X4 Foundations

Deroth

Space Marshal
Donor
Sep 28, 2017
1,827
6,130
2,850
RSI Handle
Deroth1
I've bought and played all of them at least once, lesson I've learned is to wait for patches AND mods as EgoSoft completely disregards the players as being morons that don't know what they enjoy.
 

Rear_Intruder

Space Marshal
Donor
Jun 9, 2017
736
2,624
2,650
RSI Handle
Rear_Intruder
I'm thinking about buying it, but it is pretty expensive. can anyone playing answer the following please.

1. I loved Elite Dangereous . is it too simliar?
2. Can I use my HOTAS and how does it feel?
3. How many hours do you have in it and what would you give it out of 10?
4. Should I wait for game play improvments and a lower price?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Sraika and Deroth

Deroth

Space Marshal
Donor
Sep 28, 2017
1,827
6,130
2,850
RSI Handle
Deroth1
I believe it uses the same engine as X Rebirth; I have X Rebirth and it supports HOTAS and dual stick setups.
 

Lorddarthvik

Space Marshal
Donor
Feb 22, 2016
2,740
9,487
2,860
RSI Handle
Lorddarthvik
Played x1 and x3, kinda liked both but the flight / dogfight / campaign part was always trash, and as far as I heard in a YouTube review, it's still pretty bad. Still, the graphics are nice, and the amount of scaling from a little starter ship to running your own space empire is pretty amazing.

Anyways, Farming Simulator 2019 added to cart 😆
 

Panzertard

Captain
Aug 26, 2017
33
166
250
RSI Handle
Panzertard
A bit mucky UI, but as long as you understand a bit of X3 or can be patient with X4 you should be able to have some fun with it.
A bit barebone still though, but Egosoft kind of evolves their titles over the years. So if you're willing to accept X4 as early access I would say go for it.
You can always come back to it a replay it when it has matured a bit more.
 

Stevetank

Lead Aurora Theorycrafter
Donor
Jun 3, 2016
3,248
14,909
2,900
RSI Handle
Stevetank
Hi! I love the X series and I bought X4 for many reasons. Let me share a little of my wisdom with this, though I have less than 20 hours playing so far.

Is it good?
It's an X series game that is much more like the X3 series and nothing like X Rebirth. If you loved X3 Terrain conflict or Albion Prelude, you'll enjoy this game. If you hated X Rebirth, you'll be happy to hear that this is not like Rebirth at all. You get all the ships. You can fly them all. You can upgrade them all as well.

Ship upgrades?
The ship upgrades are kind of like a mix between X3 and X Rebirth, which isn't that bad. There are a LOT more options than X Rebirth but the UI is more like Rebirth. It's much more like X3 in the fact that your ship can be upgraded a lot and you can customize a lot of things, though your favorite ships will likely have all the upgrades since you like them and your AI controlled ships will have only what they need because you don't want to spend the money on them, ha.

AI?
Yes, so your ships that you aren't flying are in your fleet. They are your AI controlled ships and you can give them tasks to do. Sometimes this involves giving them upgraded trading equipment to do their job. Other times it just involves having a pilot inside. You can give them a good amount of commands and the interface is pretty usable for commanding them, you just have to get past the steep learning curve.

Learning curve?
It's pretty steep. There's a LOT to do in this game. The basics are at least easy to learn even though the tutorials can be a little bugged and not very helpful at times but once you get what it's asking you to do, you can easily star figuring out other things. Combat in a fighter is pretty easy. Exploration is a little more advanced with the scanner system. Managing a fleet plus a space stations plus trade routes plus stocks is.... Montoya level of money management skills.

Bugs?
Oh, lots of them. But it's a single player game, so bugs don't impact you as much. It's kind of like Skyrim level of bugs where the bugs didn't stop you from playing the game but they can still be annoying at times. There's still enough content in this sandbox to be fun until the expansions come out.

Where's the content?
Right now there 's only 3 main races for you to explore, Paranid, Teladi, and Argon (humans). If you played the older games in the series you'd notice that the Boron and Split are missing. Egosoft didn't really have that much money to poor into this game after X Rebirth was such a flop so they just didn't have the money to put as much content into this game as the others. Expansions are planned in the future and if you get the special edition you get the first two expansions for free.

There will be much more coming but fans of the old games know that X4 doesn't have nearly the content that they usually put into their games. Lack of funding sucks, ha.

Is it fun?
Hell yeah, it's fun but it takes a little while to get to a point where you're having the kind of fun you would want from this sort of game. Let me tell you what you'll probably experience.

Game start:
You just made a game. You picked one of 3 starts (either exploration, fighting, or the third one that I think was trading). You won't have a lot of credits. Maybe 5,000 - 10,000 credits (a million credits doesn't go that far, ha). You'll do some of the starting missions and you'll either spend time trying to upgrade your ship or to sell it and trade for a different ship while you really should be learning the basics in the ship that you have. Trust me, I know that you'll want another ship.... the starter ships are like the Aurora and you'll be greedy to upgrade.

5 hours into the game:
At this point you'll have about 20,000 credits and you'll only know some of the basics. You'll know how to land at landing zones and how to do trade though you may not know very many good trade routes. You'll know that some stations require resources and they buy them but only if they need them. You'll also know that combat missions pop up a lot for defending stations or doing patrols but you won't like how much they pay you because of your low rank. You'll want higher ranks to get that higher pay.

10 hours into the game:
At this point you may have finally swapped ships or upgraded the ship you had to a pretty good ship. Your funding could be wildly different depending on if this was your first game or if you abandoned this progress in favor of starting a new game so that you don't make the stupid mistakes you made because this game doesn't hold your hand. This game will let you shoot yourself in the foot and it doesn't really care about how much it hurts. For me, I started over at this point. My 3rd game was much better than the first two and the boost in experience that I had in starting fresh again helped slingshot me forward in game progress. I'm not mad since I do this in a lot of games, just like Skyrim. My first character is probably going to be my burner character.

20+ hours into the game:
At this point if you rushed the story, you'll realize that you're almost done. If you went out an explored a lot, you'll notice that there's not as much space to explore as the X3 games. You'll be wanting more because you kind of like this game but realize that it was pushed out too soon. Like the game is a few deep ponds which all have a lot of stuff to do but they aren't very big. So if you like sandboxes, you'll probably start crafting the best space station the game ever saw and start building up your empire. Things like this won't bother sandbox lovers and they will gladly wait for the expansions because building an empire takes time. If you're not a sandbox type of person, this may be the end for you since the story will be done and you'll try one of the other starts to see if you like them better.

I have a HOTAS, will this work?
I don't really fly this game with a HOTAS since there are so many menus to mouse through and fleet management to work with that I don't have time to sit there with a HOTAS and just fly a combat ship. These ships do maneuver much faster than Star Citizen ships. I have not played ED, so I can't compare it. You may not feel the mass on these ships until you get to a Corvette size ship. Even the heavy fighters feel zippy to me.

What's the UI like?
Well, your character is a floating camera.... and you have ship cockpits which you can look out while flying. The ships have interiors but most of them are small. The cockpits for most of the ships make it easy to see out, unlike our Star Citizen ships, but the experience of flying a ship isn't on the same scale as Star Citizen. Star Citizen has spoiled me in how a ship should feel when you sit down and pilot one vs all other games. The frames feel thin in most of the ships that I have flown. The ship MDFs don't really do much since you're going through menus if you want to change out anything. There's no mobiglass or anything, just menus. The UI makes you feel like you're playing an old game, even though it's much better than the old X3 games. It's just the style that the game has since everyone hated the MDFs in X Reunion, so they went back to the old ways.

So what's combat like?
You shoot at fast moving target symbols on the screen since ships can get so far away so quickly. Not like being up and close like our Star Citizen is now. I really can't tell one dot from the next most of the time. From my experience in attacking things that I should not, the turrets rotate fast as well, so they stay aimed at you, but the bigger guns fire slightly slower projectiles so if you're an ace you can dodge those... or just die like I do. I really need more combat experience.

What's running an empire like?
I'm not that far in the game. I have just my 1 ship. I think it's a Teladi ship and they like trade.

Should I get this game?
Yes, if you are a patient person. It's a fun space game but it takes a bit to get to the juicy part of the game.

Should I get this game now?
If you like sandboxes and building empires and fleets, then yes. But if you want a long story and missions to do all the time, then you may want to wait till more content gets flushed out.
 

PeppaPigKilla

Admiral
Sep 15, 2019
449
1,407
800
RSI Handle
PeppaPigKilla
Sorry for reviving an old thread but i've been on the fence about this game for a while.

Is it now in its current state worth jumping into? have those of you who have been playing it since 2018 feel its worth the price and the expansions ?

I need something different from tarkov and something not as numb as SC for me atm.
 
Forgot your password?