Did Egosoft miss what the fans wanted?

[[FFCW]Urizen]

With regards to the Terran Gates. Wasn´t the Hub necessary to connect these two? Something the Terrans couldn´t do? And aren´t these gates based on the designs of the ancients? Just like the one the Paranid built?

[Nanook]

The Hub? No, that came well after. The Terrans built their first two gates leading up to the original game X-BTF. In fact, the destroyed gate in Brennan's Triumph was one of the original two created by Earth. The other one in Sol system was destroyed by the Terrans after the Xenon were lured away from Earth and into what's now the X-Universe. The Hub itself was supposedly a Xenon construct, so they had mastered gate technology, as well.

[X2-Illuminatus]

With regards to the Terran Gates. Wasn´t the Hub necessary to connect these two? Something the Terrans couldn´t do? And aren´t these gates based on the designs of the ancients? Just like the one the Paranid built?

No, according to the X lore, the Terrans managed to build their own two working gates even before they knew about / found any of the Ancient Gates.
The HUB was only required in the Aldrin missions of X3TC to rearrange Gate connections.

Besides, jump drive technology was first invented by the Xenon and adapted by the Terrans in the time of X-BTF. There's no lore that I know of that says the ancients/Sohnen can prevent jump drive use without turning off the gates. Even then, the Terrans have their own version of the gate unrelated to the others, and they also have jump beacon technology that doesn't rely on gates. Not to mention the UFJD tech that needs neither. IMO, there's no justification for eliminating jump drives in the X Universe, other than developer whim.

Keep in mind though that the Terrans only built a few prototypes of the Jumpdrive, which they never managed to get working properly. (Kyle Brennan stranded in the X-Universe due to a malfunctioning jumpdrive prototype. The version of the UFJD we learn about in X3TC/AP is also far from perfect.) And then Terran Gates and Jump beacons would still have to be manually placed. How do you do that, if you only have conventional drives at hand or jumpdrives where you cannot be sure where they bring you? Also when the gates shutdown Terrans were politcially isolated from the Community of Planets and just took a big hit in the Argon/Terran war, with a lot of ships still being scattered around the universe. So it's doubtful whether they would really be able and willing to invest their resources into technologies to connect with the other races again. Especially considering that they lived quite peacefully for almost 800 years after the first Terraformer war. While the 10 to 20 years they had contact to the Community of Planets saw one of the biggest conflicts/wars they were ever involved in.

[[FFCW]Urizen]

Ok, never played X-BtF, started out on X3R. Thx for the info.

[Requiemfang]

Keep in mind though that the Terrans only built a few prototypes of the Jumpdrive, which they never managed to get working properly. (Kyle Brennan stranded in the X-Universe due to a malfunctioning jumpdrive prototype. The version of the UFJD we learn about in X3TC/AP is also far from perfect.) And then Terran Gates and Jump beacons would still have to be manually placed. How do you do that, if you only have conventional drives at hand or jumpdrives where you cannot be sure where they bring you? Also when the gates shutdown Terrans were politcially isolated from the Community of Planets and just took a big hit in the Argon/Terran war, with a lot of ships still being scattered around the universe. So it's doubtful whether they would really be able and willing to invest their resources into technologies to connect with the other races again. Especially considering that they lived quite peacefully for almost 800 years after the first Terraformer war. While the 10 to 20 years they had contact to the Community of Planets saw one of the biggest conflicts/wars they were ever involved in.

One of the reasons for the Terran Conflict was because of how Xenophobic the Terrans were. Basically the Terrans brought the conflict upon themselves. Same thing happened with the Terraformer War, since they cut corners when they wrote the shutdown code.

[Nanook]

...
Keep in mind though that the Terrans only built a few prototypes of the Jumpdrive, which they never managed to get working properly. (Kyle Brennan stranded in the X-Universe due to a malfunctioning jumpdrive prototype. The version of the UFJD we learn about in X3TC/AP is also far from perfect.)

Except that Kyle Brennan and his Terracorp, along with the Goner's help, built a successful jumpdrive that could target the wormholes at the gates as well as jump beacons (most likely as a result of further research into the UFJD.

And then Terran Gates and Jump beacons would still have to be manually placed. How do you do that, if you only have conventional drives at hand or jumpdrives where you cannot be sure where they bring you?

Well, the Terrans did it originally by towing a gate from Earth to Alpha Centauri (currently known as Brennan's Triumph). They could also take jump beacons with them into UFJD space and use stellar navigation techniques to determine where they were. Eventually, they should be able to figure out where they were in the galaxy and start 'connecting the dots'.

Also when the gates shutdown Terrans were politcially isolated from the Community of Planets and just took a big hit in the Argon/Terran war, with a lot of ships still being scattered around the universe. So it's doubtful whether they would really be able and willing to invest their resources into technologies to connect with the other races again....

Except that they'd probably want to connect to the Aldrin system, at the very least, which requires gates, don't you think?

[Lord Dakier]

The only people I have seen complaining are the ones who want to have X3 (or X2) all over again but better but the same but better, yet the same. You can see this with a lot of products, including Amazon ratings talking about how much better the fromer gen product is.

Nostalgia is not your friend.
I hope their publisher allows them early access, the only way we could legitimately judge the game before it is too late.

Building on something that made a company successful (X2 > X3 > X3TC > X3AP) is never a bad business shout. In the above games you clearly saw how each generation improved on the last. X3R was radical and unsuccessfully so.

I want X3AP in 2019 first before we start talking about more radical features like station walking or highways. I've always considered the X-series to be half space sim, half universal real-time strategy.

[Marco Nero]

Building on something that made a company successful (X2 > X3 > X3TC > X3AP) is never a bad business shout. In the above games you clearly saw how each generation improved on the last. X3R was radical and unsuccessfully so.

I want X3AP in 2019 first before we start talking about more radical features like station walking or highways. I've always considered the X-series to be half space sim, half universal real-time strategy.

agree

[RodentofDoom]

Yes they did.
And imo that's a VERY good thing.

To put it bluntly, the average 'fan' is a drooling imbecile that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a design & development process.

The other crippling, disastrous limitation of a design process handled under a 'what the fans want'process ...
which fan
each fan is a unique individual with a personalised subjective view of what makes a game good.


Democracy is the mother of mediocrity.

[DaMuncha]

My opinion is the only one that matters.

[Graaf]

Yes they did.
And imo that's a VERY good thing.

To put it bluntly, the average 'fan' is a drooling imbecile that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a design & development process.

The other crippling, disastrous limitation of a design process handled under a 'what the fans want'process ...
which fan
each fan is a unique individual with a personalised subjective view of what makes a game good.


Democracy is the mother of mediocrity.

I take it you will not buy this new "X4" then and stick with Rebirth.

[Nikola515]

Yes they did.
And imo that's a VERY good thing.

To put it bluntly, the average 'fan' is a drooling imbecile that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a design & development process.

The other crippling, disastrous limitation of a design process handled under a 'what the fans want'process ...
which fan
each fan is a unique individual with a personalised subjective view of what makes a game good.


Democracy is the mother of mediocrity.

And that's how X Rebirth was born..... I assume you also love and approve Destiny 2 and Star Wars Battlefront 2 as well ?

[elexis]

Fans (collectively) want everything. But for any given feature, especially ones that are new for the franchise, you will have a minority who want it and a majority who don't. When faced with this opposition, the most common solution proposed is "make it an option".

While I don't work on games I do work on software. We have a lot of features in our product because someone wanted it, almost all of them are optional because others don't. I can guarantee that if you listen to users and add all feature requests, you will end up with a lot of half baked features that don't work well together and a confusing product with no clear direction.

More on topic with X4, everyone wants a perfect space game. Everybody's definition of a perfect space game is different though. XRebirth made this argument harder by broadening the definition of what could be called an X game. It is not possible to cater to everyone and if you try you will end up catering to noone.

TL;DR: Anything egosoft will do will make some people unhappy. Picking 1 vision and sticking to it will give X4 the best chance of being a good game, if not necessarily the game everyone wanted.

[Nikola515]

lets just say majority of fans didn't want XR but it happened anyway. Now we can see fallout of what happened after ignoring almost all fans. Don't get me wrong I understand that there are yes man fans and those who will criticize anything devs do but that is not my point. At this point Ego is doing good job and I must give them credit for paying attention to fans and what we want. I'm not happy with some things in X4 but I understand their limitations..... But saying not to pay attention what fans want is simply unreasonable in my opinion. Most of devs or corporations that are forcing them (like EA) that don't care what fans want are bankrupt or they are getting there. This is also reason why there are so many kick starters and early access games right now.

My point is devs need to pay attentions what fans want but they also need to be reasonable what they can do and what they cant. Perfect example is how fans want Split and Boron but devs cant do it do to their limitations (time). So it is better to take their time and do it right later than have half finished game like XR was at release.

[elexis]

I was pretty active on the X:R forums in the months leading up to the release of Rebirth. There wasn't much of fans demanding stuff as there is now, and I think that is because they didn't show much of anything before release. I know that I myself didn't see any red flags until maybe a month from release, and I didn't get worried until maybe 2 days before release.

X:R didn't fail because they didn't listen to fan feedback, it failed because they didn't show anything for fans to give feedback to. (Devnet excluded).

[Nikola515]

We already known that there will be only one ship and we did complain that game will be limited(wow fans wore actually right). We known so little that our expectations wore high based on previous titles.... XR was bad from the start and I'm not just talking about bugs.... Single ship, limited universe, indestructible stations, highway+highway mini game (glad they removed that),limited sinks and economy..... Even after being fixed (3 years later) rating is bad for it. I actually think XR is ok now and I somewhat like it but my opinion alone don't matter. Im sure Ego realized this too and that is why we probably wont see XR2 in future. Or if they do they should make it stand alone game (don't tie it to X series).

Unlike others I actually staid with the game and helped it fix it trough beta testing until HoL was out of beta.

I do agree with you 100% there. They wanted to keep it as secret so bad that it actually backfired on them. It also made it worse that fans and community felt left out of it. Well if anything XR was one big surprise in the end

[Skeeter]

I wouldn't have minded the 1 ship if it was say like the dragon m6 from x2 or something similar but we got a bit of a boring designed ship and called a stupid name the skunk. As didn't mind the X shuttle from xbtf cos it was at least expandable.

[Alan Phipps]

Let's discuss the woes of XR in the XR forum shall we? Although I think it may already have been done to death there too!

[Gazz]

As far as jump gates go - they are simply a good idea when it comes to space games.

The big problem in space is that it is big.
In order to get anything done/protected you need choke points - otherwise you need "realistic" scanners with hundreds of thousands of km range and/or a huge fleet to physically patrol a ginormous amount of space.

That leads to the other major issue with X3-style jumpdrives.
You cannot just control entry points into "your space". There is no defense in depth. You have to lock down every single jump gate with an equal force.
Strategically that is dumb gameplay.

Of course it was convenient as hell for the player. It just wasn't great gameplay design. =)

[Killjaeden]

You cannot just control entry points into "your space". There is no defense in depth. You have to lock down every single jump gate with an equal force.
Strategically that is dumb gameplay.

Which is easily solved, if the gates where set to require "jumping permission" to plot a route through them. This means, if you are hostile or not popular enough you will be stopped at the first gate in the chain that does not allow you to pass. If you have some high rank, you can jump to the desired target without getting interrupted. The instant nature of jumps (Instantly from A to B, no waiting time) can also easily be adjusted to have some transit time, dependant on distance between gates.

Of course it was convenient as hell for the player. It just wasn't great gameplay design. =)

And also convenient as hell for mission creators for the purpose of safely spawning or despawning actors (enemies, friendlies, ...)