First Impression X4:Foundation Review
X4 is a big improvement over X3 in some ways, but in others it feels like corner have been cut. Being able to fly in ships, land on, and walk around on Space Stations is a huge step forward for the X series of games. The ships are big and beautiful and you can now walk around them on the landing pad. However when you get over the novelty of walking on a space station, you’ll find that the atmosphere is sterile, and most of the station can’t be visited, the shininess wears off quickly as the Trader’s Corner, and Ship Store on each station are identical.
As far as I know
X4 has the edge over
Elite Dangerous in this regard, at least you can walk on a station, although my impression from playing ED a year ago, ED has the edge on dogfighting ship to ship combat. And the ability to manage fleets of ships, gives
X4 the overall advantage, and I like the combination of jump gates, accelerators, and highways.
So X4 offers more than ED where you can’t leave your ship on a Station. It’s a move in the right direction, considering the Elephant
Star Citizen,
X4 opens the door, but then let’s you down, walking around the sterile spaces on a space station with nothing to do but exchange two words with a vendor gets old fast. Oh, you can exchange two words with your crew members too.
The Space Station is a gathering intelligent species where you would expect to be a source of role playing interaction for immersion. Where is the space bar? Where are the mysterious people asking favors over drinks? How about renting a bed, or even a companion for the night?
Now it can be argued this is not what the game is about, but if you want to be immersed in a galaxy, there needs to be at least some social RP elements.
Now as far as cutting corners I imagine to manage the size of the game, the sector grid system appears to be missing. This seems inconceivable that this would have been chopped as precise coordinates seems like it would be important. How do you build a space station for someone?
Place it over there, in that direction? It’s been a while since I’ve played X3, but the command system, the way you give your fleet orders to carry out seems to have been nerfed. There is a section on default behavior, but there is no interface for direct commands. So if you want one ship to follow another, you left click in the ship on the map or in a list, and then right click on the ship you want it to follow. Why not have a
follow commad?
And besides, imo, default behavior should be if you have no active command you would hold position or dock at the nearest station. An active command would be Auto mine or auto trade or follow, protect, etc, something you ordered a ship to do. Maybe it is nit picky, but it is a misnomer to call those types of things, default behavior.
It has been argued by some players that you can make too much money in this game. Valid critique? It depends on what you want to do. It starts off slow if you take missions, although there is a relatively quick, somewhat risky way to jump start your income. That is by harvesting crystals, with your laser equipped ship (not mining persay), and in several hours you can produce $1-2 million in crystals that can be sold at the Trader’s Corner in most stations. Soon after that you’ll have purchased a medium sized mining vessel set to harvest silicon, and the money will start rolling in. Currently I have 4 automining ships, I went to bed with $17m, left the game running over night and woke up with $28m this morning. Now this does not preclude you from mining yourself if that what interests you, but this kind of income flow allows you to concentrate on other things like building stations, taking over sectors, training marines to capture ships, etc.
Now how satisfactory will the end game be based on what I’ve described? I’m not there yet, so I’ll report back later.
One other thing, there is no character creation at all. My understanding is that two of the starts create male characters, and the Explorer start creates a female, but you can’t alter your appearance and in fact have no idea what you look like. As far as I know, there is no ability to take selfies in front of your ship or see yourself in third person mode. That dissapointed me.
If you want to know the details of how make money fast in this game by crystal hunting in the Xenon sectors, give a shout.
