I don't agree with the devs about universe size

[Warnoise]

In one of the recent videos where the devs addressed the complaints about universe size, they said that the X4 universe is the biggest so far because the sectors are bigger. Which translates to "players complains about the universe size are wrong"

Well, i disagree with the devs. When I play X3 or Xrebirth, i felt the universe was a lot bigger than the X4 one. The key word here "I felt". I am sure many players feel the same.

Why? it is simple. Because numbers don't translate to usage experience. For example, I show you 2 houses, one is 100m2 and other one is 80m2.
The 100m2 has pillars positioned in weird places which make the house feel smaller than the 80m2 one, thus many people will choose the 80m2 because they feel it is more spacious. Despite in numbers, the 100m2 one is bigger.

X4 is the same, the way the world is designed, make the universe feel smaller than X3 and Xrebirth. They said "the sectors are bigger"...and?

I mean some space games offer literally millions of sectors and zones with empty space. So "bigger" sectors doesn't add anything other than "flying in empty space" and most importantly it doesn't add anything to the gaming experience.

In X3 and Xrebirth, majority of sectors had a meaning, they had an addition to the gaming experience, their own design, their level of danger, etc...

In X4, you have some stations here and there....and that's it. There is no change between sectors or eve within the sector itself. You don't go "damn where the hell am i?" when you reach a certain part of the sector with changed background or swarming with strange enemies.

X4 is just big on paper, but in practice, it is smaller than X3 and Xrebirth. I blame all that on the art direction of Egosoft.

[SparvieroGed]

In one of the recent videos where the devs addressed the complaints about universe size, they said that the X4 universe is the biggest so far because the sectors are bigger. Which translates to "players complains about the universe size are wrong"

Well, i disagree with the devs. When I play X3 or Xrebirth, i felt the universe was a lot bigger than the X4 one. The key word here "I felt". I am sure many players feel the same.

Why? it is simple. Because numbers don't translate to usage experience. For example, I show you 2 houses, one is 100m2 and other one is 80m2.
The 100m2 has pillars positioned in weird places which make the house feel smaller than the 80m2 one, thus many people will choose the 80m2 because they feel it is more spacious. Despite in numbers, the 100m2 one is bigger.

X4 is the same, the way the world is designed, make the universe feel smaller than X3 and Xrebirth. They said "the sectors are bigger"...and?

I mean some space games offer literally millions of sectors and zones with empty space. So "bigger" sectors doesn't add anything other than "flying in empty space" and most importantly it doesn't add anything to the gaming experience.

In X3 and Xrebirth, majority of sectors had a meaning, they had an addition to the gaming experience, their own design, their level of danger, etc...

In X4, you have some stations here and there....and that's it. There is no change between sectors or eve within the sector itself. You don't go "damn where the hell am i?" when you reach a certain part of the sector with changed background or swarming with strange enemies.

X4 is just big on paper, but in practice, it is smaller than X3 and Xrebirth. I blame all that on the art direction of Egosoft.

I was thinking the same untill I didn't find today the sector's descriptions in game. Now that I'm learning the history behind the places...X4 Universe is starting to feel bigger for me.

[Arigon2001]

I completely agree with OP. However I am optimistic that in time we'll see plenty of expansion sectors opening up in addition to what the modding community adds to the experience. Ultimately I want to feel like I did in Albien Prelude. I still feel that the highway system should have never been kept in X4 either (just throwing that out there).

[SparvieroGed]

I completely agree with OP. However I am optimistic that in time we'll see plenty of expansion sectors opening up in addition to what the modding community adds to the experience. Ultimately I want to feel like I did in Albien Prelude. I still feel that the highway system should have never been kept in X4 either (just throwing that out there).

Highway/superhighway are the best thing happened to X games....they improve so much the level design. They were implement better in Rebirth. The big ring in X4 is a completly waste of the highway potential.

[LameFox]

It feels big if you fly through it... but, at the moment at least, there's not much point. Nothing out there to attack except the weird mixed ships that get transplanted near you. No need to go that far for resources (although they do exist pretty far out in some areas). And if there's anything worth scanning for out there, I've never found it in hours and hours of searching.

IMO the gates should have been further out, resource fields should be distinctly better out there (and, critically, the AI should be aware of this), pirate stations should be out there hiding from empire patrols which stick near the centre, and those anomalies should be more common and used as unofficial gates by pirates, xenon/kha'ak, and less-legal traders. Then perhaps it would start to feel alive and worth going to instead of everyone lingering in the middle.

Unfortunately I think a large part of why they linger in the middle, and why the game teleports ships at you, is that there just isn't much going on. The more I expand and place satellites the more the universe feels bare of life. I hope that can be improved but I'm concerned it may have been a performance-based limitation.

[werewolves?]

The universe is big, and will get bigger. Foundations is just the beginning.

[Socratatus]

Foundations- it`s in the name. clearly they intend to add a lot more to it.

I think they made a mistake adding that Space Highway. It makes the Universe seem smaller since it`s so easy to get anywhere now. Also teleport- I haven`t fully researched it,but it looks like that lets you get anywhere too eventually, I`m sure | won`t like it once I try it.

[myztkl-kev]

Foundations- it`s in the name. clearly they intend to add a lot more to it.

I think they made a mistake adding that Space Highway. It makes the Universe seem smaller since it`s so easy to get anywhere now. Also teleport- I haven`t fully researched it,but it looks like that lets you get anywhere too eventually, I`m sure | won`t like it once I try it.

The highway is basically just a more logical replacement for the jump drive, I really like it and the increase in pace it gives the game, once they start adding more sectors over time, the highway will be a godsend.

As for Teleport, it just teleports your person and nothing else. So you can swap ships or go to stations to buy blueprints and stuff in a hurry. Between that and the highway, jump drive is no longer needed. It's kinda nice actually, for me anyways.

[Bozz11]

I never understand why someone would put stations all around a sector and not just around the gates, is it not more effective than havin your stations 500km from the gates xD
The only reason would be for performance sake. xR was a bit more realistic on that part.

[Playbahnosh]

The reason sectors felt bigger in XR and X3 is because there was actual stuff in them, things to see, explore, interact with, etc. Bernd is actually lying, because X4's sectors are technically just as infinite as X3's were. Even back then you could just point your ship in a direction and keep flying forever, you won't bump into a wall. It's the exact same thing in X4, only now the sector map expands with you...uh, yay? The point is, there is no point in doing that, because what's the point of flying thousands of lightyears out of a sector if all you can find out there is...more empty vacuum? I tried doing it, and aside from a couple of factories just outside the edge, I found absolutely nothing further out there, just more space. In fact, exploration is even worse than in X3, because you don't have a jumpdrive anymore. The farther out you fly in a sector, it'll take exactly the same boring, tedious trek to get back from the middle of nowhere. If there was something, anything to see or do or find out there, it would be different, but now it's just a waste of time. It's the same exact issue I have with Elite Dangerous. It's really very commendable the game allows me to experience more of the big fat nothing, but I could easily accomplish the same thing by turning off my monitor, I don't need a $60 video game for that...

I never understand why someone would put stations all around a sector and not just around the gates, is it not more effective than havin your stations 500km from the gates xD
The only reason would be for performance sake. xR was a bit more realistic on that part.

It's actually in the lore, how the Teladi thought the same thing. They simply dragged the gates closer together in many sectors to cut down on commute and increase profitsssss. I always thought that was a nice bit of trivia.

[Ghalador]

There must be more to that statement. Sectors were more or less always huge. You could always reach the planets ... and crash into them.
He must mean something different. If Bernd says that the sectors are bigger he must mean the populated sectors - that there is more to be discovered than in X3, not just empty space.

Has anyone tried to actually land on a planet yet?

[Teleth]

Well this got long, but in regards to exploration and its mechanics I think Egosoft has done themselves a disservice, even though the game engine supports more than enough features to round this out.
I think one of the problems here is that there's no real reason to go outside of the default sectors area of influence:

No resources are scarce enough or deplete. It seems everything is readily available within the core systems, or at least this seems the case?
This means there are no economic benefits to going out into uncharted territory. Perhaps when AI saturates every asteroid - impossible given how many are in core sectors; reducing/exhausting these easy resources would greatly improve exploration rewards. This however means AI would need some method of finding new fields (without the player) and claiming them (preferably without opposition being able to just poach these locations immediately), alternatively it might be easier to have core-sector asteroids providing poor grade materials and not poor quantities. These would affect production speeds and lost materials and otherwise not be highly desirable, but useful as a last resort.
Perhaps sunlight/food production factors should be exponential as one progresses further away from the center of each system, so as to promote distant but profitable energy cell and other key production chains.

No substantial economy or micro-economies exist beyond the center of systems - there is no physical reason for them to exist anywhere but the highways. Xenon/Khaak juggernauts should be encroaching from the outside of nearly every system or their infrastructure should be being put in place to stage in-sector invasions instead of through gates to provide territorial pressure.
Or how about introducing two rare 'resources', green material and blue material. One provides materials for elite weapon/upgrade construction, the other provides materials for elite ship construction or armor. All of a sudden we have sensible faction wars over these ultimate resource patches in deep-space and everyone gets to enjoy a new late-game tier to the economy that doesn't pre-exist. What exactly do the X4 factions fight over right now, because I can't figure it out - is there no reason other than genocide? That doesn't make for good economic sense and certainly doesn't promote the player to participate in a senseless conflict that doesn't benefit anyone.

No missions ask you to explore these areas. No reconnaissance missions or reasons to light up these areas. No routine patrols to check for distant threats. Perhaps we could even have in-game highway/accelerator construction so we can actually _extend_ the economy to distant areas and actually build to improve the core systems, that would be interesting. Right now it seems we can only fill holes in the economy, most of which are caused not through player agency or AI conquest but bugs.

No indication that anything of interest exists outside of the center of the core systems. Egosoft aren't providing a carrot here, so it's not hard to see why everyone thinks the game is small and nothing is out there. The game ought to have a collection of deep-space objectives in each system. Put a star in the corner of each hex displaying remaining discoveries or exploration percentage of the systems. Give credits for exploring the unknown. Anything really; even the inhabitants of the X4 world aren't interested in exploration of their own world, they just seem to accept their tiny stretch of space, where they fight over nothing.

No long-range probes, how about some deployable missile probes and/or directional satellites to provide long-distance vision or even just text information. Perhaps probes that can travel for thousands of kilometers and give written reports instead of line of sight. Perhaps scientific reports that factions will pay for, for future mining or solar potential. They can report on asteroid densities or ship signatures or anomalies in the deep. Or it could report rare xenon clusters (protected of course, by a static elite fleet of various sizes) which must be destroyed and collecting X amount of items from here which can be crafted into a serious emp bomb to deal a serious blow or buff against the Xenon in core sectors.

This isn't Elite Dangerous exploration; there are no planets to survey, there is no sensible star-structure to this universe, nor do we have binary stars and quasars, no fuel mechanics, no one will pay the player for his/her time out there. We don't lose communication with the rest of the universe out there so there is no feeling of isolation and you can't do anything cool like create a new system. Building out in deep space with a fleet seems pointless (where it could potentially be very interesting).
This isn't EVE Online exploration; there are no deadspaces for interesting combat scenarios or wormholes that can effect our ship mechanics in different ways to create challenging and unique combat scenarios and provide unique loot. There are no small combat environments littered around or protected pockets of space with containers (i.e ammunition depots, ship graveyards, pirate hideouts with station turrets etc). The scanning mechanics in X4 are not very interesting either, there is no depth to them and not a lot of logic.

There just seems to be no incentives here for the player. We've been told again and again things are hidden out there, but there are no mechanics that facilitate going out there to look for things.
I feel like Egosoft has designed a really nice sandbox here but has added very little imagination and magic to it; this is most frustrating to see because it seems like this should be basically the best space game ever. As someone who writes their own space games, it seems they have squandered a great deal of potential because they have not thought about how players will connect to the game environment.

TL;DR
The game may have large sectors, possibly even with things out there, but the game provides absolutely no reason to go looking.

[SteveMill]

In one of the recent videos where the devs addressed the complaints about universe size, they said that the X4 universe is the biggest so far because the sectors are bigger. Which translates to "players complains about the universe size are wrong"

Well, i disagree with the devs. When I play X3 or Xrebirth, i felt the universe was a lot bigger than the X4 one. The key word here "I felt". I am sure many players feel the same.

Why? it is simple. Because numbers don't translate to usage experience. For example, I show you 2 houses, one is 100m2 and other one is 80m2.
The 100m2 has pillars positioned in weird places which make the house feel smaller than the 80m2 one, thus many people will choose the 80m2 because they feel it is more spacious. Despite in numbers, the 100m2 one is bigger.

X4 is the same, the way the world is designed, make the universe feel smaller than X3 and Xrebirth. They said "the sectors are bigger"...and?

I mean some space games offer literally millions of sectors and zones with empty space. So "bigger" sectors doesn't add anything other than "flying in empty space" and most importantly it doesn't add anything to the gaming experience.

In X3 and Xrebirth, majority of sectors had a meaning, they had an addition to the gaming experience, their own design, their level of danger, etc...

In X4, you have some stations here and there....and that's it. There is no change between sectors or eve within the sector itself. You don't go "damn where the hell am i?" when you reach a certain part of the sector with changed background or swarming with strange enemies.

X4 is just big on paper, but in practice, it is smaller than X3 and Xrebirth. I blame all that on the art direction of Egosoft.

Agreed. It feels small compared to the other real X games because those universes were full of gameplay. Just finding and uncovering distant sectors was fun for me in a way that hopping on a Magic Space Road and arriving 90 seconds later isn’t. And this exploring uncovered new economic opportunities. It uncovered new threats and requiring us to defend strategic choke points against Terran or Xenon incursions.

X4 sectors may be huge but outside of the core they are empty, both of gameplay and things. As a player X4 just feels compressed regardless of the size it might be on paper.

Even so, once it reaches Release State some time down the road I still believe it’ll become a great game in its own right.

[SteveMill]

Foundations- it`s in the name. clearly they intend to add a lot more to it.

I think they made a mistake adding that Space Highway. It makes the Universe seem smaller since it`s so easy to get anywhere now. Also teleport- I haven`t fully researched it,but it looks like that lets you get anywhere too eventually, I`m sure | won`t like it once I try it.

Yea, you probably won’t. Being able to tele-presence to a ship is onr thing, being able to just pop across the universe and pick up some crafting ingredients or hand in a mission is another.

This unique ability gained from your Magic Castle turns the player into some sort of omnipresent Super Being. Along with Magic Space Roads it doesn’t feel right. Makes the universe really small.

[dholmstr]

I find this abit funny. First people complained about X:R didin't have the sectors like X3 to explore and the vastness, even tough you could fly out as far as you wanted (in both games). X:R was also to cramped with station and tight (bad for a even crappier autopillok) according to players. Now X4 has the space to fill. Station far apart, so far that people complain it's empty. It's space what did you expect?
You are right tou there is little to no point going "out there". And why should it? It's still just empty space. Look at the space between Earth and the moon, 300k km of nothing but some damn crappy mini satelites.
Were the systems more unique in X:R, yes imo. Were the systems more unique in X3...meeeh not really they were as much bland as right now.
And are you guys comparing X3 vanilla or TC with 50 updates and some addons against X4? I'm not saying X4 could not have abit more, it really should

[csaba]

Totallly agree.

I have been following the asteroid trails but that’s about it and after the 5th trail ending in nothing you start to loose hope. Uneventful 2000 kms of some rocks and dust

Aside from asteroid trails the only thing you can do is send your ships on exploration. However they don’t mark anything on the map. At best they call in that they found an abandoned ship. This is an issue as some things like wrecks only show up in active radar. All in all we need better exploration tools.


A counter as you said would be great. Could be connected to some scan data.

[Ghalador]

Well, to be completely fair, a station 280000 km out would be screwed. You wouldn't even want your traders to trade with them, taking 2 days or so to reach.
They would have to pay ridiculous prices for the goods. IF there is anything out there it's not worth it. You don't have the means to make anything out of it.

[Teleth]

Well, to be completely fair, a station 280000 km out would be screwed. You wouldn't even want your traders to trade with them, taking 2 days or so to reach.
They would have to pay ridiculous prices for the goods. IF there is anything out there it's not worth it. You don't have the means to make anything out of it.

What if said things were the only way to produce superior equipment and ships or advanced capital weaponry? On that note, it'd be nice if we had long distance convoy fleets, although I'm not sure X4 traders understand time investment cost.

[Arghan]

I find this abit funny. First people complained about X:R didin't have the sectors like X3 to explore and the vastness, even tough you could fly out as far as you wanted (in both games). X:R was also to cramped with station and tight (bad for a even crappier autopillok) according to players. Now X4 has the space to fill. Station far apart, so far that people complain it's empty. It's space what did you expect?
You are right tou there is little to no point going "out there". And why should it? It's still just empty space. Look at the space between Earth and the moon, 300k km of nothing but some damn crappy mini satelites.
Were the systems more unique in X:R, yes imo. Were the systems more unique in X3...meeeh not really they were as much bland as right now.
And are you guys comparing X3 vanilla or TC with 50 updates and some addons against X4? I'm not saying X4 could not have abit more, it really should

Actually we complain because there is no reason to go there including lack of "because i need to get from A to B". Its not even empty space you don't have to even cross, its empty space which when deleted I would not notice (with exception of my miners probably complaining about lack of minerals - but this could just be resolved by multiple solutions).

There is nothing there. No gates, no hidden accelerators, no anomalies (afaik) nothing. If i would go up there and for some reason game decided that I no longer move, until i would open a map i would not even notice.

Hide some gates out there (for example to xenos space), hide some anomalies, hide some exists out of xenos space out there, hide some content, anything.


Its even worse than No man sky "vastness". No man sky has something beside "space" to fill it and with a bit of (okey, tone of) luck you can find something interesting. We have nothing really.

Elite has planet scanning. Elite has cash for exploration (benefit and reason to go there). Even if 90% of star systems are the same boring stuff, you have a chance of finding something (not better than winning in nation wide lottery, but it exist). We got empty space.

[Chris0132]

There's significantly more weird stuff to find in the far corners of sectors in X4 than there has ever been in previous X games.

But... no there's nothing game changing out there. That isn't how X games work. If you want random novel things to find, well, there's quite a few of those scattered around and some of them can make you money too. But there's never going to be hidden routes to places or lost sectors because the AI can find those too and you will notice the traffic leading to them.

But if you want weird things to look at, there's quite a few of those in the remote sectors in X4, and there's data vaults to find and collect money from, the occasional rare pirate station to find. If you haven't found any of that then your problem is more likely that you aren't looking far enough.

The only thing they could put there is more empty sectors for the player to find, but if that's what you're unhappy about then, well, I dunno what you want?