new cockpit ineriors :/ build on the fp player aspect PLEAAASE

[nithilak]

being able to fly all the ships (for the most part) once again is cool, but IM REALLY hoping there is more than just 5 interiors. and hopfully better than the one they show off the most. It looks very, mrriored/flipped.. ,Perhaps functional control panels and the ability to sit in any seat, that exists in the universe. in front of funtional, interactable consols. also, since youve gone so far to give us a player that can walk around, why not go all the way with that? hopefully you will add a full fps rpg element to the walking around aspect of the game, a real SKYRIM in space kind of feel. fully customizable and race selectable character to build up on, carry usable weapons that you might get into a gun fight with on a station your trying to hack or sabatoge. other wise the walking around part is whatever. really. kinda whats the point in the ability to walk around and stuff WITHOUT any rpg/ player vs npc fps action. also, since the new engine is so awesome, why not add a multi player option tot the game, allow your friend you invite to jump into your universe, or vise versa. just sayin,,,,, would tottally put this game on a much larger market. dont get me wrong, im definitly NOT saying to turn it into another EVE. just, the ability to have a few friends in your game would be pretty awesome

[linolafett]

Its rather easy to explain why we can not implement the named features above.
We are just a team of 20 people, only 4-5 artists.
This would be absolutely out of scope for us to try to make a fps/rpg/action multiplayer shooter.

[Sandalpocalypse]

ah, maybe you should hold a kickstarter and extend the development schedule from between 5 and infinity years? It works for some~

[linolafett]

I guess a 100mio+ $ won't hurt

[ezra-r]

I think community can fill this aspect quite nicely based on what we've seen in Rebirth. So I'm fine if Ego just does a few and community adds over this

[Vandragorax]

Thank God Egosoft have their heads on solid ground for this issue, not in the clouds like some people appear to

The absolute LAST thing that X4 needs is a fully realised FPS/RPG experience ala. Skyrim. It would utterly dilute and destroy the original concept for the game, not least of all because of the small dev team and budget constraints!

[thrangar]

Thank God Egosoft have their heads on solid ground for this issue, not in the clouds like some people appear to

The absolute LAST thing that X4 needs is a fully realised FPS/RPG experience ala. Skyrim. It would utterly dilute and destroy the original concept for the game, not least of all because of the small dev team and budget constraints!

/\

[Killjaeden]

It's always the same...
In X3 times basically every week somebody new would come and ask about landing on planets, stations, walking around, FPS and multiplayer. The trend continues i would say...

[Skeeter]

If rebirth did so well for egosoft I wonder how they didn't get a bunch of new hires. If x4 does well maybe they can double the team to 40.

Bit surprised they keep it so small after 15+ years.

[Karvat]

I'm really sad to keep seeing people asking to land on planets or walking on stations, even more when they ask for fps elements, one of the best parts of x games is exactly the fact that the game is not focused on simply aiming and shooting to a target, but aspires much more, the ability to trade, explore, think, manage, administer (and this is the best part, you can play for an unlimited number of hours in single player and never feel alone in the universe, when you command a large number of subordinates, you really feel like a commander, like the center of something important to the universe), and this is the point, one of the very few games where you do not simply have to do the action of aiming and shoot; original, potentially infinite, deep, and people ask exactly those common and trivial elements that are found in ALL THE OTHER GAMES, this is not possible

Anyway, this company has to find a way to grow, a kickstarter campaign or some kind of crowdfunding is not a bad idea, the game was based on original and brilliant ideas that could work great, I'm so fan of this series that if I was rich I would give you 100 million in hand and I would say "do it, the videogame world needs to be revolutionized in this way"

[Skeeter]

I disagree about you not feeling alone it's too lonely imo there's not any decent NPC's where you get to know them and feel a connection. All NPC's are too simplistic with basic conversation skills or simply uninteresting. There's ships flying about but it's just background stuff they might as well not be there tbh all they do is shop stuff from one pace to the other, they don't have virtual lives where you can chat to em for missions or initiate private one to one deals they don't request your help, nothing. Crew are just as lifeless and once u hire em that's it, a forgotten memory.

So yeah a RPG element to at least NPC's would be welcome with depth of talk, helping them out with stuff, get unique rewards off them, etc would be great and much needed for a lifeless space life SIM. Stop focusing on stations, empire stuff it wasn't X games aim in the first game it was just a sideline way to build up some money to do the plot and soup up ur ship. I feel they have enough of that and need to focus on making it really a livable place with many NPC's to keep you busy.

My 2 pence worth anyhow.

At least that's how I'd like to see the X games evolve from now on. Fill it with actual life and interactions.

[Sahvion]

If rebirth did so well for egosoft I wonder how they didn't get a bunch of new hires. If x4 does well maybe they can double the team to 40.

Bit surprised they keep it so small after 15+ years.

Just because a companies game's do well doesn't mean that the company needs to expand its base. It might just be that Egosoft's CEO is perfectly fine with the people he has right now and see's no reason to hire new people, even if that means that the game's they make take longer to come out or that they can't accomplish some of what they'd like.

[Karvat]

What I wanted to say is that the RPG part and the interaction with the NPCs is certainly one of the most important parts to be developed rather than wasting time with the walls of the stations or with the planets

[nithilak]

:Its rather easy to explain why we can not implement the named features above.
We are just a team of 20 people, only 4-5 artists.
This would be absolutely out of scope for us to try to make a fps/rpg/action multiplayer shooter.:

assuming you are a dev, thats a pretty lame excuse,,maybe you neeed more material pumping artists

no offense of course, im a die hard fan and am sure i always will be.

planet side action has been desired since xbtf x-tension and shot down by devs and ultimately the uber die hard fans they landed in the very beginning, dont really expect to see it,
however,
you guys have been regurgitating the same game, enhancing, removing, and replacing some feautres over the 25 year span.. ,,im not talking about writing a new game engine when i say a skyrim like feel, although a full blown rpg multi-player experience would be awesome, , allow me to specify,,

i dont expect a player leveling system with stats like strenght and dexterity and health, etc. etc. nor am i asking for an mmorpg.

im merely talking about this, just a few enhancements to what already exists.

:player inventory seperate from the ships cargohold (if only for apparel, armor/weapons)

:a reason to carry and use said weapons and armor.
e.g. failed attempt at hacking a station terminal alerts security and now you have to sneak or fight your way back to your ship,
or perhaps youd like to join your team of marines on the next boarding attempt you make, runing and gunning along side to the helm of the bridge of your next claimed capitol ship!

:ability to shop for clothes/armor to up your defences and add something to do to kill boredome while waiting for whatever your waiting for to happen

:ability to fly even civilian small cars like ships, truly fly ALL ships, excluding khaak and xenon of course

:ability to purchase living quarters on any station you are in good enough standing with, that you can walk to, look out the window into space,, of course you want to select a quarters with an excelent veiw

this alone would DRASTICALLY change the feel of the game and GREATLY enhance the walking around aspect of the game, that has VERY LITTLE POINT TO IT AS OF NOW and GREATLY enhance the rating your game gets, thus increasing the number of people that will buy it and play it.

isnt it somewhat ironic that X series all in all has always been among the best space genre games out there, but has residually fails in ratings and sales compared to others,, maybe its time, if just for once, that egosoft relied on the feed back from their fans, rather than just their ego. serieously IF you did implement the rpg element alone,, without multiplayer, your sales a fan base would at least triple. the popularity of space/sci fi/ themed games/televsion/movies is growing rapidly,, egosoft should consider the fact that someone else is going to produce a game just like x, but better, and it very well may be a huge team like Bethesda that does it, witch would ultimitely knock egosoft out of the water, thereby reducing your sales and fans to almost nothing. meaning just the die hard fans like myself that will never put it down... could your ego actually be so big its blinded you to the competiton thats out now. Osiris New Dawn by Fenix Fire has better reviews on steam and its early access. REBEL GALAXY, GALAXY ON FIRE 2, I just hate to see the X series die withought ever fully flegded producing what everyone really wants out off it.

Hell, if you realeased X-4 early access, and got early sales to help boost productivity, then you could do all these things,, oh wait,, your stuck with your die hard fan base because your rating never go up because you never listen to your fans.

all so redundant

still i love X, Long live X

[Killjaeden]

assuming you are a dev, thats a pretty lame excuse

Some people are more grounded in reality than others. Mostly those who have experience in the matter and whose money, success and job security is on the line *shrug*

[Rei Ayanami]

assuming you are a dev, thats a pretty lame excuse,,maybe you neeed more material pumping artists

no offense of course, im a die hard fan and am sure i always will be.

planet side action has been desired since xbtf x-tension and shot down by devs and ultimately the uber die hard fans they landed in the very beginning, dont really expect to see it,
[...]
im merely talking about this, just a few enhancements to what already exists.

Considering you're calling this "just a few enhancements" i think you don't understand how much effort, time and money it already takes to implement the space aspect of one current-gen X game, let alone how much it would take to implement a planetary walking system that a) is interesting b) doesn't end up in a big copypaste job/ultra-generic procedurally generated stuff aka No mans sky/Elite Dangerous c) while everything in the universe still gets calculated.

About your first-person-shooter ideas:
Many companies struggle to make a working, interesting and engaging first-person shooter alone, despite working for years on them. Egosoft never developed a first-person shooter before, they'd have to split up their teams, so less people for the space part (which means more bugs, less features, less complete), and the other half of Egosoft probably has never developed a competent first-person shooter before. Do you think that'd work out well?

Also : Yes, walking on plantets would be nice, but what good is a 10 billion square miles planet when it doesn't have anything interesting? Again, NMS and ED come to mind. You'd actually have to find a way to make planets interesting to make it worth implementing them. Every game so far which has tried to implement planetary walking in their space sims failed miserably to make every planet and every area of it interesting and not feel generic/boring/useless.

Look at Star Citizen : They promised a super-awesome space sim, with planetary landings, fps elements, living quarters, multiplayer, character creation, and whatnot. They have been developing that for 6 years, got 150+ million dollars in funding, with 330+ developers(!!!). How much actual content do they have so far that's working properly and finished? Barely anything compared to what they promised.
And you expect the only-20-people Egosoft to do the same?

I don't think that they ever not wanted to implement planetary landing stuff or even first-person-stuff.
Would i like to have planetary walking and first-person combat inside a Xenon I? Hell yes! I'd love it.
However the limiting factor is time, manpower and money. I think many people underestimate how much work it is to implement a fully simulated universe economy and space ship sim alone. Then adding competent first-person-shooter elements on top is massive amount of additional work that can't be done in just a few weeks or months, let alone with just a small dev team and, compared to other titles, probably rather humble budget.

also, since the new engine is so awesome, why not add a multi player option tot the game, allow your friend you invite to jump into your universe, or vise versa.

Not every engine, regardless of their age or awesomeness, is made for multiplayer, just like not every machine is made to swim underwater (airplanes for example are machines that don't work well underwater).
The X-game engines so far, to my knowledge, have always been specialized for single-player only. And contrary to almost every space sim game out there X games simulate almost every ship and station in the universe, at all times. That makes it extremely difficult to work in a multiplayer environment, because you'd have to keep everything (all ships, all stations, all wares, all fights, etc) in sync.

[Tonsilgon]

Some people seem to think, that "adding fps to the game" is just coding the mechanics and add some graphics.
I think what we learned from Rebirth and many other games is, that such elements have to be coded by experts with experience AND (even more important) all those stations, hangars, ships, planets have to be designed and made by hand. In a level editor. Each with its own plan, design and graphics.
Otherwise all stations look the same and you get to know the 20 different NPC-models in very short time. (Even if there are a hundred different)

Ask for example Bethesda, how much work went into all those cities and dungeons in Skyrim. How much manpower they invested in Fallouts 4 interiours and exterior design.
End even there it does not take a lot of time and you will find repetitive elements.

Of course it would be cool to land on stations and walk around in some interesting places.

My wish would be for egosoft to make some tools and graphics for building stations. Make some specifications and then start a big competition. There are a lot of users here that would invest quite some time to build some interesting interiors. And then they could add those stations to the game. Something like that.
And the station manager could then get the name of the user that designed the station

[nithilak]

agreed, in this case,, egosoft would hardly be putting anything on the line, or need to invest any thing more than some time in implementing some new features,

your a xtc mod veterain? how much time did you invest in that and how much money did it make you and what was really on the line.

the reality is that X would reach much more massive sales and have a whole lot more people logging alot more flight time in it if they picked it up on a few things that they otherwise, might as well not have even wasted the time putting thier energy into..

you dont see the redundance? it really shows in x rebirth.

very few people like or care for the ability to walk around in x rebirth, out of us veterans and newcomers alike, veterans dont see the point and most nuewcomers think the game is unfineshed and broken lol.

i know marketing and p.r., andi gotta say, egosoft has gotten alot of flack,,, just on steam alone, 38 percent out of 4568 are positive reviewss, and about half of the positive reveiws are written by people like you and i. who have been playing the x series for since the beginning, at least i have, and i wrote a good honest review on rebirth. the balance lies in the already relatively small existing x community. most newcomers feel ripped off and wont give it much a chance.

if a dev says its out of scope because they are a team of 20 with 4-5 artist, if its about time and money,, than it seems they would invest the man power and time in deving in a co-op mode or SOMETHING to put this game on the map for real. only because it would bring a 38% good reviews up to 76% good review, which is marketing you cant buy.

if they implement more into the player character and npc's, they could bring their reviews up to 87-96% positive, and that would make ground breaking sales for egosoft, but,, like you said,,,,, experience, time, sacrfice,, egosoft seems to be focused more on the sacrifice side of it

all i was saying about the models being repetitive, i meant explicitly about the ship interiors, if you notice the ship interior in the screenshot, the left and right side pannels are obviously mirriord and flipped, i understand why and all that,, but since its the freaking year 2018 i was expressing hopes that they would have a decent varitey of ship interiors,, i had said, i hope its more than just 5 or so interiors, and hopefully they arent all that narrow tunnel of an interior

[nithilak]

and i want to end with,, i will always love the x series, even if the neXt X sucks, which i know it wont, but still,, regardless, ill be there till the end, asking for things we wont get most likely any way,, but no one can deny, theres a larger community of people out there that just wont even give the game a chance because of its crappy reveiws.. sad but true,, sure hope egosoft can stay afloat if they keep dissapointing as much as they did with rebirth.. and im not one of the ones who dislike it,, i scratch my head alot and say,, why egosoft? why did you do that? why did you leave this thing like this? i understand its not incomplete and broken, its just, (no offense) what seems like a half ass attempt at delivering somehing that the majority of the community wanted to see in an x game,, youll always have the 20 guys that say they will abandond x if it ever gets a multiplayer option added, ABOMINATION!!! they say, but whatever,, devs in disquise trying to back themselves up as community members!! im callin you out!

[Tonsilgon]

all i was saying about the models being repetitive, i meant explicitly about the ship interiors, if you notice the ship interior in the screenshot, the left and right side pannels are obviously mirriord and flipped,

I also noticed that. But I am sure this is just because of the alpha state and those are just placeholders.
In the final game, there should be real information on those panels. Maps, Trading lists, shipstatus and so on. Real and moving information. Images from cameras in and around the ship and so on.[/quote]

i understand why and all that,, but since its the freaking year 2018 i was expressing hopes that they would have a decent varitey of ship interiors,, i had said, i hope its more than just 5 or so interiors, and hopefully they arent all that narrow tunnel of an interior

Ship Bridges should be different for most of the ships. Big ships should have impressive bridges with people working.

And please Egosoft: If you do something like that, make it more or less state of the art. Or just skip it! Please no more interiors and NPCs like in Rebirth. Those would have been "good" in Wing Commander in 1990 or "decent" in some game from 2000. But not for 2013.

If you don't have the creative ressources for decent animations, make the NPCs static. Nobody will give you any better marks because "at least you tried".