Jumpdrives got me into X3, highways just dropped me off XR, and we're legion

[AdrianB1]

After reading a lot of this discussion am I crazy if I don't want jump drives and I don't want teleportation and I definitely don't want highways?

I started with X2, moved to all the X3 variants and skipped X:R for good reasons, highways being one. For me, highways are definitely a deal breaker. If the choice is to have nothing, so be it: it's a big universe, let it be big. It makes it more challenging to play knowing that you need to carefully expand and protect your space without any sort of insta-travel.A very fast scout is enough to chart the universe in person, while my other ships are factories are controlled from a distance.

The only teleportation I see fit is the X3 short distance one where you can move people, goods and equipment between ships that are next to each other without an animation of docking it together, especially for ships that cannot dock to each other. Even for that transfer I would set a time to complete, like 10-30 seconds when the ships need to be in range, so there will be no crazy reality-avoiding maneuvers. (btw, one such reality-avoiding fun-spoiler is instantly changing guns on ships).

[Uncle Benis]

The thing with jumpdrives is that their actual impact on gameplay is misunderstood, you have to literally think with portals in an environment where every player has access to them. That also bring with it the challenge of balancing a non-conventional playing field. Theres also the tinny tiny minutia of X2 til X3AP being essentially first person tycoon macromanagement RTS games that you can engage in combat yourself in and definitely NOT primarily action games.

XR was then designed as primarily and EXCLUSIVELY an action game, a sub-par one at that because it was bogged down by tacked on "Im an X game I swear" elements, and outside of combat it felt more like a freemium pay-to-not-wait game, except you dont even have the option to pay.

The trick with jump drive based movement is to embrace the non-linearity and go nuts, but I guess we get highways forever instead.

[AdrianB1]

In my mind X4 can be the evolution to X3 that X3 was to X2. It is enough for me if it builds on the X3 good points and fixes the weak ones:
+ open, vast universe; keep it
+ very nice graphics even for these day
+ good enough economy game play; improve if possible, after a while some plants disappeared and it become messy
+ nice diversity and balance of ships until Springblossom made everything else irrelevant
+ nice capital ships until it became too easy to create an insane player fleet of super-M2's
- old engine that does not scale with multi-core CPU's
- factory complexes that are a nightmare to deploy and performance-breakers
- player-owned M1, M2's. There should be a few, race-owned and only in capital sectors, not more. It's like a today's corporation building aircraft carriers and sail the Mediterranean with it
- M7M's
- carrier wings. They are a great idea, but a poor implementation, the AI was not able to keep them alive in scenarios where they should never die.
- post-campaign playability. There is only so much you can do in a sandbox, I spent hundreds of hours in the games but at some point there was nothing interesting to do anymore. We need some long term objectives, so the sensation of "game over, this is just post end credits gameplay" will go away.
- cannot change the Universe balance, like get into an alliance with one race and conquer the universe, take over sector ownership, have the factories in it surrender and give control to the player or the allied race. In fewer words, the ability to change the universe ownership.
- annoying GOD engine that randomly destructs capital objects that define the universe and not even offer the missions to reconstruct it in the same place.
- too many pointless construct factory missions for others, crowding the place and creating the need to randomly destruct others
- instant factory deployment. It should take at least 5 in-game minutes to deploy & assemble one and same to load one in a TL.
- a purpose for TM's
- a better purpose for TP's
- swarm missiles (flail, etc)
- infinite fuel & energy missiles. Real missiles get at full speed in the seconds after launch and the engine stops, they can turn but losing energy, so avoiding it will not make it come back and back and back ...

Sorry for the rant, too many memories, too much time playing X.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

And Uncle Benis said

XR was then designed as primarily and EXCLUSIVELY an action game

I beg to differ, given the number of hours I spent rebuilding the economy in Devries and also the amount of manual trading that I did directly contradicts such an idea.

it was bogged down by tacked on "Im an X game I swear" elements

I have to disagree with this as well. There was nothing "tacked" on about the trading, station / empire building elements of the game. Some things I admit were repetitive, but from what I can see regarding X4 those lessons have been learned

[Uncle Benis]

the number of hours

Case in point.

the amount of manual trading

Case in point.

There was nothing "tacked" on about the trading, station / empire building elements of the game.

Trading and empire building were clearly last on the list of things on the list to be considered when designing the game. The pew pew action part of it is done really well, but the trading and empire building appears to be an afterthought. The design philosophy screams of "linear, story based pew pew simulator that the devs at some point remembered which game series it belongs to". And Im not talking about how detailed the individual systems of trading, fighting and building are, they are very detailed and very well thought out. Im talking about how insultingly bad they work together in the foundational framework of XR, its gameplay loop. Its almost as if trading and station building dont belong into the base XR gameplay loop, and were crammed in at some later point after the framework of player interaction with the game was finalized.

Its almost as if the game was originally developed as an action console spinoff but was later rewritten to include traditional X elements. I wonder if controller optimization with no joystick support to speak of, lack of autopilot, and no SETA or JD aka optimization for open world gameplay at release have something to do with the impression I got from the game.

[spankahontis]

Trading and empire building were clearly last on the list of things on the list to be considered when designing the game. The pew pew action part of it is done really well, but the trading and empire building appears to be an afterthought. The design philosophy screams of "linear, story based pew pew simulator that the devs at some point remembered which game series it belongs to". And Im not talking about how detailed the individual systems of trading, fighting and building are, they are very detailed and very well thought out. Im talking about how insultingly bad they work together in the foundational framework of XR, its gameplay loop. Its almost as if trading and station building dont belong into the base XR gameplay loop, and were crammed in at some later point after the framework of player interaction with the game was finalized.

Its almost as if the game was originally developed as an action console spinoff but was later rewritten to include traditional X elements. I wonder if controller optimization with no joystick support to speak of, lack of autopilot, and no SETA or JD aka optimization for open world gameplay at release have something to do with the impression I got from the game.

- X Games aren't action games? LOL If you say so?? Guess FIGHT in the slogan meant FIGHT in the forums?

- ZaphodBeeblebrox made his point on Trade, this is something that Rebirth does allot better than X3, less spawning Economy, more products that originated from somewhere.. Mined, Grown, Assembled from something.
No magically appearing stations, no magically appearing wares (And yes Wares were greatly Spawned and Despawned as were the stations.
And X4 (from what we've seen in their Dev Videos) is going to greatly improve on this feature which both the God Engine (That wasn't designed to do) and Rebirth (Which had no time to implement in full and relied on a semi-God Engine solution) is going to hopefully complete.

- "linear, story based pew pew simulator that the devs at some point remembered which game series it belongs to".
Unless you can read Minds? I'm not seeing any differences from the FIGHT side of Rebirth and previous X Titles?
Also, when has X Game not been about Combat? Again FIGHT is a slogan for a reason, people would be pretty peeved if there was no combat in X Games.

- Building works just fine, constructing it piece by piece in modules is more realistic than just waving your magic wand and making a Station appear out of thin air.
That's what I liked about the Xenon Hub Mission of X:TC when you could rebuild the Hub by gathering resources.
Buying from a Shipyard and instantly assembling the Station was lazy.. If you placed a Station and it took time to assemble? That would make it less unbearable, but again it's the case of Wares being magically created and stations magically appearing and disappearing.
No immersion.


- "Its almost as if the game was originally developed as an action console spinoff "
The games way too complex for XBox and the conspiracy that they were trying to Port it to console was debunked years ago.
But then again, I don't really care if they ported X Games to Console, just as long as it doesn't effect the PC Version of the game, i'm not a PC Snob.
And the more money Egosoft can make from porting the franchise will go towards building a better sequel in the future.
People still salty about that need to get over themselves, let Egosoft reach out to as many gamers as they can; it benefits us the Fans in the long run.

[ZaphodBeeblebrox]

Uncle Benis wrote:

Trading and empire building were clearly last on the list of things on the list to be considered when designing the game.

If I was building an engine from scratch for a space game, I'm sure that complex features such as these would also be near the end of multiple design phases.

I would expect there were a whole lot of things that had to be "right" and working correctly before these could even be considered.

Played Rebirth for nearly 1400 hours never used SETA, the jump drive I only used once. Hardly ever used autopilot. No idea why open world gameplay is compromised by not having these.

Fact is not being able to get from A-Z almost instantly did actually lead me think a lot more about station and zone defences. I had a lot more large defensive ships in the game than I had ever used previously.

[Uncle Benis]

-snip-

Yer not adressing the actual point that Im making, namely that the systems dont work well together inside the games core gameplay loop. Theres a ton of measures implemented to prevent you from snowballing because the games core gameplay loop cannot accomodate snowballing. The games framework is designed as to prevent you from doing something as opposed to allow you to do something. Therefore constant downtime through manual travel, therefore building cooldowns, therefore manual trading. Cant snowball if you have to spend time doing nothing 10 minutes at a time. Because, again, the core gameplay loop cannot accomodate snowballing, and trading and building gameplay systems are all about investment vs payout, aka snowballing.

[GCU Grey Area]

-snip-

Yer not adressing the actual point that Im making, namely that the systems dont work well together inside the games core gameplay loop. Theres a ton of measures implemented to prevent you from snowballing because the games core gameplay loop cannot accomodate snowballing. The games framework is designed as to prevent you from doing something as opposed to allow you to do something. Therefore constant downtime through manual travel, therefore building cooldowns, therefore manual trading. Cant snowball if you have to spend time doing nothing 10 minutes at a time. Because, again, the core gameplay loop cannot accomodate snowballing, and trading and building gameplay systems are all about investment vs payout, aka snowballing.

Ludicrous assertion. Otherwise please explain how I could go from a single mining ship to a trading empire of dozens of stations, which made enough profit to pay for a new Arawn every couple of hours or so, if there wasn't a lot of snowballing involved. Rules for that particular game were pure Trade/Build, with absolutely no other sources of income (no boarding ops, no combat missions, no lockboxes, etc). Particularly enjoy that style of gameplay in XR because of the close inter-relationship of Trade & Build (i.e. stations make the resources from which stations & ships are built).

[gbjbaanb]

- X Games aren't action games? LOL If you say so?? Guess FIGHT in the slogan meant FIGHT in the forums?

They're not. 25% Fight, 75% "other stuff".

In fact, in X3 you can wobble about in a carrier and let your AI fighter wing and escorts do the fighting for you if you chose. There's nothing that says you *have* to fight at all. (or trade, or explore, or build for that matter)

This is why X3 was so popular and good.

[RainerPrem]

They're not. 25% Fight, 75% "other stuff".

In fact, in X3 you can wobble about in a carrier and let your AI fighter wing and escorts do the fighting for you if you chose. There's nothing that says you *have* to fight at all. (or trade, or explore, or build for that matter)

This is why X3 was so popular and good.

Hmmm, not all of the fighting, if I remember correctly.

I don't remember X3R well, but at least for getting the Hyperion you needed to shoot some fighters.

In X3TC you had to make the pilot of the Xperimental bail, and those two with the stolen Terran ships at the end as well.

and in X3AP there are several plot points you need to fight your way through, not to forget the 50 Xenon capitals you have to kill all by yourself.

cu
Rainer

[Honved]

They're not. 25% Fight, 75% "other stuff".

In fact, in X3 you can wobble about in a carrier and let your AI fighter wing and escorts do the fighting for you if you chose. There's nothing that says you *have* to fight at all. (or trade, or explore, or build for that matter)

This is why X3 was so popular and good.

Hmmm, not all of the fighting, if I remember correctly.

I don't remember X3R well, but at least for getting the Hyperion you needed to shoot some fighters.

In X3TC you had to make the pilot of the Xperimental bail, and those two with the stolen Terran ships at the end as well.

and in X3AP there are several plot points you need to fight your way through, not to forget the 50 Xenon capitals you have to kill all by yourself.

cu
Rainer

There's nothing in X3:TC that forces you to do the main storyline. It's VERY playable as a total sandbox game without ever touching the major missions. That means it can be Fight/Build/Tade/Think, or you can leave one or two of those out of the mix entirely if you so wish, and it's still a rather enjoyable experience for some/most players.

[mr.WHO]

Do you know if Egosoft confirmed or denied that there are any kind of jumpdrives in X4? I mean not "Skunk OP JD", but X-Rebith "NPC capship JD".

[Alan Phipps]

From the X4 devs' FAQ Index Sticky:

Q. With the absence of the jump drive, how do capital ships move between sectors?

A. Bernd: They fly through gates. They fly through highways and they will also use the accelerators, and they have boost drives, of course.

A. Owen: One of the reasons why we went with transporters and not having the jump drive was that we want the player to be a bit more tactical with the placement of units across the map. Not having to just say ok I have a fleet of capital ships I can fill them with energy and go anywhere instantly. Well, we also don't want that for the NPCs, because that takes away from the strategic value of things like a gate. You try and stop them making an advance and if they can just jump behind you, then it's very tricky to control. It really does add thinking. Where do I put things, am I missing any areas that they can get in. I'm enjoying looking forward to really trying to figure out how to stop the AI and expand myself and things like that, and see what the NPCs do with each other. (See also this post by CBJ about the reasons behind the removal of the jumpdrive and the introduction of Teleportation.)

[A5PECT]

I like the idea of making the game more strategic, and I think removing jumpdrives and adding player teleportation is interesting.

But for the record, you can have deeper tactics and strategy with jumpdrives, they just have to be much more limited than they were in X3.

- You can do things like make jumping cost more fuel/make fuel more scarce, which adds more supply logistics to jumping.

- You can give jumping a cooldown, making jumping itself a limited resource within a given period of time.

- You can require some kind of infrastructure to facilitate jumping (e.g. beacons), deploying which would be strategic choices.

- You can have only certain types ships be able to jump, making ship choice and fleet composition more involved.

Or any combination of the above.

[Slashman]

I like the idea of making the game more strategic, and I think removing jumpdrives and adding player teleportation is interesting.

But for the record, you can have deeper tactics and strategy with jumpdrives, they just have to be much more limited than they were in X3.

- You can do things like make jumping cost more fuel/make fuel more scarce, which adds more supply logistics to jumping.

- You can give jumping a cooldown, making jumping itself a limited resource within a given period of time.

- You can require some kind of infrastructure to facilitate jumping (e.g. beacons), deploying which would be strategic choices.

- You can have only certain types ships be able to jump, making ship choice and fleet composition more involved.

Or any combination of the above.

All of the above would also add programming complexity and likely limit the AI as well. Not to mention possibly need additional testing and balancing which is more resource-intensive.

[Graaf]

I like the idea of making the game more strategic, and I think removing jumpdrives and adding player teleportation is interesting.

But for the record, you can have deeper tactics and strategy with jumpdrives, they just have to be much more limited than they were in X3.

- You can do things like make jumping cost more fuel/make fuel more scarce, which adds more supply logistics to jumping.

- You can give jumping a cooldown, making jumping itself a limited resource within a given period of time.

- You can require some kind of infrastructure to facilitate jumping (e.g. beacons), deploying which would be strategic choices.

- You can have only certain types ships be able to jump, making ship choice and fleet composition more involved.

Or any combination of the above.

All of the above would also add programming complexity and likely limit the AI as well. Not to mention possibly need additional testing and balancing which is more resource-intensive.

But how can it limit the AI when the AI isn't using Jumpdrives? It's one of the reasons why they're overpowered.

[Ringkeeper]

hmm... why not both? Jumpdrives and highways?

Highways within the system, jumpdrives to get longer distances faster.

I didn't like the highway system in X:R but i liked the system in Freelancer.

You had Trade lanes within the system (you could enter it every couple kilometers) and you had jump gates between the systems.

You could even disrupt them to force other ships to leave the trade lane and then attack them. Or get attacked

[Général Grievous]

hmm... why not both? Jumpdrives and highways?

Highways within the system, jumpdrives to get longer distances faster.

I didn't like the highway system in X:R but i liked the system in Freelancer.

You had Trade lanes within the system (you could enter it every couple kilometers) and you had jump gates between the systems.

You could even disrupt them to force other ships to leave the trade lane and then attack them. Or get attacked

Or why don't just limit the jumpdrive range at 3 or 4 systems?
I agree it's too powerfull to alow player to jump from one point to the far edge of the map in 1sec. But if we limit the range of the jumpdrive, you have no more this problem.

[GCU Grey Area]

Or why don't just limit the jumpdrive range at 3 or 4 systems?
I agree it's too powerfull to alow player to jump from one point to the far edge of the map in 1sec. But if we limit the range of the jumpdrive, you have no more this problem.

No - there's still a problem. It would still trivialize strategic elements of the game. Can't think of a single faction in X3 which controlled sufficient contiguous territory to prevent a jumpdrive with a range of 3-4 sectors from allowing a fleet to jump directly from outside the borders straight into core sectors. That means any pretense at defending the borders is utterly irrelevant - so no strategic depth to the game. Even a jumpdrive with a range of 0 (i.e. only to other gates in the same sector) would have this problem of making it trivially easy to avoid border defences - e.g. fly through gate, see hostile fleet, jump to far side of sector, fly through gate... (repeat until you get to wherever you wanted to go without engaging the enemy at any point).