copies of the game in exchange for streaming the first 80 hours of play throughs to a private video thing so that they can see what normal people actually do.

Since the topic interests you, i learned something when dealing with real martial arts vs fighting games, at least in the learning aspect. When you dump overwhelming complexity on someone, you give them alot of potential, but unless they have a 300+ IQ, they're only going to retain maybe 5% of it. So you play through a tutorial in a fighting game, manage to put in hurs to master the weird finger bending combos that veterans say yuo'll never use anyway, only to go into the game and get bodied not just by other players, but by the AI. Why? Because your mind freezes up as you take what you learned slowly and try to react to a real-time situation, while also trying to figure out what of that 5% you actually retained is actually going to work in that situation. By the time you react, teh situation has already changed and you need to think about finding a way to reset the matchup (or situation in X4) back to neutral, and the same thing happens again and before you figure out how to do that you're dead. So in real martial arts, the instructor tells you the first time you spar, that you're going to use the jab and only the jab, anything else doesn't count, because there's so much to get used to without worrying about the 20 different blocks that are situationally applied to 20 different attack types that were trained, let alone ones that you didn't train that could come out. No, you're going to jab. And when you're wrestling instead of boxing for the first time, your sparring you'll be placed into positions and one guy's job is to try to break that position with what htey learned that day and the other guy's job is to try to prevent them from breaking that position. You're taught a "home position" in wrestling that you're always trying to find your way back to, because that's where the 3 basic submissions you were taught are easiest to perform from, so rather than trying to teach you everything all at once, you're given basic controlled scenarios. However, as you get better in each one, instead of making them only use the cross or only that one position, you slowly *ADD* more punch types (boxing) or submissions/positinos (wrestling) to the allowed list so you gradually increase in complexity. And yes, this can be done for X no problem. The problem is, the devs aren't going to do it, despite them actually kinda having done that already. For example, that early game crystal farming? Well, the crystals don't shoot back, and while you're blasting those things you're getting practice on maneuvering your ship and aiming your guns. It's slow, controlled, and you can predict what the crystal is going to do (since the asteroid spins at a constant rate and doesn't change directions or move around). That gets your coordination down really, really well. The problem is, you might get mugged before you're done with that phase. Or, in your case, you discovered that other ships getting mugged is an easier source of money (goes back to EgoSoft expected you to mine crystals instad of picking up drops). And manually ordering ships around will prepare you for later on when you actually have a fleet. But what software packages improves the AI by giving you commands that require less baby-sitting? Good question, doesn't seem to be consistent and the descriptions are absent. This isn't as bad in X4 as previus games, but it's still there. Probably the easiet way for them to handle this is not unlike what they've done before. Create a new start of the "guided" type and have you play a basic story where you have some sort of mysterious benefactor who helps you get started. Hell, you could be really cool and make this guy turn out to be a villain who thought your success would weaken a rival faction and his plan fails. Bam, easy story. The whole questline is his machinations which not only benefit you but teach you how to play the game. Let him mark two asteroids with crystals, and have you look for the little glisten and then require that you mine 4 more asteroids and deliver the illegal crystals to an associate to teach you about patrols and black markets (they acutally already do most of this idea in one of the alternate starts). They then tell you when you should have enough credits to get a medium ship then they make a clear and obvious suggestin of which miner to get and so on. Part of the key to this is that they need to make the player the only random element in this particular game start, that way they can keep the Xenon back for example until it's time to intrduce that complexity. Of curse, making you go through the menus to do these things, too so you know which menus are useful and when.

pretty sure no one mentioned this, that is a very good workaround, nice tip!

Yeah I think empire is another game with great potential that doesn't fully work. Still has my favourite replenishment, building, and travelling mechanics in the whole series.

Sounds useful! Still, I'd prefer it there was an easier way in the game - it's easy to think of what to you want to do, but hard to tell the AI to do it, and I find that a little frustrating.

@@OffyDGG I can understand your point of view but if you want to get rid of all the micromanagement that's the easiest way to do so. You can do all that fun stuff and really don't have to care about the miners and they level up your captains as well. So you can put them on the traders after a while to do the auto trade. I know that the series can be a bit unhandy but it also offers good options to get rid of some of these problems. Btw it's gotten a bit better now with 6.0.

@@OffyDGG You can add multiple areas to mine. If the first taps out, they will mine at the second. When the second taps out, if the first is back to snuff, they will mine there. If not, then they will go for a third option, if available, or wait. And waiting is mostly what they did. Prior to, IIRC 4.0, Argon Prime was mining central because it had several ore/silicon places and a need for those wares in the stations. So the yields are backed off SEVERELY to stop people just firing and forgetting and only bothering with Argon Prime. FORCING you to explore. Which is also why, I suspect, NPCs can't use long range scanning to find stations and gates to 200km range, makes YOU do it.

Yeah I've played it, got a video on this channel in fact, enjoyed it quite a bit!

That is what I remember most from Elite, found it hard to ever go some place since you always wanted to get there faster, but then it was hard to stop. need some kind of in-universe thing like a 'net' that just drags you to a halt when you are close to points of interest.

@@OffyDGG What I found worked for me in the end was to turn the auto pilot when you've almost reached the destination. It mostly allowed for speed and not going past destinations. Alternatively maybe the long in system journeys should be replaced with jumps like those between different stars for less frustration.

@@OffyDGG never saw you use "travel mode" Shift 1, that is a LOT faster.

@@OffyDGG Thing is you can choose either to have combat in space, or have "space physics", not both. They tried both in Elite 2, but all you get is a jousting match. The max speed DOES make some sense, because it really is in a medium and so your ship WILL have drag. Just a lot less than in any competent game. If you want to see real space physics, do Kerbal Space Program. But no combat. If you want "realistic" both, look at the Expanse, the TV series, and how not fun it is because it is mostly at BVR and lasers are pretty much unavoidable. Because your laser goes at light speed and missiles won't stop accelerating either. Big bada boom.

@@markhackett2302 I think the real comparison is 'you can have space physics or WW2 style combat'. You already hint towards the sorts of very large changes in approach that might come with a more realistic space combat system. The expanse isn't realistic either so I wouldn't use that as a basis. My (possibly very wrong) of true realistic space combat is extremely high speed projectiles and lasers being fired at extreme ranges, using radar and such as the main interface for targeting like modern warships. Since you can just invent some sci-fi 'shields' to make this all more tolerable, I wonder i fa system where massive fleets fight without having to actually render too much stuff could be possible. As for whether a realistic system would be automatically unfun, I don't know. It's so hard to imagine playing something so unusual that I can't really guess what it would be like, but its would be janky, that's for sure. I think for X4, just increasing speeds and ranges would be enough to get some more action and scale.

had no idea you could go to the planets, guess I should have just pointed myself at them and seen what happened :D

That's true, and a good way of looking at it. I was thinking more like the bounty you get for killing enemies isn't enough to justify a) the time it takes (since you could have made more doing something else with that time) and b) the risk of losing something. But I think on a more industrial level, war is certainly going to be useful, especially if you are strong enough that risking damage in combat isn't relevant anymore. This was all my extreme early game impressions so more interesting stuff didn't really come up.

@@OffyDGG Oh yea I got that, I was disappointed by the reward at first as well, but than I noticed my miners making more money again, because the demand was crazy since their wharf and shipyard started printing them ships again. Also, leveling captains is difficult. What I would suggest, if you have the player HQ and researched personal teleportation, to get to over 27 reputation with a faction of your choice, so you can teleport to their stations. Than you can visit the managing office where there can be 0-4 people possible to recruit and with some chance, you get a 2 or even 3 star pilot (they cost a million to hire). Which shortens the time considerably. So first things first, crew is important, service crew helps at everything but combat. Loading cargo, mining and so on. Marines help defending boarding, boarding and turret accuracy. But still, get one less in crew than needed for a ship you plan to have a good pilot on. Even if you have to chose the pilot to build, when there is 1 space left for crew, when you hire someone of the station, you can select that the new hire is the captain and the old one will go to the crew. That's how you can start with better pilots for your ships.

More like skipping the flap but reading a couple of chapters. That's just what an impressions commentary is.

That's because that is actually me! The channel is run by loads of other people, but I provide the voiceover.

It's interesting, veterans struggle to understand how first impressions can be so different, I think its holding a game like this back since the development had been so long. X4 was one of my favourite games of 2022, but people still get mad at me for posting outsider perspectives. I'm not that crazy really!

"Space", yes, totally agree. So they fill it with "trading" and "fightering". Here's a thought for space game developers: what if, when we do get interstellar, there are no fighters? No destroyers, battleships and cruisers? Surely, all flying and fighting will be done purely by automatic pilot? Baffles me how, we've had autopilot on earth for decades, but in Elite, you have to manually fly a little fighter. And trading. Was novel in the 1980's. But by now, unfortunately, buying goods at A, flying to B to sell them at higher price, then flying back and rinsing and repeating for 100s of hours, just isn't interesting. As someone above said, it's like those playing these games have Stockholm Syndrome. Basically, in most space games, "Space" is just "Earth 1492 " but with a graphics mod.

i played both, and tbf while i enjoyed ED for the first couple of hours, it got really repetitive/boring after a while for me. I have been enjoying X4 (so far - currently around 10ish hours into the game), even tho it has many issues (the AI squadmate unable to follow my ship is one of my biggest issues) i enjoy it a lot more

This sounds similar to my view on the game. It is mysteriously good because it fails at things other games wouldn't even try, so ends up being the 'best' by default for a certain feel. An enjoyable sandbox that makes you wish it was better still!

Its UI isn't bad, any more than GIMP's UI is bad, it isn't Photoshop, it isn't Windows, it isn't what you, a user of Windows, is used to. But that doesn't make the UI bad. It makes your learning of a Windows UI paradigm not appliccable. But you don't try to find the "go faster button" in a car either. Its UI isn't Windows either. You have to learn it. Yet it isn't called a bad ui.

@@markhackett2302 Sure, but bad ui can simply be 'it was hard to learn', reasonable excuse for it or not. Although in X4 it's more like cases where the ui where something could made simpler without losing any functionality, relevant info displayed in more useful places, things like that. Many things have issues with layers of UI overlapping in a broken looking way, and some UI elements like the missions screen are still unfinished/are minimally functional placeholders. So there is plenty to call bad, I think, although supposedly it was updated a bit in the newest patch.

@@OffyDGG Sure but "UI is bad" is unactionable nonsense, no matter how true it is. Can't do anything about that, except tell someone who says "I find it hard" the "advice" of "get good", which really doesn't help. This game does a lot of things. Therefore like ANYTHING that does a lot of things, it is complicated. There's no way to give Maya the MS Paint UI. People learn Maya's UI and then some complain when they face Blender calling Blender's UI "bad" or "hard to use", but the reverse happens too. Same for GIMP v Photoshop. The right hand pane didn't use to have the Information in it (that you complain is "obsuring and worthless") because it didn't exist and people complained, because they needed to have info for the ship (or its orders) AND "All my ships" because without it, they had to pop in and out of either view to see several ships, so it got changed so tat you could see the ship info on the right and all your ships on the left. This isn't telling you off, there isn't necessarily a way for you to know this if you didn't spend several hours looking at the changelogs or got it prior to its introduction in v5.0 But it does point out that things you say are "hard to learn" are in there because people found it harder to learn without it there. Imagine Elite Dangerous before limpets for rock collecting? Your tutorial mining ship with the drones was an L class miner, not an M class one. L class miners can't move quick enough, so they need drones to collect the bits, M class are "meant" to fly into those small bits to collect them in their tractor beam. As a PC you can press the O key to magnet them in, but NPCs can't make those keypresses. So the "problem" was this info wasn't presented you in the "correct way", but it was shown as an L class and the drill is an M class. THAT is shown. When you tried to buy drones, mining drones weren't part of the option. But you weren't expecting that. IIRC, it is in the manual too. And if they tried to fix it, it would be like teaching grandmas to suck eggs, if they stepped over the line and said it too many ways. So you HAVE to learn the UI. The only intuitive UI is the nipple, everything else is learned. All we can do is say what might make it easier to learn. But as the left pane shows, everyone has a different idea on how to do that, often contradictory. So sometimes our advice is ignored.

@@markhackett2302 It sounds like you're saying it used to be worse, so it's good that it improved. But still, saying 'it's bad' really is useful. Why? Because UI design is really hard to do from the 'inside'. Someone outside saying 'I wanted to do X but I couldn't work out how' gives clues about what info to show, and indeed what to NOT show. I would argue that the 'right panel' thing you are talking about, if I understood you right, is a perfect example of it being done wrong, whether it's 'better than nothing' or not. The reason is that information you don't need while doing certain things is always presented: the most obvious example is giving a ship an order, you first get the wrong tab and then the order tab itself has loads of clutter that almost makes it seem like it's the wrong tab for orders at first glance. It's *really* non-standard, so its not like photoshop user trying gimp, it's more like photoshop user being made to produce images using MS access or something. And it needn't be; even X3, which has really similar UI requirements, does it 'better' (i.e. easier to understand and use) than X4, for some reason (although I played with mods back then so not sure). All this stuff is from the perspective of new players. Unfortunately if you have been following the game for a long time, such opinions will just seem totally alien. But that is why they are valuable, contrary to your earlier point. Me saying 'I didn't get it' is potentially useful. But in this case it's just a first impressions rant, so it's not much more than a literal statement of my view.

With x4 I was just disappointed because I was a big x3 fan and somehow I didn't feel like things advanced with the series. Despite my complaining, I consider x4 and Dyson sphere project my favourite games of 2022.

Update: Boron is out !

You say 'started backwards', and set out that game plan like its intended, but the game doesn't make you do any of that. It's not like I wanted to have a bad time, is it? So it's a question for the devs: do they think the game only works/is fun if played a certain way, or in a certain order? Is what you said here the intentional gameplay experience? If so, they need to remove the open world aspect and force people to do it the fun way, problem solved. But that would suck, I think. I'd rather they go the other way: make it so different routes to success are somewhat balanced and viable, so people can do what they prefer and get whatever they want from the game. It seems like X4 would be a game like that, although maybe not in practice. Not what they are going for, but it's what I hoped for all the same.