Mokotow posted:

After a day or so I guess I can attempt a small trip report, prefacing with the answer to the standard "should I buy it?" question.

- If you've been around the block with X and have enjoyed your time with the series before, despite the problems (ignoring Rebirth), this is a no brainer and just go ahead and buy buy buy.
- If you've played X before, but found it frustrating and the jank pissed you off, stay away for a few months - there's some time to go here before we get to TC/AP level of polish.
- If you've never played the X series before, but want something fun and easy to get in and do pew pew, don't get it now - you're going to burn out on the jank and the incomprehensible universe and systems you're given.
- If you've never played the X series before, but you're fine with learning a million systems and exploring an in-game universe that'll potentially keep you busy for a few hundred hours, wait a few weeks.

Even though I've played all the X games, I found the first few hours fantastically straining. Since I only briefly played the previous entry, I struggled in recognizing with what is what, as there's no denying that Reunion was a strong base with TC and AB stuff added on top of it. It's certainly a confusing mess at times, but holy poo poo, does it have potential for the next few years to keep us busy. The interface in particular seems like a prototype more than anything else - the functionality hidden within gives a lot of ability to control anything from small to large empires, but the current visuals obfuscate everything to a degree that I fear most people will bounce off.

After a dozen hours of playing, I'm still looking for a plot, other than the Player HQ, and with the Encyclopeadia empty on most topics, there's a lot of information missing and thus getting into the universe is a bit challenging. Still, the new world, highways, sectors and races have a degree of familiarity that make finding your way around much easier. I pity anyone coming in hot, though. The world is pretty great, though, and even the station walking kinda makes sense and works, although I do hope future stations will become more unique and perhaps vary in sizes, layouts and character. Stylistically, it's no Mass Effect or E:D, but it also has enough elements from both worlds that it stands on its own. The ship design in particular stands out.

Gameplay-wise, the amount of stuff taken from E:D is marvelous, from the docking, to some of the combat dynamics and interface, and there's no shame in that. Too bad Frontier Developments wouldn't do it the other way around. Conversely, the systems in X4 feel small, but perhaps this is something Egosoft finally stopped obfuscating - if you look into system descriptions, they actually list low populations (in the few thousands range) and I suspect they might be actual numbers derrived from station and ship crews.

I tried on a keyboard and mouse, HOTAS and gamepad setups and found the HOTAS + keyboard and mouse at hand the best, though the mouse+keyboard option is the most accessible and works out of the box for anyone. The gamepad option, while great on paper, seems to be not fully there, as assigning button combinations, at least on Xbox One controller, didn't work, which left me with too few buttons to competently get around.

Performance-wise, with an i7 6700k and GTX 980, I've had no problems so far and in this regard, at least for me, this is the most stable X release in ages, from the technical standpoint.