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Siets posted:So I'm trying to understand the X games and their mechanism of travel and exploration. Sounds like X1-X3 used jump gates that took you to big system bubbles Just a straight up instance. The entire map was a 2D grid, and you'd move NWSE if a gate existed or not. Gates were usually around 20-30km apart, so it wasn't a lot of space, but you could nip outside of the 'nominal area'. They tend to hide things outside of scanner range.  This is six sectors from the X3:AP map. Siets posted:Then in X: Rebirth, they did some weird highway thing instead of the gates? What is the functional difference here? There are sectors joined by gates and highways. Sectors contain a bunch of zones connected by highways. Sectors are largely contigious, so you can drop out pretty much anywhere, but there's a lot of nothing between the zones that are populated. You can pretty much dip into a highway anywhere too, as they're a big yellow tube going through the zone. The highways are curved; in some cases entirely bent - Tip for the people playing rebirth at the moment; turn off the mouse steering before hitting the highway and strafe around inside the tube.  To illustrate: The blue things are zones, the yellow is the highway, including direction. The blue lines are sector travel highways. Zones themselves feel around 30-40km across, but they're less littered than X3. Hav fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Oct 8, 2018 |
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Oct 8, 2018 21:04
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It's worth noting that the eastern edge of the map in X3 did get really weird with jump gate connections and there were a few that went massive distances and connected back to other areas, but yes for the most part the western edge was a straight grid (that being the oldest part, inheriting from older games) And let's not get started with the nonsense you could pull with the gate hub. One of the plots gave you control of an ancient gigantic space station with like six gates in it, which you could connect between any other gates on the network, basically allowing you to superposition the hub sector between any three pairs of sectors on the map.
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Oct 8, 2018 21:10
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I think these guys blew it with rebirth, know it, and now they are going back to the well. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just upgrade the graphics and increment the number.
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Oct 8, 2018 21:12
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They're very specifically not doing that though, Rebirth and the engine rewrite and the mechanics in it are clearly serving as the foundation for, uh, foundations. A lot of the stuff you can see in the trailers is using mechanics and tech developed for Rebirth, and they've said as much in interviews. The station editor for example is using the station tech present in Rebirth, just with more customizability and a much better UI. If X3 needed anything it wasn't better graphics, the UI was woefully inadequate for the kind of things you wanted to do in the game and I'm glad they took it to bits and seem to have made some big improvements to it in X4. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Oct 8, 2018 |
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Oct 8, 2018 21:15
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I always found the space-empire part of X3 to be my favorite part. I think I am a Teladi at heart, but I always found myself getting Argon rep for those sweet OTAS ships. Mainly the mistral, which was my automated trader of choice. The Boreas always had a special place in my hanger too, even after the nerf. Complex building in X3 was a giant pain in the butt without mods though. I once built a giant modless complex in Antigone Memorial, and the mess of tubes made being in the sector terrible. Just glancing at it slowed the game down to a crawl. Complex cleaner was one of my favorite mods, at least before LU became popular. Where did everybody like to build in X3? I typically found I would start with something like an an energy-input 1 MJ shield complex in power circle. It is safe in the middle of Argon core space, and has a lot of SPPs for energy cells. 1 MJ shields are easy to move, and have one of the better returns on investment. http://grangegame.co.uk/x3tcocc.html?factories=s1m,Argon,S,5;cb,Argon,L,1;cr,Argon,L,1;om,Argon,L,1,18;om,Argon,L,1,8&wares=ore,111,145,true I would usually build a big energy-input space weed complex in ministry of finance, even though the return isn't quite as good at 1 MJ shields. I feel like I need to give in to my teladi nature though. Ministry of finance also has a few nice SPPs to help fuel a complex. Once I had enough money to consider building closed loop complexes (SPPs are expensive!), I usually ended up in Antigone Memorial. I also had a fondness for being friendly to the Yaki, and setting up around Savage Spur.
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Oct 8, 2018 22:06
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoYQ91mjM9k mmm
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Oct 8, 2018 22:18
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I always used to like setting up in that little cluster of 3 unknown/uninhabited sectors in the southeast corner. Really liked having my own space. Dump a load of lasertowers on the gate and have fun. Really hope there'll be spaces like that in X4.
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Oct 8, 2018 23:13
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Filthy Monkey posted:I always found the space-empire part of X3 to be my favorite part. I think I am a Teladi at heart, but I always found myself getting Argon rep for those sweet OTAS ships. Mainly the mistral, which was my automated trader of choice. The Boreas always had a special place in my hanger too, even after the nerf. I set up in the asteroid belt near Argon Prime because I wanted an asteroid base but with all the salvage mods and stuff it was small change compared to war profiteering in the border sectors. I never put too much effort into it beyond learning the systems because its fun due to that 1 day turn around in profitability though.
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Oct 9, 2018 03:13
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I'm actually glad Rebirth didn't kill the company. Rebirth may have been hot garbage, but the X3 series scratches that certain itch the rest of the space games don't even come close to reaching.
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Oct 9, 2018 15:01
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OwlFancier posted:the UI was woefully inadequate for the kind of things you wanted to do in the game The first release of the game had all the 'big' screens come up between you and boob window, and it was atrocious. First thing they did was decouple the screens from the 'immersion' of having a big screen TV between you and the co-pilot. Between that and the two different radials for abilities and 'stuff', and it's fairly obvious how it was going. All of the old UI is still in place, but radials don't really work in this context (as well as say, Spider-mans gadget radial). I don't know if I have a mod in place, or they revived the 'sidebar', but the beauty of that thing was you could nail the menu navigation to 'enter-7-1' to hit a specific menu. Or use a POV hat. It's really amazing how they made the UI worse, but it seems to have stabilized a _lot_ since release. Some of it is still janky as all hell, but it has a weird charm. I like the scale shift towards the bigger items, and the highways _work_ (although nobody could fixing the music sample in highways?), so I'm very hopeful for Foundations.
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Oct 9, 2018 15:09
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Obtuse as it is sometimes, I really like Elite Dangerous’s UI. Looking at different parts of the ship to actually control the ship is really immersive and makes me feel like I’m actually flying a space ship rather than accessing some taped-on-top operating system that allows me to manipulate values of code in the game’s memory. I personally hope that’s the direction they take.
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Oct 9, 2018 16:53
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Hav posted:The first release of the game had all the 'big' screens come up between you and boob window, and it was atrocious. First thing they did was decouple the screens from the 'immersion' of having a big screen TV between you and the co-pilot. They did, I think, put the sidebar back in. I still don't particularly like it though and the whole thing is just sluggish to control. The X4 stuff looks much more like X3 but just... better, and fullscreen too which is a godsend.
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Oct 9, 2018 17:25
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I'm super hopeful about X4 making the desire to switch from puttering around scrounging for cash and parts, to factory owner (so you can BUILD your own parts) a lot more intuitive. The two extremes you normally seem to hear about are "You get ONE ship (and some AI wingmates if you are lucky). Do all your trading personally" or "Space industry throws capital ships at eachother". So I always found it interesting that what most would consider X3's "Midgame". Stuff like a Corvette alongside an MT loaded with your favorite fighters, as automation deals with that whole boring trade thing for you, to be a scale you don't hear about as much. Because I just really love the idea of bargain bin star fox plus corvette, funded by local space business.
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Oct 9, 2018 18:46
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If they're keeping the artifact stuff from X3 Rebirth then chances are you can find some super rare engines and poo poo for your personal small ship, which make it more competitive than other ships, so it should allow you personally more fiat in what to fly. Especially if you can just dock everything on your capital ship and take it off again when you want to do something in the area you're in. The docking stuff makes it seem more like larger ships serve as bases for smaller ships which is a nice way to do it. Also I gather that stations can be refitted to different production runs, so that should definitely help with the station founding part of the game.
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Oct 9, 2018 18:49
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I keep reading the thread titles as 'Not another Rebirth', like everyone is whining that they're doing a second Rebirth as X4. Which I guess is partially accurate? As for me, if I can eventually roll into Kingdom's End and listen to the sector's awesome music, GOTY all years. Filthy Monkey posted:
Same. My computer was good enough at the time to minimize the slowdown, but my organization skills are poor and the mess of tubes straight out blocked up the parking lot. It made every trip into the sector wild and exciting and I think I died a few times to the tubes.
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Oct 9, 2018 22:48
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Are there any comments from beta testers for X4 about the state of the game compared to Rebirth or X3?
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Oct 11, 2018 02:42
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As far as I'm aware there are no public beta testers. I don't think egosoft has ever run open betas.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Oct 11, 2018 |
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Oct 11, 2018 02:50
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Do not preorder this game Saw the trailer on youtube just now, took me by surprise. I may buy this a month or so after release once the honeymoon phase is over, God knows I want it to be good, but, you know, Rebirth.
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Oct 11, 2018 17:40
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metasynthetic posted:Do not preorder this game Counterpoint, preorder this game so they have money to make it good before release, instead of two years later. Nah just kidding, I have high hopes but not preorder-level high hopes.
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Oct 11, 2018 17:48
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metasynthetic posted:Do not preorder this game Your logic is meaningless before my thirst for disappointment.
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Oct 12, 2018 00:50
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I have preordered this game I will either be very happy or very disappointed.
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Oct 12, 2018 01:08
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I figure that it'll probably be a mess at first no matter what, but hopefully patching fixes the worst bits. Also that they learn how to make a UI that doesn't make me cry blood.
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Oct 12, 2018 01:09
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How did this fly under my radar for so long? Looks amazing, even though I'm jaded from Rebirth I can't imagine them loving it up that badly with what they've shown so far. X2 & X3 were always too obtuse. I enjoyed Elite Dangerous but it was just a trucking sim and I wanted more agency. Maybe this game will pull it off.
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Oct 12, 2018 03:21
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Go ahead and pre-order this game because Steam lets you refund it within 2 hours. So you know, just do that if it's a broken mess.
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Oct 12, 2018 04:12
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It being an X game, you won't really know that for about 20+ hours
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Oct 12, 2018 06:08
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I follow the X series from afar, so I really don't get at all the backlash to an entire company over one stinker game Every series over 3 games has had a dud. What is it about Rebirth that causes such hatred or distrust?
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Oct 12, 2018 18:41
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It was completely broken and a gigantic step backwards from X3 in every single way. All of the depth and complexity was removed in favor of making Rebirth a shallow game with no interesting content or goals to set for yourself. It was just a soulless empty universe where you could only fly one ugly ship.
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Oct 12, 2018 18:44
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It was when they stopped using the same engine (and most of the content) they'd used for their past three games (all titled X3:something) and seemingly decided to restart from scratch, necessitating the recreation of basically all their assets and technology. Because X3 was showing its age and still doesn't do a lot of things very well, it just does them when nobody else does them at all, for the most part. This however took a very long time and a lot of work and I suspect they knew they couldn't do it all at once, so instead they released X Rebirth which, in a major departure from X3, has an extremely different focus being much more narrative driven. Now, X games do have narratives but the last two games had the narrative be entirely optional, just picked up as a questline in the world but not something you're really tied into, it was a plot within a sandbox, not the other way around. X Rebirth is the other way around, the plot is necessary to unlock the sandbox elements. This perhaps bears more relation to X3 Reunion and possibly X Beyond The Frontier, the first game they made in the series, which also had only one ship, but that was a long time ago and I've never played it. If you liked the later X3 games and wanted more then Rebirth would not have filled that role. It clearly had much of the technical foundation for the systems being displayed much more appealingly in the X4 trailers, station building for example being much better simulated but far less customizable in Rebirth than in X3, while X4 seemingly adds the necessary interfaces and versatility to the underlying simulation to faciltate X3-like custom construction, but infinitely better visualized and simulated than it could ever have been in X3, which was notoriously fiddly and clunky if you wanted to build large space station complexes. The main issues I would identify with Rebirth was that it traded on the X name which is probably not a very good practice from X3, because people will reasonably expect more of a similarity between the two and I don't think the difference was very well communicated before launch. Also Rebirth was very buggy on launch but this is not actually unusual for X games, they all are, even the ones that were iterations on basically the previous game with extra stuff bolted on. They do, however, invariably receive good support afterwards and this is no different for Rebirth, it got a huge number of patches and (some free) expansions which I think would probably make it a quite good space story shooty X-flavoured byproduct game. I enjoyed my run through it though I don't want to play it again because it is quite narratively driven and the strength of X gameplay was never in its basic combat mechanics, it always relied fairly heavily on the empire progression to give you the impetus, and that isn't super enjoyable in Rebirth. Either way this appears to have very much soured a lot of people's view of the game, possibly because a not insigificant number may have joined the series midway through TC/AP which were the later stages of X3 development and less buggy/more content packed than the earlier offerings. So to end up seemingly back at square one for no reason is an understandably unpleasant experience. Rebirth was and is a very significant step forward technically for the X series, but the gameplay built on top of those technical features was not really comparable with the previous installment either tonally or quantitatively. There's less of it and it's not leaning on the same things that X3 does. X4 is clearly built on that technical foundation just by looking at it and how some of the interfaces are set up, but they appear to have leaned in quite heavily to expanding the gameplay in more of an X3-ish way. I'm hopeful that it does well enough to see more content because content is really the thing that X3 had that the new engine games simply can't replicate, because it just requires time, and games art especially takes a lot of time nowadays. Honestly I think some of the vitriol is excessive and a lot of people didn't like their first impression with the game and so wrote it off without really looking at it. Which is fair enough, but I don't think it leads to an accurate impression or understanding of what the game actually was, what was actually in there, because there really was a bunch of good technical changes that would have been incredible to have in X3, but which were part and parcel of the engine rewrite. The changes shown from Rebirth to X4 are all, I think, very much in the right direction even coming from X3. Complex building looks better than I could ever have hoped for in an X game and the interface generally looks vastly improved. The game (and this was present in rebirth too) has a much better sense of scale and environment than X3 does because it can actually do dense areas as well as big open empty space, creating both a very nice visual effect and great contrast too. Given how much of your time in X3 was spent staring at menus, I think the visual and scale changes really help to enhance that because just looking at the stuff you built is a kind of important thing for the game to make fun, cos you're gonna be doing it a lot. I also very much liked the later additions to Rebirth in the form of finding rare poo poo in space you can't just buy. It makes exploring actually different and interesting and gives you rewards you can't get otherwise. The reason I stopped playing X3 is because while it's the only thing that does what it does, as I said earlier, it doesn't actually do a lot of it very well. Building stations involves manually setting their X/Y location using orthographic views which makes even just locating a station somewhere specific, extremely difficult. There is a loving art to making passable looking complexes and it's all down to knowing the idiosycracies of the way they're connected and being able to master the absolutely terrible interface for doing it. I'm hopeful for a game that takes the things I liked doing in X3 and makes doing them, not an utter loving chore. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Oct 12, 2018 |
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Oct 12, 2018 19:32
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Honestly the only reason I never bought Rebirth is because you were stuck in one ship, which in itself was fine, but as I understand it for some reason it's called the Skunk. Why would I limit myself to a ship named that? It's really called something like the Pride of Albion or something like that but whyyyy would you nickname it the Skunk? It didn't help that the first mod I heard coming out for Rebirth was one that painted some skunk furry on the side of the ship. At least I think that was a mod.
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Oct 12, 2018 20:05
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Nnnno that's actually the default nose art afaik. Though you may have found a mod that makes it a bigger titty skunk furry.
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Oct 12, 2018 20:10
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 Why, X? (No I've heard of no such mod, thankfully)
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Oct 12, 2018 20:18
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The default art kind of fits with it being some clapped out old shitbox you literally find drifting at the start of the game. It's basically a cartoon skunk crossed with an old bomber pin up and fits with the really worn out hull texture. I'm sure someone's made a version with half a dozen extra tits and a giant dong though because it's not a videogame if someone hasn't done that.
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Oct 12, 2018 20:20
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X Rebirth was an anomaly for modding, the first mods for it was one that removed the furbait nose art and to remove your copilot's boob window. Usually the first mods for games are ones that make those things even MORE deviant!
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Oct 12, 2018 20:41
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Rebirth was both very bad and incredibly buggy at release. I did my damndest to enjoy it, but I hit a showstopper bug which made it impossible to progress the storyline. Given that it was clear the design direction of the game was not only a huge departure from X3, but not at all appealing to me on its own merits, I had no interest in waiting around to give it a second chance. I say this as someone who enjoyed No Man's Sky (finally) after the big update this year. Saying 'well Rebirth paved the way for X4's engine' doesn't make it OK in my mind. I'll buy X4 if it can live up to the series' promise, because Egosoft are a unique developer and I'm willing to support that - but only after they deliver a quality product. They squandered their goodwill with Rebirth.
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Oct 12, 2018 21:50
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While buying or not buying the game is entirely your choice, saying you don't like X rebirth but do like No Man's Sky of all things is an incredibly strange position. Rebirth may be quite shallow but it's not that loving bad jesus. If I had to describe Rebirth in terms of NMS it would be "Like if NMS had actual gameplay and better art and story direction." OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Oct 12, 2018 |
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Oct 12, 2018 23:11
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Airspace posted:Honestly the only reason I never bought Rebirth is because you were stuck in one ship, which in itself was fine, but as I understand it for some reason it's called the Skunk. Why would I limit myself to a ship named that? It's really called something like the Pride of Albion or something like that but whyyyy would you nickname it the Skunk? I always assumed it was an aircraft R&D reference, especially since the Skunk was supposed to be a unique prototype before being lost.
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Oct 12, 2018 23:54
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OwlFancier posted:It's basically a cartoon skunk crossed with an old bomber pin up and fits with the really worn out hull texture. I think the argument made when it came out was that it was indeed supposed to be a straight-up WW2 bomber nose art homage; but while cartoon animals would've no doubt been a common theme, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I'm pretty sure bomber crews never actually had sexed-up furry gals on the front of their planes.
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Oct 13, 2018 07:52
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Drunk in Space posted:I think the argument made when it came out was that it was indeed supposed to be a straight-up WW2 bomber nose art homage; but while cartoon animals would've no doubt been a common theme, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I'm pretty sure bomber crews never actually had sexed-up furry gals on the front of their planes. Only because furries weren't a thing back then. Don't give pilots too much credit.
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Oct 13, 2018 10:36
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I say compromise and wait like a week before buying so you know if the bugs are "carriers maneuver like fighters" bad or if it's "saving your game deletes your Documents folder" bad. a week's not gonna hurt Egosoft's check
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Oct 13, 2018 10:57
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Conskill posted:I always assumed it was an aircraft R&D reference, especially since the Skunk was supposed to be a unique prototype before being lost. Nah they play off the joke as it was originally named the Pride of Albion and someone renamed it in the computer because it smelled bad. Like the devs were oddly excited about the ship being garbage.
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Oct 13, 2018 11:01
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