Livestream 2: highways

[Nanook]

First of all, in addition to what Nanook and others have described, there is an added bonus to the use of highways vs acceleration gates, namely that they make it possible for you to get off mid travel so there is the possibility, for the player ship at least, to explore and get to places.....

The speed of travel along with the highway graphics inhibits a player's ability to even spot interesting things unless they're right by the highway. I'd say that exploration happens a lot less in Rebirth because of the highways. Personally I spent a lot more time exploring Toride and Cold Star systems because there were no highways..

I would argue that it's actually the distance between areas of interest that is the cause of exploration happening less... when you absolutely need a highway to get between them in any reasonable time, then the likelyhood of people going out of their way to explore the "in between" area by chance is very small. Also, if they do it a couple of times and find nothing, that will lead to them thinking that it's not worth the time to look at all in the "inbetween area".

It's not really exploration if it's the endpoints of highways, now is it? I personally explored Toride and Cold Star extensively just because there were no highways to lead me to 'areas of interest'. Exploration is all about discovering the unexpected in out of the way places, which highways do not encourage. As for players getting discouraged, that could be solved pretty easily by Egosoft and/or the game itself giving hints that there are cool things to find and see 'out there somewhere'.

[ezra-r]

By contrast EvE has an incredibly 'down to business' travel system with no highways just gates AND jump drives of many different types and applications that have detailed balancing factors in place to keep them for becoming OP or game breaking.

You forgot to mention EVE has Warp Drive. That in a sense , it is the alternative to a highway, you choose destination, activate warp, off you go at ultrahigh speed, non-stop.

There is more benefit in a highway compared to this type of Warp Drive, that is, with Egosoft highway you can stop at any point in the middle of the trip.

If I had to remove highways in favour of a warp drive, I would choose a warp drive that allows me to stop manually while warping.
--

An example of the warp drive I would prefer if you are interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_f3mWH ... u.be&t=150
(ahh, so many memories.. )

[Crellion]

By contrast EvE has an incredibly 'down to business' travel system with no highways just gates AND jump drives of many different types and applications that have detailed balancing factors in place to keep them for becoming OP or game breaking.

You forgot to mention EVE has Warp Drive. That in a sense , it is the alternative to a highway, you choose destination, activate warp, off you go at ultrahigh speed, non-stop.

There is more benefit in a highway compared to this type of Warp Drive, that is, with Egosoft highway you can stop at any point in the middle of the trip.

If I had to remove highways in favour of a warp drive, I would choose a warp drive that allows me to stop manually while warping.
--

An example of the warp drive I would prefer if you are interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_f3mWH ... u.be&t=150
(ahh, so many memories.. )

Well yes and no. Warp-drives are there simply because EvE chooses to encompass the entire solar system (i.e. many light years in 3Ds in each direction) instead of just a few grids stitched to each other like Rebirth. Essentially warpdrive is just like being able to use the X3 jump drive. Pretty much the same if you ignore PvP game play elements that are not of interest in X3 or X4.

So my post still holds true irrespective of the additional existence of warp drive in EvE.

One a more technical issue there are ways to jump out of warpdrive in EvE and with enough practice so accurately that people find grids a few hundred kms wide in a 20-30-40 light year journey without the benefit of a warp to bookmark (like marker or beacon).

But after all ... people are amazing

[gbjbaanb]

Just to complete my thoughts above, I sound a bit bitter because I fear Ego may have started with the wrong foot again.

They should have kept the newer better game engine and then started with all game design elements from X3-AP and then picked choice elements from Rebirth to incorporate. Instead they went the other way keeping the Rebirth game game design elements and looking to 'evolve/devolve' them back to X3 in some respects.

This tells me they may still be in denial as to how inferior a product Rebirth was to X3. I understand how natural this is. Rebirth is their latest and technically highest achievement. They will stand by this labor of love. It doesn't make it any less wrong though.

Amen. All the livestreams make me worry that this is going to be Rebirth+1 rather than a true X4 that would take as much gameplay features and concepts from X3 as possible. Highways, no JD, all point to them not realising this. Early days though, but I hope they're reading and really taking the time to consider what we're saying here.

[Observe]

I don't like local highways at all. To me, they have been the ruination of immersion in XR and I'm sad to hear they will persist into X4.

[Killjaeden]

It's not really exploration if it's the endpoints of highways, now is it? I personally explored Toride and Cold Star extensively just because there were no highways to lead me to 'areas of interest'. Exploration is all about discovering the unexpected in out of the way places, which highways do not encourage. As for players getting discouraged, that could be solved pretty easily by Egosoft and/or the game itself giving hints that there are cool things to find and see 'out there somewhere'.

You didnt get my point. If the travel distance between 2 points of interests is 100 flight hours in a straight line , vs. when it is 5min, how likely would you deviate from the straight line flightpath in the first case to explore when you could fly for 10 hours into a direction, that wouldnt get you closer to a known goal, and have a high likelyhood of not seeing or finding anything whatsoever?
With highways beeing the only method to travel fast, distances between two zones are effectively muuuuch larger, because when not using them you are significantly slower. Greater distances -> reduction of density -> exploration becomes much more flying and boredom and less finding. Unless you splatter random loot things all over the space, which would just get repetitive and meaningless after a while.

Or put simply -> faster travelspeed means exploration is more eventfull. Highways where introduced to be able to increase distances in the universe. So relative to the universes size, ships got slower (except when traveling on predefined paths aka highways). So this means only planned areas that where designed to be explored (highway-less areas in XR) are worth exploring. When it is obvious which areas are to be explored and which are not, it's pretty immersion breaking imo, as it's "gamey".

[Nanook]

...Highways where introduced to be able to increase distances in the universe.....

Doubtful. More likely, they were introduced to help eliminate collisions. You don't need highways to introduce high speeds and great distances. You just need a different propulsion system that allows the player to go in any direction at high speeds rather than restricting the high speeds to just a highway. Have you played Elite Dangerous? In-system travel uses something called 'cruise' to travel fast, and when you see something interesting, you drop out of cruise to 'impulse' speed. It's very similar to boost in XR. IMO, that's a system that allows much more freedom of movement.

[Sandalpocalypse]

Doubtful. More likely, they were introduced to help eliminate collisions. You don't need highways to introduce high speeds and great distances. You just need a different propulsion system that allows the player to go in any direction at high speeds rather than restricting the high speeds to just a highway. Have you played Elite Dangerous? In-system travel uses something called 'cruise' to travel fast, and when you see something interesting, you drop out of cruise to 'impulse' speed. It's very similar to boost in XR. IMO, that's a system that allows much more freedom of movement.

I'm pretty sure we're still going to have boost in x4. having different tiers of fast movement lets you create distinctions of desirability and distance between areas in systems and between different systems. It also gives structure to navigation; you can look around and see a highway nearby and know approximately where its going and where you are and how to get to where you want to without having to interact with the UI or a menu.

Supercruise is kinda garbage. I wish it wasnt. It puts you into an instance that painfully obviously starts up when you enter it, has highly predictable scripted random crap, and in all ways essentially puts a blatant noncontiguous break between grids in a system. It's far worse than EVE's implementation in that regard.

At least when Highways have random ships it's just window dressing...in ED its supposed to be content.../rant.

[spankahontis]

My only concern now is how the Capship will fly between sectors without JD?
Boosters are good for zone-to-zone, but might not be good sector-to-sector.

Unless only small ships (Fighters/Medium Traders) have boosters.
The Jumpdrives are replaced with boosters with enhanced speed, fast enough to cut sector travel in half?

IMO if found the highway idea total stupid. It gives the feeling of a car race game instead of a space sim. The (too much) clouds and other things give a air (plane) sim feeling.
Additional deep & most dark space got lost, so did the space feeling.

It would be much better to improve the booster (or have few types), maybe a way of fast / long term, but after start, bound to one direction, no way to change direction while boosting. Besides, the idea to need capital ships (to dock) to travel to far distance is not bad at all.

Jumps should be limited to special local installations, like gates or nav beacon. If you could simple jump for anywhere to anywhere, this would be too easy.

For XS ships that buzz around stations, they'd be too small to use jumpdrives and boosters. So they would need highways to get around.
To which fighters and larger vessels could travel where they like without needing highways (except superhighways, accelerators).

[Leszek]

For me, the highways completely destroyed the feeling of moving in space in the XR. The minimum distance from Earth to Mars is 56 million kilometres, and a maximum of 401 million. The construction of 56 million gates, in addition synchronized between the moving planets gives the impression of absurdity. The filling of a tens of millions of kilometres of tunnel, a swirling stream of energy, would probably require energy equal to the Sun's energy. In the X, distances are a thousand times smaller than in real space - this is OK, otherwise the game would be unplayable. The problem is that these glowing tubes make us aware of this, and our minds see the whole ecosystem as unbelievable.
Would not it be better to deprive these highways of visualization and leave only the gates at their ends? It would not change the game's functionality, but it would not ruin our experience.

[Skeeter]

Subspace lanes would be better than highways in normal space. Think of it like in voyager dragonsteeth episode using the subspace corridors system.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Drag ... _(episode)

So in x games you could have a station at say the south end of a system, it opens a portal and u go in u switch to subspace corridors so ur out of normal space, so u hide the lanes there so space looks empty and cool again. You travel quickly in the corridors like 5x speed, its like a river so theres a current u float along, u cant really steer much so enjoy the ride. You can exit at certain points inside like say a red bit coming up you hit exit and ur back in normal space, no shields cos thats the downside, shields dont work in corridors as a tradeoff for going faster. And then u just map the lanes and it gets u around the systems/universe.

Maybe egosoft can 8ntroduce wormholes thats fixed but make em rare to find and it lets a ship go from one side of universe to other, but again no shields so u take the risk to use it so u cant use it to invade.

You know, jumpdrive if ego just disabled weapons and shields when charging and jumping or do it after jump with a timer delay till u get em back, that would negate fleet wide invasion usage as ud die if u jumped into a bad hostile sector if u didnt have support already there that got there the slow way.

[gbjbaanb]

I agree, highways might be a game artifact to help the AI plot routes, which is fine, but there's no reason they have to exist as in-game entities that the player uses too. they could be invisible plots between areas that the AI uses, and you'd just see a load of ships moving in convoys instead - which you saw in X3 and it was pretty cool.

But it does destroy immersion if the highways are supposed to link planets together, planets that rotate around the sun at different rates so Mars and Earth can be quite close some times and then on the opposite sides of the star at other times. These highways must be super-stretchy!

Gates or some other type of portal make much more sense.

[Observe]

For me, the highways completely destroyed the feeling of moving in space in the XR. The minimum distance from Earth to Mars is 56 million kilometres, and a maximum of 401 million. The construction of 56 million gates, in addition synchronized between the moving planets gives the impression of absurdity. The filling of a tens of millions of kilometres of tunnel, a swirling stream of energy, would probably require energy equal to the Sun's energy.

I agree completely.

In the X, distances are a thousand times smaller than in real space - this is OK, otherwise the game would be unplayable.

I don't think that distances have to be small for play-ability.

Space is big and so should the feeling conveyed by a space game. Otherwise, it feels like an arcade game; as Rebirth does. There are several examples of space games designed around "real" distances and planetary orbits etc. Seems to me, "bigger" instead of "smaller" worlds/universe is what X4 needs to have, if it is going to compete with current and upcoming space games.

[UniTrader]

i can only tell for Albion, but when you say that the distances feel too small then you basically say that travelling through tubes is too fast - because the distance between the broken Moon and the Planet in Albion is on a pretty realistic scale. its roughly 300.000 km - similiar to the Earth-Moon System. i didnt check other systems regarding that but its pretty obvious that interplanetary travel was not the intention in the 4 original systems, because most of it is clearly set in the Region of a Planet and its moons, so bringing up the Distance between Earth and Mars for this is like comparing a Freight Drone with an Super Freighter....

[Killjaeden]

I can only tell for Albion, but when you say that the distances feel too small then you basically say that travelling through tubes is too fast - because the distance between the broken Moon and the Planet in Albion is on a pretty realistic scale. its roughly 300.000 km - similiar to the Earth-Moon System.

I came to the conclusion, that this whole "distance should be/not be realistic" is, boiled down, a moot point. Because in terms of usable space (space you actually can interact with feasably in the game) does not grow by spacing the planets further or closer. It doesnt matter if 10.000km or 1 million km. It's not usable for gameplay in meaning full ways.

Anything further than a 200km radius around the sector center in X3 for example was theoretically reachable, but nobody went there to achieve any real gameplay. People only did it to prove or find out what is beyond there (nothing) and to realize that it takes a bloody long time. And the same is certainly true for XR. The game size is determined by the distance between fast travel nodes, relative to ship speeds (including various modes), relative to the ship and station scale. Anything else is mostly irrelevant. Unless the space between fast travel nodes is so small that you could reach it without considerably accelerated travelspeed (factor of say less than 3 with current relative ship scales) in a couple of minutes/ tens of minutes. Second condition would be if there are real points of interests (missions, points of interactions etc) within that space. Think of freelancers universe and travel system setup.

Otherwise it's just filler, abitrary and theoretical space that has no inherent value for the gameplay itself. Maybe there is immersive and visual value - but it doesnt scale well at all. Making distance realistic doesnt make it significantly more immersive than having "just large" distances. And visually it would degrade the more realistic you get. For example would you not be able to see a neighbouring planet from the orbit of another (e.g. Earth to Mars) as anything but a tiny spec too unlikely to notice under most conditions.